When I worked in Oregon we entertained ourselves by pitting some of the desert insects against each other in a plastic hamster cage. My praying mantis Buddha was the office champion, besting several critters including a black widow spider. Buddha got taken out by another black widow, and watching him lose made me feel intensely guilty. I felt really bad about it and that was the last time I pit two animals against each other.

Until now.
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I learned about Iron Dukes thanks to a thread on Ars Technica’s forum (thanks, mojo-jojo!!). Iron Dukes part RPG, part shooter, and part arcade-like driver (well, “sailer” … is that even a fucking word?). It’s a nifty little Flash game so you can play it at home or at the office, should you dare to do such a thing. It’s not really a pirate-themed game, it’s not really a steampunk-themed game, it’s got a privateering bend to it where you’re out for blood but I just get the feeling that it’s not every man out for himself. The game’s them is sort of, well, pirate-y. You are the captain of a pirate-y type ship. You can command up to three crew members, whom you can hire at the Shop for free. You make money by diving for sunken treasure, fighting other pirate-y type duders, or navigatating OMG SCARY storms. You can spend your hard earned ducats on equipment or goodies for your crew. Each crew member has three equipment slots: head, hand, and body. Equipment raises one skill stat and health. Iron Dukes keeps things simple, and there are only three skills: fighting, diving, and being “salty,” which is a pirate-y word for “bad ass sailor.”
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Oregon Trail was a game I originally played on the Apple IIe a long time ago. The concept was simple: put your family on a caravan and try to get to Oregon. You could die in all sorts of horrible ways, from raids to starvation to dysentery. Combine traveling in a hostile environment, plus trading, plus bands of post-apocalyptic renegades, and you have the Flash-based game Caravaneer.
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This is making the rounds at Ars Technica right now, and I thought I’d pass it along to my Gibberish readers who don’t make it over there.

From the mind and talents of Sean Cooper comes this totally righteous Flash game about killing zombies. There are only two ways for the zombies to come in, and it’s a matter of time before they seal your fate. But like Churchill said, TAKE ONE WITH YOU. Or, if you have an explosive barrel, grenades, or a landmine, take a dozen or so with you at a time! :)

As the game progresses you get weapons upgrades and a score multiplier. My personal best so far is 1.5 million, and that’s before reading about strategies in the Ars thread.

Thanks to Hagbeard for posting this.

Try out this Flash-based game for a time waster: Yeti Bubbles. The object of the game is to shoot colored balls one at a time towards an ever-approaching wave of colored balls. If you match up three or more balls of the same color, they are cleared from play. The game is over if the wall-of-balls (no, not that frightful evening you spent in jail) gets to the bottom of the screen. More colors are added as the level progresses, and the starting position of the WoB is closer to the bottom.

Special balls like the dot sight and TNT make for slight variations on strategy and shot placement, but all in all this is a simple shooting game.

So far I’ve only completed level 9, I’m not sure if level 10 is the final level or not.

[edit] Go go compulsive behavior!

I finished level 10, it is indeed the final level. It got pretty white-knuckle at the end, but I did it. Here’s a screen shot, with a final score of 3873. What’s your best?

Almost a week ago, Ars came through with another gem: a Flash-based game called 3D Logic by Alex Matveev made the rounds on the forum this weekend. The game is simple; the object is to connect pairs of like-colored squares. Red to red, orange to orange, etc. You may not cross colors over each other, and you can only traverse the dark gray squares, not the black ones.

The game is fun and easy to play. There are 30 levels. Be warned: there is no saving, and navigating away from the game or closing your browser will lose all of your progress.

Give it a shot, it’s free and there’s no login/registration requirement.