It's the Friday before Christmas weekend. Stop pretending you're trying to get any work done today. Your boss is either off on vacation already or has her feet up on the desk, waiting for the appropriate hour to sneak off for a "late lunch" and never come back. To help you in your final hours of pre-holiday work, I compiled a list of some addictive online games, easy to play but hard to master. Have hours of fun. Go on, you deserve it.
Line Rider - You know it, you love it. This is the new version, just released.
Winterbells - Jump a bunny from bell to bell.
Finger Frenzy - How fast can you type the alphabet? (My high is 8.54 seconds. (Slow typer.))
Sober Santa - Steer drunk Santa away from the rails.
Falling sand game - Part game, part physics experiment.
Throw Paper! - This would be more fun on the Wii.
Bejeweled - Billions of collective hours of productivity lost.
50 states map challenge - Place the US states on a map. (I got 92% accuracy.)
Cursor Thief - The short little dude wants to steal your cursor.
Mini golf - 18 holes. (Another version.)
Collapse - Kinda like Columns, if you've ever played that.
Fly the Copter - A simple one-button game.
Pingu Throw - Wherein a Yeti hits a penguin with a club to see how far it will fly.
Mission in Snowdriftland. Like Super Mario Bros, but with a snowman.
DoubleJeu - Balance a ball while playing Pong.
Chaos Theory - A bit like a chain reaction Missle Command.
Troyis - A chess-like puzzle game.
MotherLoad - I'm telling you, don't get started on this one. Like crack, it is.
Domino Pressure - Knock down the dominoes to squish the tomato.
Dodge - Dodge the blocks with your mouse.
High scores to share? Other neat online games that people should know about? Taunt my slow typing skills? Leave 'em in the comments.
kdice - www.kdice.com - like Risk but with fewer rules. Multiplayer in the browser. Wildly addictive.
That's funny... I just posted a VERY similar list on my blog 2 days ago. Wonder if you saw it...
More Halloween than Christmas, but an addictive game nonetheless...
www.theskeletonshop.com
(to get to the scarecrow game, hit enter and then in the bottom right hit play)
I think I was the one who brought down test scores in Los Angeles last year when I introduced N to my girlfriend's brother. It went viral.
Farm Hustle
http://farm.avocadolite.com/game.phtml
Like Bejeweled, but with cute animals, and an extra layer of challenge -- you have to eliminate at least one animal from each square on the grid to move to the next level.
Kingdom of Loathing, the best and funniest addictive stick-figure self-parodying MMORPG ever.
A lot of those will work on the Wii, I've been poking around at Wiicade.com today.
flOw is "a flash based implementation of flow theory and immersion in a game format". Super addicting and relaxing.
Csikszentmihalyi would approve.
Definitely should have included kdice and gpokr.
Awesome list.
ANY GAME MADE BY EYEZMAZE IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED THIS IS ONE OF MY FAVS THOUGH>
*TONTIE*
http://www.eyezmaze.com/tontie/v1/index.html
The "grow" games are highly addictive also.
today its been all about bin ball!
http://www.binballwizard.com/
try more games here :
http://www.game-oldies.com
Bowmaster prelude:
http://www.lostvectors.com/prelude/index.html
snowcraft is and always has been a holiday tradition for me ever since i first ran across it. there's a slight chance anyone else reading this might not know about it. if so, awesome.
anyway, it's TOTALLY addictive.
The Good Experience Games page is an excellent list of these types of games. Most of the ones you mention are on that list.
Easter Egg Drop!
A Holiday (Easter) classic!
3.828 seconds is the best I can do on Finger Frenzy. I'm sure that's easily beatable but I seriously doubt the high scores in the 1 second ballpark.
Nothing to do with Christmas, but addictive. Better than Pingu throw because it involves more strategy and awesome boosts.
http://homepage.mac.com/pockyrevolution/nanaca_crash.html
Shuffle the Penguin http://www.fingertime.com/shufflethepenguin.php is the best game ever. Wintry and one button fun!
I've found Nudist Trampolining to be pretty fun.
http://www.nudisttrampolining.com/
Dynomite is a favorite of mine. And may have cost me a letter grade back in school.
http://www.popcap.com/gamepopup.php?theGame=dynomite
A couple weeks ago my roommates and I played Winterbells competitively. After two days of trash talking and drama, I got 4 488 346 789 835 480 (over 4 quadrillion) points. Since Winterbells does not display such high scores, I had to find a program to extract it. Then I retired.
i generally find most casual games at jayisgames.com. It's run very well by recent RIT grad and sometimes-game-designer jay bibby and has a quality and thoughtfulness level similar to that of kottke. He's a big fan of ferry halim (winterbells, et al) and on (grow, tontie, etc) and other good game designers and they participate in the generally fun-to-read comments. also the customizable favorites menu is sweet!
I'm addicted to JawBreaker (SameGame):
JawBreaker
Co and I got 90% on the 50 States Map Challenge... but I think they were kind of harsh on a couple of "misses": Our average distance in a miss was 22 miles.
Thanks for these.
well... you are definitely going to get me fired...
Linerider, throwpaper, sandpaper, and motherload are my favorites
Great list. Here's another one. Grab a friend (or many) and play Bemoggle.
Mansion Impossible is so simple and so wasteful of my time.
MotherLoad ROCKS! I finally made it to the core of the planet... It was worth the dig!!
I love the one-button simplicity of Pendulumeca and Geartaker (second in the list). And yeah, everything on Orisinal is wonderful, but especially the Amazing Dare Dozen.
I agree with Scott. They were pretty picky on the 50 states challenge: 92%, but an avg of 9 miles off.
On my second try. My first try was 80%. Who knew Delaware was so far south? Besides Delawarians?
geosense can be addictive too !
Gamezebo is another site which covers casual games (and has a piece on the wii.
My former employer, Iwin, is offering 50% off all games through jan 7th.
Family Feud Holiday isn't worth buying even at half off, but many of the other games (such as Jewel quest solitaire and Bookworm Adventures - the biggest budget for a casual game - are worth trying and buying if you like it.
I see Big Fish also has a sale through Jan 1 with 25% everything and up to 70% off on a few games (including the original Mystery Case Files for $6).
If you sign up for the Gamezebo newsletter, sometimes have offers to beta test games (though usually only for PCs which dominate casual games though that is slowly changing - Big Fish has a Mac games section and Gamehouse has a lot of mac games and you get SuperCollapse for for free for mac or PC if you sign up for their newsletter.).
And Casual Games Blogs aggregates Gamezebo, Jay is Games, and several blogs from game developers.
heh thanks for the games.now more goofing off at my work lol...
anyways you guys can chek out KeepV.com, a nice site for downloading videos
Nice list - a lot of those I've wasted plenty of time on before.
A few I've recently become fond of:
Electric Man 2
Metal Slug Reloaded
Marvin Spectrum
I've been posting games on fritterware.com for a bit, found some good ones as well... now adsense revenue site too, makes it nice...
Neither Safari nor Firefox like MotherLoad on my mbp... crashes every time...
That cursor thief is really freaking me out! Thanks for the links, I think I've plyed most but added them to my delicious bunch anyway.
Merry Christmas!
i am ooked on dolphin olympics, great list tho...
I got 2.7 seconds on finger frenzy. I spent at least an hour doing it, kind of left me in a trance. I can see how 1 second is possible (the top score) but my fingers would need to be replaced by more nimble ones to beat it. Oddly enough I think that this game is going to help my typing more than alot of other typing tutors. I now know where all the keys are for typing and can find any of them in a very little time. Wow this is very uninteresting. Sorry for anyone who actually read this comment.
You know, you could have warned a brother about Mothetload. I saved $149000 to buy a diamond tip, saved the game, shut down the computer, woke up the next day to get the last $51000 and was told there were no saved games. I DIDN'T KNOW I HAD TO KEEP THE $%@#%$! BROWSER WINDOW OPEN!!! MERRY %$#!@$#% CHRISTMAS!
damnit.
Beating Motherload was absolutely the highlight of my Christmas Eve. The bonus after you drill past everything was a fun suprise. Be sure to stock up on a hundred or more big and small bombs and even more health packs! *hint hint!*
Finger Frenzy doesn't work on the Dvorak keyboard on my Mac, which makes me sad. I can get up to S, but it seems to disallow any of the keys that would be punctuation on the QWERTY keyboard (S falls on the key labelled ';'). Shame, I was surprising myself up to that point.
This thread is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who responded.
