This Week's Waste of Time

Is that blood? Is that your child on your back? Something's clearly gone wrong.

After a brief hiatus, TWWT is back with part 3 of a series corralling the browser friendly entries to the Independent Games Festival. What? You didn't read the first and second installments? Click on the links, catch up, and let's never speak of this slight again. Once you've atoned you will undoubtedly want more games to play. Since you asked ...

Moto: This puzzle platformer has a fair amount of depth, but the game's logic never revealed itself to me. The variety of guns and things to shoot to help you get from point A to B is interesting but the physics are stunted at best and confounding at worst. Unless you're playing Portal, physics should be relatively predictable. Not so with Moto. It's worth a look, but as the difficulty ramps up the games weaknesses turn into frustrations.

Mr. Runner 2: A salvageable game in the vein of Canabalt but more closely akin to Super Meat Boy, Mr. Runner 2 tasks players with navigating a series of jumps and spikes in the hopes of completing the level quickly and safely. The jumping mechanic – a platforming game's bread and butter – floats a bit too much, making me want to go back to SMB, but if you're stuck in front of your browser, you can play the Flash version of Meat Boy.

One Chance: We've discussed this game before. Be warned: The title is literal.

Pink Planets: Players can dig their way out of each level or just build interesting shapes and new levels in the charming Pink Planets. The controls aren't perfect but the design makes up for a lot of that. Moving and stacking blocks to get to your destination is fun enough, but with the wonky controls the idea of building something elaborate had no appeal to me even if there were incentives to get your creation posted so others can play it.

pOnd: Another one that's already gotten the TWWT treatment. One might think I'm actually up on this stuff. Weird.

Potty Racers: I'm on the fence about this one. It's a standard achievement-based game in the same wheelhouse as Radical Fishing and the more meta Upgrade Complete. I enjoyed the game but resented the game for using up my time merely to pimp my porto-potty and rack up more point and money to keep pimping. All in all I felt like a whore. But the question is, why don't I feel that way about Radical Fishing which at its core, has the same basic mechanic. It could be that the scatological humor wasn't impressing me, but I refuse to believe one game is bad and the other good merely because one involves rocketing into space with a toilet and the other shooting fish with a gun. In conclusion, I can't explain why this is bad, so I guess it's good.

Round to One Chance. It's not the first to experiment with permanent death in games, but it also packs an emotional wallop. Enjoy the ride.

Return next week for part 4. We're over the hump.