Swine flu may be pushing the human race towards oblivion, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all be ushered into extinction with a big, old smile on our collective faces. To that end, I present the ten Flash games I’ll be fiddling with when the devil comes knocking. And if these don’t satisfy, check out last year’s roundup for further delirium.

Scary Girl

Quite impossibly beautiful, Scary Girl is a tricky, wonderful platformer full of weirdness and imagination and joy. Which is a bit strange given you play a Tim Burton-inspired scary girl with an eye patch, a hook for a hand and a giant, talking cat for a best mate. Every single second of this is life-affirming, so I’m going to shut up and let you fall into its wonder.

Qwerty Warrior

Is it a touch-typing teacher, or a highly addictive, backs against the wall, Alamo-esque war romp? Brilliantly, it’s both. Learn to type, while saving the human race. Type words to destroy enemies. More enemies for a better score. A higher score for better looks, a happier life, and that street cred you’ve always wanted. Play this game, be a better person.

RoboKill

Smash TV’s gloriously OTT offspring tasks you with the simple mission of clearing a space station of the robots that have infested it. You clear the space station room by room, collecting stonking great spaceguns and generally indulging every genocidal urge you’ve ever suppressed. This is a game so good I fully intend to name my first born after it.

Headspin Storybook

Two words describe Headspin Storybook. Relentlessly lovely. It’s essentially a spot the difference in which you must match the two halves of a storybook. Each level adds in more trees, and cows, and hay, and buildings, and just general rurality. It’s so picturesque it almost makes me wish the colour green didn’t make my teeth itch.

Doom

The grandaddy of first person shooters. In a browser. Nuff said.

Mastermind

Mastermind is brilliant in ways minions like you will never understand. Look in my direction again and I will crush you beneath my bejewelled boot heel. Ahem. Apologies, this is what Mastermind, a game about global domination does to you. Take over the world by force, intimidation, or just by building a globe-spanning coffee chain – the choice is yours. Beware, Mastermind takes a lot of ploughing into and unlike most other flash games won’t be content with mere minutes of your life. It wants your soul in a serviette, and to be fair, it just may be worth handing over.

Fantastic Contraption

Open my head and see the happy. Fantastic Contraption is a physics-based puzzle game in which you must solve puzzles by building big ridiculous THINGS. These THINGS will undoubtedly feature a variety of cogs and bands and sticks and will, equally undoubtedly, cause you to drag your friends to your desk so they may bask in your reflected glory. There’s no one way to do anything, and while the puzzles are inevitably fiendish, the challenge is in creating THINGS so daft the world itself shudders beneath their ludicrousness.

Don’t Look Back

One for anybody who misses their Spectrum. Don’t Look Back is a platformer built of all those familiar platforming elements from your childhood. There’s no lives, no attempt at cute graphics, just a knee-deep wade through your past which, as it turns out, was a right pain in the backside. Don’t Look Back is astoundingly hard and yet endlessly forgiving which is the worst possible combination. Walking away isn’t an option and one more go-ness pervades. I dare you to look back and see what we’ve lost.

CDX

A mysterious operation. An amnesia victim and a room full of stuff to click on. CDX is a puzzle game in which you’re tasked with figuring out how you came to be locked in the room you’re in. To do this you click on everything to piece together clues and unravel your dark past. It’s great. Ten minutes of self-contained fun. Go play.

Thing Thing

The Thing Thing games are so unbalanced you half suspect at some point in the past they butchered cats and paraded around using their heads as hats. Thing Thing is a gloriously over-the-top sideways, stylised shooter in which you fight your way through levels bringing wanton carnage to anything that has the temerity to stand in your way. Big guns, big kills and big grins. Thing Thing is the sort of game that would be perfect for Zen meditation. Shoot something in the face for me. I recommend Thing Thing 3.