I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.
In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.
To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.
Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.
View more Time Wasters
The eBay wiki that we mentioned last week? Today it has launched and seems to have hit the ground running. Sitting pretty at its own domain name, eBay Wiki is powered by by JotSpot and the edits seem to be piling on already--Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb describes it as the "world's largest commercial wiki," which may very well be true. Users must be signed in with their eBay ID and password to make edits, editing is done with a WYSIWYG interface, and organization is accomplished with both categories and tags. The front page of eBay Wiki is a simple Recent Changes list, which is nice, especially for power-users, but for casual users I think navigation could be improved considerably. The wiki's content is currently an interesting hodge-podge, including everything from articles about stoneware to a tutorial on Linux automation using cron. Clearly eBay Wiki has some evolution to do, but I think there's a ton of potential there, not just for eBay users but for internet information-seekers at large.
