• Desktop Tower Defense: This addictive, low-intensity game has been out there for a while, but what was new to me was the context of it's creation. Jeff Atwood dives into the history of Tower Defense style games, and makes a surprising observation:

  You'd be surprised how much money you can make by creating a flash game and giving it away for free on the internet. The Tower Defense game mode is a business opportunity for an enterprising programmer. According to a recent interview, Paul Preese, the author of Desktop Tower Defense, is making around $8,000 per month.

  I suppose it can't last, but wow. Making almost $100,000 a year by making such a simple flash game and giving it away for free? That's just amazing, even if it does only last for a year or two. In any case, a good entrepreneur would reinvest that money into new games and enhancements, or any other number of potentially lucrative endeavors.
• Shuffle: Another simple, low-intensity game that is no less fun for the effort. Good stuff.
• Starcraft: Flash Action: When did this happen? I haven't played much of this (for fear of falling into black hole of such games), but it seems like, well, a web implementation of Starcraft. Interesting.
• The Zoomquilt (and Part II): Not really a game, but a mesmerizing pseudo fractal piece of art that you can continually zoom in on (or zoom out from).

I don't recall, have you seen Flow?

I don't think so... Is it a flash game?

How about Pandemic? Someone pointed me to it the other day. I've yet to find quite the right balance of contagiousness and lethality to infect every region and kill the entire populace before a couple areas close their borders. The troubles an enterprising new virus strain faces in today's world. http://www.crazymonkeygames.com/playnewpandemic.php

Dave, That game is quite addictive. The tricky part (for me, at least), appears to be Western Europe. For some reason, it doesn't have an airport, and I find it's always the last to go.

I had luck with deactivating the lethality and letting the contagion spread throughout the world. It spreads relatively quickly (except for Western Europe, dammit), so once every country is infected, you can suddenly activate all of the lethality. This makes for a sharp, dramatic increase in deaths right away, and it only takes about a week for the world to die. I still haven't made it on to the high scores page. I suspect this is because of pesky Western Europe. I'm not sure how to get it to spread there other than dumb luck.

I tried going completely non-lethal until I was everywhere and that worked nicely. Western Europe is definitely a pain. I started in Central Europe and I think I had spread everywhere else before I managed to infect the people just over to the west.

I've started there a couple times. That's kind of a pain too because it takes a long time to infect another region. There must be some trick with it to get on that high scores list.

I played Flow after I saw this:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/12

Apparently it exists for PS3, but most people
play it in Flash.

I had the same problem. Why doesn't Western Europe have a stupid airport?

I know, what's up with the Western Europeans being so insular:P They don't seem to cross their borders much at all...

I got up to around 6500 points once, but just barely missed being on the high scores list...