So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.

Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.

The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, and you need to move around the game board collecting yellow coins or keys, and make your way from the green starting area to the green end, without getting touched by the blue hazard balls. The only controls in the game are the arrow keys to control where your red square goes.

Like I said, it looks simple. But in practice, I gave up at level 4 after over 100 attempts. I wouldn't same I'm a video game expert, but I've certainly played my fair share of games in my time, and this one is certainly one of the most difficult.

How far can you get?

Water Werks is another Time Waster where the aim is to get the balls to the goal. In this iteration of the well-used concept, you can only influence the balls by spraying water at the objects in the environment around them. The balls themselves are impervious to the water's effects.

You can move your hose around and adjust the spray nozzle from a wide to narrow stream, which influences the strength of the stream as well as its direction.

I found Water Werks to be more difficult than an average time waster, but certainly not impossible. It's a fresh take on a potentially tired genre.

Must Pop Words is a boggling word game that boggles the mind; it reminds me of a trademarked game who's name I can't quite put my finger on. The idea is that letter balls fall from the top of the screen, and you have to quickly type words to make them pop and disappear. The letters fall with alarming regularity, so if you're not on the ball, so to speak, your screen can quickly fill up your game is over.

As the game progresses, a penguin pops up offering you bonus points if you can complete certain tasks before he disappears. The tasks include things like creating words of specific lengths, and words that end with a specific letter.

The game quickly takes on a frantic feel as your window fills up with unused balls. Interestingly, there is no penalty for using the same word over and over again, so if you're in trouble and have lots of z's and o's on the screen, there's nothing stopping you from typing the word 'zoo' three or four times.

If you have a friend that is a word game fan, don't let them see this game unless you want to lose them for a few hours.

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.

Man, oh man. If ever there were a time waster with a name that could evoke innuendo and double-entendre, it's one called Balls. It's excruciatingly difficult not to comment about playing with them or that this game scratches a real itch. Staying strong, we'll steer well clear of commentary like that.

Balls is a very simple game in which you play the part of a little grey ball, trying to touch a large hollow ball until it disappears. Complicating matters is the black ball, which chases you and when it catches you, makes your small grey ball grow. This in turn makes it harder to evade the black ball, and the walls which are continuously closing in on you. The game simply repeats over and over again with this simple formula, making it seem a bit like a bad dream. But somehow it's an enjoyable and addictive bad dream. Try it and you'll see what we mean.