Fancy a Quickie? Facebook Gaming Special

We play games for a living here at VideoGamer.com but some of you aren’t so lucky (we write a lot about them too, to be fair), so every Friday afternoon we’ll introduce some gaming into your workplace. “Fancy a Quickie?” presents five bite-sized Flash gaming nuggets for you to sneakily play in your web browser while the boss is busy dealing with an important client or stuck in a meeting. This week we pour through stupidly popular social networking site Facebook and pick out the best games it has to offer.

Ragdoll Laser Dodge

Strangely addictive and curiously psychedelic, Ragdoll Laser Dodge sees you control a stick man with either the mouse or keyboard as you avoid scores of lasers that flash across the screen. And just like those rag dolls you see in next-gen gaming, it’s all ultra realistic. That’s a joke. The reality is the stick man floats about as if he’s being reeled in by a fishing rod. Pick up score multipliers, shield power-ups and Matrix-style time delays as you go for a high score. Nice.

Block Star

This Tetris clone is basic but works, and that’s enough for us to while away the long afternoon hours. Using the arrow keys, left and right moves the blocks left and right, up rotates and down drops. What more do you need to know? Just make sure you turn the sound down on your computer – the Tetris music will give the game away if you’re playing on the sly and will probably make you lose your mind.

Orbital

Apart from being named after one of the best UK dance acts of the 90s, this game has a lovely look, calming music and simple but addictive gameplay. You need to move a small blob around the screen with the mouse, collecting other blobs of the same colour. As you collect them they orbit your original blob, giving you less room to manoeuvre. Further complication is added by including lots of different coloured blobs on screen – once you’ve collected all the blobs of your colour it switches and you need to do the same with the new colour. It’s an incredibly simple concept but things soon get quite crowded, with blobs all over the screen. Worth it for the music alone.

Bricks Breaking

The aim of the game here is to click on red, green and yellow bricks and make them disappear. When two or more bricks of the same colour are touching, touch on one and they will all go, dropping those above down and moving completed columns together. You have a limited number of magic wands that can be used to make single bricks disappear, making the game a little forgiving. It’s more therapeutic than anything else, and can get quite tricky the more you play. For added fun, see what score you can manage by randomly clicking the screen like a crazy person.

The Dot Game

We’ve all played this on squared paper at some point in our lives – usually when on a train with a friend or waiting for the kettle to boil. You each take turns drawing a line between two dots, with a goal of creating a square on a grid. When all the dots are joined, the person with the most squares wins. Now you can play it online through Facebook against your equally work-shy mates. There are three grid sizes – 3×3, 5×5 and 7×7, and you can change the game speed too. Compelling for no reason we can fathom.

What do you think of the games on Facebook? Are flash games the way gaming will cross into the mainstream? Let us know in the comments below.