This Week's Waste of Time

Holiday vacation is officially over. Time to dive back into the Independent Games Festival entries. More specifically the games that can be played on your browser, for free; as is the nature of this blog column. I've already been through a whole pantload of them. Check it out here, here, and, oh yeah, here. Or you can cheat and just skip to part 4:

Realm of the Mad God: It's a little but Gauntlet with a dash of MMO and RPG to make things a bit more confusing. You can team up with other players online to help you defeat bigger enemies, but more likely you'll just get tired of the same old shoot and level up cycle long before that.

Rebuild 2: Didn't zombies go out with Creed? Oh well, here's a post-zomb-pocalypse strategy games that puts a Sim City spin on survival. Reclaim your town one building at a time by building fences and killing zombies. Train survivors for specific tasks and watch out for the surprise invading hoard or two. The game play is relatively deep for a Flash game, and worth a spin.

Red Rogue: On first glance Red Rogue has a lot of atmosphere, but after a few minutes it reveals it be little more than lengthy exploration of a repetitive 2-D dungeon. The controls don't do the game any favors either.

Reverie: This is possibly the first game I've played where the main character is unable to move. Instead you are tasked with moving the world around to help complete objectives. The origami inspired art is refreshing and while the physics might take a while to get a handle on they are just challenging enough to make you stick with it. At one point the world turned 90 degrees (which I thought was an interesting twist) until the controls also turned making things extremely difficult and counterintuitive. At that point I couldn't tell if the game's controls were purposefully messing with me or if there was a glitch in the game. A very promising start either way.

Ridiculous Fishing: This entry is actually an app, but before you get up in arms about me selling out please know that it's based on a free browser game, Radical Fishing. The iPhone port of the game definitely has more polish, but the free version will give you a good idea of just how much fun it is to hook an absurd number of fish on your hook, launch them into the air, and shoot the bejesus out of them.

Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure: Yeah, I put this one on my list of Top 10 games of 2011.

Sweat Life: A typing game as social commentary. Feel the inescapable unpleasantness of the 9-to-5 job as, chances are, you work a similar 9-to-5. Hopefully it won't hit too close to home. Thankfully it didn't in my case since my character ended up committing suicide.

Stay tuned for the fifth and hopefully final installment of IGF insanity.