Kitty needs to eat, dodge human feet in Time4Cat - Time Waster

The goal in Time4Cat is to guide your kitty around the crosswalk and snack on falling food while avoiding pedestrians.
Just like in real life, it's all good fun until someone steps on the cat.
Nice green ladies move comparatively slowly, while purple men rush past with little regard for your feline. Trickier still, the speed of their gait is directly related to how fast you're moving. Zip around the crosswalk, and a blur of hurried pedestrian traffic ensues. Move more slowly, and everyone else does, too. Stop, and they stop.
You'll need to do the occasional zigzag to get someone to walk away from that slice of pizza they're standing on.
Cat isn't totally defenseless. Every now and then you'll see a glowing white orb appear. Grab them, as they give you the power to throw a telekinetic sphere around yourself that repels nearby people.


[Via: Download Squad ]

Don't snag your ball on the spikes in Scriball - Time Waster

As with a lot of good Time Wasters, the concept behind Scriball isn't rocket surgery (to quote Don Cherry). Your goal is the green circle, and your mission is to guide the yellow ball onto it.
Things are complicated ever-so-slightly by your means of locomotion. You've got two ways to make the ball move: click to jump or draw a line by dragging your mouse.
See how long the line is in the screenshot? That's about all you get to work with. Imagine guiding the yellow ball by dragging around an overcooked spaghetti noodle two inches long, and you have the general idea. Getting the hang of Scriball's physics can be a wee bit frustrating, but it doesn't spoil the fun.
I'm sure you can guess from looking, but here's a quick PSA: just like in real life, keep your ball away from the spiky things. They'll make your ball explode.

[Via: Download Squad ]

World Golf Tour - Time Waster

Just how far can you go with an online game? By some measures, World Golf Tour could be considered a Time Waster that is all grown up. It's trying to be a desktop-quality game provided online.
The game play is pretty much par for the course, as far as golf games go (sorry, I couldn't resist), and the course imagery is gorgeous, maybe a little too much so. As is typical in golf, there are only a few things that move: in this case the player, the ball, and the flag. Unfortunately, it's pretty obvious that these are rendered in 3D on top of a static image of the course, making them look out of place.
Worse, to achieve the beautiful effect of having photographic imagery for the game, you are confined to a set number of vantage points, many of which are fine when the ball lies in the center of them, but become very awkward when the ball is not. The terrain very obviously has undulations in it, and the ball seems to react fairly reasonably to the terrain, but you can tell that the ball's movement is somehow disconnected from the scene.
Although all of this seems like criticism, the truth is that these are compromises that are reasonable for such a beautiful free online game, if it wasn't for one fatal flaw: Flash. Unfortunately, on my reasonable speedy machine, Flash seemed to act up on every third shot, and would cause my shot meter to jump around sporadically, making it impossible to make a decent shot, never mind a good one. Now, I'm not very good at this as it is, but in one 9-hole round I had at least 8 shots completely ruined by a freezing display.
Now to be fair, World Golf Tour is still in beta, and hopefully they can iron out this very ugly divot in what is otherwise a fairly decent fairway.
You can play a skills game for free without signing up for an account, but to play a full round or to play with your friends, you'll need to sign up for an account and give away your email address and birthday. Is it worth it? I guess it depends on how much you like golf.
[Via: Download Squad ]

Lively from Google going the way of the dodo

Not that we were huge fans of Lively to begin with, but I'm sure someone out there loved it. Right? No? Perhaps that explains Google's announcement that, "despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year." So grab those screenies before 2009 and your avatars and rooms go dead.
One or two of you may cry out in anguish as a few million vertices are silenced with the click of a mouse: "why Google, why?" Well, I'm sure it wasn't the fact that it was PC-only (and Firefox or IE7-only). Or that it wasn't the most stable thing Google has produced. Or that it was, ya know, like Second Life Lite but for chat. Because, clearly, the world needs a few zillion more Second Life-style chat clients, right?
If you are to believe Google, it's because they want to focus on their core business. You know, search and ads and apps that don't look like Animal Crossing. Besides, they can always roll this into Sketchup, so you could have a virtual barn raising. We can dream, can't we?
[Via: Download Squad ]

Z-Rox - skill testing Time Waster

How good are you at identifying well-known alphabetical characters and shapes? Well, I'm pretty good at it. I can even read, and stuff. So at first I wasn't sure how a game that had to do with identifying shapes and letters would be all that interesting.
But what if you can only see a one-pixel slice of a letter at a time, and you have to imagine that that slice is scanning from top to bottom? Basically, you're looking at a little line that changes size and moves back and forth, but is representing a shape or letter. Well, it certainly gets more challenging.
Z-Rox is a quick little online game that presents letters and shapes in exactly this way, and challenges you to identify them. For letters, you just enter the letter as the answer, but for shapes you must type the name of them.
[Via: Download Squad ]

FunOrb, lots of random games - Time Waster

So, you're still looking for just the right way to waste some time? Not enough to keep you busy in your cube? FunOrb should keep you busy for a few hours. Those hours might be spent playing a lot of games to find one you like, but, hey, you're still wasting time, aren't you?
There are lots of little, simple puzzle games, think Bejeweled and the like, as well as Pool, arcade games and strategy games. All of the games have music and sound, so turn down the speakers before you get started.
Read on for the gory details.

• I found the music in the pool game to be of the grocery store jazz variety, which I found annoying. Otherwise, the game is okay.
• Dungeon Assault is a game where you are the dragon, planning your assault on other dragon's dungeons and defending your own. The intro to the game made me think of games like Empire Earth with it's very sweeping, epic views and big, booming voiced narrator. The game, on the other hand, involved lots of pointing and clicking and was very slow moving in general. If you want to play more than the tutorial, you must register with the site. Oh, and when you battle monsters, you actually see dice rolling on the screen to determine the outcome.
  
• OrbDefense is much like Desktop Tower Defense but not quite as cool. You have to build towers to keep various critters from making it from one point on the maze to another.
  
• In Zombie Dawn you are in charge of the undead apocalypse (really! That's what the instructions say). You basically left click on your undead minions and left click on where you want them to go. Chase down the humans and leave a pile of green goo behind when they are turned into a zombie. The intro screens have much better graphics than the actual game. Seems to be a recurring pattern of that.
  
• Pixelate is a Tetris type game where you have to make patterns with your dropping blocks. Some levels are more challenging than others.
  
• Transmorgrify is a Wheel of Fortune looking game with Scrabble type playing. They have Pat and Vanna avatars but you have to make words from letters that are given to you. I enjoyed the game, being a word nerd and all, but you have to double click on the letters to choose them and it just wasn't working well for me. Sometimes I had to double click several times to get the letter chosen.
  

So, FunOrb has some decent games. But, you have to hunt around and try a lot of crap to find one you enjoy. And, you have to register with the site to play full versions of any of the games which I always think is lame. But, if you really need to waste some time, you might find something in there you like.
[Via: Download Squad ]

Kill (yourself), again! - Time Waster

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
[Via: Download Squad ]

Snake for old school gaming - Time Waster

Snake is a quickly played, easily addictive game. It's just like the Snake games of old where you have to control your snake around a box, picking up things along the way. You can't touch the sides or yourself or the game starts over. The good part? Much better graphics.
Obviously the longer the snake becomes, the more difficult it is to maneuver. And those darn mice always pop up in the most tricky places.
But, if you're like me and played Snake when you were a bit younger, your fingers may remember what to do quite quickly. After running into walls about four times I was able to play a much longer game.
It's a nice little flash game that is good for burning off a few minutes at a time without sucking you in for an hour.
[Via: Download Squad ]

Time Waster: Drink beer and throw axes LOTR style

You've seen Lord of the Rings. You've drank beer. You've thrown axes. Ok, so maybe not the last part.
Now do all 3 online for points with the Lord of the Rings Swig & Toss game! All thanks to the wonderful thing we know and love called Flash!
This is brilliant for a few reasons.

• The more you drink, the harder it is to hold the axe straight, naturally.
  
  
• The more you drink and the better you do, the more points you get!

This is the definition of a Time Waster.
As always, post your scores here...if you can type straight!

[Via: Download Squad ]

Sleepless Assassin - Time Waster

Some days when you're sitting at your desk at work, don't you just wish that you had a different job? Something a little more exciting, and maybe a bit dangerous? Something that makes you feel alive... Like maybe being an assassin!

If you're looking to get a little fix of being an assassin without actually having to, you know, kill people, check out Sleepless Assassin, a Flash-based side scrolling action game. While it looks and handles much like many other games that are of a similar style, Sleepless Assassin has one very cool trick up its sleeve.

When it comes time to shoot enemies, your character has a bow and arrow. Since the default view is fairly close up, the screen pulls back to give you a wider view when you click to draw the bow. You can then aim, and an arc is shown to give you an idea of your arrow's flight path. This allows for some "trick shots" where you can kill enemies that can't see you, as well as giving you a quick way to get the lay of the land.

In terms of the fun factor of the game as a time waster, with (very) little practice you can be good enough to have a good time with this little gem.

[Via: Download Squad ]