This is a fun little remake (more or less) of the puzzle mode of Tetris Attack; you have a limited number of moves to swap blocks and clear the whole board. While the early levels are pretty easy, some of the later stages get pretty complicated — all in all, not a bad little browser-based timewaster to kill some time on a Sunday.

HDOS Databank request 01 [Game Reclaim via IndieGames]

Insidious Tuna sent this along. I swear I've seen it somewhere before, but apparently not on Kotaku. This game has a very simple premise and a very difficult opponent -- your own patience. My only advice to you is that, after you click to start the level, any movement of your mouse, click, or key strike fires the gun. This game should be used at business leadership conferences, because it would definitely show who was the hypercompetitive, win-everything-at-all-costs guy in the crowd. I got to level 7 before I just had to fool with it and kill the puppy. But I'm thinking I could beat this game if I had a good book to read in the meantime.

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Reader Alex B. sent in this -- Fantastic Contraption -- a physics flash game where you string together wheels and joints in order to carry an object toward a goal on the screen. It's nice nonviolent trial-and-error fun, indulging both the competitive urge to be as efficient as possible, and the creative impulse to be as outlandish as you can get away with.

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We're having a slow weekend here at Kotaku: Owen is off, and I'm holed up in bed trying to stave off the flu; Aether made a nice respite from my headache and general feelings of 'blah.' It's a weird little game — a little abstract and fuzzy around the edges, you control a little guy and his pet who can fly through the air with the greatest of ease, using said pet's tongue as a grappling hook/trapeze .... I actually quite enjoyed zipping through space from planet to planet, trying to solve puzzles and bring the colour back to unhappy people (the core of an unhappy planet seen above). It's not the most intuitive game ever — it did take me some time to figure out how to successfully get off the ground and into the atmosphere - and I broke out the mouse because the trackpad wasn't cutting it. Still, it's pretty and soothing (and short) — good for a bit of time on a Saturday afternoon.

Aether [Armour Games via IndieGames]

From Chris Basmajian comes a darling, piggieful little game called Attention Hog. As the titular attention hog, your job is to capture the attention (and love) of as many people as possible, while avoiding bacon and nabbing power ups to make your job a little easier. Basmajian says the game "reflects some of the social and psychological trends present in social-networking communities, including self-promotion, social anxiety, obsessive need for peer validation, and distraction as entertainment". Heavy stuff. Ian Bogost notes that while he's "happy to see a game that critiques today's attention culture, but I'm not sure Attention Hog reaches the level promised in the description". Still, while I'll admit to being a sucker for cartoonish pigs (my little Monokuro Boo collection is probably a touch unseemly for a 25 year old), it's adorable and worth a few minutes of time on a lazy weekend.

Attention Hog [Chris Basmajian via Water Cooler Games]

Alright class, time for a flash game. This is "Orbitrunner" and it's reasonably addictive for such a simple concept -- place your star on the grid so that the planets (and their satellites) fall into orbit without smashing into you, each other, or going out of the boundary. I'm not sure how realistic the gravity physics are, but it's very challenging, and I like the background music. The collision/explosion sound/animation is lame, however. I was hoping for a Praxis Effect. If they put this in a 3D, rotatable-camera environment, I'd play it for hours.

You can skip up to five levels if you find you're just not getting the hang of one. It stores your IP address and lets you continue.

Orbitrunner [Gamezhero.com]

While the weekend timewasters at Kotaku are generally free, and Now Boarding — an indie time management/sorting game that has a nice, slightly retro aesthetic — isn't, the demo is lengthy and engaging enough to waste an hour or two on a lazy Saturday. The point of the game is to manage your airport empire and keep the poor slouches stuck at the terminal or on the plane reasonably happy, or at least not hopping mad. The $US 20 ($US 15 right now) price tag for the full version seems a little steep, but the demo portion has already gobbled up time this morning that I should've been dedicating to plowing through another couple of thousand pages on Japanese colonialism. Frankly, sorting flights is a hell of a lot more fun — and this is a nice, reasonably polished little game that is fun to play.

Now Boarding [via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Ever wanted to decimate the world's population or see if you could develop a super-bug that would leave the globe in utter pandemonium? If the answer is yes, browser-based Pandemic 2 is your game; even if the answer is 'uh, no,' it's an interesting way to while away some time. Watch as your customised disease of choice is let loose on the world, then use your 'evolution points' to mutate the perfect delivery method for a global pandemic — the goal is to have a trail of devastation (and bodies) left in your wake. There are two different modes, 'realistic' and 'relaxed,' so if you're not sure you're ready for a realistic onslaught, you can try your hand with the easier mode.

Pandemic 2 [CrazyMonkeyGames via IndieGames]

We've mentioned Jason Rohrer's weird little works before, in the form of Passage and Gravitation; now with his 'Game Design Sketchbook' column at the Escapist, he puts up new little games monthly. This month features the theme of life, death, and immortality (appropriately called Immortality):

We generally assume that immortality is good, just as we assume that death is bad. Of course, universal immortality (all six billion of us) would be physically impractical. But what about individual immortality? What about for you? If you could become immortal, would you?

Immortality is a game about that question, and it's also about the converse of that question: Does death have some fundamental value that we usually ignore?

Immortality [The Escapist]

Ever wondered what it's like to be a librarian at an institution where your patrons are incapable of finding the most basic of materials on their own? No? Me neither. But just in case you're dying to find out, the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries have put together the 'Library Arcade' (no, really), where you can test your shelving skills following the Library of Congress call number system or try your hand at a Diner Dash-esque fetch it game.

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