Doodle or Die is basically the web-version of Telestrations. Given a description, you draw a picture. Someone else looks at your picture and describes it. Someone else draws that description. And you watch it change over time. Being online, it can get a lot more vulgar and racist than the home game, but there are also some really talented artists (click for a larger version of the one shown here… I obviously didn’t do that). Especially impressive since you’re stuck with a little window and a toolset that makes MS Paint look like the GIMP. But it’s a decent timewaster, even if, like me, you can’t draw. This is the contribution I’m proudest of so far (he’s supposed to be giving a double thumbs up).

Glitch is a browser-based MMORPG type game that people seem to think is quite cool. After reading a little about it maybe a month ago, I signed up for a beta invite, got one, and promptly did nothing. Slightly bored with a long night’s work on Sunday, I finally signed up. I suspect it’s the constant stream of rewards and new challenges, but the game is oddly compelling. I’ve got a growing list of quests, and any time I have nothing to do, I find myself thinking I should hop on and do a little something.

A few things I thought were interesting:

• You don’t kill stuff, so Geebs is immediately not interested.
• Death is not catastrophic, but it is slightly tedious. You go to “Hell” and have to do a repetitive task to return to the regular world.
• Energy is effectively your health (you also have mood, but the only time I’ve run low on that is when I’ve forgotten I was signed in), and it replenishes once per game day (every 4 hours). You can also restore it by eating or meditating (or leveling up), but they set caps on things that, at least at the level I’m at, limit the advantages of power gaming. There’s only so much you can do in 4 hours before you kinda have to wait for the next day. As I progress, there’s more I can do before I need the daily energy refresh, but I don’t think I could fill the entire 4 hours yet. At least not unless I was willing to basically acquire no money/stuff/favor with gods and eat everything I harvest (I’m at this point a tree picker, though I’m not sure the value of that int he long run).
• You can progress in the skill tree without even starting the game. If you tell it to learn a skill, it counts down the time even when you’re not signed in, and you get an email when you’ve learned it, so you can just go to the website and, without entering the game world, pick the next thing you want off the skill tree.
• The one thing I really don’t like, because I’m me, is the quests that encourage you to socialize. I obviously haven’t attempted to talk to anyone so far, and only one guy’s tried to talk to me. And he was begging for free stuff. So screw other people.

It says I have invites to give out, but I don’t think you necessarily need one to sign up. But whatever, if anyone reads this and wants to try it and can’t get in, let me know.

3 Slices is a physics game where you make cuts to try to get as much stuff to fall off the screen as you can. It makes sense when you play it. This became one of those things I played semi-obsessively until I got gold scores on every level.

I think Siege Hero: Viking Vengeance is the sequel to a flash game I’ve played before. Or at least one with very similar gameplay. But it was a nice little waste of time. I anally kept playing until I got the crown thingy for completing each level in a minimum number of shots, with the pictured level being the hardest. In two shots it was easy, but I had a lot of trouble doing it in one.

This is a pretty fun flash game. Play through once, and then you play through again while your moves are replayed along with you. You cooperate with your previous attempts to try to get to the top floor.

Kingdom Rush is a tower defense game with some cool elements, but I don’t like that you’re forced to place your towers in specific spots. For whatever reason, I’m not grasping very good strategy in the game and I was barely able to beat it. Maybe because I spent all my points improving the arrow towers, when really it’s the cannon type ones that seem to do the most damage (but do require arrow towers in support).

Cursed Treasure: Don’t Touch My Gems, as was mentioned to me a while ago but I forgot about it until I saw it linked elsewhere, is sort of a sequel but more of an upgrade to the original. The game could really use keyboard shortcuts for the spells, especially since casting the meteor spell in rapid succession is necessary for my goal of passing every level flawlessly (I can’t do the last 2, the bosses of the type that are unhittable for some number of seconds are nearly impossible to kill before they reach your gems). Anyway, it’s still addictive/fun.

Learn to Fly 2 is the sequel to one of the best of the fly/buy upgrades games. Not as good as the original, since the extra complexity doesn’t add much except for complexity. I actually didn’t even notice the fuel upgrade option and was thinking the game seemed unusually hard. But it does get points for the “start the game on mute” option that it would be really nice if all flash games had.

In Famous Objects from Classic Movies, you are shown an object from a movie and have to guess the title, hangman-style (but with only three lives). I started to get bored after about 60 of them, but kept going to a nice round 100, with 86 right. I’d only seen one of the 14 I missed (and I don’t remember a lobster in that movie, though it’s probably the most famous scene and I’m just being an idiot).

In Rebuild, you lead a group of survivors in the zombie apocalypse as you scavenge for food, recruit other survivors, and expand your fort outward, all while keeping your group happy and fending off frequent zombie attacks. This seemed really hard at first, but once I knew what all the buildings did, I was mostly ok.