This Week's Waste of Time

Hint: The spikes aren't good for you

If you’re not still trying to transport your way to the elusive cake at the end of the deadly, deadly tunnel that was last week’s waste of time, Portal, then perhaps the four iterations of Shift will keep you busy.

Like Portal, Shift’s controls are easy: left and right keys to move and spacebar to jump. But instead of portals to help you achieve your goals you have the ability to flip the x-axis and turn what was negative space into positive space, in other words the black floor and white space becomes the black space and the white floor. This switch turns chasms into skylights and spiky ceilings into death drops.

The original game shouldn’t be too much of a struggle, but Shift 2 ups the ante by adding the y-axis into the mix making strategies more complex and difficult to visualize. Shift 3 and the recently released Shift 4 do little to improve the game, including a map system that is more frustrating than rewarding.

Click here to play the original and you can go from there.

Let’s hope Shift 5 adds another dimension making for one trippy, interactive M.C. Escher painting.

Enjoy.