Posts Tagged ‘browser games’

The Evolution of Trust is a cute explain-o-game about cooperation

The evolution of trust

Here’s something nice, but also depressing. I started playing The Evolution of Trust [official site], a short browser-based game, expecting it to show me why trusting other people is a good thing. Ten minutes in, it’s taught me that I need to cheat more.

It has you playing a quick ‘Game of Trust’. If you stick a coin into a machine, the person at the other side gets three coins, and vice versa. So, should you co-operate and play the slot, or cheat, withhold your money and hope the sucker on the other side is feeling generous?

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It Is As If You Were Doing Work really is

I should’ve posted about an hour ago but, to be honest, I was too distracted by It Is As If You Were Doing Work [official site] to do actual work. Pippin Barr’s free browser-based game offers a virtual desktop with all the thrills, chills, and Windows alert trills of actual work – but purely for funsies! Mash your keyboard to fill out nonsense e-mails, click buttons, watch progress bars, and feel the real satisfaction of a job done well. Take your fake job seriously enough and you can even earn promotions. Ah, work! Read the rest of this entry »

Quick, Draw! And have a neural net guess what it is

I’ve lost entire afternoon’s to GeoGuessr, hitting the button again and again to teleport to a random place in the world in Google Streetview and then try to work out where I am from the scenery. Now I’ve spent a similarly long afternoon making Google do the guessing. Quick, Draw![ official site] is a sort-of game, sort-of web tool in which you doodle images upon request and a neural network tries to guess what it is you’re drawing. Come, play, abandon productivity. Read the rest of this entry »

RPS Feature

Cookie Clicker: A Pip And Alice Chat

Cookie Clicker is a game about clicking cookies. A recent update (the first since 2014) tempted Alice and Pip back into the (dough) fold. They’ve uncovered horrors beyond all imagining, not least Pip’s competitive cookie streak.

I have been playing Cookie Clicker [official site] for a few days now. I thought I was doing well. My “legacy meter” which I don’t understand is ticking up nicely, I’m spewing out 42.4m cookies per second, there’s a lot of stuff I buy and yet ALICE IS ON 89.3M CPS. This is awful and will not stand.

Pip: Alice, what am I doing wrong and how can I beat you at biscuits? Or am I doomed to failure, like my unicorn turd cookie experiment?

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Consume! Produce! Click! Cookie Clicker Version 2 Out

Have you figured out how you’ll procrastinate at work today? Stop. I’ll tell you: you’ll be clicking on cookies in the new version of Cookie Clicker [official site].

I still fondly remember when the feeling of “What is this and why do I keep clicking seriously what’s wrong with me?” began shifting to “Oh no, what… what’s happening? Why are they so… fleshy?” as a horror story unfolded through clicking to bake imaginary cookies. After a long stretch in beta, version 2.0 of the free browser-based idle game is now live. Look, I just want to see what’s new, and then I’ll stop, okay.

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Corpseburg Is Zombie Survival On A Google Map

I live in Bath, England, a Georgian city with an abundance of coffee shops and places to buy hummus, but a real lack of hardware stores. This is a problem when I need to buy nails, but also when playing Corpseburg. It’s a free browser game in which you attempt to survive a zombie apocalypse, the trick being that it’s played upon a Google Map. You provide the starting address, and the locations you’re then looting and dying inside are the real shops, pubs and schools nearby.

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Color: A Browser Game About Headshotting Colours

This post marks the death of all productivity.

Sometimes a browser game comes along that just seems to swallow me and everyone I know. Quick to play, a challenge which measures some gaming-unrelated skill, the kind of thing you want to brag about and don’t feel bad about recommending. The last one was GeoGuessr, the game of geographic trivia. The new one is Color, the game of ffs-am-I-blind-or-something. It’s only a colour matching game, but it consumed my evening.
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Communication Breakdown: Gamer Mom

World of Apathy

Gamer Mom is a rather lovely browser game about games, although not in some sort of complex metagaming metasense. Instead, Gamer Mom is a conversation between a mother and her family, at a dinner table, and the topic of discussion, skirted around, flanked and finally approached, is World of Warcraft. She loves it, it’s her social life and her escape, but her family don’t really understand. It’s about people really and the great divides between them. As player, you guide the conversation and, unnervingly, perhaps the family’s future. It’s sad, sweet and short, with plenty of branches to discover. Click here to see.

RPS Feature The horror, the horror

Realm Of The Mad God Has Ruined Me

You bastard

Sometimes, a game comes along that’s the absolute last bloody thing you need right now. There are many things I need right now: time, a haircut, lunch, the extension of about 48 deadlines, someone to do my shopping for me, a cat that can empty its own litter tray, a keyboard that doesn’t give me an RSI, a teleporter, and even more time.

There is but one thing I don’t need right now: a horribly compulsive action-RPG MMO that tickles just about every lizard-part of my brain. I want I want I want I want. I want to level up, I want a better bow, I want to get to the bigger monsters, I want to show that cocking Mad God Oryx just who’s boss. (The boss is me. Or at least it will be. One day. Soon. Yes, Oryx. Soon.)

It’s everything I hate about action RPGs. It’s everything I love about action RPGs. It’s everything I hate about browser games. It’s everything I… oh, you get the picture.
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You Are Likely To Be Eaten By Another Grue

Zork lives! The grandpappy of interactive fiction has been slumbering since 1997’s graphical adventure Grand Inquisitor, but it’s due for a surprise, browser-based return later this year. Details? Not a lot as yet, really. Legends of Zork is being handled by Irish outfit Jolt Online Gaming, with some sort of backing from Activision. There’s no word on whether any of the original Infocom team behind the classic Zorks are involved. Oh – just one more thing. It’s an MMO.

[Pauses for screaming and shouting].
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