The Next Floor is an interesting blend of side-scrolling action game and tower defence game. In The Next Floor your goal is to defend against the incoming waves of bad guys. You start off on one floor of a building, and you have an elevator in an elevator shaft. You move using either the arrow keys or the A and D keys, and you point your mouse at the bad guys and click the mouse button to fire your gun.

Killing bad guys earns you money, and it's a good thing, since the waves of bad guys get increasingly fierce and you must buy weapons that you can station in your elevators to automatically fire at the bad guys. Wait, did I just say elevators with an 's'? Yep -- as the game progresses you will find additional floors of the building open up, and you have the option to buy additional elevators to defend those floors.

One thing that was not immediately obvious to me is the fact that you can move the elevators around by dragging them with your mouse, and they can move even if there are elevators occupying every floor. If you drag an elevator to a floor that already has an elevator on it, the two elevators will magically swap positions. You can use the elevators to move your man around from floor to floor, but fairly quickly your elevators will have more firepower than your poor little dude's pistol, and you'll find you're not really using him.

The 15 levels of The Next Floor provide just the right amount of gameplay; any more would have become tediously repetitive, and any less wouldn't have given enough time to build up your elevators to the incredible killing machines they can become.

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.

Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.

The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, and you need to move around the game board collecting yellow coins or keys, and make your way from the green starting area to the green end, without getting touched by the blue hazard balls. The only controls in the game are the arrow keys to control where your red square goes.

Like I said, it looks simple. But in practice, I gave up at level 4 after over 100 attempts. I wouldn't same I'm a video game expert, but I've certainly played my fair share of games in my time, and this one is certainly one of the most difficult.

How far can you get?

[Update] The folks from A Story Before Bed contacted us and have offered a coupon code that allows users to try the site including sharing a story for free. The code is good until the end of November. Just enter MT9C-WN6Y-TF6J at the point of checkout, when you're asked to pay for the story you recorded.

Having to be away from your young children at bedtime is probably the absolute worst part of having a job that requires travel. Worse, sometimes it's not practical to call and talk to them before bed. A Story Before Bed is a site that is looking to solve this problem for traveling parents.

The idea behind A Story Before Bed is that you choose one of the stories in their library, then you record yourself reading it using a webcam. You can then send a link to your child's caregiver, who can then open the book on their computer, and watch as you read the story to them. They see the full pages of the book with your face inset, and the experience even includes animated page turns. To make sure that what you are reading relates to the page being displayed, the video of you reading is actually split up on a page-by-page basis, so you can only ever be listening to the correct voiceover for a given page.

A Story Before Bed is not a free service, but recording a story is free. The service charges $6.95US if you want to keep your recording so that you can pass it along to the young people in your life.

The best time wasters are games that are intellectually challenging, but not necessarily frantic or anxiety-inducing. Too many puzzle games rely on a beat-the-clock scenario to make games more challenging instead of simply making the puzzles more challenging. Well, Sleepy is a time waster that doesn't do that.

In Sleepy, the goal is to remove all of the colored blocks from the screen without waking them up. If you wake them up, a wakefulness bar starts to drop, and if it reaches the bottom, you lose at that level. The more blocks that wake up, the faster the bar moves, until they settle into new positions and fall back asleep.

The challenge in the game comes from the fact that you can only remove blocks of the colors given on one of the two indicator cards at the bottom of the screen. When one of the colors is a block that is sitting on top of a pile, it's not a problem, but soon you'll run into a situation when the only block you can remove will dislodge a bunch of other blocks, waking them up.

Sleepy is a cleverly-designed game with lots of replay value, a perfect distraction for your coffee-break or lunch time. And the soundtrack is perfect if you've got insomnia - just play Sleepy for a little while and you'll be headed back to bed.

If you've ever used Google to search for, ahem, "adult" content, you're aware of the site's SafeSearch feature. It filters out questionable content, to the delight of parents and the dismay of porn-seekers. Now there's a new "lock" function for SafeSearch, which keeps your account's settings locked in strict filtering mode until you enter a password and change them. The obvious use here is for parents looking to keep risque material out of view of their kids, but I can also see it being handy to prevent embarrassing search results from accidentally popping up at work.

When SafeSearch is locked, you'll see four extremely conspicuous, very large colored balls in the top right corner of your search results. Google says this is so parents and teachers can tell from across the room whether the lock is still in place, and come over to reset it if it's not. It even works across Google's various languages, so clever kids can't get around it that way. Could they thwart SafeSearch in an even more obvious way, though, by simply logging out of Google? I guess that's where keeping a close eye on the giant colored balls comes in.

If you're confused about how to go about turning the lock on, the very clear video instructions in Google's official blog post will shed some light.

[via AppScout]

Maybe I'm old, but I remember back when arcade games were not powerful enough to do 3D video. Then one day along came a new technology called vector graphics, and 3D games became (sort of) possible. Instead of seeing a fully rendered 3D model of the various objects in the game, you instead would be presented with wireframe representations. Still, in its day vector graphics were amazing.

Fast-forward to today, and you can play a modern game based on classic vector graphics. Vector Conflict: The Siege is a shooting game where your goal is to protect your outpost from an ever-increasing onslaught of enemies. You are literally surrounded on all 4 sides, and need to carefully plan your movements between views (north, south, east, and west) to ensure that none of the baddies sneak up behind you when you are not looking.

Playing Vector Conflict is made quite enjoyable by the forgiving shooting mechanics. As long as you are aiming near an enemy, your weapons will lock on and make destroying it easier. If it sounds like the game is easy, think again. The sheer volume of enemies attacking will make sure that you are never bored.

Make sure you play Vector Conflict with the sound up, as it has one of the most engaging soundtracks of any time waster I've played. In fact, you can download the tracks if you enjoy them as much as I did.

I'm not a parent, nor am I kid -- but that doesn't prevent me from appreciating a totally neat iPhone app called 'Kids Eat For' (I guess the domain with 'free' on the end was already taken?)

Basically -- and this is about as basic as apps get -- this app just shows you where the nearest restaurant with a kids-eat-for-free deal. The developers say that the database is kept up to date, with new deals added daily and expired deals removed -- so you don't have to have one of those embarrassing moments when it comes to paying the bill... and you actually have to pay for your kids. Oops.

I guess you'd be able to trade in your iPhone to pay the bill, if it came to that.

Or, wait a second... if you didn't splurge and buy an iPhone in the first place, maybe you could afford to feed your kids proper home-cooked food instead, rather than going out and gorging on crappy ribs and all-you-can-eat wings at the local Armadillo Willy's (what on earth is that?)

At just $3 -- and yes, this is sadly only for restaurants in the USA (at the moment!) -- Kids Eat For must surely be a must-have for all parents. Well, parents with iPhones.

Small Worlds is a beautiful and uniquely relaxing pixel-art platform game created for the Casual Gameplay Design Competition. The point of the game is to move around exploring each level to find he exit.

Though Small Worlds uses the typical side-scrolling view of a platform game, what makes it unique is that you start each level zoomed in tightly on your very simplified character, and you can only see the area immediately around you. Moving about reveals more of the level to you, and the camera pulls back and back so that you can see the big picture of the level you are exploring.

Small Worlds is all about exploration. You're not dealing with the plethora of bad guys that most other platform games have. Instead the enjoyment of the game comes from discovering just where you are, in a relaxed, distinctly non-anxious state.

If most video games make you feel agitated, Explore may just be the game for you. It's a charming little distraction.

Have you ever wondered just how big a red blood cell is in comparison to a grain of salt or the influenza virus? Now you can, visually, using the Cell Size and Scale page on the University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center's site.

To be honest, I wasted a bunch of time using this page to look at the various sizes of things, though I can't in good conscience call it a Time Waster. It's too edumacational for that.

I'd love to see this same approach extended to things at a macro size, so that you could zoom from a carbon atom all the way out to the universe. But for now, I'll take this.

Pandemic 2 is a strategy game where you play the part of a virus, bacteria, or parasite. The goal of the game is to infect and then kill all of humanity.

At the start of the game you choose to be either a virus, bacteria, or parasite. Each has their own unique characteristics, like being more or less virulent, and mutating slowly or quickly. Once you've chosen the type of pandemic you represent, you move into the gameplay.

The game starts with you infecting a very small number of people in a specific country. You can then increase the rate of infection by purchasing symptoms, resistances, and modes of infection like airborne and waterborne. You can also slow things down by getting rid of a symptom or resistance, but doing that also costs points, so you need to be careful not to waste your moves.

Pandemic 2 ends when either you win by wiping humankind off of the face of the planet, or the humans successfully develop a vaccine and prevent you from infecting everyone.

There are two modes of play, the traditional simulation mode, and a shorter, simplified mode. The short version of the game can be played in about 10 minutes, making it a good coffee break game.

Fatty Bum Bum is a surreal adventure game from Dutch game developers Hanazuki. You don't actually play as Fatty Bum Bum, who is a large, friendly-looking, hungry character - sort of reminds me of a big Katamari. Instead, you're a kid who's floating through space, trying to collect food to deliver to Fatty Bum Bum, to make him grow as enormous as possible.

The game has three levels, and your food-grabbing abilities get stronger in each one. You start out by using your hands, then graduate to a spaceship with a grabber claw, and finally end up with a chomping crocodile costume. The game is side-scrolling, so you have to slow down as much as possible for maximum goodies. Once a piece of food scrolls off the screen, you lose it for good.

Fatty Bum Bum is a solid kids' game. It's not particularly challenging, although beating the current online high scores looks pretty impossible. Instead, the appeal is in the visuals. Grabbing food can set off fun, colorful animations where you character does a cool stunt or turns into some unexpected animal or object. In terms of gameplay, this slows down the clock (each level is time-limited) and helps you grab more stuff.

[Pro Tip: You can download the game for Mac or PC, and it runs a lot faster on the desktop than in-browser.]

The open source movement isn't just for grown-ups: Open Office 4 Kids is a slimmed-down version of the open source Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice.org.

The target age group for Open Office 4 Kids is 7-12, but after trying it out, I think there are a lot of adults who would prefer it over MS Office or the full version of OpenOffice. It's available on whichever OS you've set your kid up with: Mac, Windows and (of course) Linux.

Less UI clutter helps make OO4K super-fast. Load times for the app and for creating a new document blew away Office 2008 on my Mac, and I didn't experience any of the annoying lag in loading font menus that I sometimes get in Office.

OO4Kids also has large, very obvious buttons for all of the most common functions of each Office app. The "4Kids" branding is almost a shame, because this could also be Open Office 4 Your Mom Who Always Asks You How To Do Stuff in Office.

On the other hand, I'm glad that any 7-to-12-year-olds who use this app will grow up understanding that Microsoft Word isn't the only way to write a paper.

[via Ghacks]

Cyclomaniacs is a side-scrolling bike racing game with solid gameplay and tons of charm. There are multiple goals in the game. As always in racing games the goal is to win, but quite often there are a number of other goals as well.

For example, it's possible to do tricks like wheelies and flips. Often unlocking new levels or new characters relies more on performing tricks than it does on winning the race.

Speaking of characters, they might be the most intriguing part of the game; you start with just a robot character, but quickly start to unlock other riders with bikes that have very different characteristics. My favorite so far is the King (and Elvis-like character) that seems to make performing wheelies quite easy. He's not the fastest, but I find him the easiest to control.

Cyclomaniacs is a very deep game for a Time Waster, providing tons of levels, and even lots of reasons to replay the levels you've already opened. One tip: to silence the game's annoying music, start a race then hit the Pause button in the lower-right part of the screen. Once you've paused the game you have control over music and sound effects.

Fragger is a physics-based game in a similar vein to the tank war games that you played as a kid. In Fragger, you choose the angle and power for your grenade launcher, and you try to blow up the people on each level. The game has a cartoony quality, and while the explosions are blowing up little grey people, they're still somehow satisfying.

The challenge level ramps up fairly quickly, and it becomes increasingly difficult to pinpoint a grenade's landing spot right where you need it to go. You can cancel a given grenade before it blows up by pressing the spacebar, but you have a limited supply, so you can't abuse that feature.

Fragger is a good time waster for people that don't like games that have time limits. There's nothing anxious about playing Fragger, but it is surprisingly fun.

Water Werks is another Time Waster where the aim is to get the balls to the goal. In this iteration of the well-used concept, you can only influence the balls by spraying water at the objects in the environment around them. The balls themselves are impervious to the water's effects.

You can move your hose around and adjust the spray nozzle from a wide to narrow stream, which influences the strength of the stream as well as its direction.

I found Water Werks to be more difficult than an average time waster, but certainly not impossible. It's a fresh take on a potentially tired genre.