As a kid, at family reunions and holidays like Thanksgiving, my cousins and I used to play a variation of Super Mario Bros. that we liked to call, "Suicide Mario." The goal of the game was not to complete the level as directed, but to find the most creative way to kill our Mario or Luigi character. Bonus points were awarded for quick, hilarious and extra sadistic acts of hara-kiri. It was a great way to infuse new life into a game that we could all beat in our sleep, and the idea eventually spun off into other variations like, "Suicide Zelda," "Suicide Starfox" and in later years, "Suicide Golden Eye."
This is why [adult swim]'s Five Minute's to Kill (Yourself) easily earned its place as one of my favorite Flash games, well, ever. In that game, you are an office worker who has five minutes to kill yourself. You inflict damage upon your character by annoying co-workers, microwaving metal, stapling your head, running yourself through the shredder, that kind of thing. It's hilarious and awesome.
Now, the game team at [adult swim] has released a sequel: Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) 2. This time, instead of trying to kill yourself at work, you are trying to kill yourself at a family reunion. Even before I played the game, I was already in love based on the concept alone.
In the original game, you used your keyboard to move around and select objects to inflict self-injury. The new game uses the mouse instead, which offers better mobility, and I dare say might make the game a bit easier. There are also several "areas" to explore where you can slit your proverbial pixelated wrists, each area has its own unique death trabs -- the beach has sharks and life-guardless pools, the pavilion has drunken relatives and hot oil, the park has fire-ant hills. You get the drill. To get certain injuries, you have to first collect items that will trigger their release. This makes the game a bit more challengng, as you have to find what someone might want before they can hit you with a baseball bat or hug your out of drunken fervor.
Real suicide is not funny. Pixelated suicide, however, is hilarious.
You can play Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) 2 at [adult swim].com
Bored? Feeling creative? Why not head over to Mr. Picassohead and throw together a 5-minute masterpiece?
Mr. Picassohead is a simple Flash collage app that lets you put a cubist spin on drag-and-drop image creation. Pick a face, scale it just so, and then start adding your elements. It's ridiculously simple and yet somehow strangely gratifying.
Abstract shapes are included, and you'll need to make use of them to add color behind object like eyes and ears. Changing their color only alters the outlines. When you're all done, be sure to add your signature for that professional finishing touch.
If you're especially proud of your creation, you can save or email it. Impress your friends and family with your artistic genius!
While you're in an artsy mood, don't forget to check out the classic Jacksonpollock.Org, which we wrote about in 2006.
Enough of this practical advice and useful downloads! I know you've been working hard, and you're probably itching for some fun and excitement. If you've read some of my previous Time Wasters, you'll know that I've got a soft spot for old school gaming.
Grab your browser, and get ready for some classic, low-fi action! Neave Games specializes in making flash remakes of classic games, and has a few tasty selections for you. Among them are Frogger, Space Invaders, Tetris, and the old Nokia cellphone game Snake (pictured). Rad. c64s.com is dedicated to my first computer and gaming system, the Commodore 64. It's been on DS before, but they've added a lot of great new games over the years. Packacuda, Wizard's Lair, Crystal Castles. It's hard to believe how good some of the games were for the trusty old c64.
So, I am guessing that pretty much everyone out there in Internet land has played RuneScape, except for me. But just in case you forgot about it or, like me, you just woke up from a long internet gaming nap, let's have a look-see.
RuneScape bills itself as a massive online adventure game. In theory, it could be a lot like World of Warcraft; except, it's not. For one thing it runs in a tiny window in your browser and you don't have to load any software to play (you do need to have Java installed though). In that sense, it's much more portable than something like WoW.
And if you're used to a really pretty game, you won't find it here. The graphics are ok at best. And the story progresses with a lot of read this paragraph and click here to continue type stuff.
But, if you are looking for a time waster that's a throwback to what games used to be, RuneScape is where you will find it. It moves so slowly you can definitely keep it running while you are doing other things. I played for about an hour while going about my business and found it relatively enjoyable.
After spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.
It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.
Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.
Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.
Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.
Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.
This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.
If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.
I have to admit, this is probably the most self-indulgent Time Waster ever (and we can be pretty self-indulgent), but as a huge fan of the too-quickly canceled "Arrested Development," I could not resist.
ADchoose is a stand alone Mac application (though it is written in Python so porting it would just be a matter of compiling against a different binary) that does exactly one thing: it recommends what episode of "Arrested Development" you should watch. That's it. I know, I know, it sounds pretty one-note.
Here's why this has potential: A) Genius idea -- as GOB would say, "Come on!" B) The developer already has a poll asking what users would like to see in the next version, and one of those choices is direct Hulu links. THAT makes a one-note application instantly more useful.
If you are a big fan of the Bluth Company, give ADchoose a try...with club sauce!
So here at Download Squad we've been into wasting time lately. Here's another time waster, this time all about physics.
You can visit Phunland and download Phun which is a 2D physics sandbox type game. Basically you have your toolbox of gears, levers, springs, boxes and more to build whatever your heart desires. You can start with a preloaded scene that has some pieces already there or go from scratch to build whatever you want.
I chose a wagon and added some springs to make it keep smashing backwards into the wall. I am more of a word nerd than a physics nerd so this was about the extent of my capabilities.
The media page has lots of YouTube videos of phun physics in action as well as a movie explaining phun and even playing the phun theme song. So if you need some phun fun check it out. If you're one of those people who finds physics enjoyable it just might get your creative juices moving on a boring afternoon.
This is a simple and quick time waster for you word nerds from Lunchtimers. Or even for those of you that always like to slip a naughty word into a scrabble game.
Remember those refrigerator magnets you had when you were a kid that were all letters? Letters is the same concept in your browser with one fun twist. Instead of just you playing with the letters you have to share with whoever else is logged in. When I tried it there were 12 people sharing letters.
Every time I got close to spelling out "Download Squad Rules" someone kept stealing my letters, moving them around and trying to put them into their own words. Of course when someone named Kevin tried to proclaim he was god, I took the time to change it to goofy which seemed to annoy him since the next thing he came up with was who?
There were plenty of people using their letters to spell out naughty words and plenty of others who would immediately try and change those naughty words into something nicer.
See what you can spell before someone steals your letters.
I suffered through two years of physics in high school, and it's not really a subject that most people would consider an exciting way to waste time on a Friday afternoon. Well, slap me silly, Fantastic Contraption proves that physics can indeed be fun!
The goal is simple: assemble your contraption in the work area (the light blue box) and propel the pink wheel into the pink box. You're provided only a handful of simplistic components with which to build - wheels, a water-drive rod, and sticks. Assemble them like a caveman MacGuyver to reach the goal, and move on to the next level! The physics is surprisingly realistic, and the game can get quite challenging.
Registering allows you to create and save levels, and you're given given a url that links directly to your creation so you can frustrate your friends. Unfortunately, playing other user's saved games requires a $10 registration fee, but you'll have plenty of fun playing the free levels.
Micro Olympics is a simple,yet addictive Flash-based game that brings wasting time and shooting things out of a cannon to a whole new level.
There are three varieties of Micro Olympics, the original, Micro Olympics on Mars and Micro Olympics Christmas. All three have the same guiding principal: shoot your plane, flying saucer or Santa's sled further than your competitor.
You control the height of your launch by clicking on the cannon and stopping at your desired angle. The velocity of the launch is then chosen by when you click on the canon as you see the velocity increase and decrease. Match the right angle with high enough velocity and you're golden.
In each round you are given three opportunities to best your competitors average distance. After each launch session, you are awarded points based on distance, bonus points dependent on other features and money that can be used at the end of each round to buy add-ons that will help you obtain higher distances, either through power-ups or bonus points.
The first few rounds are pretty easy, but after that, I got stuck and had to start playing with power-ups to increase my distance. Thirty minutes later, I finally remembered that I better start writing up this post instead of playing Micro Olympics.
The graphics are pretty hilarious, especially when landing (Christmas Olympics is worth a play just to see how Santa lands in the snow -- adorable). The sounds are fun too, but office workers might want to make sure that you disable the effects and background music or mute your workstation before playing.
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.
After spending the better part of an hour on 
I have to admit, this is probably the most self-indulgent 
