Favorite Flash Timewasters

I have a love/hate thing going with flash games. On one hand, they're free, simple, and often fun or amusing. Since I do everything on a notebook, I can't play the high-res, graphics-heavy games anyway, as laptop screens have a poor refresh rate, making everything choppy. On the other hand, they are designed to be addicting, and some of them can achieve this without offering the slightest in mental exercise. I recently "played" one game where the object is to keep a dot, controlled by mouse movements, moving for as long as possible. That's it--no obstacles of any kind--just keep the mouse moving. At 10 seconds, it taunts you; at 20 seconds it offers a half-assed compliment and taunts you again; at one minute it challenges "Can you keep it going for five minutes?". I didn't try to find out, but that's the trick--to keep you entertained like a baby. "Look at the bunny! Ohh, the bunny's over here now! Look at the bunny!"

My other main complaint about flash games is that they try to do too much, sometimes. Most games start out fairly easy, and become hard as you adapt to the controls. Often, getting more difficult means introducing more elements, and this slows down the game. For games that involve timing, it's a fatal flaw, as all of your practice on the earlier levels developing an internal clock is wasted. Plus it's just frustrating to sit there waiting for the program to catch up with you. Many flash games have no end; they simply get harder and harder until you hit the breaking point, or until they are so sluggish that you quit in disgust. I do like it when you can reach the end, though.

So what makes them addicting? For me, the successful ones are either abstract puzzles with simple beauty and very few rules, dexterity-based games, or games where you level-up incrementally, meaning that you accumulate gold or experience in each level, and you can use this to enhance your capabilities for the next round. It is this latter type of game that usually suffers from the overload slowdown alluded to above.

My earliest favorite was Double Jeu, from the crazy French guys at Zanorg. Their games page includes a lot of ok games, most of which are "keep it going as long as you can"-type games. The shining stars are definitely Double Jeu, Get Rich, and the Poodle one. My favorite thing about all of their games is that they always taunt your progress when the game ends, as only the French can do. Note: after selecting a game, be sure to click on the Union Jack symbol at the bottom of the instruction screen for English instructions and insults.

Addicting Games host a ton of flash games from a variety of developers, many of which are rather sucky (this is where you find the infamous Keep it Moving). They don't seem to filter. Some great finds on that page are Pac-xon, Bowman 2, the Impossible Quiz, and Tanks (make sure to play against at least 3-4 enemy tanks or it's too easy).

Desktop Defense type games are great time-wasters where you place turrets of various types in key locations as wave after wave of increasingly tough enemies crawl across your territory. If too many of them make it through, you lose. I'll link to my favorite one.

Finally, give Portal a shot. It's a game that has just been released for one of the console systems (PS3?) as part of a software package, but someone has made a flash version that's pretty fun. I've gotten to level 32, and I figured out how to get past that level during Elaine's early morning feeding. It's very cool.

Some Flash games that come sooo close, but miss, often fall within the Accuracy category. The two examples in my head are Bloons and Ball Revamped. I love both of these games for the first 20 or so levels, before they FAIL. In Bloons, where you have a monkey who is throwing darts at balloons, you hold down the mouse button for the strength of the throw and move the mouse up or down for the angle. In the higher levels, you often have to throw the darts absolutely perfectly to get past the level, which is just a boring-as-hell exercise in trial and error. Many of the earlier levels have more problem solving, which is what makes the game so cool. Similarly, in Ball Revamped (particularly IV and V), where you're trying to keep a ball aloft by tapping the up arrow and bouncing the ball around obstacles, the early, satisfying problem-solving devolves into the cold sweat of getting the ball between two closely apposed obstacles. Plus, they have an annoying, graphics-heavy splash of stars between each level that chops up the flow.

I'll post my favorite flash games in a links module off to the left (adding more as I think of them). Happy timewasting!

(Please feel free to suggest your favorites in Comments)