Believe it or not, Atari have just released a bunch of old games on their own website. These aren't clones, these aren't even 'loving interpretations' -- these are the real thing, remade by Atari themselves. This comes as part of a re-launch for the Atari website which includes an online store.

I warn you, if you read on, this might turn into more than just a mere ten-minute time-waster.

Continue reading The Atari classics are back and free to play! Asteroids, Lunar Lander and MORE!

The Atari classics are back and free to play! Asteroids, Lunar Lander and MORE! originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Company of Myself

Continue reading Delightful and haunting Braid-clone Time-Waster

Delightful and haunting Braid-clone Time-Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Minim (now on iPhone): the game so nice we've reviewed it thrice

Minim (now on iPhone): the game so nice we've reviewed it thrice originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Weird Wednesday: Billy Mays app awesomes up your CAPS LOCK KEY! originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Next Floor is an interesting blend of side-scrolling action game and tower defence game. In The Next Floor your goal is to defend against the incoming waves of bad guys. You start off on one floor of a building, and you have an elevator in an elevator shaft. You move using either the arrow keys or the A and D keys, and you point your mouse at the bad guys and click the mouse button to fire your gun.

Killing bad guys earns you money, and it's a good thing, since the waves of bad guys get increasingly fierce and you must buy weapons that you can station in your elevators to automatically fire at the bad guys. Wait, did I just say elevators with an 's'? Yep -- as the game progresses you will find additional floors of the building open up, and you have the option to buy additional elevators to defend those floors.

One thing that was not immediately obvious to me is the fact that you can move the elevators around by dragging them with your mouse, and they can move even if there are elevators occupying every floor. If you drag an elevator to a floor that already has an elevator on it, the two elevators will magically swap positions. You can use the elevators to move your man around from floor to floor, but fairly quickly your elevators will have more firepower than your poor little dude's pistol, and you'll find you're not really using him.

The 15 levels of The Next Floor provide just the right amount of gameplay; any more would have become tediously repetitive, and any less wouldn't have given enough time to build up your elevators to the incredible killing machines they can become.

The Next Floor - Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Autocomplete Me is a gallery of Google users' bizarre searches originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.

Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.

The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, and you need to move around the game board collecting yellow coins or keys, and make your way from the green starting area to the green end, without getting touched by the blue hazard balls. The only controls in the game are the arrow keys to control where your red square goes.

Like I said, it looks simple. But in practice, I gave up at level 4 after over 100 attempts. I wouldn't same I'm a video game expert, but I've certainly played my fair share of games in my time, and this one is certainly one of the most difficult.

How far can you get?

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The best time wasters are games that are intellectually challenging, but not necessarily frantic or anxiety-inducing. Too many puzzle games rely on a beat-the-clock scenario to make games more challenging instead of simply making the puzzles more challenging. Well, Sleepy is a time waster that doesn't do that.

In Sleepy, the goal is to remove all of the colored blocks from the screen without waking them up. If you wake them up, a wakefulness bar starts to drop, and if it reaches the bottom, you lose at that level. The more blocks that wake up, the faster the bar moves, until they settle into new positions and fall back asleep.

The challenge in the game comes from the fact that you can only remove blocks of the colors given on one of the two indicator cards at the bottom of the screen. When one of the colors is a block that is sitting on top of a pile, it's not a problem, but soon you'll run into a situation when the only block you can remove will dislodge a bunch of other blocks, waking them up.

Sleepy is a cleverly-designed game with lots of replay value, a perfect distraction for your coffee-break or lunch time. And the soundtrack is perfect if you've got insomnia - just play Sleepy for a little while and you'll be headed back to bed.

Sleepy - Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

There are plenty of wallpaper-changing applications out there, and plenty of them can tap into photo sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket for access to a plethora of images. Still, not many of them are quite as well-connected as Wally.

Even fewer are cross-platform. Wally, though, is happy to share its background-rotating skills with Windows, Mac, and Linux users alike. It's built using Nokia's Qt4 framework and supports an insane number of image sources: local and remote folders (via FTP), and popular photo sites like Flickr, Yahoo!, Panoramio, Pikeo, Ipernity, Photobucket, Buzznet, Picasa, Smugmug, and Bing. You can use any combination of sources you choose by adding and removing them on the settings screen.

Customization options are plentiful, from specifying the delay between image changes to tweaking the size of your local image history store. Images from the 'net are pulled in based on the search terms you specify - and yes, you can shut off Bing's adult filter if you want to.

Wally is free and open source, and pre-compiled downloads are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The project is also mirrorerd over at Sourceforge.

Wally is a kick-ass, connected wallpaper changer for Windows, Mac, and Linux originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Monster's Den The Book of Dread: an addictive dungeon crawling time-waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Fullmoon: delicious ten-minute Time-Waster

Fullmoon: delicious ten-minute Time-Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Tinker and Hold 'em coming to Games for Windows - for free! originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Phytrix

Phytrix: a Tetris-Meets-Match-3 Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Balloons: launch a balloon from your iPhone, see who finds it originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Everybody loves a good Time Waster. Everybody loves ninjas. And everyone loves solving mathematical equations, right? Number Ninjas is all this goodness rolled up into one slick little Flash game!

You play the number one, armed with a ninja's favorite projectiles: throwing stars. And by "stars" I mean +, -, /, and *. To complete a level, you've got to defeat enemy numerals using the correct operator to satisfy the equation in the bottom right corner.

Sure, nailing this eight with a + would do the trick, but who knows what other numbers lurk around the next corner? Perhaps there's a two waiting to pounce? Who knows how many other nasties this guy brought to the fight. Getting the correct mix may take you a few tries on some levels, but I didn't find the process frustrating.

If you want a good way to keep your brain limber for a few minutes, Number Ninjas is a good way to do it.

[via JayIsGames]

Number Ninjas is an addictive, equation-solving Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Maybe I'm old, but I remember back when arcade games were not powerful enough to do 3D video. Then one day along came a new technology called vector graphics, and 3D games became (sort of) possible. Instead of seeing a fully rendered 3D model of the various objects in the game, you instead would be presented with wireframe representations. Still, in its day vector graphics were amazing.

Fast-forward to today, and you can play a modern game based on classic vector graphics. Vector Conflict: The Siege is a shooting game where your goal is to protect your outpost from an ever-increasing onslaught of enemies. You are literally surrounded on all 4 sides, and need to carefully plan your movements between views (north, south, east, and west) to ensure that none of the baddies sneak up behind you when you are not looking.

Playing Vector Conflict is made quite enjoyable by the forgiving shooting mechanics. As long as you are aiming near an enemy, your weapons will lock on and make destroying it easier. If it sounds like the game is easy, think again. The sheer volume of enemies attacking will make sure that you are never bored.

Make sure you play Vector Conflict with the sound up, as it has one of the most engaging soundtracks of any time waster I've played. In fact, you can download the tracks if you enjoy them as much as I did.

Vector Conflict: The Siege is an old-school, Battlezone inspired Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Small Worlds is a beautiful and uniquely relaxing pixel-art platform game created for the Casual Gameplay Design Competition. The point of the game is to move around exploring each level to find he exit.

Though Small Worlds uses the typical side-scrolling view of a platform game, what makes it unique is that you start each level zoomed in tightly on your very simplified character, and you can only see the area immediately around you. Moving about reveals more of the level to you, and the camera pulls back and back so that you can see the big picture of the level you are exploring.

Small Worlds is all about exploration. You're not dealing with the plethora of bad guys that most other platform games have. Instead the enjoyment of the game comes from discovering just where you are, in a relaxed, distinctly non-anxious state.

If most video games make you feel agitated, Explore may just be the game for you. It's a charming little distraction.

Small Worlds is a stylish, pixelated Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Have you ever wondered just how big a red blood cell is in comparison to a grain of salt or the influenza virus? Now you can, visually, using the Cell Size and Scale page on the University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center's site.

To be honest, I wasted a bunch of time using this page to look at the various sizes of things, though I can't in good conscience call it a Time Waster. It's too edumacational for that.

I'd love to see this same approach extended to things at a macro size, so that you could zoom from a carbon atom all the way out to the universe. But for now, I'll take this.

Cell size and scale viewer originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

Pandemic 2 - Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Tiltshift Generator brings easy toy camera effects to the iPhone originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.