Good day, Persephoneers! Today’s question is one I thought of after obsessively clearing five straight levels of Angry Birds.
What are you idle past times? A game on your phone? Solitaire? Soduku?
Do you like games where you can master levels, like Angry Birds, or do you prefer open-ended, non-competitive one-person games?
Noncompetitive all the way. I have kept myself from getting a smartphone for just this reason – but when I’m bored and need stuff like that while I’m at a computer, I play endless games of this app on my iGoogle called Flood It! So pointless, but there is no speed involved and I have an embarrassing amount of points.
I am a huge fan of both Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. And Sporcle! I play Sporcle every morning to wake up my brain.
Spite and Malice on my Touch is my go to time waster.
OMG. My mom and I used to play the shit out of Spite and Malice, I had no idea it was available for the gadgets. I am on the hunt.
I played with my Grandma. She lives in another province so we didn’t/don’t get to play that often, so I was super excited to find a version for the Touch/iPhone!
The maker of the one I have is ‘Trivial Technology LLC’ and I’m pleased with it … but there may be newer/better ones available!
Did you guys have the rule that if a card in your discard area was playable and the other player noticed it, you had to play it? Or was that my Grandma being ruthless? The digital version doesn’t have that rule in any event.
No, but if my mom had known your grandma I bet she would have implemented it. My mom was a card shark. We also played a lot of Canasta, but she made up all sorts of rules to make it harder to win.
Ha!
The Mister has this game called Glass Tower on his iPhone, and I play it every chance I get. The premise is pretty simple: there are red blocks and blue blocks. You need to break all the blue blocks without breaking the red ones or having them fall off the side as things fall down when the blue ones go away. Love it.
I’m also a big Tetris fan, so it makes sense.
Fruit Ninja. I stopped loving it as much when my boyfriend started playing it and blew my score out of the water, but he isn’t as into it as I am, so I can still impress myself with my ninja skills. Angry Birds was my favorite, but it gives me a headache, unless I wear glasses, and I feel old getting my glasses out to play a game on my iPhone (I am old anyway). I also love Wheel of Fortune, but if I am not bringing my A-game, it is infuriating. I have to devote my brain power to it, which isn’t something I look for in an iPhone game. It should be mindless but satisfying, and I have to be passably good at it. Therefore, Fruit Ninja wins.
I never downloaded Words with Friends, but I watched/helped my boyfriend play it, and everyone he played with cheated, so I am staunchly opposed. I am not even going to try.
I have this odd thing where I can’t talk on the phone for long periods of time unless I’m playing Bejeweled or Zuma while chatting. I don’t know why. Is this just me?
Also, Angry Birds is my companion on short commutes and while waiting in long lines. Except I’ve kind of gotten to the place where it’s almost impossibly hard? I am very bad at these sorts of things.
Civilization. Dear god, Civilization and Pirates. I spent hours, could kill an entire summer vacation day defeating barbarians and pillaging Caribbean outposts. These days it’s looking for vintage housewares on eBay.
Oh my god. I spent an entire summer of my life playing Civilization.
Have you played Civ V? It’s the prettiest yet, but I think the gameplay is kind of lame compared to earlier versions. I’m not much of a warlord, though, I always feel guilty going for anything other than a Cultural or Space Race victory. MY PEOPLE MUST BE EDUCATED AND HAPPY, DAMNIT.
I’ve moved on from my gaming days, unfortunately. After a year-long affair with WoW, I decided that I’d rather use my limited time to knit–and then I had a baby to suck up all my free time. My new plan is to game all through retirement.
Of course, first I have to find a job …
In high school I spent WAY too much time playing Sims 2. I would not let myself bring it to college. Once I secure a ‘real’ job I hope to get a netbook that can be totally dedicated to Sims 3. Because if I put that shit on my regular laptop that would be ALL I WOULD DO ALL THE TIME.
Oooh. I just found my Sims 2 disc the other day. I may take it out for a spin tonight …
I don’t even want to tell you how many hours I’ve spent on The Sims in all it’s incarnations. I ended up uninstalling TS3 and returning to TS2 because TS3 is borked beyond repair. None of my custom content – even the shit I bought from the stupid overpriced EA store – will show up and it crashed every time I saved. I have a monster computer (because of my sims habit, primarily) with 8gb of RAM and a quad-core, and it can’t handle it. TS2 works like a charm, except it doesn’t offer up a resolution that matches my monitor, so everything is grainy and a bit pixelated.
I only let myself play on Friday nights after the Open Thread is up. It’s the only way.
Oh God. I’ve been playing bubble blaster 2 obsessively for like 3 weeks now. I play it while I’m watching TV, while I’m laying in bed, when I wake up, on the subway. Right now that’s my most mindless pastime.
Oh, good lord, Snood. I used to play snood obsessively in undergrad. I can’t tell you how many times I uninstalled and and then broke down and reinstalled it.
Nowadays I look at craft blogs.
Snood was singlehandedly responsible for my dismal GPA my freshman year in college.
One girl on my floor refused to install it, and instead co-opted everyone else’s computers so she could play it.
I was recently obsessed with an Android game called Game Dev Studio, which is an eight-bit graphics sim game. It works like every other sim game for the phone, but it was ridic fun. I played some Sally’s Salon on the phone, too, and it’s pretty fun.
I love the puzzle-y games like Bejewelled and Alchemy, too. For solitaire, I like using an actual deck of cards.
I have a pretty serious words with friends habit. Anyone else? I’ll tell you my username if you want to play!
Games that have taken on the epic idleness of my days in the past include Bejeweled (hell yeah, xfafafabulous!), Angry Birds, and more recently, Tiny Wings. That one’s fun. More often, I keep a to-do-list that’s more game than task with the Epic Win app, and enjoy making up ridiculous tasks for myself just to get points. The current personal schedule doesn’t really allow for a lot of idle time, so I’ve been doing things like trying to remember all of the words to any given broadway score while doing the dishes, or picturing my house perfectly clean and then seeing how close I can get it to the ideal.
That sounded more sad than it feels.
Me and Bejeweled. The end.