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.

If your Friday is beginning to feel like a long trudge up a slippy hill with rocks raining down on your head thrown by bureaucratic monkeys from towers, then our our sister site iGizmo could have just the half-time oranges to make the slog a little easier. They’ve got a horribly addictive quiz designed to test the mettle of even the most hardened tech geek.

The aim is simple: identify ten zoomed-in pics of technological bobbins in as short a time as possible. The winner will go on a leader board and be crowned Lord High Geek and brought tithes, tokens and offerings by his subjects. I made the last part up, but the quiz really is marvellous so I recommend you take a look-see.

Just so you’ve got something to aim for, I did it in 13.6 secs, which is to the top ten what Paula Radcliffe is to the Olympic medal positions.

If you’re still rooting around for fun Friday things to do, can I also point you towards our devastatingly good roundup of the top ten greatest Flash games, and Robokill – which is so good I might name my first child after it.

Enjoy your weekend.

Still here? Good.

At one point yesterday one website occupied the screens of no fewer than nine journalists across Pro and our neighbours at MacUser (sorry guys). It’s called Fantastic Contraption and, I really can’t emphasise this warning enough, it’s more addictive than crack.

It’s simple yet incredibly complex, if that makes sense. You start in the light blue zone, and all you have to do is get the pink object into the target zone; all you have at your disposal are rotating cogs, wooden rods and watery “string”.

Roll the object on home-made caterpillars; catapult it with a trebuchet; construct your own terrain-mashing death tank if you have the imagination for it – it’s entirely up to you. The only laws that matter are those of physics, with everything interacting exactly as you’d expect.

Try it if you dare. Even after completing all 20 levels you’ll be going back to try them in different ways. And the ability to view other people’s wierd and wonderful solutions online just emphasises how much freedom you have in your methods.

Don’t click these links until you’ve completed the respective levels for yourselves, but here’s a few we came up with when we really should have been busy writing a magazine. (Just click the green Start button in the top-left corner to set them going).

Level 17 – Handling

Level 19 – Back and Forth

Level 20 – Unpossible

Be creative, try your own methods and post the links to your best contraptions in the comments below – we’re sure you can do even better than us.

And the first thing it made me thunk was this: everybody, no matter what they say, is a gamer.

Games, when done well, are entertainment. Everybody likes being entertained, therefore everybody likes games. This was brought home to me on Wednesday, when PC Pro effectively ground to a halt as everybody – from production through editorial, and even our sister site IT Pro – became obsessed with The Helicopter Game. More musings on this can be found in the flash game roundup, but in a nutshell you fly a little helicopter as far as you can without crashing. That’s it. It’s brilliant, it’s entertaining, and more importantly, it’s accessible. You don’t have to make any time commitment up front to play it, as with GTA – you can decide how much time you want to commit once you’ve started playing it.

The second thing that occurred was that flash games are fearless things. This is not an indictment of modern gaming, which continues to throw up innovative titles – but with so much money now involved it’s inevitable that some of the more “way-out” concepts, once so prevalent in commercial gaming, will fall by the wayside with publishers terrified of alienating the casual buyer. Flash game developers hold no such fear, and the result is fascinating experimentation – check out Chronotron in the round up for an example.

The third thing, and last, I promise, is that flash gaming is home to a bastion of talent. Developers, artwork, physics, ideas, puzzles. These are not shoddy jobs knocked out in five minutes. In many cases years of effort have been invested with no other reason than that the folks making these games truly love gaming. It’s heartening to see and yet another reason to love the internet.

As a gamer who’s become slightly jaded with gaming in recent years, this roundup has renewed my faith – the future of gaming is in good hands.