TimeWaster posts

A computer's keyboard and mouse have never been very good as an interface to play a virtual piano, but The Virtual Keyboard takes an interesting approach that makes the resulting music much more appealing.

While you can individually click on any key on the piano's keyboard to hear the resulting tone, where it shines is in its ability to play predetermined chords just by pressing a number key on your computer's keyboard.

Each number from 1 to 7 represents a chord from the scale of the key you're playing in. You can choose what key to play in, and even shift the chord voicing lower or higher to better approximate the sound you want to hear.

What's great about this approach is that the numbers represent a valuable musical concept: musicians often use numbers to represent chords relative to one another, regardless of the key they're playing in. So, for example, Louie Louie could be represented by "1, 1, 1, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4" -- try it, and you'll see what I mean. It doesn't matter what key you're in, that pattern still sounds like Louie Louie when played with the right rhythm.

While The Virtual Keyboard seems like a toy or time waster, I can see it being of real value to songwriters who don't play piano, but need to figure out some chords for a song they're writing. It is limited by the fact that you can't play chords that don't naturally fall into the key the virtual piano is set to, but I'll take that simplification for the ease of use it offers in return.

Have you ever wished you could see what you look like with only one eye? Yeah, me neither. But, if you DO want to, there's a web-toy called Monoclopse that will let you do exactly that.

The site offers up a grid of other users' pictures that they created using Monoclopse, and you can click the camera icon to create your own. Rather than using your webcam to take a photo, Monoclopse asks you to upload a photo you already have. It then has you mark the centers of your eyes, and finally offers a fine-tuning scroll bar to get it just right.

Of course, if you have a Mac you can achieve a similar result with one of the effects in Photo Booth, but Monoclopse makes the process more simple, and more accurate.

It's silly, but fun.

Thanks to Thomas for the tip.

If you like retro-style gaming, you're going to love Don't Look Back, which is a modern platformer in a retro style by Terry Cavanagh.

The game manages to create fantastic ambiance with the use of only about 4 colors, and very simple music. The graphics are old-school, which is to say extremely pixelated. The control scheme is also very simple; you can move left and right and jump, and if you're lucky enough to get a gun, shoot it. You can only aim right and left, so you'd better hope the bad guys come to eye level at the right time.

The game opens with your character at a grave site, and he goes on a long adventure. I haven't completed the game yet, so I'm not sure where he's going, but it's the getting there that's the fun part anyway.

I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of putting together jigsaw puzzles; it's just not an activity I would ever choose. On the other hand, when there's a partially completed puzzle sitting on a table, I can't walk by it without sitting down and starting to look for pieces to match up together.

I suspect this Time Waster is only going to appeal to the real die-hard jigsaw puzzle fans out there. Among the various games at Shockwave.com are a set of 10 jigsaw puzzles that you can put together online. Playing involves moving pieces around and rotating them until you get a match, at which point you hear a satisfying click. Of course, there's none of the tactile feedback of feeling the pieces in your hands, the smell of the cardboard, and the frustration of finishing a 1,000 piece puzzle and discovering that one piece has gone missing.

Hmm, maybe it's not such a bad idea.

I'm always looking for a good distraction when I'm sitting in classes I don't care about... which tends to be almost all of them. Rockface Rescue is a great, addictive game that I found on the BBC's website. From what I understand, the show followed a fictional rescue helicopter service that is plagued with disaster and love triangles. The show was cancelled in 2008. Luckily, the game is nothing like the show.

In the game, you're a helicopter pilot tasked with finding and rescuing hikers (and the occasional baby cow) stranded in the mountainous landscape of Glenntannoch. Each level gets a little longer and the terrain gets a little more challenging. To add to the realism, each hiker has a life meter that can be either green, yellow or red. As you can imagine, a good strategy might be to get all the red guys first since they're probably pretty critical.

Be careful not to knock your rescuer around too much or run out of fuel or you're going down too. The controls are really simple - left, right, up and down are all you really need to know. The training and five individual missions are addictive and I'm yet to get through the entire game. Check it out!

Here's the problem with games these days: too much actual playing and not enough unlocking of achievements.

Is This a Game? might not be a game, but it provides you with 100 achievements to unlock using a (mostly) blank canvas. Pretty much anything you can think of is an achievement.

Clicking a whole bunch? Yep. Doing nothing at all? Achievement!

The thing is, you start to run out of ideas, eventually, and the non-game becomes a challenge to your creativity. Use the mouse, use the keyboard, and try different combinations.

You'd think it would get boring after a while, but it's frustrating to be defeated by a blank screen. I haven't been able to complete all 100 mystery tasks, but maybe you will.

Here's a free, quirky one for you: the Konami Code unlocks one achievement.

A game where you have to fly a big, slow-moving blimp and drop bombs on some slow-moving planes would normally sound pretty boring. That's exactly what Shouter is, but it adds a unique twist that makes it really difficult. See, Shouter isn't controlled by keyboard or by mouse, it's controlled by microphone. That's right, you have to make noise to keep your blimp in the air and use your weapons. The voice controls tried my patience after a while, but I think the game would be a winner with kids who love being loud anyway.

Any steady noise will lift your blimp, but it takes a sharp sound to drop a bomb. I found that a high-pitched noise worked best. Unfortunately, shouting "BOOM!" did not activate the bombs. Yeah, I tried that. The graphics aren't great, the gameplay isn't complex, and those bombs are awfully hard to time, but Shouter is different from anything else out there ... it just might not be the best choice of games to play while you're slacking off at work or in the back row of a university lecture.

I can't bring myself not to post this silly little time waster. On one hand, I'm surprised we haven't previously covered it, but on the other hand, it's so simple and inane that I guess it's not really that much of a surprise.

Simplicity and inanity aside, ZeFrank's Frog is far more entertaining than it has any right to be. It's a simple site with a Flash-animated frog, and if you accept the dialog that asks to use your microphone, the frog will open and close its mouth when you talk, based on the amplitude it detects on the microphone. That's it.

Simple, right?

So how come I can't bring myself to close the page?

Ed note: please welcome Erez Zukerman to the Download Squad team! Though he's a technical writer and software developer, he decided to go with a nice, relaxing Time Waster for his first post on DS. Who are we to argue? Enjoy!

This is not much of a time-waster, but only in the sense that it doesn't take much time to play. However, MicroSports is intense - and half the fun is trying to figure out what the heck you're supposed to be doing right now.

The premise is simple: use your mouse to move stuff around in mini-mini games which are somehow supposed to approximate sports. The games feel a bit like WarioWare, and each one takes about five to ten seconds. They're super-simple, provided you figure out what to do quickly. The soundtrack mashes nicely with the whole experience, which means it's pretty hectic.

All in all, MicroSports can be a nice change of pace for a sleepy Friday at the office.

One tip, though: you definitely need a mouse for this one. A trackpad simply doesn't cut it!

Let me warn you up front that Eenie Bounce is not a challenging game. None of its 25 levels took me more than a minute to beat. The object of Eenie Bounce is to bounce your ball around the screen, collecting all the stars and landing on the numbered platforms the appropriate number of times before you hit the ground. Some platforms bounce you higher than others, but that's the only challenging part. The replay value comes from trying to beat the game in the shortest time possible to get a high score.

Eenie Bounce is more like a puzzle game than a fast-paced game of skill. Once you've figured out the pattern that will beat a level, execution is pretty simple. The platforms are large, and the ball moves slowly enough that you should have no trouble pulling off the necessary mid-air maneuvers. Maybe Eenie Bounce isn't going to keep you awake and playing for days, but it's not a bad way to kill a lunchbreak.

Peel yourself off the floor (like Flickr user B. Rosen above), Download Squad readers! It's time to usher in 2010!

Over the past twelve months we've shown you plenty of great tools to improve your productivity. We like to keep things in balance, though, so there were also plenty of awesome Time Wasters posted to keep your stress levels in check. Although in hindsight there were several which probably stressed some of you out even more... so... sorry about that.

Still, there's no better way to kick off the new year than with a big ol' helping of button-mashing, bad guy-blasting, puzzle-solving fun. Without further ado, it's time to take the jump and enjoy ten of our favorite Time Wasters from 2009!

What do you get if you combine two of the three greatest-selling video game franchises of all time? Other than a stupid name, you actually get quite a fun and playable game!

Tuper Tario Tros. looks just like the beginning of a NES or SNES Mario game: you run, you jump, you crush unwitting Koopas... UNTIL -- shock! horror! -- you reach an unscalable wall! Mario can only jump three bricks, not SIX! What to do, what to do?!

You hit space bar, because the game tells you to, and suddenly you're playing Tetris, with the usual blocks thrown down by that those little guys that follow you in a cloud (Lakitus, for the game nerds out there). Your job is to place the blocks so that Mario can then carry on with the level. It scrolls, albeit too slowly, to add a little bit of pressure.

It's a fun take on two very old franchises. It works surprisingly well and is worth a few of your Time-Wasting minutes.