Easy gaming

So you're casually browsing the internet and find yourself bored. Or maybe you're on your laptop in class and have just stopped caring about what the professor has to say. Maybe you just want to play a game without paying for anything.

Well there are plenty of websites online where you can find games to play: AddictingGames, Newgrounds, Armor Games. My personal favorite free game website is Kongregate.

Kongregate has thousands of games from all kinds of genres. Shooters, tower defense, platforming; you name it they probably have it. And with advancements in technology, these simple Flash-based games can be almost as long as a full size game. You can log hours upon hours in something like Kingdom Rush or Doodle God trying to beat them.

The reason I probably prefer Kongregate to other gaming websites would be the badges. For most of the popular games, Kongregate has set certain goals that if you can pull off, they give you a badge and some points. Now, you can't do anything with these points, so it's all kind of useless, but it's a matter of pride and accomplishment. Points are given based on difficult of the badge, and when they label something as Impossible, it almost is.

To get the Impossible badge in the top-down shooter Frantic, you must survive all 10 levels without being hit. The above picture shows level 2, meaning that's only 1/5 of the difficulty level. This type of game is known as "Bullet Hell"

You can, however, make these points worth a little something if you have a Gamestop Powerup Rewards Account. Kongregate has partnered with Gamestop and has started a daily badge challenge, allowing players to gain both Kongregate points and Gamestop Powerup Points for 1 specific badge a day. Of course, everything in the Powerup Rewards Catalog costs thousands of points, and you only get about 15 per badge on Kongregate, but it you do bored gaming a lot, it can add up.

So next time you have some time to waste, check out Kongregate and throw your life away to Bloon's Tower Defense or something.

Monkeys throw darts at balloons. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I've wasted hours on it.

Origins of Video Geeks

Today we are going to move on from comics and explore a new geek activity. We are going to explore video games.

Video games have come a long way in a relatively short time. The first video screen game was Tennis for Two developed by William Higinbotham in 1958. This game was played on on oscilloscope and it was vaguely reminiscent of the actual game of tennis.

The graphics are awesome...

From there arcade games developed like Pong and Spacewar. In 1975 Atari released their home version of Pong and video gaming exploded from there. A more in-depth history can be found here if you are interested.

Today, video games are everywhere. With the advent of the smart phone we can have full length games in our pockets at all times.

This beast sucked away my life for several days.

So we're going to explore the realm of gaming for a little while on my geek blog. But its important to remember while your playing something like this:

Screen shot of Guild Wars 2 released last month.

That it all stemmed from something like this:

Video games: Preserving Geek virginity since 1958.