Sunday, October 28, 2007

Free Online Nostalgic Games.

Well before computer gaming and games like World of Warcraft and Halo became popular in the early 90s', children and adults alike enjoyed hands-on family games such as Scrabble and Rubik's cube. These simple but highly enjoyable childhood games of yesterday provided endless family fun and are making a comeback where games like Tic-Tac-Toe and Pictionary can be played online for free.

Scrabble
The online version of the popular 1948 board game can be found at scrabulous.com and can also be added to your Facebook account as a third-party application. Scrabulous, however, allows players to make a move in their own time, which means no pressure to come up with a word pronto. Users can also look up words in internationally recognised word-lists. With the intention of trying to keep the game alive by offering everyone a chance to play it online, Scrabulous is a massive hit with more than 375,000 Facebook users adding the game to their accounts.

Pictionary
Remember giving a miss on a game of Pictionary when you are unable to gather a group of friends to play? With it's online presence, you no longer have to miss this highly popular game and friends can be miles apart but still be able to guess what is being drawn. Running on Shockwave, the game provided by isketch.net is hassle-free as no account is needed. You are also given the option of choosing the level of difficulty before you start a game, by either joining an ongoing game or setting up your own.

Hangman
If you fancy a challenge the old school way then try playing Hangman online, a game that was usually played on the blackboards of my school when i was young. A simple but fun game where players have to guess a word by calling out letters one by one, where the more wrong guesses the players make, the faster they "kill" the man on the gallows. Available at theproblemsite.com, the website also has a dictionary of about 17,000 words and allows users to customise their game - you can choose the length of the words you want to guess and the number of wrong guesses allowed.

Scissors, Paper, Stone
Who can forget this simple game that has provide endless hours of childhood fun. Played not only to while away time, the game was also often used as a fun way to settle disputes. In this game, two players compete by throwing out hand signals of three different kinds - scissors, paper and stone. Stone beats scissors, paper beats stone and scissors beats paper. The online version version gives players a chance to pit their skills against computers and other players around the world.

Tic-Tac-Toe
Another popular childhood game, Tic-Tac-Toe is played by two players on a three-by-three grid. The winner is the first person who has place three marks - using either an "X" or "O" - in a horizontal , vertical or diagonal row. Aptly suited for young children, the online version allows you to choose from five levels of difficulty.

Rubik's Cube.
Who could forget this intriguing game, the cube with six different colours on each face, that made waves in the 1980s. Players aim to return the cube to its original form, with each face of the cube in one solid colour. The online version not only allows you to play with different designs of the cube such as brick and wood but there is also no manual twisting either, as a click of the mouse switches the positioning of any row of the cube. You can also scramble the cube into five different permutations, for e.g, to have one face pre-solved, making it easier to solve the rest of the puzzle.

*Related post : Free Games Downloads.

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