This article was originally posted on July 6, 2022. Since this was one of the early articles for The Retro Millennial it was only seen by a few people — and because this summer has been an unusually busy time for me at work and at home — I thought I would republish it. I hope you enjoy it.

I love playing video games. PC games, console games, they’re all great, but I’m also an adult with family responsibilities which doesn’t leave a lot of free time. Now I have my old Game Boy Color, and my hacked New 2DS XL, but I don’t often carry them with me these days. Back in the day, the solution to this problem might be to head over to Newgrounds or some other site that hosted a plethora of Flash Games, but with the demise of Flash last year (hallelujah!) those options are fewer than they have been in some time. Thankfully, portable consoles and archaic flash games aren’t the only option out there for a gamer on the go. All you need is a web browser and a few minutes to kill.

Nation States

I stumbled upon Nation States back in college. I think it was 2008 or 2009 and it was a pretty humorous way to kill some time. You start by creating a new nation.

Select the type of government you want and answer a few generalized questions about the values of your nation, then select your name and flag to finish up the creation process. For my new nation I chose the name “The Free Land of Cafalia”, a “civil rights love fest”.

From here on out the game is pretty simple. At the top you see an option called Issues. I have 4 unresolved issue that need to be addressed. Your choices on these issues will affect your country in a variety of ways: civil rights, economy, political freedom, defense, etc. You gain or lose influence based on these decisions as well.

Click on one of the issues and make your choice. Keep in mind, that the choices you make affect your country, and the game is designed to make the reactions to your choices completely over the top. Let’s look at the anti-crime issue.

Now I’m personally pretty libertarian on most issues, including privacy — which is why I like Linux — so I’m going to choose option number 1. Let’s see what happens.

Well, I guess I surveillance cameras are illegal now. See what I mean about the over the top reactions to your choices? Another option I’ve seen before was legalizing pot causes half of the population to spend their entire day getting high and your economy tanks. It’s really quite fun to see what happens.

Now if you get really into it, you can also hop onto the forums and roleplay as your nation’s representative to the broader world via the World Assembly or write stories based on your country in the forums, but that takes us out of the quick browser game realm. Fun fact, the World Assembly used to be called the United Nations back in the day but had to be changed after the creator got a cease and desist letter from the actual UN.

Sword

Don’t want to create an account? Only have a minute to play a quick game? Well here’s one for you that I just discovered yesterday. It’s called Sword. One of the guys I’ve been getting to know over at lunduke.locals.com named Ross created this fun little game.

The rules are simple. You have three hearts and so does the computer. You slash and stab at the enemy while guarding and dodging its attacks. It’s basically rock-paper-scissors but with a couple more rules that he outlines at the bottom of the page. You can play a round in under a minute, and it’s really a fun time. My kids and I played it together last night and they had a blast!

Sometimes, with all of the triple A games being released with vast sprawling worlds and deep lore, we can forget that games can just be quick, easy, simple, and fun. I hope you all will give these two a try, and let me know what you think about them!

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