I quite like ‘Gratuitous Space battles’. Design your ships and deploy your fleet, then let the space battle unfold.
If you like to go old school, there were couple of retro console sites that have come out recently. Both have a huge library of old games, and are playable in your browser…
http://www.ssega.com/ (for Megadrive games)
and
http://www.snesfun.com/ (for SNES games)
Thank you. And damn you.
Civ and casual^^ I sometimes need up to a week to finish a game.
Take a look at Don’t Starve http://www.dontstarvegame.com/. It’s a Canadian indie game. Basically, it’s about surviving, building your own camp and trying not to starve. Meanwhile, you’ll face a bunch of dangerous monsters and other friendly creatures. The character has an ‘‘insanity level’’ which drops at dawn/night and you shouldn’t let this happen otherwise your character goes nuts. There’s much more as the developers roll out an update with a new theme once a month. And it’s only 10 bucks.
Cogs - simple, challenging puzzle game. Like the classic “sliding numbers” game, but much harder.
Little Inferno - extremely casual. You just buy stuff and burn it. Try to find combinations. No points, no time limit, no clear goal. It sounds dull, but for reasons I do not understand and cannot explain, it’s fun.
It’s not REALLY; I mean, it “is” but it doesn’t have most of the trappings of the genre. It’s like saying “Portal is an FPS, isn’t it?”
I’ve been enjoying Sword of the Stars: The Pit, which is a scifi roguelike. Being turn based, it’s easy to abandon at any time.
Skulls of the Shogun might also serve, being, once again, turn based.
they’re both multi-player, but you’re only expected to take a turn a day. so for example today you decide to fortify to Kamchatka from Alaska, you do that in less than a minute and you’re done for the day.
on the other hand, if you have more time to burn, you simply start a chain of games and take as many turns (on separate games) as you want and then stop whenever.
I’ve been having fun with Rodent’s Revenge since the mid-1990s. Since it was designed for Windows 3.1, loading won’t be a problem. And it’s fun, involves very little thought, and it’s easy to pause a game when you have to get back to work.
I wish I could have it on my work computer, but at my workplace, the only software allowed is that which is distributed by the IT folks. I can understand their logic, but I’d get a lot more work done if I could take a 5-minute break with a computer game, instead of meaning to spend 5-10 minutes on the Web, and getting back to work 40 minutes later.
Correction : I found the easy mode which allowed me and (most of) my family to survive (and also the European format for dates. It helps.). Ok, it’s a nice game, since there is a variety of events and choices, with apparently 20 different endings (including bad ones). However, I still find that checking documents becomes tedious at times.
Tetris?
Another vote for FTL.
I have this suspicion that this is part of the point.
Almost the whole point. You have an increasingly large number of informations and must figure out as quickly as possible who to let in and who to deny since your pay is dependant on how many people you process correctly.
For instance, by the end of the game I could have a vaccination certificate, a work permit, a passport, an admission slip, and was supposed to check for discrepancies between the documents or between the documents and what the person was saying, to compare the picture with the person in front of me, occasionnally fingerprints, to ask for missing documents, to make sure the stamps weren’t forged, that the city where the document was issued existed, and a number of other things all the while remembering that I should let in Joe Smith or piss off my boss, hand out work adds to all immigrating engineers, and look out for the big bearbed guy who was on the most wanted list. And don’t forget the second stamp for denied visas, nor to remove the family picture from the wall at the end of the day in case there would be an inspection in the morning.
It’s definitely a brain teaser, that requires memory, organization and speed. And it’s original : I never played a similar game. But I wonder if other people would be entertained by that alone.
Personnally, I saw that mostly as a chore, and was waiting for events and unusual situations (making an agreement with a drug smuggler, letting in anarchists, denying entry to journalists, illegally keeping people passports, shooting tresspassers, etc…) which were indeed fun.
Also, I think the game has some replay value since it has several endings. I played this game as a perfect boot licker and totally corrupt official (although I did let in some people just to be nice, but only when I was sure I wouldn’t get a bad mark for it), but I could replay it as a paragon of virtue trying to undermine his autocratic government, for instance. I tried just to get by with my actual job, mistakenly letting in many people just to process them all quicker, but didn’t explore a very rigorous approach (who might get its own rewards, I don’t know).
Sorry for all the posts. I’m just trying to be informative and objective about the game.