Casual electronic gameplay

I spent a good deal of this last Sunday playing videogames, which is a little unusual for me.

I've found a new-to-me site for those wonderfully addicting Flash games that are so popular these days. On the plus side, the eponymous Jay of "Jay is Games" does a good job of reviewing/overviewing each game, adding tags and such so you know what is Flash and what is downloadable: Windows (usually) Mac (sometimes)... Sorry, Tux, you're vastly underrepresented. On the minus side, prepare to lose track of time.

Here are a few picks; N.B., I take no responsibility for your lost productivity.

• Airport Security, a quick clicky political statement
• Castle Smasher, phun with physics and destruction
• Cyberpunk, a hackerly puzzle adventure with tons of atmosphere
  
• Egg Way, a bizarre Japanese game about frying an eggFeed me, a fun little Venus-flytrap platformer
• Flow, a gorgeous and beautiful microcellular eating game
• The Game of Disorientation, a very trippy and queasy avoidance game
• Gateway, a brief and fun robot puzzle
• Knytt, a Windows-only downloadable platformer
• Line Rider, a physics/racing toy
• The Missile Game, a racing avoidance game, very fluid
• Panic, shooty shooty
• Prototyprally, a very light hovercraft game with interesting steering
• Red, simple shooty game with nerf ammo
• Ringmania, sort of like a bubble-shooting game
• RSVP, a delightfully old-school card game on the web
• Tomb of the Mummy, a semi-frustrating puzzle
• Virtual Villagers, a light island sim, only downloadable for Mac or Windows

There's literally dozens, if not hundreds, more games to choose from. I have at least three or four tabs open with what to play next.

You'll notice a theme here: Casual. This is sort-of-a buzzword for the kind of gaming that things like the Wii or mobile phone games try to achieve: Imagine the person with only drips and drabs of free time: the commuter on the subway with ten or fifteen minutes to kill, or the office worker with a thirty-minute lunch break, the new parent with a napping infant. These people like entertainment, but might not have hours and hours to devote to play. (Somewhere Greg Costikyan has a great essay on the growth of casual gaming, but I can't find it at this point in time.)

At any rate, casual gaming is great stuff. Electronic games don't need to cost $50 plus a subscription fee, run only on the latest hardware, or require you to devote tons of time to squeeze out the fun.

What are you casually playing?