The biggest trend in web games has been the desktop defense game. The best part is the formula works for dozens of games, each with their own twist on the model My favorite new twist is Tarnation where you care for a garden being invaded by an army of colorful bugs. By highlighting the seeds in your garden, you can launch them like missiles at the bugs, but be careful you don’t run out of seeds. The unique strategy makes for a new, fun challenge and maybe some gardening skills while you’re at it.

Geek-Out Game: Tarnation

Does a game with Too Many Ninjas need an explanation? Not really. There’s lot of ninjas trying to kill your ninja. You must kill the bad ninjas. Don’t let them kill you. Actually the game is very simple. You can’t move, just point and swipe your sword, blocking ninja stars and causing the ninja’s themselves pain. Try to survive as long as you can.

Geek-Out Game: Too Many Ninjas!

You can never have enough colorful block/ball puzzlers.  Flashxed, a clone of the Palm OS game Vexed, offers a huge assortment of puzzles where you moves various blocks around trying to clear the board.  Be care though, you only have a limited number of moves, making for a great challenge.  And with dozens of prepared puzzles, you’ve got lots to distract you from things like work and responsibility.

Geek-Out Game: Flashxed

Simple.  Build a robot. Move him around. Watch him kill people.  Build more robots.  It’s as awesome as it sounds.  This game with the overly long yet descriptive name is an addictive romp of destructive power with cute animations and a surprising amount of challenge.  You can unlock new robots and put together an army of robots to take out the cute little stick figures.  Destroy the stick figures.  This is what Flash was made for.

Geek-Out Game: Robot and the Cities that Built Him

It like a frog based immune system.  Flu Fighters puts you in charge of defending all the vital organs against a variety of attacking viruses.  These viruses will attach to the organs, slowly killing the host.  Your goal is to eat as many as you can and keep your host alive as long as possible.  While there is unfortunately no leaderboard or high score, the game is quite the challenge, with you pulling your frog-based immune system by his tongue, eager to eat and grow fat from all the delicious viruses.  So bon appetite.

Geek-Out Game: Flu Fighters

Gamers conventional wisdom assumes commercial releases are going to be better than the pathetically, free flash games.  I’m a big fan of Trauma Center series on Nintendo’s DS and Wii which features excellent controls replicating the stress and life-and-death drama of surgery.  I did, however, wish for an alternative to the brightly colored anime and oddly super-powered surgeon I played as (draw a star to save a life).  Dark Cut 2 might be too real, and that makes it only more awesome.  You play as a Civil War surgeon performing M.A.S.H. like meatball surgery only without all that newfangled mid-20th century technology.  Bloody, dirty, raw surgery.  That’s Dark Cut 2.  Get your patient drunk before slicing and watch them writhe in pain when you clean their wound in alcohol.  In other words, this game is not kid friendly.  Of course, it’s only a free game so there’s only four surgeries, but each one will take some practice.  Not four years of med school.  Consider this an entry exam.

Geek-Out Game: Dark Cut 2

Instead of showing you one game this week, I feel like showing you almost about 660. vNES is an online emulator that plays excellent versions of most major NES game you can think of from Super Mario Brothers to Mega Man 1-6 to Magic Johnson’s Fast Break. Each includes sound and simple keyboard controls. The site is ad-free, supported by donations and regularly updated (the site’s owner Jamie Sanders added 26 new games on October 25th, 2007. The emulator itself, by Sanders, was created with some very impressive Java skills.

Geek Out Game: vNES

Every Wednesday, I profile a unique web game to distract you from real-life.

My absolute favorite time wasting site has to be the Experimental Gameplay Project, a site featuring a few hundred free and insanely inventive (often twisted) games. There’s the Tower of Goo, a Global Warming shooter, and Super Tummy Bubble!, just to summarize a few of my favorites. The site, started in 2005 by the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, requires contributed games be created by only one person in less than seven days with a common theme like gravity or swarms. Each game is usually a single .exe file or a small .zip. No installation needed. So download to your pleasure and enjoy.