Pandemic 2 is a strategy game where you play the part of a virus, bacteria, or parasite. The goal of the game is to infect and then kill all of humanity.

At the start of the game you choose to be either a virus, bacteria, or parasite. Each has their own unique characteristics, like being more or less virulent, and mutating slowly or quickly. Once you've chosen the type of pandemic you represent, you move into the gameplay.

The game starts with you infecting a very small number of people in a specific country. You can then increase the rate of infection by purchasing symptoms, resistances, and modes of infection like airborne and waterborne. You can also slow things down by getting rid of a symptom or resistance, but doing that also costs points, so you need to be careful not to waste your moves.

Pandemic 2 ends when either you win by wiping humankind off of the face of the planet, or the humans successfully develop a vaccine and prevent you from infecting everyone.

There are two modes of play, the traditional simulation mode, and a shorter, simplified mode. The short version of the game can be played in about 10 minutes, making it a good coffee break game.

Red Remover is one of the all-time classic casual puzzle games, where the object is to remove the red blocks while keeping the other ones from falling. With Halloween coming up, the game is getting into costume as Pumpkin Remover: instead of blocks, you've got rotten pumpkins to get rid of, and fresh ones to defend. It's not just a reskinning of Red Remover, though, it also features some new levels.

Just like Red Remover, Pumpkin Remover presents a lot of physics-based challenges. Some of the obstacles you'll face include ramps, barricades, and weird directional gravity. It might not be the spookiest Halloween-themed game out there, but Pumpkin Remover is a fun expansion for anyone who just can't get enough of this particular style of puzzle game.

Pro Tip: Definitely play through level 5 for a cheesy Halloween joke. I LOL'd.

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.]

Cyclomaniacs is a side-scrolling bike racing game with solid gameplay and tons of charm. There are multiple goals in the game. As always in racing games the goal is to win, but quite often there are a number of other goals as well.

For example, it's possible to do tricks like wheelies and flips. Often unlocking new levels or new characters relies more on performing tricks than it does on winning the race.

Speaking of characters, they might be the most intriguing part of the game; you start with just a robot character, but quickly start to unlock other riders with bikes that have very different characteristics. My favorite so far is the King (and Elvis-like character) that seems to make performing wheelies quite easy. He's not the fastest, but I find him the easiest to control.

Cyclomaniacs is a very deep game for a Time Waster, providing tons of levels, and even lots of reasons to replay the levels you've already opened. One tip: to silence the game's annoying music, start a race then hit the Pause button in the lower-right part of the screen. Once you've paused the game you have control over music and sound effects.

Fragger is a physics-based game in a similar vein to the tank war games that you played as a kid. In Fragger, you choose the angle and power for your grenade launcher, and you try to blow up the people on each level. The game has a cartoony quality, and while the explosions are blowing up little grey people, they're still somehow satisfying.

The challenge level ramps up fairly quickly, and it becomes increasingly difficult to pinpoint a grenade's landing spot right where you need it to go. You can cancel a given grenade before it blows up by pressing the spacebar, but you have a limited supply, so you can't abuse that feature.

Fragger is a good time waster for people that don't like games that have time limits. There's nothing anxious about playing Fragger, but it is surprisingly fun.

I've seen a ton of Tetris variants in my day, and Tetris'd is a wild one. It's not even a puzzle game: it's a platformer, with Tetris blocks as the platforms. You play a tiny, acrobatic person (a ninja, maybe?) who can jump and climb on the blocks as they fall, and the object is to survive for as long as possible without getting squished or falling off the board.

The controls are tricky: there are only arrows, a grab and climb button, and a button to jump onto a midair piece. Theoretically, you could get pretty high in the air by jumping up onto a series of falling blocks, but I found the controls a little too unresponsive to do that effectively. It's still a fun game, though, especially when you manage to pull off a clutch move to escape certain death. Like in real Tetris, pieces fall faster as the game goes on. Unlike in real Tetris, lines never clear, so you just have to keep climbing up and up and up ...

Destroy the Wall 3 is a straightforward puzzle game. Your goal is to throw a ball so that it knocks down a wall (or walls) in such a way that a specific number of blocks fall out of the level, without losing your ball out of the level. The challenge is that you can only grab the ball in a small pink area, so you really have to actually throw the ball in the direction you think will cause the most destruction.

The more difficult levels later in the game can involve using levers to knock the blocks about, or pushing larger balls around. There are even levels featuring teleports that move your ball about the screen in confusing ways.

The somewhat random result of throwing the ball using your mouse (this is not a game that plays well when using a trackpad) means that even though you might have the right idea, it can take multiple frustrating tries to pass the level. The game unfortunately does not remember your progress, but you can start from any level, so you're not stuck back at square one if you reload the page or come back to the game at a later date.

Destroy the Wall 3 is one of the more addictive time waster's I've tried recently. Give it a shot, and let us know what you think. What levels are the toughest?

In Miami Shark, you play the title character - a shark, naturally - who's hell bent on destroying every swimmer, boat, fish or helicopter in the vicinity. Wait ... HELICOPTER? Yes, my friends, you can jump out of the water and bite down on flying objects, dragging them down to cause explosive chain reactions. This is not a realistic physics-based game. It's a blow-up-everything-you-possibly-can-by-biting-things-with-your-awesome-shark-teeth game.

Miami Shark isn't hard to play. The only controls are the arrows keys (for movement) and A or CTRL (for BITING!). You can chomp things along the surface of the water, or dive down deep and then hold the up arrow to get into the air. If you manage to cling on to a flying vehicle, keep hitting the down key until you drag it back into the water. If you can pull it down on top of an unsuspecting boat, it's all the better for you and your score.

Lose/lose is a space shooter that offers completely boring, uninspired gameplay ... until you realize you're risking your data to play it. The aliens you fight are generated by the game based on random files on your hard drive. When you blow one up, the file is deleted, too. If your ship is destroyed, lose/lose deletes itself. The thing is, the aliens don't actually shoot back at you, so it's unclear why you should shoot them at all.

Lose/lose is meant to raise a lot of important questions, but the intended message is somewhat jumbled. Is this a game about how much we value our data, and what risks we're willing to take with it? Or is it about our unquestioned assumption that having weapons in a game means you need to use those weapons? Even if the relationship between these two big ideas is unclear, one thing's for sure: the only way to win at lose/lose is not to play.

As a user of the location-based social game Foursquare, I'm not sure how I missed this one: thanks to a new round of funding, Foursquare is expanding to new cities and making some dramatic improvements to its website. One of the more obvious changes is the new domain name: foursquare.com. Previously, the service was running on playfoursquare.com. The site is now easier to navigate and much more stable.

Meanwhile, Foursquare is planning to add new cities using crowdsourced location info, rather than seeding the game with locations from a third-party database. A BlackBerry app is in the works, too, following the success of Foursquare's very slick Android app. Some common gripes about the game are also being resolved, so expect fewer crashes, fewer duplicate locations, and less gaming of the leaderboard.

Gravitex 2 is a classic gravity-based time waster. You pick a direction and amount of power, and shoot a ball off into space where various orbs' gravitational pull affect its trajectory. The goal is to collect all the green coins and get the yellow ball safely to its goal.

Interestingly, the green coins are not persistent; if you collect one and get the ball to the goal, that coin does not return again if you replay the level. That means that you don't have to come up with a single magic trajectory that will collect every coin in one go, but instead you can tackle a level multiple times in multiple ways to try to conquer it.

The graphics in Gravitex 2 are simple but do the trick, which can also be said for the soundtrack. The game offers both mouse-based control, and keyboard control. Given that this is very much a trial-and-error based game, you'll want to get comfortable with the keyboard controls, though for very tough levels the only way to finely control the settings is to use the mouse.

Gravitex 2 is pretty much a perfect casual game for people who enjoy physics games. You can play it for five minutes on your coffee break, and come back to it for a few minutes on your lunch hour.

The Walls are Not Cheese is an old-school pixelated platform game. It's so old-school, in fact, that your character is a square. While the graphics may not be that detailed, the gameplay is pretty entertaining: you shoot your way through soft walls that make you suspect the game's title is a lie.

Blasting through the walls gets you into new rooms, but your ammo is limited.To replenish your shooting power, you have to suck up the debris from the walls (not cheese?) that you've previously demolished. Jumping over pits and tangling with enemies is par for the course, as in any platform game.

If you're the cheating type, you can make The Walls are Not Cheese a little easier by digging a tunnel in the floor or ceiling and using it to avoid the obstacles in each level, but it's more fun to play it straight.

Time Fcuk might have been better named if the word "time" in its title was swapped for the word "mind". In the game you play the part of a cute little robot-like creature, who is contacted by yourself from 20 minutes in the future. You are told to get into a box, and from there you enter a world of strange puzzle rooms, where there is always a secondary dimension to the room. You can toggle between dimensions, and doing so can change the structure of the room, as well as the objects within it that you can interact with.

While you're busy trying to figure out how to exit each room, "future you" continues to talk to you, and it's creepy. The voice is a little disturbing, but it's what "future you" says that makes things seem weird. He becomes distrustful of you, and talks of being stuck in a room with hundreds of bodies. Like I said, creepy.

The puzzles are challenging and fun to think through, and the game has virtually limitless replay value because it has a level creation mode where anyone can create and submit levels. The game can then generate a virtually limitless number of iterations based on user-submitted levels, which are ranked in order of difficulty. Very clever.

Time Fcuk may well eat up a bunch of your time, and if you're not careful it might just leave you fcuked.

Go Home Ball calls itself a physics game, but is really more of a time-based puzzler. Your job in the game is to get the red ball from the top of the screen, where it rolls out of an opening in a tree, to the bottom of the screen where an opening in the top of a tree trunk awaits, ensuring to collect all the gold stars along the way. Your tools to move the ball along vary across the levels, but they are typically a stick that you can temporarily lay to allow the ball to cross gaps, and a hand that you can use to nudge the ball in the correct direction.

Don't let the simple and cute appearance of the game fool you; the timing and placement for each move is crucial, and your skill with a mouse will play a big part in the success you have at the game.

(after the break, Happy Gilmore weighs in with his thoughts about balls going home...)

Semantic Wars is a castle defending game with a little bit of hangman thrown in. The idea of the game is that you are building various types of combatants to advance across the screen from your castle to the enemy castle, fighting any opposing warriors they encounter. The goal is to protect your castle while advancing far enough to attack the opposing castle.

Creating combatants costs you points, and aside from getting lucky and acquiring some through a bonus box that is dropped by the blimp overhead (really), the only way to increase your points is by guessing letters in secret words, hangman-style. You earn 8 points for each correct letter you guess, but you lose 3 points each time you guess a letter that is not in the word.

Though the fighting element of the game isn't particularly well done, the combination of that aspect of the game with the word game is enough to really get your head spinning. It can be challenging to shift gears from guessing letters in words and ensuring that you are creating enough troops to defend your castle, but if you space out for even a little bit, you will get overrun.

Semantic Wars is a fun little time waster that should get your brain juices going.