Kitten Cannon addresses one of mankind's most primal urges; firing small fluffy animals out of a cannon.
The goal is simple really; shoot the kitten out of the cannon as far as possible. You can adjust the aim and velocity of the cannon, but the real distance is obtained when poor fluffy lands on a pile of explosives, or is trampolined into a balloon-bomb. Watch out for the Venus Cat-traps and death spikes that will stop fluffy DEAD in her tracks.
Some may think that there is a trivial amount of strategy involved in firing a Kitten from a cannon. Obviously they haven't reached 2,164 ft!
Time wasting is fun, especially when things need to get done. For that purpose BioLabs: Outbreak! is perfect, because it offers the player a fairly repetitive task that is interesting enough that you can keep doing it instead of what you should actually be doing. That, coupled with a very forgiving learning curve, allows you to really take your time with it and get the most out of your time wasting investment.
The concept is simple: there is an outbreak of some sort (inside a purple rectangle of all places) and you must administer an antidote to contain and kill off all the elements of the outbreak. But there is a catch, of course. The quantity of antidote is limited and the outbreak continues to grow in size as you progress through the levels. You contain the outbreak by growing bubbles of antidote and surrounding the individual cells with those bubbles. If during the antidote-bubble-growing-process the antidote makes contact with the outbreak, the bubble breaks and wastes precious antidote. So, it is important to exercise caution when growing bubbles, especially in the later stages.
And that's about as deep BioLabs: Outbreak! gets, which is probably good since you really don't want to spend too much time with any one time waster. In the end, BioLabs: Outbreak! will have wasted a good bit of your day and will let you enjoy the hectic catch-up session that follows your time wasting exploits.
SuperTuxKart is a cross-platform version of the popular Nintendo racing game Super Mario Kart, with a few key differences. Instead of Mario characters, it stars the beloved Linux mascot, Tux the Penguin, and some of his friends. The racing takes place on all-new tracks, either as a one-off race or a series. Up to 4 human players can join in, and up to 10 racers can be on the track at once, including computer drones.
SuperTuxKart is almost as fun as Mario Kart, but it has a couple of drawbacks. The multiplayer mode is a little tough to work out without a network play option, the splitscreen view and sharing of the keyboard reduces the fun-factor significantly. There are also some frustrating corners you can get stuck in on some of the tracks, and the game slows down a bit with all 10 racers in play. However, the plusses outweigh the minuses, and SuperTuxKart is actually a lot smoother and more visually appealing than playing Mario Kart on an emulator.
Today's time waster is MotherLoad - the time waster that lets you excavate your time away. You are an operator of a digging vehicle on Mars, being one of the brave few that dares dig in this hostile environment. The game's objective is simple: dig your way to riches and upgrade your digging vessel as you sell the collected ore on your way to the hidden treasures deep within Mars.
The game has fantastically intuitive controls, which - although being merely the arrow keys - can really be sensed when the digger moves exactly as expected. This not only allows you to get into the time wasting action quickly, but comes in handy as your digging vessel is rather fragile and needs to be cared for if you want to survive multiple trips below the surface.
In order to make any progress in the game, getting upgrades is crucial. Your vessel's fuel range as well as the cargo space that holds the excavated ore is very limited, besides the fact that the beginning drill is awfully inefficient. But, as you make progress and hit certain depths, say 1,000 feet, you will get bonuses from your employers which should help with getting these upgrades more quickly. Once you have some good gear on your excavator, you'll be able to start hitting deeper depths where the ore becomes progressively more valuable.
But be warned, after having pulled in your first few loads and made some basic upgrades, MotherLoad becomes incredibly addicting. Remember to waste time responsibly.
On some days, the urge to waste time is just a little stronger than others. If it happens to be one of those days for you today, you are in luck, because Blobular will not only help you waste your time, but also make you slightly nauseous.
The game starts innocently enough: Blobular, a blob out and about in the world, needs to get back home to Blobsville. To start you off on your journey, you pick how Blobular looks (his/her/its eyes and body color) and then enter a world of collectible items and foes. Each level has a given number of items you need to collect in order to pass it while running against the clock and avoiding enemies.
But here's the catch: you move your blob by spinning the world around and letting gravity pull the blob around. Although this is slightly disorienting (and slightly nauseating), once you get adjusted this time waster has some potential. As you collect more items (say mushrooms), your blob begins to grow and won't fit through smaller gaps anymore. You can then split your blob apart into smaller blobs that can fit through these gaps, and merge again whenever you please.
Continue until you have finished the game, are done wasting time, or can't continue due to nausea from all the spinning. Don't say we didn't warn you.
Recently we've noticed more and more two-dimensional games incorporating use of both the keyboard and mouse, much in the same way that first person shooters do. The latest to catch our eye is Dirk Valentine and the Fortress of Steam, a side-scrolling game in which you play the part of the hero, Dirk. Your goal is infiltrate Lord Battenberg's steam fortress, and destroy it.
The control scheme includes the typical movement buttons including jump, but then you use the mouse for aiming your weapon. Dirk is equipped with a chain shooter that kills enemies, but it also allows him to build short bridges out of the chain between specific types of platforms.
The gameplay is solid, and the look of the game has a sort of quasi-steampunk feel. Rather than giving you a training mode or page of instructions, the game's creator has instead decided to train you as you go. You can stop at specific points to get more information, making the learning curve very comfortable yet giving the game the ability to introduce more depth as you continue.
If you're looking for a five minute distraction from your regular work, Dirk Valentine is not a good choice for you. This game appears to have hours of content. But if you're looking for something a little more engaging that you can come back to again and again, check it out.
There are days that call for time wasters of a nature that have virtually no learning curve, are simple, and mindless the way Snake is. Comboll is all of those things, but also adds to that the element of very intuitive, nice bouncy physics that are good the way gummy bears are.
The goal of the game (if you can call it that) is to keep your sphere alive in a world of red and blue bars that horizontally scroll across the screen and accumulate as many points as possible. If you continue to bounce on bars of one color, you can build a combo, allowing you to earn a large number of points very quickly. In the event that you do fail to make a jump, your score is reset and you get to do it some more with almost no delay.
You can influence the jump and movement of your ball with the directional keys, allowing you to aim for bars of your chosen color. You can also "double jump" in mid air, letting you stretch some jumps to get where you want. The game comes in two modes, normal and extreme, but after playing the game for a bit we have come to the conclusion that the extreme mode is definitely better, since the bars disappear after you jump on them and hostile flying triangles will make it more difficult to make the jumps you want to.
All things said, if Comboll were an arcade game in the 70's, people would have spent all their quarters trying to play it.
If you have a penchant for survival/defense type games, R.O.B.O.T. (Relatively Obedient Being Of Thought) will be right up your alley for your time wasting needs. It is basically a cross-over of both a defense game and a survival game (which intrinsically overlap as it is) in which you utilize both manual movement and firing with turret placement to advance through levels.
The premise appears to be that you are a Robot defending a heap of rubble and dirt, or getting attacked on top of it, however you like to think of it. As you kill enemies and progress through waves, you are able to buy upgrades for you plasma gun (your primary means of disposal), your treads, a placeable (and enhanceable) turret, as well as your shields, armor, and an EMP shockwave for use against heavily shielded enemies. Of course, the waves continue to get harder, with more enemies coming in all shapes and sizes and attack styles, which keeps things interesting.
Once you progress a fair bit into the game, it is fairly difficult even on easy, but if you feel that does not apply to you can go all the way up to Insane difficulty. But, regardless of the difficulty your play it at, it's all very forgiving since you can always continue from the last wave you managed to clear.
Today's time waster is Ramps, which basically revolves around setting up ramps so that they guide a ball into a little bin in a sea of lava. You can adjust the ramp position as well as angle, utilizing ball velocity and bounce to jump gaps between the ramps. A warning if you are looking for a challenge: the game starts out ridiculously easy, and doesn't get difficult until vacuum holes and robotic sharks are introduced, which still isn't a problem since it appears that a score reduction is the only penalty incurred for losing a ball.
But when the day calls for some easy puzzle solving to pass the time, Ramps fills that niche perfectly. There's a definite sense of progression with a lenient learning curve, which ought to fit right with those that don't have the energy to play a game that requires more energy than the work they are putting off. The game's only real downside is that the "physics" and ball dynamics can be irritating, and levels are a bit repetitive. If that is not a deal breaker for you, give it a try, but it's no Incredible Machine.
For those of us who have just managed to get over our Blockles obsession, the guys over at iminlikewithyou have another game to soak up hours upon hours of the day: Dinglepop. The principle behind the game is pretty simple. Use the canon to shoot a colored ball at the other colored balls already on the screen. Whenever three or more balls of the same color come together they'll drop. The goal of the game is to keep the dingles from reaching the bottom the screen.
The fun in this game really comes in the fact that you're playing it against anywhere from two and seven other people. As you're shooting "dingles" you can collect different items that you can use to hurt your opponents, or help improve your game. Some of the items will lower or raise the top wall on a board, others will scramble all the dingles on a board, or help colorize it. All of the items you collect are stored on the right hand side of your board and you can either decide to use them on yourself or select what opponent you want to attack with them.
Iminlikewithyou has also added a leaderboard to Dinglepop (and to Blockles) that allows you to collect medals for your wins and see where you rank against other users on the site. There's also a widget on the homescreen that lets you see exactly how much times you've wasted on the game over time and a leaderboard for the biggest time wasters.
When life lays on the pressure and you're reeling from post April Fools day reality distortion, few things can help you zone out and postpone real life like a time waster.
X-HOC is the name of the game, and it works a lot like an indoor soccer game if it was played by a bunch of robots. The premise is fairly simple: put a silver orb (the "ball") into a black rectangle on the opposing side (the "goal") using passes, shots, and tackles. But, unlike real soccer, there are no out of bounds so you can bank passes off the wall to make some quick plays and keep the ball from the enemy team.
Although X-HOC has a bit of a learning curve until you get a hang of the game's "physics," it is what time waster are at their best: simple, challenging, and an excellent time sink.
If you enjoyed the arcade classic Missile Command, you will be happy to know that today's time waster is right up your alley. M.A.D., short for Mutually Assured Destruction, takes the classic Missile Command concept and builds on it with a variety of different upgrades, abilities, and enemy projectiles.
The goal of the game is to survive an onslaught of incoming missiles. You do this by shooting your own missiles at the incoming ones, which requires a little bit of reaction speed and dexterity as you have to aim yours on an intercepting path. However, although you will initially only be bombarded with plain go-in-a-straight-line missiles, you will soon have to face homing missiles and missiles with irregular flight patterns. Of course, to deal with these oddballs, you have an arsenal of support weapons to help make things easier, ranging from flak weaponry, emp discharges, and localized time distortion fields.
What all of this really means, is that if you have some time that needs disposing, M.A.D. is there to help - especially if you enjoy time wasters of the survival type.
If we told you that we wanted you to try out an Asteroids clone, you probably wouldn't be all that excited, would you? It seems like that genre of game has been done - to death - and there's not much more that could revive it. Surprisingly, Luminara seems to do just that.
Just like Asteroids, you play a little space ship thingie, and you fly around shooting at objects, in this case mostly just geometrical shapes. Sometimes the shapes simply explode and disappear, while in other cases they fragment into a bunch of smaller pests.
While the game has a nice soundtrack for a simply time waster, and pleasing if simple graphics, what sets Luminara apart from other Asteroids clones is the control mechanism. Instead of using space ship physics requiring rotating and firing boosters to move and aim, Luminara is a two-handed game. You use the mouse cursor to aim and fire your weapon, and use either the arrow keys or A, S, D, and W keys to actually move about the screen. The direction keys are absolute; rather than rotating, you simply move the direction of the key you press. The cognitive dissonance this creates when you're used to the way Asteroids works makes for quite the challenge, but that challenge is also what makes Luminara fun to play. It's neat to be able to pull off moves like strafing and nifty little dekes around the bad guys.
The game also sports some nifty power-ups, like Spread which turns your one laser shot into three that spread out, or Buddy which positions another mini version of yourself on the screen that flies around shooting baddies on your behalf.
This time waster can be played for a 5 minute break from your day, but also stands up if you want to dive in for an hour of gameplay. Have fun!
We were surprised to find an interesting time waster on the BBC's website, of all places. Microlife doesn't fall neatly into a game category. Essentially you play God, and control the lives of tiny microlife, which are single-cell organisms that move around slowly.
You feed them, and can train them to become warriors to defend their nest, but you have to be careful to keep an eye on your funds. Each microlife goes through a life cycle, starting as an infant, moving through middle age where it spends the majority of its time (and lays eggs if you're lucky) then becomes elderly and ultimately dies. Illnesses can also befall your little critters, so ensuring that they stay healthy is also your responsibility.
In the early levels you get to try your hand at raising little microlife without having to worry about the evil Catchers, but later on these predators come looking for a snack, so you have to make sure to have Warriors trained up to fend them off.
Microlife is well designed to slowly introduce new game concepts as the levels progress, and keep you addicted. This time waster can eat up an hour easily, so consider yourself warned before you click. But you're going to anyway, aren't you? You know you are.
Time wasting is fun, especially when things need to get done. For that purpose BioLabs: Outbreak! is perfect, because it offers the player a fairly repetitive task that is interesting enough that you can keep doing it instead of what you should actually be doing. That, coupled with a very forgiving learning curve, allows you to really take your time with it and get the most out of your time wasting investment.
SuperTuxKart is a cross-platform version of the popular Nintendo racing game Super Mario Kart, with a few key differences. Instead of Mario characters, it stars the beloved Linux mascot, Tux the Penguin, and some of his friends. The racing takes place on all-new tracks, either as a one-off race or a series. Up to 4 human players can join in, and up to 10 racers can be on the track at once, including computer drones. 
Today's time waster is MotherLoad - the time waster that lets you excavate your time away. You are an operator of a digging vehicle on Mars, being one of the brave few that dares dig in this hostile environment. The game's objective is simple: dig your way to riches and upgrade your digging vessel as you sell the collected ore on your way to the hidden treasures deep within Mars.
On some days, the urge to waste time is just a little stronger than others. If it happens to be one of those days for you today, you are in luck, because Blobular will not only help you waste your time, but also make you slightly nauseous.
Recently we've noticed more and more two-dimensional games incorporating use of both the keyboard and mouse, much in the same way that first person shooters do. The latest to catch our eye is Dirk Valentine and the Fortress of Steam, a side-scrolling game in which you play the part of the hero, Dirk. Your goal is infiltrate Lord Battenberg's steam fortress, and destroy it.
There are days that call for time wasters of a nature that have virtually no learning curve, are simple, and mindless the way Snake is. Comboll is all of those things, but also adds to that the element of very intuitive, nice bouncy physics that are good the way gummy bears are.
For those of us who have just managed to get over our Blockles obsession, the guys over at iminlikewithyou have another game to soak up hours upon hours of the day: Dinglepop. The principle behind the game is pretty simple. Use the canon to shoot a colored ball at the other colored balls already on the screen. Whenever three or more balls of the same color come together they'll drop. The goal of the game is to keep the dingles from reaching the bottom the screen.
When life lays on the pressure and you're reeling from post April Fools day reality distortion, few things can help you zone out and postpone real life like a time waster.
If we told you that we wanted you to try out an Asteroids clone, you probably wouldn't be all that excited, would you? It seems like that genre of game has been done - to death - and there's not much more that could revive it. Surprisingly, Luminara seems to do just that. 
We were surprised to find an interesting time waster on the BBC's website, of all places. Microlife doesn't fall neatly into a game category. Essentially you play God, and control the lives of tiny microlife, which are single-cell organisms that move around slowly.
