RunPee, the website that tells you when it's safe to take a bathroom break during the movie you're watching, was a big hit when Lee wrote about it back in May. If you're a RunPee fan who's been wishing for a better, more practical mobile method of using the site, you might be interesting in the iPhone app. Now you can simply whip out your iPhone before the credits start and see when it's time to go relieve the effects of that large soda.

The best part about the iPhone app is that it will allow you to quickly check RunPee from the bathroom and read the site's quick synopsis of what you missed, so you can jump back into the movie when you return. Don't worry about spoilers, though, they're obscured by default so you won't accidentally read them before it's time. Sure, it's kind of a novelty, and definitely not the most useful thing you're going to have on your phone, but using it even once would be fun.

I've had the Sonacom Experience site on my list of things to blog about for a long time, but could never really figure out how to describe it. It appears to be a front-end for a French design and production firm's website.

The site is a Flash-based web toy, where you click on floating globes to unleash visuals and sound stored inside of them. You can control the color of the globes, and the colors match up with feelings or themes. For example, red is Aggression, purple is Vibration, and blue is Imagination.

Sonacom Experience is intriguing and fun to play with, but there isn't really a point. And maybe the lack of a point is the point - Sonacom is more of an art installation than it is game or application, sort of a "look what we can do". It has the same addictive quality as popping bubble wrap; I keep thinking I'll just burst one more globe to see what's inside, then close the site. Just. One. More.

Ninja Roll 2 is a simple ball rolling game that has you drawing a line for your "ninja ball" to roll and bounce down. The goal of the game is to collect all of the stars on each level.

The game has a very sparse look, and the physics of the ball remind me of the superballs that I played with as a kid. It's actually frustrating how bouncy this ball is. Sometimes it's hard to maintain momentum because just as your ball is about to ascend a ramp, it hits some tiny bump and bounces off in an unexpected direction. To be fair, part of the fun of playing Ninja Roll 2 is watching the ball make crazy moves.

Some of the levels appear physically impossible at first, but that's where your ball's incredible bounciness becomes an advantage - you can make it perform moves that you would have never thought possible.

My only gripe with the game is that for some reason it was choppy to the point of almost being unplayable when running in Firefox, but in Safari it is perfectly smooth.

KissTunes is an online service that makes it easy to play and record music using your computer's keyboard. It offers three different instruments, and all the home row keys (and a few from the row above) represent notes. You can save your song, along with any comments from friends, as a .kiss file that will open from the KissTunes on any computer.

The "kiss" in KissTunes probably refers to a show of affection, but it could also very well stand for "Keep it Simple, Stupid!" KissTunes isn't a complex compositional tool, and it's not aimed at professionals. It's more akin to a greeting card, except instead of sending cheesy canned music, you play and send the music yourself. Obviously, this isn't going to revolutionize the Internet, but it's a fun idea.

Downhill Snowboard is a physics game with a human dimension. You play the part of the snowboarder, and your job is to successfully navigate down the hill, while pulling off tricks over the various jumps you encounter along the way.

The game is very similar to side-scrolling car-based games that require you to maneuver over jumps and other obstacles, but in this case you do not have an engine, and must rely on the power of gravity to pull you down the hill.

My favorite part of Download Snowboard is how your character moves on the screen. Though you only have very limited control over his movements, somehow the developer managed to make the snowboarder's body move in a relatively natural way, particularly with how the knees flex when landing from a jump.

As mentioned, the controls in the game are limited; you can lean your snowboarder back and forth, jump, and grab either the front or back of the board while in the air. While the graphics in the game are simple and repetitive, there are a wide variety of courses ranging from shallow and long high-speed courses to steep and short hazard-ridden courses.

Neon Maze is a fresh take on maze games. The goal of the game is to reach the goal square with your spaceship, but to do so you need to navigate through a maze of variously colored neon barriers. The only way to pass through a barrier is to change your spaceship to the same color as the barrier, which can be done by passing over color pods spread throughout each level.

The puzzles are challenging, but not too challenging, and the way the spaceship moves when controlled with the mouse has a nice, springy quality, yet it responds in a very snappy fashion.

The game becomes more complicated once you advance to a certain point, and the neon bars become "locked". To open them, you need to have the key of the same color, which you can only get if your spaceship is that same color. If it sounds complicated, it can be, but it's also a good way of twisting things yet one more time to keep the challenge level up.

What could be more compelling than documenting the lives of characters from the video game The Sims? Okay, it doesn't sound all that compelling, and there are many examples on the web of it being done poorly. But once in awhile someone comes along and does something that seems like a bad idea in such spectacular fashion that it truly becomes noteworthy.

Alice and Kev is a blog by Robin Burkinshaw that documents the lives of two characters he created in The Sims 3, the latest iteration of Electronic Arts' blockbuster game franchise. The two characters are a father and daughter, and Burkinshaw decided that to make things interesting he would give his characters some real challenges, such as homelessness and in the case of the father, Kev, insanity.

The resulting story is somehow both heart-rending and hilarious. Burkinshaw's blogging style is almost entirely graphical, with occasional pithy comments thrown in. The few comments he includes give the story life, and the characters really do feel all too real.

Reading the comments for each update is almost as entertaining as the posts themselves; Alice and Kev have a huge following, and an average post results in 100 or more comments by people who seem to genuinely care about this duo, and the other characters they are involved with.

It's an inspired bit of storytelling, a bit of a surprise given the usual fare when it comes to Sims blogging.

[via Boing Boing]

Try as I might, I just can't get away from the physics games. There's something so compelling about applying real-world movement to a game, even if sometimes the physics are only approximations of reality.

Collider, the game I'm into currently, does a fairly good job of approximating balls rolling down ramps and chutes, and otherwise reacting to gravity. There are three types of balls in Collider: positively charged balls, negatively charged balls, and neutral balls. The goal of the game is to get all of the positive and negative balls to touch, causing them to explode and disappear.

Complicating matters is that when two similarly-charged balls touch, they combine into a larger ball. Conversely, if a large positive ball touches a smaller negative one, the negative ball disappears, and the larger positive ball shrinks proportionally.

Your only control in Collider is to place the balls on the playing board, but you are limited by the "radiation line", which is at different heights on different levels. Once you choose positions for all of the balls (and you have to place all of them), you can press the Play button and watch the level unfold.

The first few are easy, but the difficulty ramps up fairly quickly. Luckily (for some), solutions are available for any level if you get stuck - just click the I button on at the top-left of the window, and amongst the options is a Show Solution link.

Kinetikz is a simple shooting physics game where the goal is to shoot discs at a ball and manage to move the ball into the goal tile. Getting the ball into the goal replenishes your limited supply of discs, while running out of discs ends the game.

Figuring the angles is reminiscent of playing billiards, but the variously shaped game boards coupled with hazards like small blocks and levers complicates matters somewhat. The levers in particular add an element of interest to the game; some levers are unpowered, and can be moved by shooting discs at them, while others are motorized and move of their own accord.

If I had to describe a recipe for this game, I'd go with one part playing the angles, one part timing, and one part frustration when the first two parts don't work out perfectly. That being said, this game certainly has a challenging, addicting quality.

I have a confession to make: though I am an unabashed iPhone lover, nothing will ever top the infatuation I had with the Commodore 64. The C64 was my family's first computer, and it was soon to become my computer.

Harry McCracken over at the Technologizer blog latches onto a recent story about a Commodore 64 emulator (reputedly a very good one) that was rejected for entry into Apple's iPhone App Store due to the fact that code interpreters and emulators are expressly forbidden. Unfortunately, this appears to be a a blanket application of this rule, which seems to have been intended to block things like Adobe Flash, but the point is that it was blocked.

That story lead Harry to come up with a magnificent grid comparing the venerable C64 to the iPhone 3GS, a comparison which seems apt considering the fervent popularity of each platform.

A couple statistics from Harry's form really jumped out at me. For example, the iPhone already boasts over 50,000 software titles in the App Store. Compare that to only 10,000 titles total that were released for the Commodore 64 over the course of its life. Also, did you know that the iPhone's resolution is higher than the C64's was? The iPhone's display is 320 x 480, while the C64 sported a 320 x 200 pixel display.

The comparison grid isn't serious business; it's clearly intended to have some fun with a couple iconic computing devices, and for me at least it hits home.

Sometimes developers hit the nail on the head when they name their applications. Make A Celebrity Odd is a pretty much perfect name for what the service does. The entire capability of this site is to take a celebrity's name, look up a headshot of them, and make it look weird by applying a mirror-type effect similar to one of the ones you might use in Photo Booth on a Mac.

The fun of it is that it seems to be able to consistently find head shot photos, and this is done through Microsoft's new Bing search engine's API. According to the site, this API offers a unique way to restrict photos found to just faces without showing shoulders, while Google can return faces but there is no ability to get specific about whether or not shoulders are shown. Interestingly, the site falls back to Google if not enough results are found on Bing, which is probably a wise choice. The example image on this post clearly must have come through the fallback Google search.

I wasn't sure what the copyright issues would be with a service like Make A Celebrity Odd, but given that everything on this site is done on the client-side via JavaScript, there may not be any. This is arguably no different than if I were to grab a photo of a celebrity online and put it in Photoshop, then manipulate it for my own entertainment.

Except, of course, that this is a web service that appears to display modified images that likely have copyrights on them.

So, what do you think? Aside from being a fun little time waster for a few minutes, is this site a legitimate use of search results? Do you think Make A Celebrity Odd is on shaky legal ground?

I Love Traffic is a unique take on a flow-management game. In it, you play the part of traffic computer, turning lights green and red to control the flow of traffic. Some roads you have control over, while others are free-flowing. This means that to avoid accidents, you need to carefully manage which lights you turn green, and for how long.

The game view is top-down, and while the graphics are simple, crashes have satisfying skid marks and believable motion accompanied by a solid "crunch" sound. Sometimes it's actually not all that disappointing to fail a level when your mistake results in a multi-car pileup, with cars being bounced into other lanes of traffic. A failed level also results in a random fact being displayed, which is sort of fun until they start repeating and you realize you're having too much trouble with that level.

I Love Traffic is a short time waster, and it should take only about 15 minutes to complete the game. My biggest pile-up resulted in about 8 cars shooting off in different directions. Let us know how badly (or well) you do.

I cut my list off at 25 games, which means some great ones weren't included. Since they started to appear in the comments, I've added a page for your choices. Thanks for pitching in!


FreeCol - Oh crap, I'm in trouble. As if I hadn't blown enough time over the years on the various Colonization/Civlization games. Explore new lands, build a nation, survive, and win! Thanks to wcroskeys for suggesting this one!

Neuiz / Tremulous / Urban Terror - I included Nexuiz and Tremulous on a previous post, but all three of these great FPS games are worth mentioning again. There you go, zezke!

OpenArena / Alien Arena - By now you've noticed that cross-platform, open source gaming and FPS go hand in hand. Two more great choices, and as posted by 404 it may just have the most polished visuals of any in the bunch. Thanks to him, and to Austen for OpenArena!

Scorched 3D - A remake of the classic turn-based artillery game. Challenge other players online and be sure to check out some of the interesting mods, like Christmas and Stone Age. Big ba-da-boom. Thanks, Randy!

Warzone 2100 - Thanks to, er, John Doe for offering Warzone - a 3D RTS set in the future with a massive number of technologies (over 400) and units (more than 2,000). Multiplayer mode supports up to eight players.

Want more RTS action? Check out the list of games built on the Spring Engine, which feature themes like Star Wars, Gundam, and WWII (Spring: 1944). Thanks, Waldo!

Regardless of what operating system you run on your computer, it doesn't have to be all work and no play. Heck, that could turn you into some kind of axe-wielding homicidal maniac bent on destroying your own family while watching over a remote resort hotel in the dead of winter.

I'd certainly never want that to happen to any of our DownloadSquad readers, so here's a list of games that you can install on Windows, Mac, and Linux (and some even on BeOS and BSD). Enjoy!

...And, as usual, if there's a particularly killer cross-platform game that I didn't include, feel free to post it in the comments -- and tell us why you love it!


Battle for Wesnoth - One of the best known open source games around, Wesnoth is an excellent fantasy-themed turn-based strategy game. There's plenty here to keep you busy - multiple campaigns and large maps, and online multiplayer for when you grow weary of playing on your own.

Battle Tanks - It's got colorful, cartoonish graphics, massive explosions, tanks....And best of all, it's got multiplayer. What could be more fun than blowing up your friends while causing immeasurable damage to an unsuspecting city?