Time Wasters of the month October 2008

Of the five games that I will select, there will be one flash game, one browser based game (not flash, usually text based), one open-source game, a free to play downloadable game and a game that you can buy in the stores.  So there will be 4 free games and one paid game. My selection criteria are quite simple: it must be amusing, otherwise it won’t get on the list. because not every game is amusing for everybody, I will write a very short review about the game so you can easily choose the games that you like to play.

Here it goes, the time waster game list for October 2008:

• Kings of Chaos (browser based text strategy MMO game)
  This game is all about getting the most powerful kingdom. You do this by buying weapons, joining alliances, recruiting people and stealing gold from other players. It all happens in a text based engine, so you won’t really see the actual battles, but you will know the result of the battles. The game isn’t really hard to play, spying, attacking, buying and selling weapons, but it’s hard to get a high rank, and if you aren’t in the game from the beginning of the age, you probably won’t get at the first rank. It will take you about half an hour a day if you are an active player (since you get a specific amount of attack turns every day), but you can easily stop playing for a week, since your attack turns will be stacked.
  Website: www.kingsofchaos.com ^[1]
   
• Curveball (Flash Game)
  I guess this is one of the most popular flash games around, it’s like a 3D version of pong. You must get the ball behind the other player. The fun thing about it is that you can curve the way of the ball by hitting it in a different way, so you actually need some skills to win.
  Website: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/curveball

• Wolfenstein Enemy Territory (Free to play game) 
  This game is getting a little old, but nevertheless it still is a great shooter.  It’s the axis vs the allies,  but in a arcade way. The gameplay is totally focussed on online multiplayer, and you will need to download mods if you want to play against bots. There are a lot of mods out  on the internet for this game and it’s free, a reason for a lot of people to play this game.  You will love this game if you like unrealistic shooters and if you don’t mind the graphics.
  Download it: http://files.filefront.com/Wolfenstein+Enemy+Territory/;852002;/fileinfo.html ^[2]
   
• Solitaire Settlers of Catan (Open Source game)
  This game is an open source version of the popular board game "Settlers of Catan".  It’s a game where you collect resources and  use them to expand your  settlement. It has 4 difficulty levels for the bots, but you can also choose to play against other people on the same computer. If you liked the board game, you will definitely like this version, because it’s actually the same. You can play this game on all operating systems, and if you use the executable jar file, you won’t even need to install this game (just copy the files, and you are ready to play). And of course, it’s absolutely free.
  Website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/solitairecatan/ ^[3]
   
• SPORE (Paid game)
  This definitely is one of the most interesting games I played in quite a while. You start as a one celled creature and your target is to evolve and try to take over the milkyway. The gameplay is quite original, in the different phases of your creatures evolution, you have a totally different kind of game. In the cell phase, you have a sort of 2D action game, but in the final phase, the space phase, the game has evolved to a strategy game. Besides that, a very large part of the gameplay is creating creatures and buildings which you can share over the internet.  Which is quite amusing to do, and it sure wastes a lot of time. A must have game if you are obsessed with evolution, the Sims and strategy games.
  Website: http://www.spore.com/ftl ^[4]