Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters
Phytrix: a Tetris-Meets-Match-3 Time Waster
by Jay Hathaway Nov 10th 2009
Phytrix is another entry into the venerable genre of falling block games. Pieces in various shapes and colors descend from the ceiling, and your objective is to rapidly organize them so that three or more blocks of the same color are touching, which makes those blocks disappear. Yes, it's two classic games - Tetris and Match 3 - rolled into one. That's not all, though. Each level of Phytrix has its own rules. For example, maybe you need to clear 40 blocks without removing any purple triangles. This sounds insidiously challenging, but Phytrix doesn't punish you very harshly for breaking the rules. Instead of losing the game when you make the wrong piece disappear, you just get a row filled in at the bottom of your screen, pushing your pile of pieces upward toward certain doom.
It's like Tetris, except that those filler rows aren't permanent. You can remove them by clearing more of the right pieces. As a result of this leniency, Phytrix doesn't get tough until several levels in. It's a neat idea for a game, and it's fun to play for a while, but it could offer more of a challenge.
Tower Bloxx
Finding Time Wasters to blog about should be considered a high-risk activity. While there's no doubt that it's a fun way to spend our time, the truth is that our productivity takes a serious hit every time we start testing out possibilities for inclusion as daily time wasters. Some are worse than others in this regard, but recently 
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, ...
