The Company of Myself is one of those games that you don't want to conclude. When it does end -- if you have what it takes to get there -- it leaves you feeling sad. Kinda empty. Like there's a gap in your soul that's exactly Company of Myself-shaped and there's nothing to fill it with.

The game is very simply played, platform-style. You progress through each level to the green door, passing obstacles as you go. The first few levels have dialogue where you are seemingly talking to yourself, reminding yourself how to play -- it's weird, but it works. It works really well.

But there's a twist. A twist of genius!

No, no, really... I'm not suggesting you head to the supplies cupboard and actually toss the turtle! It's a game! NO! Not the kind of game you play with friends while drunk! A Flash game! Adobe Flash! In your browser!

Toss The Turtle is the epitome -- the end of the line -- the ULTIMATE 'fire a canon ball as far as you can' game, a genre that you might remember from the (really) olden days. The basic premise is obvious: you gotta toss the turtle as far as you can.

But oh boy is it more complicated and involved and awesome than simply firing a canon. This could be significantly more than a 10-minute-time-waster, I assure you.

The Next Floor is an interesting blend of side-scrolling action game and tower defence game. In The Next Floor your goal is to defend against the incoming waves of bad guys. You start off on one floor of a building, and you have an elevator in an elevator shaft. You move using either the arrow keys or the A and D keys, and you point your mouse at the bad guys and click the mouse button to fire your gun.

Killing bad guys earns you money, and it's a good thing, since the waves of bad guys get increasingly fierce and you must buy weapons that you can station in your elevators to automatically fire at the bad guys. Wait, did I just say elevators with an 's'? Yep -- as the game progresses you will find additional floors of the building open up, and you have the option to buy additional elevators to defend those floors.

One thing that was not immediately obvious to me is the fact that you can move the elevators around by dragging them with your mouse, and they can move even if there are elevators occupying every floor. If you drag an elevator to a floor that already has an elevator on it, the two elevators will magically swap positions. You can use the elevators to move your man around from floor to floor, but fairly quickly your elevators will have more firepower than your poor little dude's pistol, and you'll find you're not really using him.

The 15 levels of The Next Floor provide just the right amount of gameplay; any more would have become tediously repetitive, and any less wouldn't have given enough time to build up your elevators to the incredible killing machines they can become.

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.

Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.

The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, and you need to move around the game board collecting yellow coins or keys, and make your way from the green starting area to the green end, without getting touched by the blue hazard balls. The only controls in the game are the arrow keys to control where your red square goes.

Like I said, it looks simple. But in practice, I gave up at level 4 after over 100 attempts. I wouldn't same I'm a video game expert, but I've certainly played my fair share of games in my time, and this one is certainly one of the most difficult.

How far can you get?

The best time wasters are games that are intellectually challenging, but not necessarily frantic or anxiety-inducing. Too many puzzle games rely on a beat-the-clock scenario to make games more challenging instead of simply making the puzzles more challenging. Well, Sleepy is a time waster that doesn't do that.

In Sleepy, the goal is to remove all of the colored blocks from the screen without waking them up. If you wake them up, a wakefulness bar starts to drop, and if it reaches the bottom, you lose at that level. The more blocks that wake up, the faster the bar moves, until they settle into new positions and fall back asleep.

The challenge in the game comes from the fact that you can only remove blocks of the colors given on one of the two indicator cards at the bottom of the screen. When one of the colors is a block that is sitting on top of a pile, it's not a problem, but soon you'll run into a situation when the only block you can remove will dislodge a bunch of other blocks, waking them up.

Sleepy is a cleverly-designed game with lots of replay value, a perfect distraction for your coffee-break or lunch time. And the soundtrack is perfect if you've got insomnia - just play Sleepy for a little while and you'll be headed back to bed.

Monster's Den The Book of Dread is a lo-fi, highly addictive, dungeon-crawling, RPG. Choose one of three campaigns (dungeons), create a party of four characters from seven possible character classes (warrior, cleric, mage, ranger, rogue, barbarian, and conjuror, the classics), select from one of three difficulty levels (beginner, standard, and EXTREME), and you are off to kill monsters and gather items.

Seemingly endless levels, each with their own boss, and hundreds of possible magic items (weapons, armor, potions and scrolls) make this game very compelling for the avid dungeon crawler. I played one of the campaigns to level 118 (hangs head in shame...) before giving up on finding an end boss.

Random encounters, epic rare monsters that drop wonderful items, and the promise of more treasure just around the corner make up for this game's complete lack of graphics.

If you enjoy fighting orcs, undead, dragons, dwarves, humans, creatures from Greek mythology, and myriad other foes for the promise of experience points, stats boosts, and new spells and abilities, then do NOT play this game (or you might never stop...)

Who doesn't love a superficial pop-psychology tool? Analyze Words purports to reveal the personality of Twitter users by analyzing their recent toots tweets. The resulting analysis is broken down into three main categories: Emotional Style, Social Style, and Thinking Style.

Each main category consists of three or four ratings; for example, Emotional Style consists of Upbeat, Worried, Angry, and Depressed. Social Style's ratings are Plugged in, Personable, Arrogant/Distant, and Spacey/Valley girl, and Thinking Style's ratings are Analytic, Sensory, and In-the-moment.

Unfortunately, Analyze Words doesn't do any intelligent filtering - for example, retweets are analyzed along with regular tweets, so if you happen to retweet a lot of other people's content, the analysis won't really reflect your own words. But maybe I'm just being touchy because Analyze Words told me I'm a worried, arrogant / distant sensory thinker. Or something like that.

Phytrix is another entry into the venerable genre of falling block games. Pieces in various shapes and colors descend from the ceiling, and your objective is to rapidly organize them so that three or more blocks of the same color are touching, which makes those blocks disappear. Yes, it's two classic games - Tetris and Match 3 - rolled into one.

That's not all, though. Each level of Phytrix has its own rules. For example, maybe you need to clear 40 blocks without removing any purple triangles. This sounds insidiously challenging, but Phytrix doesn't punish you very harshly for breaking the rules. Instead of losing the game when you make the wrong piece disappear, you just get a row filled in at the bottom of your screen, pushing your pile of pieces upward toward certain doom.

It's like Tetris, except that those filler rows aren't permanent. You can remove them by clearing more of the right pieces. As a result of this leniency, Phytrix doesn't get tough until several levels in. It's a neat idea for a game, and it's fun to play for a while, but it could offer more of a challenge.

What's 20 megabytes, has awful graphics, awful sound, and is vaguely reminiscent of Super Mario Brothers 3?

Why it's RunMan: Race Around The World of course! The website, you assume, is trying to be ironic. 'The game can't actually look like this, surely...' But... well... it does.

The game's visuals look like they were created in MS Paint. In fact, they probably were.

So it looks bad, and the sound effects are pretty awful. But the gameplay is actually quite good. You play as a little star-thing who runs around. Your job is just to make it to the other end of the level at the highest speed possible. The faster you go, the higher the score multiplier. You lose points for falling in holes and hitting enemies, just like in real life.

Maybe I'm old, but I remember back when arcade games were not powerful enough to do 3D video. Then one day along came a new technology called vector graphics, and 3D games became (sort of) possible. Instead of seeing a fully rendered 3D model of the various objects in the game, you instead would be presented with wireframe representations. Still, in its day vector graphics were amazing.

Fast-forward to today, and you can play a modern game based on classic vector graphics. Vector Conflict: The Siege is a shooting game where your goal is to protect your outpost from an ever-increasing onslaught of enemies. You are literally surrounded on all 4 sides, and need to carefully plan your movements between views (north, south, east, and west) to ensure that none of the baddies sneak up behind you when you are not looking.

Playing Vector Conflict is made quite enjoyable by the forgiving shooting mechanics. As long as you are aiming near an enemy, your weapons will lock on and make destroying it easier. If it sounds like the game is easy, think again. The sheer volume of enemies attacking will make sure that you are never bored.

Make sure you play Vector Conflict with the sound up, as it has one of the most engaging soundtracks of any time waster I've played. In fact, you can download the tracks if you enjoy them as much as I did.

Small Worlds is a beautiful and uniquely relaxing pixel-art platform game created for the Casual Gameplay Design Competition. The point of the game is to move around exploring each level to find he exit.

Though Small Worlds uses the typical side-scrolling view of a platform game, what makes it unique is that you start each level zoomed in tightly on your very simplified character, and you can only see the area immediately around you. Moving about reveals more of the level to you, and the camera pulls back and back so that you can see the big picture of the level you are exploring.

Small Worlds is all about exploration. You're not dealing with the plethora of bad guys that most other platform games have. Instead the enjoyment of the game comes from discovering just where you are, in a relaxed, distinctly non-anxious state.

If most video games make you feel agitated, Explore may just be the game for you. It's a charming little distraction.

Have you ever wondered just how big a red blood cell is in comparison to a grain of salt or the influenza virus? Now you can, visually, using the Cell Size and Scale page on the University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center's site.

To be honest, I wasted a bunch of time using this page to look at the various sizes of things, though I can't in good conscience call it a Time Waster. It's too edumacational for that.

I'd love to see this same approach extended to things at a macro size, so that you could zoom from a carbon atom all the way out to the universe. But for now, I'll take this.

Pandemic 2 is a strategy game where you play the part of a virus, bacteria, or parasite. The goal of the game is to infect and then kill all of humanity.

At the start of the game you choose to be either a virus, bacteria, or parasite. Each has their own unique characteristics, like being more or less virulent, and mutating slowly or quickly. Once you've chosen the type of pandemic you represent, you move into the gameplay.

The game starts with you infecting a very small number of people in a specific country. You can then increase the rate of infection by purchasing symptoms, resistances, and modes of infection like airborne and waterborne. You can also slow things down by getting rid of a symptom or resistance, but doing that also costs points, so you need to be careful not to waste your moves.

Pandemic 2 ends when either you win by wiping humankind off of the face of the planet, or the humans successfully develop a vaccine and prevent you from infecting everyone.

There are two modes of play, the traditional simulation mode, and a shorter, simplified mode. The short version of the game can be played in about 10 minutes, making it a good coffee break game.

Unsurprisingly, you start off in a room with nothing. It's the de facto rule that all of these Room Escape puzzles share: you don't know how you got there, or why you're there, but damnit -- you're there, and you need to find a way out!


Inculcation is the first room escape game that I've played with real-time combat elements. There are actually monsters -- zombies? -- that pop up and require shooting. Fortunately it's very easy to shoot them dead, but it does mean that you occasionally lose health. There are syringes about the place that can restore your health.

Mostly the gameplay is what you'd expect from such games -- pick up objects, open doors, solve rudimentary riddles that involve some observation skills. It is nothing special in this regard -- in fact, some of the puzzles feel a little random and rely on guesswork rather than applying your knowledge of the game.


I played through the first house in Inculcation, and I can tell you this now: the enhanced elements of music, artistic direction and creatures that can actually kill you really add to the tension, the danger. I admit I yelped out loud a few times. I admit my hand slipped off the mouse a few times when attacked by zombies. I admit I'm a wuss when it comes to the horror genre.

There's one part in the first house where a door shakes -- as if something is behind it, desperately trying to get out -- and it keeps shaking. Over and over. Louder and louder. And when it finally comes to open the door... well... you're in for a big surprise. Give it half an hour of your time at least -- you won't regret it...

[via JayIsGames]