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Jan 29

Get Your Five-Minute Multiplayer Game Fix with OMGPOP

Posted in: Games, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on October 16, 2009 by CyberNet.

Have a few minutes to spare for a quick online game? OMGPOP has over ten different multiplayer games (and counting) that have one thing in common: they’re excellent at getting your productivity down a notch! And thanks to the site’s obligatory social networking features, it’s really easy to challenge your friends to a Bomberman game over the internet. Here’s a selection of some of their best games.

Hover Kart Racing is a 3D racing game. Even if you’re not good at its more advanced counterparts such as Need for Speed, it’s pretty easy to get the hang of this game. Watch out for mines, bombs and other Super Mario Kart-ish dangers. Expert tip: to cut corners, use the Shift key to drift.
How to play it: Up accelerates, Down brakes, Left/Right steers, Shift jumps or drifts, Space activates power-up.

Balloono is an excellent Bomberman clone, with a small difference. Instead of dropping bombs to blow up your opponents, you have to use water balloons. On the plus side, you no longer need to share your keyboard with your friends to play against them.
How to play it: use the arrow keys, hit the spacebar to drop bombs.

Ballracer is a 2D racing game. Every time you play it, you’ll be dropped in a random level from Ballracer’s large level set. There are plenty of speed powerups, hidden shortcuts and pitfalls to separate the men from the boys.
How to play it: use the arrow keys, press Up to jump.

If you consider yourself a button masher, you might like Hit Machine. The concept is no different from Guitar Hero or Tap Tap Revenge: when a note hits the bottom of the screen, you have to hit the appropriate button. The music in Hit Machine is limited to unknown songs, so if you’re looking for Lady Gaga’s newest hits or that old Beatles classic, you’re out of luck. The multiplayer element of this game is limited to a leaderboard.
How to play it: use the letters ASDJKL on your keyboard.

In the early days of OMGPOP, their games were largely cool adaptations of popular games. You used to be able to play a killer Tetris clone with power-ups called Blockles on OMGPOP but – you guessed it – the lawyers from The Tetris Company weren’t too happy with that, so OMGPOP had to kill it. The current version of Blockles is a Dr. Mario clone. A few other “clone” games such as Tracism (Pacman with a fun twist) seem to have shared that same fate.

Fortunately though, most games that are worth playing are still available so play ‘em while you still can! Be careful though… don’t get caught visiting this site at work.