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A year ago, the contemporary artist Marina Abramovic held a show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, at which patrons waited in line for a very, very long time just to meet her. The excitement of that encounter is now chronicled in a recently launched free-to-play online game. More »
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Are you browsing this page on Google Chrome right now? Well, you're going to want to. Some saint of a coder has developed an utterly delightful hack that rolls up all of a Web page's text and pictures, Katamari-style. More »
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This nifty timewaster's been around since early October; someone just brought it to my attention, so now I'll bring it to yours. By bookmarking this link, you can play Asteroids on any page. Watch me shoot up Crecente's bio! More »
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Oh, you thought we were done with vuvuzelas? Hell no, now you can play the bitches in the inevitable "Vuvu Hero" flash game spoof. More »
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Oh, dammit. Iron Maiden was flying to its first ever intergalactic gig when space pirates ambushed them, blew up their gear ship, and sent everything flying into space. Now they expect you, space roadie, to get it back. More »
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Sort of a cross between Adventure and Berzerk is "Halo 2600" by Ed Fries, a clever little timewaster that riffs on the tropes of Atari 2600 game design, especially the snicker-inducing bleep-bloop Halo Theme in the intro. More »
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The nearly universal reaction to seeing Google's playable 30th anniversary Pac-Man doodle was, "Well, there goes Friday." Indeed. A productivity firm has calculated the time spent playing Google's Pac-Man front at more than 4.8 million hours. More »
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Mrs. Claus has been abducted, and Santa's out to deck the walls with gingerbread men and nutcracker guts. It's a Christmas mashup of Kung Fu for the NES and it's (wait for it) ho-ho-holarious. More »
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The great thing about working weekends is I can blast gas with impunity in the Kotaku Tower elevator, and then on Monday when the car smells like Donkey Kong's taint, Fahey gets blamed for it once Crecente comes in. More »
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Yesterday we explored the crossover between balloons in the news and video games. Today, certifying the saga of Balloon Boy as a true news event, someone made a flash game out of it - a flash-based side-scroller anyone can enjoy. More »
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Been a while since we've done these. Here's GrowBox, courtesy of King.com. The object is to pick up all of the gold orbs, but consuming them makes your box grow, so the board must be navigated in a specific order. More »
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This flash-game parody of JRPGs perfectly nails every device, trope, conceit and theme of the genre. Hang in there - even if the odds seem ridiculous, someone shows up to give you 200 gold to buy the JRPG sword. More »
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Physics games are like National Geographic maps. I could stare at them for hours and feel like I learned something even if I couldn't articulate what I had been doing all this time. More »
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Some wit cooked up a HD-version of Tetris - I can't even begin to count the grid here - which makes dying or clearing lines an agonizingly long process. More »
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There's just no quit in the zombie genre. Here's a flash game whose object is to corral a horde of infected, lest one wander off the screen and kill a human. More »
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Unlockables give this jump-physics Flash game some pretty strong replay value. I spent at least 30 minutes tricking out my cart and practicing midair handstands. More »
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Here's a text-based real-time "survival horror" game with surprisingly strong replay value, for such a passive act. Its title is its goal: Don't Shit Your Pants. More »
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The Majesty of Colors is weird, lovely little game by Gregory Weir that's been making the rounds as of late. There are five different endings, and your (in)action throughout determines the outcome. More »
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This is a fun little remake (more or less) of the puzzle mode of Tetris Attack; you have a limited number of moves to swap blocks and clear the whole board. While the early levels are pretty easy, some of the later stages get pretty complicated — all in all, not a bad little browser-based timewaster to kill some time on a Sunday. More »
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Here's another one of those games that actually is boring as shit, but because it's geography, it preys on your need to show that you're not some bumpkin and you've either visited countries other than your own or at least know where they belong. It's Statetris, which challenges you to fit together, Tetris-style, the countries on two continents, or states in nine nations, or — here's the big WTF — all the counties in South Carolina. For those wondering, yes you will be asked to drop into place tiny ass San Marino, Andorra, Malta, etc., if you play Europe. And if you play on hard setting, where the territories are not identified, I don't know how you can get it right. Anyway, if you won your school's geography bee, you'll love Statetris. Or not. More »
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Insidious Tuna sent this along. I swear I've seen it somewhere before, but apparently not on Kotaku. This game has a very simple premise and a very difficult opponent - your own patience. My only advice to you is that, after you click to start the level, any movement of your mouse, click, or key strike fires the gun. This game should be used at business leadership conferences, because it would definitely show who was the hypercompetitive, win-everything-at-all-costs guy in the crowd. I got to level 7 before I just had to fool with it and kill the puppy. But I'm thinking I could beat this game if I had a good book to read in the meantime. Sorry about the lame screengrab. I couldn't get actual gameplay, for reasons that will become obvious. Don't Shoot the Puppy [rrrrthats5rs.com] More »
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Reader Alex B. sent in this — Fantastic Contraption — a physics flash game where you string together wheels and joints in order to carry an object toward a goal on the screen. It's nice nonviolent trial-and-error fun, indulging both the competitive urge to be as efficient as possible, and the creative impulse to be as outlandish as you can get away with. More »
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This wonderfully adorable (and kind of weird) game is pretty straight forward — guide the marshmallow around a variety of objects just waiting to take a bite out of your head and send you hurtling towards the ground so you can land with a 'splat.' It's cute. It's not terribly taxing. The soundtrack is ... well, something (soothing? Weird? Vaguely Katamari-esque? All of the above?), but the game is really cute and a nice way to waste a couple of minutes or more .... More »
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Hoshi Saga 3 is a fun little puzzle game — the object is to discover the star(s) in each level through experimentation. The mechanics of each level are different, and while some are familiar, some will require a little more fiddling to get the right answer. Some levels are quite easy, though others may have you scratching your head — overall, a nice, relaxing little collection to spend some time with. More »
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IndieGames succinctly describes this as 'a cross between Breakout and Space Invaders,' which is pretty accurate — but it's a fun game with a retro feel. I was in the mood for some candy-colored, easy to pick up fun this weekend, and this definitely hit the spot. Boss battles every 10 levels, power ups, and trying not to get hit with your own bullets (so watch out for that trigger finger) — add in some cute alien enemies, and you've got the recipe for how I wasted a good chunk of my Sunday morning. More »
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We're having a slow weekend here at Kotaku: Owen is off, and I'm holed up in bed trying to stave off the flu; Aether made a nice respite from my headache and general feelings of 'blah.' It's a weird little game — a little abstract and fuzzy around the edges, you control a little guy and his pet who can fly through the air with the greatest of ease, using said pet's tongue as a grappling hook/trapeze .... I actually quite enjoyed zipping through space from planet to planet, trying to solve puzzles and bring the color back to unhappy people (the core of an unhappy planet seen above). It's not the most intuitive game ever — it did take me some time to figure out how to successfully get off the ground and into the atmosphere - and I broke out the mouse because the trackpad wasn't cutting it. Still, it's pretty and soothing (and short) — good for a bit of time on a Saturday afternoon. More »
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From Chris Basmajian comes a darling, piggieful little game called Attention Hog. As the titular attention hog, your job is to capture the attention (and love) of as many people as possible, while avoiding bacon and nabbing power ups to make your job a little easier. Basmajian says the game "reflects some of the social and psychological trends present in social-networking communities, including self-promotion, social anxiety, obsessive need for peer validation, and distraction as entertainment." Heavy stuff. Ian Bogost notes that while he's "happy to see a game that critiques today's attention culture, but I'm not sure Attention Hog reaches the level promised in the description." Still, while I'll admit to being a sucker for cartoonish pigs (my little Monokuro Boo collection is probably a touch unseemly for a 25 year old), it's adorable and worth a few minutes of time on a lazy weekend. More »
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Alright class, time for a flash game. This is "Orbitrunner" and it's reasonably addictive for such a simple concept — place your star on the grid so that the planets (and their satellites) fall into orbit without smashing into you, each other, or going out of the boundary. I'm not sure how realistic the gravity physics are, but it's very challenging, and I like the background music. The collision/explosion sound/animation is lame, however. I was hoping for a Praxis Effect. If they put this in a 3D, rotatable-camera environment, I'd play it for hours. More »
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Fans of pre-graphical RPGs like Nethack and Rogue might occasionally wander out from their UNIX labs and find themselves confronted with a modern web browser. More »
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While the weekend timewasters at Kotaku are generally free, and Now Boarding — an indie time management/sorting game that has a nice, slightly retro aesthetic — isn't, the demo is lengthy and engaging enough to waste an hour or two on a lazy Saturday. The point of the game is to manage your airport empire and keep the poor slouches stuck at the terminal or on the plane reasonably happy, or at least not hopping mad. The $20 ($15 right now) price tag for the full version seems a little steep, but the demo portion has already gobbled up time this morning that I should've been dedicating to plowing through another couple of thousand pages on Japanese colonialism. Frankly, sorting flights is a hell of a lot more fun — and this is a nice, reasonably polished little game that is fun to play. More »
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Ever wanted to decimate the world's population or see if you could develop a super-bug that would leave the globe in utter pandemonium? If the answer is yes, browser-based Pandemic 2 is your game; even if the answer is 'uh, no,' it's an interesting way to while away some time. Watch as your customized disease of choice is let loose on the world, then use your 'evolution points' to mutate the perfect delivery method for a global pandemic — the goal is to have a trail of devastation (and bodies) left in your wake. There are two different modes, 'realistic' and 'relaxed,' so if you're not sure you're ready for a realistic onslaught, you can try your hand with the easier mode. More »
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We've mentioned Jason Rohrer's weird little works before, in the form of Passage and Gravitation; now with his 'Game Design Sketchbook' column at the Escapist, he puts up new little games monthly. This month features the theme of life, death, and immortality (appropriately called Immortality): More »
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While I have enough work to kill an ox this weekend, I took some time last night to play with this delightfully silly side-scrolling WoW sendup. Here's one introduction to a quest: "Now that you've begun to get the hang of that most fundamental of skills - killing shit - and started to properly become a bit more class conscious, we can tackle a slightly more disturbing problem." Karl Marx even makes an appearance (never mind the Mario appearance pictured above). It's worth checking out if you've got some extra time to waste this holiday (in the US) weekend. More »
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I don't have time to waste this weekend, sadly, but if you do, there's a challenging little puzzler called Putty Puzzler, found over on the interestingly named 'Coke and Code.' It's putty. It's a puzzle. It's kinda hard. I spent a little bit of time with it and was pleasantly challenged — I'll come back for more after I've got a little time to waste. More »
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Quite literally. "The Hell of Sand" is a brilliant time-waster of a flash game. "There are many dynamics to this game but no goal. Play around for a while and you'll get the hang of it." Great premise. More »
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I really love the too cute for words Grow games — nothing complicated, but cute and fun to play. There's a new game from the same creator — while not a grow game, it's a cute and quick little puzzle. And if you haven't experienced such classics as Grow Island, there's even more to go and click. More »
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Sure, it may borrow wholesale from Independent Games Festival finalist Crayon Physics by Petri Purho, but Magic Pen is much more multi-platform friendly, requiring but a short download via your web browser of choice. Perfect for those of us not willing to walk from our Macs to our Windows boxes. You'll draw primitive shapes—circles, triangles and rectangles—as well as pins, hinges and swing-arms to move a red ball to each level's flags. It's fun and physics accurate and has a very soothing looping guitar ditty. More »
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Flash game coders have a shot at some loot and a developer gig in a contest UGOPlayer.com is running beginning April 8. So if you think you've got the next killer office time waster, it could net up to a $5,000 first-place prize and, potentially, a job writing games. More »
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Back in December, I mentioned a little game called Passage. Well, Jonathan Blow clued me in to the fact that Jason Rohrer is back with yet another weird, artistic little game, this one called Gravitation: More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=362660&view=rss&microfeed=true Not precisely a game, but there has been talk lately of physics (and science in general) in games, and this is a neat little program that's fun to spend a while playing with. It's still in beta and has the requisite bugs you might expect, but here's what the creator has to say about it: More »
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