Growing up, I never had guppies or goldfish. Weirdly, I never even bothered to ask my parents for permission even though, in retrospect, they probably would've said yes. (I once had a pet turtle.) But I did get super into freshwater aqua...

Tetris has had a resurgence of late with the enchantingly beautiful Tetris Effect and the battle royale Tetris 99. Although they have wildly divergent approaches, their goal is the same: An enhancement of Tetris by building o...

In 2012, all was not what it seemed with the bug-eating edutainment web game Frog Fractions, and depending on which pocket of the internet you lived in, word spread far and wide. It was such a novelty. In 2020, we aren't caught off guard qu...

I'm not above spending a sleepy lunch break on browser games, even when I could be out for a relaxing stroll, reading a book, meditating, or accomplishing something else – literally anything at all – instead. And so I bring you ...

The next time you're looking for a semi-mindless distraction on your computer, consider checking out the Internet Archive's now-even-more-massive collection of cool, weird, and sometimes gross MS-DOS games. The preservation website recently...

With the release of Untitled Goose Game and the reveal of Sirfetch'd, it seems that waterfowl are having their video game moment in the sun. But geese are arrogant dicks who will attack you and Pokemon Sword isn't out for almost two months....

Granblue Fantasy Versus might be grabbing the headlines as the hot new anime fighter, but the game it's based on isn't about to give up all the attention, and its newest targets are otaku with nostalgia for the halycon days of 2008 and...

It's possible to (officially) play Minecraft Classic for free in your browser like it's 2009 all over again. You won't need to bust out a separate launcher or catch up on in-depth wikis – it's a cinch. In celebration of the game's fas...

Just in time for Halloween 2018, Google has released The Great Ghoul Duel, a team-based multiplayer Google Doodle game in which players race to collect spirits and bank them back at their base. You can play it in your browser with mouse or ...

Characterizing the relationship between the fanbases of the Love Live! and [email protected] tends to veer between "beautiful friendship" and "vicious rivalry", depending whose social media feeds you follow, but mobile megagame Granblue ...

Show, don't tell is the easiest way to convey what Constellation is about. Found at the perfectly appropriate JustTypeStuff.com, this free browser-based game-like thing has you typing words to make objects appear. It's a neat little ex...

A few days ago, YouTube recommended me some video for Line Rider, a monstrously effective time-waster I haven't thought about in close to a decade. Like most of these automated suggestions, I only gave the video's title a glance before movi...

It's been a long, slow, ecstasy-inducing tease for Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation, the upcoming browser game from DMM and Koei Tecmo. After getting a naughty little peek at the game more than a year ago, the developers used the Tokyo ...

I escaped the clutches of Clicker Heroes once, and I'll do it again. It was my favorite of the time-wasting, dopamine-releasing idle games. It got me real good. Now, a sequel is underway for next year. It's a substantial step up, visually ...

Nicky Case makes games that might just teach you something. There are topics ranging from voting to coming out to two-dimensional matrices. This most recent game hits pretty hard right now, when the world seems bad and people in it seem bad...

Dang it all, there's a new Cooke Clicker update and I couldn't resist reading up on it. If "reading up on it" sounds like code for "running the game in a tab and letting it sabotage my productivity every eight seconds," you know the score. ...

RuneScape's been around forever. Since first releasing in 2001, Jagex's browser-based MMORPG has quietly built a huge player base. To many, months (or years) spent adventuring across RuneScape are a defining experience; an introduction...

Over here in the United States, most of us have off from work on Independence Day. It's a National Holiday, after all, where people gather to grill meat, drink beer, and remember Bill Pullman's iconic speech about kicking alien ass. It's a ...

The original Tomb Raider may not have aged all too well, but it definitely remains an important title in the fifth console generation. Not only was it one of the first mainstream titles to feature a female lead, it also introduced gamers to...

Terry Cavanagh is the man behind VVVVVV and Super Hexagon. Even if you've never played those games, you've probably heard about their extreme difficulty. While I love VVVVVV and have since surmounted most of its challenges, I'm still perple...

DMM Games, ever heard of them? Before this morning, neither did I. Apparently it's a Japanese game publisher that focuses on browser games. Some of its titles are published in English at Nutaku.com, another website I'd never heard of until ...

Bless 'em for trying, but the retro inspired mini-games 20th Century Fox cooked up to promote X-Men: Apocalypse are pretty damn terrible. Tenuously tied to the film as a throwback to the '80s when the movie is set, Retro X: Arcade is a set ...

In principle, wikiHow is a great resource. Everyday people can use it to learn new skills. We can educate ourselves on basic ideas without the embarrassment of publicly admitting we don't already know them. In practice, it makes for some we...

Remember that voxel Zelda browser game we told you about? The fan-made tribute crafted without Nintendo's permission? The one all the game websites were talking about? Surely you know where I'm going with this, right? It took just a couple ...

Sega has been aggressively marketing with their "weird" and "that's so random!" angle for the past year, but this time I'm actually on board with it. For April Fools', they've released a Big the Cat game called Big's Big Fishing Adventure 3...