The Computer Evolution Arcade
Ultra-minimalist
games you can play in the browser
Roll a rectangular box into a hole. Way more
fun than it sounds.
Reunite a circular polar bear with its circular
mother using an abstracted slingshot to ricochet it off rectangular
brown bears. Featuring music and sound effects straight out
of Björk, quite
a computer-animated polar bear herself.
Don't let the black cat escape from the green
molecule!
Design a deathmaze for bacteria, using resources
obtained by slaughtering the bacteria. Like a live model of
an immune system or a digestive tract. My friend Mike
advises: don't worry too much about the length of your maze.
Focus instead on getting a few squirt towers to the highest
upgrade level, they'll put the beasties in a world of hurt.
Hand-drawn platform jumper about you and your
colorful pants.
Any web site at all becomes the setting for
an old-skool top-down rescue game.
Small, simple.
Annoying music, but the game is worth playing
anyway, and it's just fine with the sound off.
Two controls, left and right. Hard.
Attack of the orthogonal zombies.
Simplest possible control scheme: the space
bar. It's all in the timing.
You play the ghosts!
In 1987, I would have plotzed: Super Mario Bros,
Tetris, The Legend Of Zelda, Double Dragon, Bubble Bobble, Bomberman,
Contra, ExciteBike, Galaga, CastleVania, Metroid, Rampage, Marble
Madness, Tecmo Bowl, Ghosts N' Goblins, Mega Man, Ice Hockey,
Pro Wrestling, Bionic Commando, Arkanoid, Gradius, Lemmings,
Q*Bert and many other classics from back in the day.
A web-based remake of The Incredible Machine,
which in a perfect world would be the basis of fourth grade
science curricula nationwide.
Title says it all.
An open-source version of Star Control II, offering
you endlessly entertaining variations on Newtonian gravity and
inertia in a torus-shaped 2D space.
Richard Dawkins helps you understand how evolution
works.
Interactive doodads and friendly retro clip
art people teach you about the cutting edge of experimental
physics. Did you know that you can cool something to within
a gazillionth of a degree of absolute zero by shooting lasers
at it?
His explanatory text is not super helpful because
he assumes that you're conversant with advanced physics. It's
still totally worth naively plunging in with these things, because
they're mesmerizing and beautiful, and it gives you something
to mentally hold onto when you go to wikipedia to figure out
what it all means.
Fold proteins, help molecular biologists cure
diseases. Doesn't work on my computer for some reason, too bad,
it looks like fun.
Two different fun games about, you guessed it,
gravity.
Maneuver a cartoon ant over obstacles by changing
the direction of gravity. Internally consistent counterfactuals
like this one are the best thought experiments.
Who knew that graph theory could produce such
a pleasurably addictive game? As the game designer says: make
Planarity your anti-drug!
Generate trance music in the browser
window through a fun hand-drawn interface.
An emulation of Roland's classic old
skool drum machine.
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