Today is Black Friday and there is just over a month left until Christmas. With the biggest shopping season underway the most anticipated video game releases of the year have recently just came out. With all due respect to big games like Batman: Arkham City, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, I am going to focus on video games that are simple with much less production costs but are still just as addicting. There are some video games that are great time wasters. These addictive games are the ones people play while they are sitting on the toilet or when they have nothing to do at work. Personally, these are the video games that I played as a student when I should have been doing schoolwork. Omitting any card game like solitaire or free cell (because including them would be too easy), here are my top 5 time wasting games:
Honorable mention - SkiFree
In this Microsoft Windows game you are a skier and the object of the game is to ski downhill while avoiding objects. Before there was Windows 7 or Vista or XP, there was Windows 3.0 and SkiFree was one of my favorite Windows games back when 16-bit graphics and VGA display were considered advanced technology. (note: SkiFree also worked with my friend's very slow and inferior EGA machine) The highlight of the game was skiing past the 2000m mark and then having that abominable snow monster chase you the rest of the way.
5. Tetris
The original time waster computer game. This iconic Russian puzzle game was released in 1984 (a year later Sylvester Stallone introduced the world to an iconic Russian movie character, Ivan Drago). It is probably the puzzle game that is the most imitated (for example, Bust-a-Move) and most played. The game is so popular that for the last 15 years my mom has played it daily. My mom was the Asian parent who would not even let me have a Nintendo (she thought video games would make me stupid. If you continue to read this post then you will realize that she may have had a point) as a kid yet she made an exception for Tetris. My mom struggles to get onto the internet but she made sure that she was able to figure out how to put the Tetris floppy disk into the computer (she eventually upgraded to a handheld version). Tetris deserves to be on this list if only because it broke my anti-video game mom... and spawned the hilarious human Tetris Japanese game show.
4. You Don't Know Jack
Whenever my high school friends tried to study together the sessions would inevitably deteriorate into You Don't Know Jack marathons. I think this game happened right around the time that I discovered high speed internet and the internet version was available only to those lucky enough to have upgraded from a slow dial up connection. You Don't Know Jack was your basic pop culture trivia game complete with irritating host. There were categories that you had to pick with questions that related to the category. Basically, when my friends and I were using silly trivia games to determine who was "smarter", there were real students actually studying and becoming smarter. (side note: another time waster that ruined my academic career was when my friend and I had a Big-2 showdown... best of 7 OF 7.)
3. Lemmings
This video game had the perfect mixture of puzzle, action and most of all problem solving strategy. I will go on the record and state that Lemmings was borderline educational. It was like you were MacGyver trying to get a bunch of green haired midgets out of a seemingly impossible situation. The objective of the game is to lead a certain percentage of lemmings past obstacles to an exit. In order to get to the exit you had to assign a skill (there were only 8: digger, climber, builder, floater, miner, basher, blocker and bomber) to specific lemmings that allowed the selected lemming to alter the landscape (for example, a climber would climb any vertical surface it hit) and behavior of other lemmings to create a safe passage for the rest of the lemmings. Unless assigned an action, a lemming will walk in one direction not stopping unless it hits an obstacle it cannot pass and possibly dying if it falls off an edge.
2. Minesweeper
We all wasted many hours playing this game because after all, the mines wouldn't just sweep themselves. The goal of the game is to uncover (by left clicking on the mouse) all of the squares on the board without detonating a mine. Clicking on a square in the board reveals what is underneath. If the selected square did not have mine then there would be a corresponding number representing the number of mines adjacent to that square. Wherever you thought there was a mine, you could flag that particular square. Although the game appears to involve a lot of problem solving you do have to be lucky as you sometimes have to guess the location of the mine. My strategy was to click on a bunch of random squares really quickly hoping to clear a lot of the board without detonating a mine in order to obtain a high score.
1. Angry birds
From wikipedia:
With a combined 500 million downloads across all platforms and including both regular and special editions, the game has been called "one of the most mainstream games out right now", "one of the great runaway hits of 2010", and "the largest mobile app success the world has seen so far"
The game is addictive, humorous and most importantly cheap. My sad predicament is what do you do when you beat the game? I have three stars on all levels as well as all of the golden eggs so I have spent the last few months twiddling my thumbs waiting for an Angry Birds update that does not seem like it will happen anytime soon for my HP Touchpad. According to Rovio, players log more than 1 million hours of game time each day on the iOS version of the game, 3.33 million hours per day across all platforms and 40 million monthly active users. That is a lot of people sitting on the can for a long time playing Angry Birds.
