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 ]

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 ]