If you're like me, you rarely played dominos properly as a kid. Instead, you just built elaborate chains and knocked them down, Domino Rally style. Drawminos is a site that lets you virtually relive those fun times, building and saving different domino setups, so you can watch them fall whenever you want. The best part? You don't have to set the dominos back up when you're done.

If I have a complaint about Drawminos, it's that it's tedious to pick up a new domino every time you want to place one. It would be fun to have a domino tool you could just hold down and drag. I guess that part of the simulation is a bit too realistic for me. On the other hand, you won't run out dominos like you would in real life.

There's something of a minor craze about this thing called Akinator lately. It's been popping up on Delicious and it's all over my RSS feeds. But what the heck is it? Akinator is a guessing game. You think of a famous person, and it asks you questions and makes a guess about who you're thinking of.

There are plusses and minuses to Akinator's popularity. On the plus side, all the data it has collected makes it surprisingly good at guessing some pretty obscure celebrities. Akinator has successfully guessed everyone from Britney Spears to 80's prog-rocker John Petrucci to various literary characters and ... Pokémon? It's that good. The downside to Akinator's high traffic is that it's sometimes excruciatingly slow. To remedy this, Akinator currently only allows 1500 players at once, and it's almost always full.

Oops, there goes my entire day! I just discovered an addictive new musical puzzle game called Auditorium, and I'm trying to play though all of the demo levels. Gameplay in auditorium is centered on a flow of "audiovisual particles" that you can direct by moving and resizing different objects that are available to you. The object is to direct the flow across musical audio containers, using arrows, attract and repel symbols, and any other special tools that pop up.

The audio containers each represent a different piece of the music, and they get louder the more you fill them up with flow. To clear a level, you need to max out all of your containers, which brings the song together. There are multiple ways to solve each level -- right now, there are 3 acts, with 5+ levels each, and 20 total acts are being planned. Once you get into some of the more complex levels, you have to deal with multicolored flow, and even containers that need more than one color to fill up. It's challenging, but the freeform gameplay gives it good replay value.

RjDj (iPhone only) is a reality-hacking music experience that you have to see and hear to believe. RJDJ takes different musical "scenes" and incorporates the sounds of your surroundings into a unique, immersive composition. The developers pride themselves on creating "a digital drug which causes a mind twisting hearing sensation," and artists are creating new scenes all the time. RjDj is a great way to show off the possibilities of that new iPhone to the person you're giving it to. ($2.99)

I hope the genre of physics-based games on the web never dies, because they're just too damn fun. Color Infection is just such a game, where the object is to "infect" all of the yellow balls by turning them brown. Yellow balls are turned brown when they come in contact with brown balls, so the object of the game is to release the balls in such an order that every yellow ball is at some point touched by a brown ball.

Because much of the game relies on balls slowly rolling down slightly inclined planes, the game can become very slow. Luckily, the game designer anticipated that problem, and if you tap one of the number keys on your keyboard while you are playing, the game speed will multiply by the number you pressed. I found the game to be mostly playable at 5x regular speed, but there are moments requiring very careful timing where I had to slow it down to 2x or even 1x.

If you're a gamer, chances are good you've bought something from Steam - Valve's "Nexus of PC Gaming." If not, it's a great place to purchase some inexpensive and extremely fun games. Steam, of course, offers a gift purchase option, making it an ideal spot to find a nice, cheap gift for that special someone on your list.

Steam has tons of casual, fun games in its library - here's my list of five titles under $20 that are sure to provide some maddeningly addictive fun. Hardware requirements for these are fairly light, so they should run on just about anyone's desktop or laptop (provided they're running Windows).

Just how far can you go with an online game? By some measures, World Golf Tour could be considered a Time Waster that is all grown up. It's trying to be a desktop-quality game provided online.

The game play is pretty much par for the course, as far as golf games go (sorry, I couldn't resist), and the course imagery is gorgeous, maybe a little too much so. As is typical in golf, there are only a few things that move: in this case the player, the ball, and the flag. Unfortunately, it's pretty obvious that these are rendered in 3D on top of a static image of the course, making them look out of place.

Worse, to achieve the beautiful effect of having photographic imagery for the game, you are confined to a set number of vantage points, many of which are fine when the ball lies in the center of them, but become very awkward when the ball is not. The terrain very obviously has undulations in it, and the ball seems to react fairly reasonably to the terrain, but you can tell that the ball's movement is somehow disconnected from the scene.

Although all of this seems like criticism, the truth is that these are compromises that are reasonable for such a beautiful free online game, if it wasn't for one fatal flaw: Flash. Unfortunately, on my reasonable speedy machine, Flash seemed to act up on every third shot, and would cause my shot meter to jump around sporadically, making it impossible to make a decent shot, never mind a good one. Now, I'm not very good at this as it is, but in one 9-hole round I had at least 8 shots completely ruined by a freezing display.

Now to be fair, World Golf Tour is still in beta, and hopefully they can iron out this very ugly divot in what is otherwise a fairly decent fairway.

You can play a skills game for free without signing up for an account, but to play a full round or to play with your friends, you'll need to sign up for an account and give away your email address and birthday. Is it worth it? I guess it depends on how much you like golf.

Jelly Towers is a physics-based flash game in which the goal is to feed jelly blocks to monsters called Jydras. Too successfully complete a level, you must stack up the jelly blocks to get them to the point where one is near or covering the mouth of the Jydra.

You get variously colored and shaped blocks to deal with, and manipulating them can be challenging since you grab with your mouse pointer, and they can rotate around the axis of the point at which you grabbed them. Further, the tether that you have to grab with is elastic, so the jelly blocks tend to move around more than you might like.

I'm not sure what it is about this game that keeps me engaged; I find it frustrating at times, and the Jydra component is not very compelling, at least from my perspective. But it's a new and different physics-based game, and I can't seem to get enough of them.

Although the presidential election is over, Obama-inspired design seems to have made a lasting imprint on American culture. If you loved those Shepard-Fairey-designed HOPE posters that the whole Internet seemed to be making parodies of, you can have the effect for yourself in Apple's Photo Booth. Here's how to do it, using the Obamafy plugin.

Once you've downloaded the .qtz file, move it to Compositions in your Library folder. Once you've done that, open up Photo Booth and click effects. You might have to cycle through to the last page of your effects to find Obamafy, but it should be there. It took a little bit of experimenting for me to find the right lighting to get a result that looks like the posters, so don't give up without playing around a little bit.

If you're the sort of person who can spend all day playing casual web games instead of getting any work done, I'd advise you to stop reading this post. Like now. Come back to it this weekend. Seriously.

OK, for the rest of you, the guys behind the insanely addictive Desktop Tower Defense game we told you about last year are back. This time they have a new web site and company called the Casual Collective that's choc full of similarly addictive games.

The games include an updated version of Desktop Tower Defense, which supports multiplayer mode, a run and jump game called Buggle Stars, a real-time strategy game called Minions, and 5 other games. In other words, you could easily spend an hour on each and ruin your entire workday. Or make it better...

[via GigaOm]

'Tis the season to go on a murderous rampage, according to PETA. Once again proving hostile to cavemen but friendly to animals, PETA has re-created Cooking Mama in a Flash version (downloadable on Macs and PC's through the magic of Adobe AIR).

Unlike the soothing "Better than Mama!" you're used to on the Wii, this Mama is more akin to Sweeney Todd. PETA is calling their creation, "Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals." I think I just heard the Lawyermobile at Majesco pulling out of the garage.

Killing turkeys, ripping out their guts and stuffing them with Atkins-unfriendly carbs is the name of this game. PETA tries to drive home the point that cleaning and cooking a turkey is a messy, horrible affair. Unfortunately, I had too much fun with the cartoonish game to truly grasp the horror of the situation. Luckily, after two rounds -- and regardless of whether you "win" -- you're treated to a "bonus" video describing and illustrating the sad lives commercially-raised turkeys are forced to endure. It ain't pretty.

Still, I give the idea two big thumbs-up for creativity; PETA has always been a creative bunch. But I doubt the Southern gents I know would be dissuaded in the least by this game. It's tricky to preach through videogames, and trickier still to illustrate terror when making something so cute and fun. All the same, I look forward to "Hello Kitty: Shelter Edition" if they ever pick up the idea.

Check out the screenshots... if you dare. Oh, and if you check out the game I recommend you turn your speakers down. There's some screaming and loud music involved. Enjoy!



[Via Planetsave]

Remember the classic arcade game Marble Madness? If you enjoyed the frustration that is trying to guide a ball along a 3D course using an isometric view, without falling off the arbitrary edges, just like in Marble Madness, you'll probably enjoy Gyroball.

As you might be able to tell, I find Gyroball frustrating. The first few levels are fairly straightforward, but on the third or fourth level, I was completely stymied. It started driving me nuts. I'm sure many of you long-time timewaster players will cruise right through that level without a second look, but for whatever reason I just couldn't get the right combination of direction, momentum and control.

The game controls are dead simple - use your direction arrows to push the ball in various directions. Of course, because the game is presented in an isometric 3D display, the arrow keys do not correspond with the direction that your ball will typically be traveling; the ball is mostly going in diagonals, requiring multiple button presses at the same time, or very quickly alternating between two.

If your frustration tolerance is high, this game could be played for an extended period. Otherwise, it makes a nice, short time waster between tasks.

Assembler is a fun physics-based game where you get to toss around boxes, beams and other shapes, trying to get a box into a target somewhere in each level. It's difficult to write a review of Assembler without becoming distracted for an hour, playing Assembler. The puzzles become challenging in later levels, but a lot of the fun is in throwing boxes around, hitting them with beams, and making goofy little catapults.

Some levels have more than one target to reach, and a lot of them have metal bits that you have to work around. Solving the puzzles isn't conceptually difficult so much as tricky to actually execute. You can see the structure you need to build, but making it balance properly is another matter. The Assembler high scores are based on time, too, and it's even more challenging to complete some of the levels when you're trying to do it as quickly as possible.

Remember Lunar Lander from back in the days of your Apple ][ or Commodore 64? I sure do. It was tough, but landing in that deep and narrow trough was so rewarding, and a great way to show off to your geeky friends.

There have been many similar games over the years, and Super PerfectoProp is one of them. The concept is similar, in that you are flying a little guy around, but instead of using jets, you're using propellers, and instead of three, you have four. The idea is to take off on the left side of the screen, collect all of the coins, and land safely on the right side of the screen, avoiding the various dangers around you.

In terms of controlling your character, it's a bit more complicated than Lunar Lander. Instead of one booster that pushes straight up, you have two that are on 45 degree angles. To go straight up, you have to press both at the same time, but if you do you'll go up fast. And since there's a power line overhead, you have to be pretty careful about it.

Super PerfectoProp is interesting for just about as long as you'd want to spend playing a time waster, which might be a great fit for your next coffee or lunch break.

Wrapping your mind around a simple game like 99 Bricks is harder than you might imagine. The object of the game is to build the highest possible tower using only 99 pieces. Sounds easy enough, but you're playing with Tetris pieces and distinctly non-Tetris physics. If you screw up, you don't just leave gaps that you could have used to score points, you cause your whole tower to wobble and collapse.

Pieces also don't lock to a grid in 99 Bricks, the way they do in Tetris. You can wind up with pieces slanted diagonally, and there's an edge of the board that your toppled bricks can fall off of. 99 Bricks is kind of like Jenga, in that it's almost as satisfying to watch your tower crumble as it is to play seriously. Once you get the hang of the way the pieces behave, it's an addictive little game.