This Week's Waste of Time

You'd think the birds would have flown away when they saw the aliens attacking.

Now that our blogs look all fancified and special with bells and whistles in all the right places I figured it would be a good time to feature a free online game that strips the gaming experience down to nothing but playability, excitement, and, ultimately, addiction. This week's "less is more" game is Canabalt from Adam Atomic.

Yes, I know, I featured a game from Adam Atomic not two weeks ago. It's not my fault the guy has skills. Adam (whose last name is actually Saltsman) took part in the Experimental Gameplay Project and created a game in five days using the "bare minimum" theme given by the project's organizers. Knowing that a game made in five days will likely be minimal in many ways, Canabalt looks amazingly good.

So where's the "minimum" part of the game? There's only one button: jump. Aliens attack, buildings crumble around you, general chaos? Running is a given. Jumping is up to you. The trick is to time your jumps just right to get from building to building – avoiding crashing robots, chairs, and boxes, of course. Gain momentum and see just how much distance you can put between you and ground zero (my record is 5032 meters, beat that.)

Click here to play Canabalt.

Enjoy.