Fatty Bum Bum is a surreal adventure game from Dutch game developers Hanazuki. You don't actually play as Fatty Bum Bum, who is a large, friendly-looking, hungry character - sort of reminds me of a big Katamari. Instead, you're a kid who's floating through space, trying to collect food to deliver to Fatty Bum Bum, to make him grow as enormous as possible.

The game has three levels, and your food-grabbing abilities get stronger in each one. You start out by using your hands, then graduate to a spaceship with a grabber claw, and finally end up with a chomping crocodile costume. The game is side-scrolling, so you have to slow down as much as possible for maximum goodies. Once a piece of food scrolls off the screen, you lose it for good.

Fatty Bum Bum is a solid kids' game. It's not particularly challenging, although beating the current online high scores looks pretty impossible. Instead, the appeal is in the visuals. Grabbing food can set off fun, colorful animations where you character does a cool stunt or turns into some unexpected animal or object. In terms of gameplay, this slows down the clock (each level is time-limited) and helps you grab more stuff.

[Pro Tip: You can download the game for Mac or PC, and it runs a lot faster on the desktop than in-browser.]

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.

They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use the shield. Some enemies throw projectiles at you, and your health will disappear quickly if you don't use the space bar to block. Of course, you could just try to blow away everything on the screen before you get attacked, but your gun is unfortunately pretty lame, and overheats if you start clicking too furiously. Good luck protecting yourself from the undead hordes!

As a protocol droid, C-3PO was the only character in Star Wars who ever really understood what poor R2-D2 was trying to say. But, with this neat little R2-D2 translator, you can speak R2's language, or at least get a good audio file of it. Put in any word, and it'll be translated into droid-speak for you to download as a ringtone-ready mp3 file.

The most disappointing limitation is the 30 character limit on text. I mean, come on: you can't even put in "the Force is strong with this one!" However, if you have some audio editing software, you could certainly splice multiple Mp3s together to make one longer ringtone. If it's not edited exactly, no big deal. To be perfectly honest, only C-3PO is going to know what your R2 ringtone is really saying.

"Daddy, what's a bookmarklet?" A childish question, perhaps, but not a question a child might ask. The kid might also call them favelets if he was raised on a diet of Internet Explorer. A bookmarklet, or favelet comes from "bookmarks" and "favorites" that you would save in your browser. Bookmarklets are Javascript applications in the form of URLs, and wherever you can store a URL, you can store a bookmarklet. Usually you drag them from the page to your bookmark bar, or you can add them like any favorite or bookmark.

A bookmarklet functions much like a button, but instead of just taking you to a website (like your garden variety bookmark), it does something at that website as well. As I said, it is an application. Some bookmarklets are used to modify a website, even if the effect is an illusion on your machine. Javascript can do some crazy cool things in a browser, and bookmarklets can similarly do some crazy cool things. Unfortunately each browser handles Javascript just a bit differently (and different versions of a browser will behave differently), so your mileage may vary.

Bookmarklets are commonly used to quickly tie into websites that allow you to share information. For example, this handy Delicious bookmarklet that allows you to easily save a URL to your Delicious bookmarks. Normally you'd copy the URL, go to Delicious, then paste it in to the right place and fill out the metadata. With the bookmarklet you simply hit the button (the bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar, or elsewhere in your bookmarks) and it will take whatever site you're on, send you to Delicious, and fill out the URL and title. It usually suggests some tags as well.

Lots of sites provide handy bookmarklets, including VodPod, Tumblr, Reddit and FriendFeed. But here are a few resources you might find handy or fun:

• The Internet Archive has a Wayback bookmarklet so you can see previous versions of a website instamagically (scroll down a bit).
• Prank your friends with the ability to edit any website (well, not Flash sites) using this fun bookmarklet.
• Opera users? Here's a pile of bookmarklets just for you.
• Ever wanted to read some text on a web page in big text, one word at a time? Check out the nifty Spreeder bookmarklet to do just that.
• Finally there's the spiffy Rollyo, which adds a search to any page you visit. Plus, you can save your searches for later.

If you missed it the first time, Lee recently put together a list of 15+ handy bookmarklets.

[Hat tip to Lifehack for another excellent list of bookmarklets]

Odosketch is a drawing tool that's been around since 2006, but just caught my eye this month with its latest relaunch. It's a quick Flash-based way to do some drawing on a background that looks like a page in your trusty Moleskine sketchbook. You may not be as talented as some of the artists in the Odosketch featured gallery, but because of the way the app is designed, pretty much anything you draw with it looks good.

There's a selection of several brushes that vary in color and thickness, and it's just plain hard to make something look bad with them. The colors in Odosketch's limited palette all go together well, and I found myself accidentally achieving effects with my mouse that probably look better than anything I could do with a real brush. Also, Odosketch has an important feature that we take for granted in desktop apps, but some Flash projects unfortunately lack: you can actually save your work.

Do you like mind-bending puzzle time wasters? If so, I think you're going to like Magneboy. The game play is simple, but the game quickly becomes a thinker. You play the part of Magneboy, and you have the ability to move yourself over gaps of space to steel tiles using your magnetic ability. Some of the other tiles on the board are moveable using your magnetic powers, and still others have effects that change the direction or effect of your magnetism.

The game has a fun, whimsical look and feel, which makes me feel bad for not feeling as calm as the game appears to deserve. But seriously - sometimes the tiles simply won't move the way I want them to. It's frustrating. I mean fun, yes - fun. Frustratingly fun. That's a thing, isn't it? Now it is.

Magneboy: Frustratingly fun.

Now that I've got a full-time work laptop and a second system to reformat every other day I finally have a reason to customize my desktop with some snazzy wallpapers, sound schemes, and icons. I like to keep my desktop lighthearted, so I tend to lean toward cartoony, fun elements.

All of these sets are totally free for personal use, so download away! If you know another great set, feel free to share your links in the comments!

Comic Tiger - Obviously Mac-themed, but the set works well on Windows desktops, too. Created by Fasticon, but no longer listed on their free downloads - fortunately InterfaceLIFT still has it.

Desktoon - I first came across Everaldo's icons when playing with some Linux live CDs several years ago. Desktoon is packed with 31 pieces of hand-drawn goodness. Available from Yellow Icon.

Typically, when you're playing a game where the object is to keep the board from filling up with pieces, it's vertical.

Being used to Tetris and all its variants, it took me a second to adjust to Gridshock, a game where you match and eliminate colored lights on a horizontal playing field. It's an easy game to get the hang of, but the lights pile up faster as the levels go on, and it's tough to avoid getting overwhelmed.

As in Tetris, you only get one color to work with at a time. Your job is to decide where to put it for maximum board-clearing effect. Any combo of 3 or 4 matching pieces will disappear, and they can be connected horizontally, vertically, or an L-shaped combination of the two.

A meter on the side that shows you when more lights are going to be unceremoniously dumped into your grid, but there's hardly time to pay attention to it.

Tonematrix by AM Laboratory is a very fun and easy-to-use music sequencing toy. It's a 16 x 16 grid of grey boxes, and clicking in a box will turn it on. Boxes that have been turned on go white, and you will quickly see that each line of boxes has its own individual tone.

You can very quickly just click and drag all over the place to get a fast sense of how Tonematrix works, but the fun is in actually arranging your notes in a way that makes sense. Luckily, it's easy to make music that sounds good because rather than using a major or chromatic scale, Tonematrix uses a pentatonic scale. You may have noticed that if you play only the black keys on a piano, it's fairly easy to play something that sounds nice - that's because together the black keys make up a pentatonic scale.

What fun is making some music if you can't save it and come back to it? The makers of Tonematrix agreed, and built in the ability to copy and paste a series of comma-separated numbers representing each individual composition. For example, if you copy the following sequence of numbers and right-click on Tonematrix and choose "Paste", you will hear my first composition with Tonematrix:

36896,32772,33280,36868,32896,32772,33280,32788,16420,32768,33286,8192,32900,32768,16966,32768

Paste your favorite composition in the comments, and let's have some fun!

Most of our Time Waster are a good way to gill a few minutes whilst on coffee break at work. How about one that doesn't really get going for two weeks? Tiny Tetris features blocks so tiny that even after being left alone for a fortnight (someone else has done this for us), you probably still won't have a stack that reaches the top and ends your game.

The controls are the same as any Tetris clone - left and right arrows to move, up to flip, space bar to drop. You can even pause the game if you need to go AFK for a while, but where's the fun in that? The well is so massive that you could easily have left it running the whole time you partied at SXSW without losing.

I'm not convinced this is really a game, but it is a fun SWF to download and set as your screensaver. If you want to prove me wrong and rack up a few Tetrises, be my guest. You won't catch me waiting around for that damn 4-block straight piece to clear rows on this one.

Enjoy your squinting!

[via BoingBoing]

Browser Ball is an experimental time-waster that lets you spawn new browser windows and throw a beach ball around them. You can set up as many new windows as you want, and the ball will bounce off their edges and cross between overlapping windows, which makes for satisfying free-form play.

The most appealing part of Browser Ball isn't the game itself, but the concept of using multiple windows to create a playing surface. Sure, you can blow off steam by bouncing a beach ball around, and it's actually kind of addictive, but this could also be a fun way to create simple environments for browser-based games. Your desktop is the playing field, and that's pretty neat.

Looking for a new "spin" on those games where you shoot objects at each other and try to match colors? Pardon the corny pun, but Bubble Spinner might be for you. Instead of shooting at a static playing field, in Bubble Spinner your shots actually rotate the board. The object is to clear the screen by connecting 3 or more bubbles of the same color, making them disappear.

Having the target in the middle of the screen instead of at the top adds some new tricks to your Bubble Spinner arsenal. You can bounce off two walls to reach tough spots on the bottom of the board, and you can throw away a bubble by having it bounce too many times without touching another one. If you're having trouble getting a high score, you can always take out your frustration by spinning the board around as much as you can.

I've always enjoyed assembling models and contraptions out of Lego, and my four-year-old son is becoming quite a fan, too. Unfortunately, dad's stash doesn't always have all the fancy bricks required to meet his design requirements.

Thankfully, the good folks at Lego offer the Digital Designer, a 22mb free download that offers a rich, 3D program for crafting creations on your Windows PC.

We've been using it for quite a while, and the latest version sports a more polished interface, wider selection of pieces and backdrops, and reduced CPU and memory loads. It runs beautifully on my Frankenlaptop, a Core2 T5200 with integrated Intel video.

The interface is easy to understand, and several "starter kits" are included. They're a good way to see Digital Designer's impressive capabilities at work.

Everyone loves free games. Everyone knows ninjas are cool. And Flash with physics is pretty sweet, too.

Roll it all together, and you've got N: a simple but addictive platformer that is very reminiscent of the old Loderunner games. You mission is to navigate 2-D levels and collect all the gold you can. You'll have to be careful, however, because the game's ragdoll physics can play havoc with your tiny ninja self.

The controls couldn't be simpler: left and right arrows to move, shift to jump. Hold shift to jump higher.

The environment seems fairly tame at first, but some rooms contain I Wanna be The Guy -style booby traps. You've got to keep your Ninja wits sharp, or some springy block will shoot out and trampoline you to your doom. There are tons of rooms to explore - including a number of user-created levels - and it's insanely addictive.

N is Flash-based, and downloads are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux so everyone can enjoy the updated old-school action. Hell, you can even get versions for Xbox Arcade or your Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. Awesome!

If N's not enough to quench your thirst for gaming, don't forget to check out some of our previous posts!