Exceptional Internet

The internet can be really useful, exceptionally useful in fact, hence this website. But to paraphrase an old Yellow Pages advert “it’s not just there for the serious things in life”…oh no, it can be a great source of boredom relief too.

Here are ten of our favourite websites to turn to when you just want to kill a bit of time.

1. Ninja Kiwi created an incredibly addictive game called Bloons. Like many of the best games the premise is simple. You are a monkey armed with a few darts aiming to pop the required amount of balloons to progress through each level. There are 50 levels in the original game, and More Bloons offers even more fiendish levels. And if that’s not enough don’t forget to check out the Bloons Tower Defence game on the same page. Here at EI we’ve lost several evenings to that cheeky monkey and his darts!

2. Miniclip.com is one of a couple of sites we like that features a collection of free games to play online. Our current favourites are Mountain Bike and Bloxorz.

3. “Better than a remote control” is how TV-Links describes itself. This website allows you to watch full episodes of many classic and current TV Shows. Sites like this are often on dodgy ground as far as copyright goes (don’t worry, it’s only going to cause problems for the site owners and not the users) so make the most of it while it lasts!*

4. The chances are if you were born before about 1980 and lived in the UK you will remember Clive Sinclairs incredibly popular ZX Spectrum home computer. Well now you can relive those days of classic home computer gaming without the long tape loading time. Play a vast selection of “speccy” games right in your web browser. If you came from “the other side” and prefered the Commodore 64 then you are catered for too at JaC64.

5. Yahoo! Games offers a collection of free games to play in your browser. They have one of the widest ranges covering arcade and puzzle games in addition to more traditional board and card games that you can play against real people over the internet.

6. Addicting Games is another site offering a wide range of free online games. The word “Addicting” is really really irritating…it’s addictIVE that’s IVE, addicting isn’t even a word is it? But when it features such amusing games as The Impossible Quiz 2 then we can let it off it’s stupid name.

7. CAD software is boring right? It’s used by engineers to design things. Sounds like work to us. So what are CAD software company Solidworks doing making such an awesome free online game as Paper Pilot? Build a virtual paper plane and see how far you can make it fly. Once you’ve honed your skills you can challenge your friends over e-mail!

8. Do you just want to listen to some music while you idly surf about? Last.FM is a great website that builds a custom radio station just for you. Enter the name of your favourite artist and it plays songs that it thinks you’ll like based on what music other people who listen to your artist of choice also listen to. Try it out.

9. YouTube is the 800 lb gorrilla of online video sites and is a great place to waste a few minutes or more. It’s especially good for nostalgia moments - it never ceases to amaze us what half remembered TV shows or even news reports from our youth have been digitised by YouTube users and uploaded to the site.

10. Okay okay so this one is a bit of a cheat as you actually need to download the games but we couldn’t let this list of timewasters go without mentioning Skinflake Games, in particular Stair Dismount and Truck Dismount where you have to inflict as much damage as possible on a poor virtual person by pushing them down stairs or crashing their truck. It’s as idiotic and brilliant as it sounds…but don’t worry, all the damage occurs to a very stylised mannequin so there’s no need concern yourself with the evils of videogame violence here.

We hope these sites will help you while away a few idle minutes and relieve a bit of boredom when spending time online. If you have another site to recommend for a bit of online time-out please let us know by adding a comment to this article.

* update:
As predicted tv-links didn’t last long, and in fact the site owner was arrested for the crime of linking to content on the internet! Google had better watch out then…and me for that matter. Anyway I’ll be researching and rounding up the best tv-links style sites for a future article but in the meantime you could do worse than heading over to Alluc.org to get your online tv fix.

Filed under: Online Entertainment