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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Exclusive Lego Universe Video Offers Game's First Glimpse [Exclusive Peek Into Lego Universe]

Lego Universe developer NetDevil has given us an exclusive peek into Lego Universe, the massive multiplayer online game where you can use bricks to collaboratively "build in real time", having adventures through maps that span across all Lego themes: from Space to City to Pirates to Ninjas to Underwater, everything will be in there. After creating the game tools, the game is now in the world design stage, where advanced Lego users are helping NetDevil to create the actual worlds. This video was recorded in NetDevil's second Lego Universe Project event. According to Scott Brown, NetDevil's president, in the first LUP event they asked these Lego users to give them an idea of what the game should be like, which of course resulted in them building hundreds of actual Lego models of monsters, places, and all kinds of devices, machinery, and vehicles. After that session, NetDevil started to program the software tools and the models needed to design Lego Universe terrains and structures. Now, in the second LUP event, they have trained those Lego people on the tools themselves, which they are using to create the virtual worlds. Apparently, NetDevil is very impressed by how fast these people—who in their day jobs are mostly engineers—got into the tools after just a three-hour class. Hopefuly that means things are progressing fast and we will see this game—which seems to have great potential—sooner than later.

[Via: Gizmodo, The Gadget Blog ]

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 ]