What's 20 megabytes, has awful graphics, awful sound, and is vaguely reminiscent of Super Mario Brothers 3?

Why it's RunMan: Race Around The World of course! The website, you assume, is trying to be ironic. 'The game can't actually look like this, surely...' But... well... it does.

The game's visuals look like they were created in MS Paint. In fact, they probably were.

So it looks bad, and the sound effects are pretty awful. But the gameplay is actually quite good. You play as a little star-thing who runs around. Your job is just to make it to the other end of the level at the highest speed possible. The faster you go, the higher the score multiplier. You lose points for falling in holes and hitting enemies, just like in real life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unsurprisingly, you start off in a room with nothing. It's the de facto rule that all of these Room Escape puzzles share: you don't know how you got there, or why you're there, but damnit -- you're there, and you need to find a way out!


Inculcation is the first room escape game that I've played with real-time combat elements. There are actually monsters -- zombies? -- that pop up and require shooting. Fortunately it's very easy to shoot them dead, but it does mean that you occasionally lose health. There are syringes about the place that can restore your health.

Mostly the gameplay is what you'd expect from such games -- pick up objects, open doors, solve rudimentary riddles that involve some observation skills. It is nothing special in this regard -- in fact, some of the puzzles feel a little random and rely on guesswork rather than applying your knowledge of the game.


I played through the first house in Inculcation, and I can tell you this now: the enhanced elements of music, artistic direction and creatures that can actually kill you really add to the tension, the danger. I admit I yelped out loud a few times. I admit my hand slipped off the mouse a few times when attacked by zombies. I admit I'm a wuss when it comes to the horror genre.

There's one part in the first house where a door shakes -- as if something is behind it, desperately trying to get out -- and it keeps shaking. Over and over. Louder and louder. And when it finally comes to open the door... well... you're in for a big surprise. Give it half an hour of your time at least -- you won't regret it...

[via JayIsGames]

Red Remover is one of the all-time classic casual puzzle games, where the object is to remove the red blocks while keeping the other ones from falling. With Halloween coming up, the game is getting into costume as Pumpkin Remover: instead of blocks, you've got rotten pumpkins to get rid of, and fresh ones to defend. It's not just a reskinning of Red Remover, though, it also features some new levels.

Just like Red Remover, Pumpkin Remover presents a lot of physics-based challenges. Some of the obstacles you'll face include ramps, barricades, and weird directional gravity. It might not be the spookiest Halloween-themed game out there, but Pumpkin Remover is a fun expansion for anyone who just can't get enough of this particular style of puzzle game.

Pro Tip: Definitely play through level 5 for a cheesy Halloween joke. I LOL'd.

You'll never guess what the primary purpose of this game is. OK, OK, stop guessing! I'll tell you: you gotta push pumpkins!

But it's not as simple as that. It's not just a Boulderdash clone with Halloween-skinned baddies and pumpkins for stones -- no, it's like some kind of fantastic mash-up of Boulderdash, Mega Man and Pac Man. In Pumpkin Push you play a plucky pumpkin-pushin' protagonist whose primary objective is to clean the world of various undead ghouls. Vampires, ghosts, robot-pumpkins... they're all here and waiting to be vanquished.

Fatty Bum Bum is a surreal adventure game from Dutch game developers Hanazuki. You don't actually play as Fatty Bum Bum, who is a large, friendly-looking, hungry character - sort of reminds me of a big Katamari. Instead, you're a kid who's floating through space, trying to collect food to deliver to Fatty Bum Bum, to make him grow as enormous as possible.

The game has three levels, and your food-grabbing abilities get stronger in each one. You start out by using your hands, then graduate to a spaceship with a grabber claw, and finally end up with a chomping crocodile costume. The game is side-scrolling, so you have to slow down as much as possible for maximum goodies. Once a piece of food scrolls off the screen, you lose it for good.

Fatty Bum Bum is a solid kids' game. It's not particularly challenging, although beating the current online high scores looks pretty impossible. Instead, the appeal is in the visuals. Grabbing food can set off fun, colorful animations where you character does a cool stunt or turns into some unexpected animal or object. In terms of gameplay, this slows down the clock (each level is time-limited) and helps you grab more stuff.

[Pro Tip: You can download the game for Mac or PC, and it runs a lot faster on the desktop than in-browser.]

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.

They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use the shield. Some enemies throw projectiles at you, and your health will disappear quickly if you don't use the space bar to block. Of course, you could just try to blow away everything on the screen before you get attacked, but your gun is unfortunately pretty lame, and overheats if you start clicking too furiously. Good luck protecting yourself from the undead hordes!

Cyclomaniacs is a side-scrolling bike racing game with solid gameplay and tons of charm. There are multiple goals in the game. As always in racing games the goal is to win, but quite often there are a number of other goals as well.

For example, it's possible to do tricks like wheelies and flips. Often unlocking new levels or new characters relies more on performing tricks than it does on winning the race.

Speaking of characters, they might be the most intriguing part of the game; you start with just a robot character, but quickly start to unlock other riders with bikes that have very different characteristics. My favorite so far is the King (and Elvis-like character) that seems to make performing wheelies quite easy. He's not the fastest, but I find him the easiest to control.

Cyclomaniacs is a very deep game for a Time Waster, providing tons of levels, and even lots of reasons to replay the levels you've already opened. One tip: to silence the game's annoying music, start a race then hit the Pause button in the lower-right part of the screen. Once you've paused the game you have control over music and sound effects.

Fragger is a physics-based game in a similar vein to the tank war games that you played as a kid. In Fragger, you choose the angle and power for your grenade launcher, and you try to blow up the people on each level. The game has a cartoony quality, and while the explosions are blowing up little grey people, they're still somehow satisfying.

The challenge level ramps up fairly quickly, and it becomes increasingly difficult to pinpoint a grenade's landing spot right where you need it to go. You can cancel a given grenade before it blows up by pressing the spacebar, but you have a limited supply, so you can't abuse that feature.

Fragger is a good time waster for people that don't like games that have time limits. There's nothing anxious about playing Fragger, but it is surprisingly fun.