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.

Rope 'n' Fly 2 [iTunes link] is an example of a casual iPhone game done right. The gameplay is incredibly simple: you tap on a building to shoot out a rope and attach it, then tap again when you want to release it. The goal is to use your swinging momentum to move forward in the game, but also to increase your altitude since you are constantly falling.

For such a simple game, there are a surprising number of game modes to choose from. Timed modes, distance modes, even silly ones like "how far can you get with only one rope?"

But what really enhances the game is the high score and achievement functionality that is powered by OpenFeint, a social platform for iPhone game makers and players. Rope 'n' Fly 2's gameplay is solid, but very simple and repetitive. OpenFeint brings achievements, high score tracking, leader-boards, and the ability to compare your scores with friends playing the same game. In Rope 'n' Fly 2, this means it will tell you when you've successfully completed an achievement like flying more than 200 meters.

I love that you can pull up Rope 'n' Fly 2 quickly, and have a fun gaming session that lasts only a minute or two. For a price of $1, this makes it the epitome of a casual game. If you're not interested in tracking your score, or any of the slight variations on gameplay, you might be satisfied with Rope 'n' Fly 2 lite [iTunes link], a limited version of the game.

Icycle is a "capture the stars" style game where you control a naked (yes, naked) character. Instead of stars, your character is trying to collect frozen bubbles. Since he's missing his clothes, and if you ride him into a hazard and he falls off his bike, he freezes, or dies in numerous entertaining ways.

While the game play is solid, the physics of the game are pretty limited when compared to other side-view bike or car games. But Icycle isn't trying to be a physics-based game; instead it focuses on lush visuals and simple but challenging gameplay that requires memorizing the location of hazards and bubbles. Rather than scrolling as many games of this type do, you ride through multiple screens, which means that you don't get to see what's coming. It's admittedly a retro-style game, as the game's creator Damp Gnat freely admits.

Savanna Blocks is a falling-blocks puzzle game created by Clockwork Monster that uses a fresh take on a tired genre. In Savanna Blocks your goal is to draw a line through groups of blocks that are touching either horizontally or vertically (not diagonally) to clear them from the board. As soon as you release your mouse button, the blocks that you've drawn on will disappear, but if you draw outside of the group of touching same-color blocks, your line will disappear.

Adding to the challenge is the fact that while you're busy connecting 10 blocks together, rows are being added to the bottom of the screen, shifting the blocks in play and potentially ruining your current line.

There are also special blocks available that will slow down the addition of new lines, blow up an entire line, or simply give you bonus points. The special blocks can be added on to any adjacent grouping you are making.

Savanna Blocks takes only seconds to learn, but I was surprised at how addictive the gameplay is given how tired I am of falling blocks games. Give it a try, you might be surprised too.

While I've written about plenty of great online games, sometimes a Time Waster really surprises me. That's the case with Fig 8, a very stylistic and unique game. In it, you control an old-fashioned bicycle as it rides along a page of old-style diagrams. Your tires trace lines as you go, and the goal of the game is to get as far as you can as the window scrolls over more and more of the page while avoiding riding the bike into any of the digrams.

Making things more difficult is the fact that the bike's rear tire, like on a real bike, doesn't necessarily trace the same route the front tire does, particularly at slow speeds. So you need to be extra careful when weaving through spaces to line yourself up ahead of time.

As you go, there are checkpoints so that you can continue without having to start from scratch, though they seem to be spread very far apart. As you go, you collect points, and your points are multiplied substantially for every moment that your tires trace the exact same line. If you hold the Shift key, you can slow down your steering, which makes it easier to keep your multiplier going, but much more difficult to avoid obstacles.

Probably my favorite part of the game is that the music is appropriate for the style of the game, and it progresses along with you. The creator of this game gave a lot of thought to style, while at the same time inventing a unique and addicting gameplay.

While pretty graphics are nice, my favorite time wasters are those that have a great concept, and I'm particularly partial to physics games. Color Infection is definitely one of my favorites.

I was therefore very happy to discover that there is now a sequel, Color Infection 2. The concept and game-play is all the same, but this iteration is a little more challenging. In particular, the later levels start using multiple weighted platforms that have you counting on your fingers and backwards trying to make sense of it all.

If that sort of thing is your bag, you're going to like Color Infection 2. If not, I find I keep coming back to Learn to Fly; maybe that would be a good alternative.

Redstar Fall is a game that falls into the "balancing games" genre of time waster. The goal of the game is to carefully lower the red star onto the main platform without letting it fall off the side, by carefully removing the blocks that are supporting it in the correct order.

The game is definitely a no-frills affair, with an almost spartan look, but that's not a bad thing; the game play is very solid, and while the graphics aren't stunning, they're very functional and don't detract from the game's fun in the slightest.

Some of the later levels include blocks that can't be removed, exploding blocks, and multiple platforms, only one of which is the correct one.

The game is fairly quick to complete, making it a good choice if you're looking for something on your coffee break that isn't going to tempt you to continue playing into work time.

Question...what is only 72MB, downloadable, free, fun, and fraggalicious? Why OpenArena, of course. This little game (with excellent graphics I might add) is built on the FOSS Quake 3 engine. There is a single player, as well as multiplayer mode you can play with. The latest version is 0.6.0, and is really a lot of gameplay packed into a small download (for what it is). If you are a gaming fan, especially of Quake, Unreal, and other fraggin games like that, and maybe a little old-skool, you'll like this game. I mean it doesn't get much better for free, does it? Heck, I like a free flash game, and this is just a tiny bit more involved. Try it out, it is actually quite addictive. Almost as much as the downloading of the game itself. Fresh bits and pixels man (in geek-speak, it means "sweet-lovin"). Enjoy and frag away!