maze

Finally, Chrome has given me a way to turn work into a game.

Chrome World Wide Maze is a nifty experiment from the Google Japan crew that syncs the mobile Chrome browser to a tab on the desktop, turning your smartphone into a controller that navigates a digital pinball on the desktop screen around a 3D rendering of any site on the Web.

Sounds like an odd concept at first, but once your device and desktop are synced up via HTML5 WebSockets (it took me a few tries, as I got a couple of "null" responses on the … Read more

Rail Maze is a free puzzle game that brings back childhood memories. You play by assisting a little train from the start of a rail maze to the finish line, while solving easy puzzles. There isn't any action, or high-definition graphics, but continuous challenges enhance the overall gaming experience. Unfortunately, repetitive music plays constantly, which gets pretty annoying after a while.

The Rail Maze user interface is very simple, with no fancy eye-catching graphics, and dull explosions, but the puzzles are the point of the game. This is why any level of player can enjoy using it to fill … Read more

Most QR codes are little things that are attached to ads or show up in the corner of TV commercials. A farm in Alberta, Canada, has made one that covers 309,570 square feet.

The Kraay Family Farm took a little departure from its usual corn maze themes. Recent years have had homages to Rick Hansen's Man in Motion tour and Alberta tourism. This year, it's a massive QR code that leads back to the farm's Web site.… Read more

Games don't always have to have dazzling graphics or cutting-edge gameplay to be fun. If you need proof of this, look no further than Maze Quest. This simple little game is surprisingly challenging and addictive, and we found ourselves playing for far longer than we had intended to--always the sign of a worthwhile game.

Maze Quest's interface is nothing to get excited about, just a small rectangle with some fairly unremarkable 2D graphics; they're not amateurish, but they didn't impress us, either. There's a little man in a green hood and some blocks that are … Read more

There are corn mazes, and then there are NASA-themed corn mazes.

Over at Universe Today, there's a great piece on SpaceFarm 7: To celebrate 50 years of manned spaceflight, the U.S. space agency has teamed up with the creators of corn mazes in seven regions across the country on SpaceFarm 7, a set of special crop circles that represent each area's efforts on behalf NASA.

"Seven 'Space Farms' around the country have chosen to honor NASA and the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight with their 2011 corn maze designs," NASA wrote on its Web site. &… Read more

Sokoban has been around since the 1980s, challenging users to move boxes around a puzzle and into designated storage areas. It sounds easy in theory, but there's actually quite a bit of strategy involved. Sokoban++ is a basic version of the puzzle game that won't impress you with its graphics, but will definitely strain your brain with its 50 levels of challenging gameplay.

The program's interface is plain and not particularly intuitive; if you've never played Sokoban before, you'll definitely be turning to the HTML Help file in short order. Although some versions of Sokoban … Read more

Shift 2 is the sequel to Shift, a unique puzzle game that uses a Shift button to invert black-and-white objects, letting you walk on different surfaces to try to reach the goal. Though difficult to describe, you'll quickly understand once you start playing, and Shift 2 takes the unique game mechanic to new heights across 120 levels. Like the original, you only have a couple of controls on the bottom for running and jumping, and then Shift buttons on both sides at the top to invert the colors.

To get you started, Shift 2 gives you onscreen hints to … Read more

Most people remember Daedalus, if they remember him at all, as the maker of the wings his son Icarus used to fly too close to the sun, but the Edison of the ancient world also constructed the notorious Labyrinth that trapped the Minotaur. He's a fitting namesake for Astrolog's Daedalus, a free program that creates and solves labyrinthine mazes in just about any geometric shape, in up to 16 dimensions, and viewable from a wide range of perspectives, including overhead and first-person 3D views. Really obsessive types can even create infinitely long fractal-based mazes with more than 1 … Read more

Dark Nebula Episode 1 is the first entry in the Dark Nebula series, an innovative, motion-based arcade game in which you pilot a fast-moving disk through short, obstacle-filled levels.

The interface relies entirely on your accelerometer: you tilt your device in the direction you want to move, and the more you tilt, the faster you go. That's it, as you traverse your way up scrolling, vertical levels. You can also touch the screen with two fingers to "calibrate" your device, if you don't want to hold it parallel to the ground.

What separates Dark Nebula from … Read more