Wasties

An old friend, JP, used to spend quarter after quarter at video arcades. That was during the 1980’s, when arcades sprang up like toadstools in any vacant retail space. Games like Arkanoid, Dig Dug, Crazy Climber, Galaga, and others offered the opportunity to break out of alien prisons, tunnel through the planetary crust, scale skyscrapers while dodging potted plants, or make war on interglactic bugs.

JP called video games “wasties,” because, quarter by quarter, you could waste a lot of money. An invitation to “play wasties” meant “Let’s run down to the arcade for a while.”

Wasties — and my feelings about them — have changed a lot over the years. Since I work so much at a computer, I’m not inclined to play at one. As a result, the idea of investing hour upon hour playing the latest 3-D shoot-em’-up lacks any appeal. In fact, the only wasties I’ve played with any passion or regularity at all have been Diamond Mine and Bookworm.

Now, however, the folks at a company with the unlikely name of Orsinal have come up with dozens of elegant, gentle, and challenging Flash-based games. These games are unlike anything I’ve seen, with stunning pastel graphics, fluid motion, haunting melodies, and simple rules and goals. Better yet, the Orsinal games, while challenging and often difficult, take no more than twenty seconds to learn and understand.

So go fly Santa’s sleigh, take a lazy journey to the bottom of the sea, catch a pocketful of stars, or, in my personal favorite game, help a little white mouse ride a snowball to the end of a downhill course.

And you can’t really call these games wasties, because every single one of them is free.