Well, think again. Mouse avoider is a flash game designed to pit your manual dexterity against a sly little man hell bent on stealing your cursor. Don’t be fooled; he’s faster than he looks. He’ll jump around, bounce off the walls and ceiling, fire missiles and bombs at you… anything to get rid of your mouse cursor. All you can do is avoid his attempts for as long as possible.

The game’s much more clever than it appears at first. It seems like, the longer you have it open, the more new moves the little man uses against you. He’ll throw bigger missiles, immolate himself, teleport, or create a seemingly inescapable chain of explosions. All of this is in contrast to his earlier moves, so stay on your toes… err, fingers. Also, don’t get spooked enough to move your cursor off the flash screen, or else your points will drop back to zero.

That’s just my strategy for Monopoly, though, and it’s far from perfect. If you’re looking for something a little more comprehensive, Tim Darling has an interesting strategy based on property-specific ROI. There’s some great analysis to back up his conclusions, although his final exception rule (i.e., buy properties to prevent opponents from controlling monopolies) seems like it would reduce his rules to “buy everything.” Nevertheless, I plan to try out his suggestions whenever I can convince my friends and family to play me again (don’t hold your breath…).

If you’re interested in giving this strategy a shot, though, don’t count on being able to play Monopoly online. The old Monopoly sites like Games.com, Hasbro.com, and Atari.com don’t fit the bill anymore, and a few that do make you download and/or pay. The only free, online, multi-player Monopoly site I’ve been able to find that doesn’t look like total spam is this Australian site, and I can’t vouch for its authenticity. If anyone knows where you can still play Monopoly online for free, let me know and I’ll link to it.

All in all, I’d say Kingdom of Loathing is good for an afternoon’s distraction. My wife got more into it than I did, playing it for a week or so before her interest waned, so it might tickle your fancy for a while. You don’t find many browser-based RPGs these days, especially none that take such a unique approach, so Kingdom of Loathing is worth checking out if only for novelty’s sake. Being free and browser-based, though, just don’t expect it to hold your interest like a well-developed RPG.

You can’t really win the Desktop Tower Defense game, unfortunately. Different arrangements of enemies continually file into the kill zone, with each new set being a little tougher than the last. Eventually no amount of firepower can stop them and, once you’ve let 20 through, the game is over. No ultimate victory; just the highest score you can manage.

I’ll let you in on the secret to getting a high score, though. Every tower secretly serves a dual purpose, raining death down upon the enemy as well as blocking movement. Once you learn how to set up your towers to route the enemy along a dangerous, tower-lined path, you’ll be able to take them out much more efficiently. Doing this, I managed to get a score of 1458 on normal difficulty. Give it a try. Trust me, it works.

Thanks to the marvel of the internet, of course, it’s no longer necessary to hunt down an NES to play Lemmings. Instead, you can play Lemmings online. As far as I can tell, it’s the whole game in all of its vexing glory. Kudos to Crisp for resurrecting a true classic.

Yes, it’s pretty strange, and the graphics aren’t the greatest, but don’t be fooled. This is an incredibly difficult game to master. Fling your wire too short and you’ll lose momentum. Fling it too far and you’ll catapult yourself out of control or miss altogether. More than that, the shapes change with each new level. I got stuck on the perilous vertical at the start of level five for the longest time.

Even if you don’t master it, though, it’s hard not to appreciate the wonderfully organic feel of the game’s physics. My all-time high score was 106.83 yards. Think you can beat it? Give Double Wires a try.

Okay, sarcasm aside, this is a neat little game that will fill a solid few minutes. I played it through about a dozen times and managed to get a score of 54.1 (which confused me before I realized that a lower score was better). Yeah, I’ve got mad car parking skillz. Think you can beat me? Show me what you’ve got.

Note: Since the link now seems to redirect to a car company website, I’ve removed it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

• The darker the background color, the greater your depth and difficulty. Red microbes make you dive, while blue microbes make you go back up. If you can’t find them, just look for the blue and red ripples as guides.
• The microbes in the background are at the next depth level, so looking there will give you some idea of what to expect.
• Remember to eat everything, including the other big microbes. Just aim for their bright sections and you’ll eventually reduce them to squid-like bits of food. Be careful, though, because they can chomp you back if you’re not careful.
• When you reach the bottommost depth and eat the big nasty there, you’ll evolve into a different life form and get placed back in the shallows to do the whole thing over again.

As far as Flash games go, it doesn’t get much better than this. I could probably kill a few hours playing flOw without getting bored. Having just discovered it this morning, I have a feeling it’ll be hard to ignore it until I get home. Oh well, that’s what lunch breaks are for.