Bloony Wheel

Easy to play: Navigate to each level's goal using the arrow cursors.

Also available for download.

Bloony Wheel

Dino Game

This is a game that's "supposed" to be able to be played on Chrome even while offline.  I just tried it and couldn't get it to work, but that doesn't mean anything...except that I am not able to follow simple directions, a distinct possibility. 

They provide the code to embed it, though; hit the space bar to start, also using it to jump over the cactus - use the down arrow to crouch.

Google Dinosaur Game

---

EDIT:  OK, I usually test these things in my ToTG "practice" blog, but didn't do it with this, sorry. Every time I hit the space bar, my page scrolled.

If you want to play the game or get the code to make your own HTML page, just visit Dino Game.

Castle Clout

Castle Clout another fun game from Physics Games.

Try to knock down the castle (and mash the inhabitants) with your medieval trebuchet.

It was hard for me to get my timing down, but after three-four times, I managed to wipe out everything and everyone to move on to the next level.

Play Castle Clout

The Oracle of Bacon

The Oracle of Bacon, one of my long-time favorite sites.

The object of the game is simple:  find the shortest route, via movies, from any actor to Kevin Bacon using other actors who were fellow cast mates in a particular movie, creating a chain of mutual movies.  For example, just the other day I saw a movie with the lovely actress Teri Polo in it.  I entered her name (spelling it wrong, but the site will offer up choices of actors if there's any doubt) and found that there were only two movies and one mutual fellow cast mate between Polo and Bacon:

The site uses the database of another of my favorite sites, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB)  The results are cached on their server, so any new queries will appear quickly.  There's also a couple of other interesting features of the site, finding out the "Center of the Hollywood Universe" ranking of a particular actor as well as a useful one, finding actors with a certain letter of their last name.  (one of those "tip of the tongue" tools)

For you baseball fans, there's also an Oracle of Baseball which will link baseball players in the same manner as the Bacon Oracle, only using teams and mutual teammates.

Block the Kitty

Easy to play: Click on the circles to darken and block the kitty's path to the outside.

Me? I'd let him go; otherwise you might wind up steppin' in sumpthin'.

Seriously, a fun game.

Play it!

I'm sure there's a trick to the game, but I'm not so good with spatial relationship-type problems. I have beaten it twice in about ten games.

Ball

Play Ball!

This is one of those games that is simple, yet maddeningly frustrating.

Using your cursor that's "tethered" to the ball, flick it up and click on it and the ball will change colors.

Easier said than done, and not easy to do several times in a row.

A friend of mine sent me the link to this game and it reminded me of when I had an MSN Group that found these types of games, zipped them up with the page and instructions, even included screenshots to promote them.

(It - the group - was a resounding failure, but that's another story)

When I'd find a game like this, I would write the webmaster, tell him what I wanted to do, ask his permission to redistribute his game. More often than not, they'd give permission, sometimes stipulating certain things such as what websites were prohibited from using the games.

I liked this game, so I "dug" the shockwave file out of my Temporary Internet Folder and made my own page so I can play it anytime I like.

I wondered if the site had more games, so I clicked on over to the index page, found out it was a forum for techie types, no other links to other games or cool things.

I did see this graphic and it made me literally lmao:

BallDroppings

Cool application - draw some lines so the balls dropped can bounce off them, turn up your sound and waste some time in a fun fashion. It helps if you draw some "boundary lines" so the balls don't bounce off the screen. Adjust the ball drop rate and gravity to change how the balls react.

BallDroppings

Rubik's Cube Trivia

A Rubik's cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (43 quintillion) possible configurations.

Lightning Safety Game

An entertaining and educational quiz,  Leon the Lion's Lightning Safety Game from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

Guide Leon through the activities by alerting him whether is is SAFE or NOT SAFE during lightning.

IOW, you want Leon the Lion to look like this after each question:

 And not this:

Leon the Lion's Lightning Safety Game

oeillade

oeillade oeil·lade [œ-yad] noun, plural oeil·lades [œ-yad] French

an amorous glance; ogle.

---

Even though I wasn't familar with this term, I've always liked to do an oeillade. The trick is to not get caught at it.

As in this game: Lust for Bust

Sober Santa

The object of the game is simple: Using the keyboard arrow keys, get Santa drunk by guiding him to the champagne bottles; after that, nab the gifts as they appear....all the while trying to keep him from falling off the roof.

Santa's pretty snockered, though, so you'll have to excuse his belching and passing gas.

Play Sober Santa

transpontine

transpontine trans·pon·tine[trans-pon-tin, -tahyn] adjective

1. across or beyond a bridge.
2. on the southern side of the Thames in London.

---

I had never seen this word in print nor heard it used, but after seeing it I was reminded of something my sisters and I used to do on trips with our parents; we'd come to a bridge and we'd all hold our breath until we got to the other side.

I remember one particularly long bridge we crossed while on vacation and my oldest sister and I gave up and started breathing again before we passed out but my other sister acted like she was holding her breath all the way. She had her lips pursed tight and face scrunched up like it was painful but it was obvious she was breathing through her nose because her chest was moving. After we got to the other side, she "let out" the air with an explosive gasp and denied that she had cheated. 

Years later she got onto me for telling my nephews how I would do when I had to jump center in basketball against a much taller boy; right before the referee threw the ball up in the air, I'd step on the guy's foot. Sometimes I got away with it, other times I got a foul called against me. It irked me to have my sister criticize me about cheating when she cheated at a childhood game like holding your breath while crossing the bridge. Oh well.

Like most other kids, we did things like that to pass the time. We'd also hold our feet up when crossing railroad tracks and touch the roof of the car when going under an elevated railway crossing when a train was passing overhead.

I still do that last one!

Shape Trace

Shape Trace is a maddeningly frustrating game, so much so I can't put the tag "fun" on this post.

You'll be shown a shape and then be asked to use your mouse to trace the outline:

The big trouble with that normally easy task is when you start, the shape disappears and you have to do the trace from memory:

That was my best effort, and it still wasn't good enough to move on to the next level. I'm not sure just what excuse I should offer up, because I'm not drunk nor am I hungover...maybe I should go get tested for Parkinsons? (seriously) It's not that I can't recall where the lip of the bowl was, it's that I cannot get my mouse to cooperate.

I never was much good with an Etch A Sketch®, either.

Play Shape Trace

A "bump" from 2009.

Hearts: Round Two

Here's my second go-around of playing a hundred games of Hearts (first one here: Half-Hearted); I did a little better this time.

Now, I'm sure this post doesn't interest many - if any -  of you reading it, and probably is boring to the rest, just as if I were to post about the dreams I have or what I had for supper, but please cut me some slack...you'd pity me if you knew just how boring my life is otherwise. (nearly as boring as my dreams) A close game of Hearts is about as exciting as it gets for me these days. (well, there ARE my thrilling Skip-Bo sessions)

I think I'll give Hearts a rest for a while, maybe have another go at a hundred games during this upcoming winter when it's too cold to do much else.  I'll post about that after I'm done.

Or not.  I may just have some sympathy for the pitifully few readers of this pathetic excuse for a blog.

Strange Hearts

I've been playing another 100 game set of Hearts (see: Half-Hearted) and just finished a game.  It started out with one of my computer opponents "shooting the moon", then I did, then another one did, all in the first three rounds.  I had never seen that before and was thinking "What if the fourth player does it, too?"

A little way into the hand it sure looked that way, but I couldn't be sure;  the computer game isn't like a real-life Hearts game where you can see who is catching all the tricks.  I've sometimes passed up the chance to catch a trick and ruin one of my computer opponent's chances of shooting the moon because I've been so intent upon my own hand I don't pay much attention to which of the others are catching the most tricks. 

This time, however, I was being a little more aware because of the extremely rare way the game was playing out.  Even though I didn't have to, I caught a trick in the middle of the hand and after it was over, saw that it was indeed going to be the fourth-in-a-row shoot the moon...and that it caused me to lose the game by a single point.

And You Don't Have To

Stick a matchbook in me to make me work!

You Are Super Mario Bros.

You have an active imagination, and you are a very creative problem solver. You know that there is more than one way to get things done, and you love figuring out new ways of doing things. You are goal oriented but not competitive. You like to complete tasks, but you also need to have fun along the way. You are compassionate and helpful, but you also value your alone time. You are reserved about expressing your true self.

What Classic Video Game Are You?

I used to date a woman who was given a Nintendo from her nephew; after playing the few games she had received with it, I bought one not long after and would take my game cartridges over for her and her roommate to play and we spent many, many hours playing Super Mario Bros. It took weeks, but we finally managed to reach the end of the game. There was elation for a while, then a letdown when we realized the fun had gone out of it. We did find another game that was as much if not more fun than Super Mario Bros, The Punisher, but I managed to beat that game, too.

(If you didn't understand the matchbook reference, you probably never owned one of those Nintendo units.  In every one I'd ever seen, after a while the contacts would get bent and it was necessary to put some sort of shim - usually a matchbook - between the top of the cartridge and the unit to make it work. The machine could be opened up and the pins re-aligned, but that fix seldom lasted...come to think of it, neither did the matchbook trick.  It was either a design flaw/shoddy workmanship or planned obsolescence.  I always figured it was the latter.)

Half-Hearted

I think it was sometime in May I decided to see just how good of a Hearts player I was. I've had the game on this and my last few computers, but until I got this PC and game, I never did very well. I can't remember if this game came with the computer or I had to download it (it came with my last couple of computers) but I certainly like this version best of all I've played.

So, I decided I'd get a large enough sample of games to be significant and figured a hundred would be good enough.  As you can see by the screen shot below, I did fairly well, winning nearly half the games.  I had started a few games, then got discouraged or had to do something, so when I closed the program, it counts the game as a loss.  I don't know if I would have won those games or not - probably not, because some of them started out badly, catching the queen right off the bat several hands in a row.

Still, I'm fairly proud to have done so well. In the other Hearts programs, I very seldom won, hardly ever over 25% of the time. That's probably about right for a novice Hearts player such as myself. Still, it seemed as though my three computer opponents "ganged up" on me.  I know it's programming, but I couldn't help but think of the computer players as "real"...but "real" players wouldn't have taken the cursing I gave them like I did my computer opponents. (named Huey, Dewey and Louie)

My better play can also be attributed to my better remembering the cards that have been played, which is one of the most important strategies of Hearts but I also think this version of the game is more "fair".  With this version, the other players will seem to try to keep one of them - and me- from "shooting the moon" and winning all the tricks. With the previous games, it seemed as though I was the only one trying to prevent it. 

Now, you may think a blog post about a computer cards game might be silly and you might think I don't have a life posting about it and playing so many games of Hearts.  You'd be right thinking both.  Need proof?

Previous post about Hearts and another and another

Building Blaster

Note: A "bump" from August '09. I found this after checking something earlier and spent an hour playing the game. I also d/l the game to play on my computer, loads of fun!

A fun game from 2DPlay.com.

Drag explosives to desired area, press the + (plus) or - (minus) buttons to set timer, then press "detonate".

Combine explosives for more explosive power!

Here's a screenshot of one of my failures:

As you can see, I left most of it standing, but I got better after I got the knack of where to place the charges and how to stagger the time to make parts fall into others in order to get them to hit the ground.

Play Building Blaster

Also available to put on your website, but you can also download the files to be used on your own computer.

The Eyeballing Game

From the website:

The best way to figure out how the game works is to simply play it.

The game works by showing you a series of geometries that need to be adjusted a little bit to make them right. A square highlights the point that needs to be moved or adjusted. Use the mouse to drag the blue square or arrowhead where you feel it is 'right'. Once you let go of the mouse, the computer evaluates your move, so don't let up on the mouse button until you are sure. The 'correct' geometry is also shown in green, so you can see where you went wrong.

You will be presented with each challenge three times. The table to the right shows how you did on each challenge each time.

Here are my scores:



The odd thing was I got worse in several categories as I played the game.



The Eyeballing Game

Cursor Invisible

How good is your hand-eye coordination?  How about when your eye can't see what the hand is doing?

Try this fun game Cursor Invisible.  Click the start button, then start clicking the circles.  After a few seconds, your cursor will go invisible and you have to keep trying to accurately click on the circles.  The game continues as long as you successfully click on a circle but ends when you miss.

I just played a half-dozen times and my last (and best) score was 43.

Cursor Invisible