From Nitrome comes a game about space, stars, and making aliens blow up. Guide a fledgling star across thirty levels requiring a steady hand and quick reflexes. While the control scheme may take some getting used to, Nebula is a cute, quick little game that would be at home in any arcade, thirsty for your quarters. And remember, kids. Friends don't let friends play with space bombs.

Short and sweet, Para Cute sends a teddy-bear out searching for a gift for his beloved the old fashioned way. Parachuting through a series of caves and warp points to collect as many hearts as he can! At only six levels, Donut Games has crafted a tasty little title suitable for your coffee break, or any other time you feel the need to go awwwww.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy, all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage. I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for avoiding the solid black lines of architectural blueprints as they whiz by at unsafe speeds while you struggle to stay upright on your bicycle built for DEATH.

Reach for the stars — literally — in Casual Space, where treasure, danger, and secrets are sprawled across two enormous maps comprising over 40 levels of spacey action! Balancing a quirky, kid-friendly presentation with some genuinely challenging gameplay, Casual Space is good casual fun for all ages.

A space-themed mixture of Time4Cat and Replica. Your hyper-drive has malfunctioned, and deadly replicas of your ship are popping out of a wormhole behind you, retracing your path. They only move when you do, but you still have to travel fast to collect the research from nearby planets that will allow you to escape.

A game in which you face wave upon wave of enemies, and you don't have so much as a dull spoon to defend yourself with. That's not fair, you may think, but this is the fast-paced and frenetic hand you've been dealt, serving up a bountiful feast of action-y goodness that's hard to put down. You don't have any weapons of your own, but the hundreds of enemies eager to see your undoing have more than enough to make up for that, as you turn their heat seeking bullets right back onto them.

A mouse-avoider game from Finefin, the makers of Dotville. Your goal is to skydive from Point A (umpteen thousand feet up) to Point B (the ground) relatively unscathed. However, a series of walls and tunnels has formed in midair, and running into them would likely be painful. The cheery pixel-art and energizing music make this a fun game to play.

Time 4 Cat is a new mouse avoider game in which your movements also control the enemy, so you can make everyone stop and start, or go faster or slower. Your goal is to hustle through the big city and scoop up all the food that is dropped. Each piece of food has a count-down timer on it, the faster you collect the food the higher your score. What makes this game stand out is the fact that you can slow everything down and go at your own pace.

Bomba is a new arcade avoidance game from Nitrome. Look just beyond the surface and Bomba reveals itself to be much more than a simple "don't touch the walls" game. There's strategy, there's speed, there's planning, there's even backtracking and careful timing involved. Think of it as an adventure/avoider and you'll get an idea of what to expect.

A unique new anti-shooter game of collection and avoidance by Felix Reidl. You have two minutes to collect as many yellow squares as possible, while various gun turrets try to mow you down. Whenever you start to feel overwhelmed, you should hit [Space], which instantly ends your game and adds up your score. If you don't hit the space bar in time—and this is important—you don't get any points. You have only one life, and if you die, your score is zero.

A fast-paced, single-player mouse avoidance game where your only goal is to survive as long as possible. Dodge angry red buggles and collect mysterious blue boxes to obtain a high score. Catch the little green buggles to become the mighty devourer, destroyer of red buggles! Eat them all! Muhahaha!

Trying to describe a game using splendiferous prose just seems so... right-brained-centric. How discriminatory! Thus, as a public service to all you left-brainers out there, I hereby present this mathematical description: Retroid = (Pong + Gravity - 1 player + Ball² + 3Enemy) * 4 modes + Bob.

In Entropic Space, no one can hear you smash planets together. It's true, sound does not travel in space, but what does travel are "fun-waves", those mysterious quanta of play that science is just beginning to understand. A submission to our 4th Casual Gameplay competition from Studio Cypher, Entropic Space has you pilot an mega-scale space pod that can bump planets into each other, engineering parsec after parsec into entropy.

It looks simple, like what computers experience when they practice zazen. And it is, my brothers and sisters, it is very simple. Therein lies the beauty of Avoid! (I bet that exclamation point was jarring), a compilation of short vignettes by Alex Miller that plays off the theme of avoidance.

Hearken back to those adrenaline-happy days with Vector Runner, an arcade action game concerned purely with the sensation of speed. Control a humble blue cube on its journey down a futuristic highway, dodging deadly pyramids of various shapes and sizes. Wherever you need to be, you're going there fast.

Most everyone has probably played an avoidance game before. They are generally based on a very simple gameplay mechanic. Orb Avoidance is a simple game of mouse avoidance with the added bonus of a combo system. It's a little mindless fun to get your gears turning, and it won't take more than 10-15 minutes of your time.

Overhead Consistence is another mouse maze game, but please bear with me... this one's good, even if you don't normally go for manual dexterity games. If you don't believe me, go check out Overhead Persistence, reviewed here in March. Has JohnB ever steered you wrong? This one is well worth the effort.

The old "navigate through a maze" concept enjoys a small rebirth in the form of Overhead Persistence, a gorgeous Flash game by Acrid Rose. Guide the cursor through each level avoiding the walls and any other obstacles you come across. Normally a game like this wouldn't be anything special, but Overhead Persistence provides a stunning audio and visual package along with a level editor and other extras to make a worthwhile experience.

Instead of simply moving one object around the screen to avoid the falling dots, in Formation you must control an entire setup of orbs that rotate and periodically change position. Touch one of the flashing white balls that fall from the top of the screen and it becomes part of your formation, thus forcing you to be mindful of yet another ball's position and causing your brain to hurt.

Arguably one of the best (if not the best) Flash game series of its genre, Dr3i is more than just a game of avoidance. As before, collecting small positive and negative signs speeds up and slows down the rotation of the obstacles that you must make your way past. However, this 3rd version in the series introduces an animated "beast", an engaging cloud of black smoke that follows you in pursuit.

Drag the Dot is a simple Flash game, created by Oliver Castañeda of Scarsdale, New York, in which the objective is literally self-explanatory. Just drag the dot to the goal in each of the game's 16 levels, and a final boss level that is "better than doom" (whatever that means.)

An updated version of the original Reverse game (previously reviewed on JIG), Reverse 2 is a very simple point-to-move-the-block game where the basic rule is that the mouse input directions have been reversed, so pushing the mouse up pulls you down, and so forth.

Those shifty (har, har) 8-key critters are cruising down the screen towards you, an intrepid, er, lightbulb, as you ascend the y-axis in this evasion flash game. While 'don't touch the sprites' is a very (very very very?) common game mechanic, this is a superb execution with twists that make it less about endurance than about nerves.

String Avoider is an online flash game where you slide a string through a series of mazes using your mouse. Coded by fwe and part of the Gamenet network, String Avoider has the nasty habit of being both addictive and maddeningly frustrating all at once.

German Flash-based design firm, Mach Parat, has released an update to its excellent Flash game, Dr3i, that was reviewed here back in October of 2004. This new horizontal scrolling version of the action game is played just like the original. Use the mouse to move the red dot through the maze and collect all the black dots.

To be filed under the "simple but highly addictive" category is this latest game by Max Abernethy of flecko.net. Simplistic but challenging is Cubefield, a strangely beautiful dodge-the-obstacles type of game. The author of this 3D Flash game even offers an explanation of the technology behind it for those interested.

Drifts is a Flash action game based on a very simple idea: collect the green bubbles while avoiding the purple ones. And yet the simplicity of the game is deceiving: underneath the surface lurks a challenge that is difficult to master. It's an exceptionally well-designed casual game that is fun to play.

Next up are a couple of games with no name, simply refered to as NoName Game #1 and NoName Game #2, created by MadMax of Poland and hosted on his Freshblood.zic.pl site. An action puzzle game of hand-eye coordination, the games are similar in design to DR3I and Reverse that...

Time for a break from all the thinking required in those point-and-click adventure games. This next game comes from Jared Tarbell, maths and Flash wizard extraordinaire. Maeda Path is a relaxing game of eye|hand coordination with elegantly simple graphics and a brilliant use of sound. Using your input device of choice,...

Dr3i is a simple game to click and play for a quick diversion, and is remarkably fun... if not a little dizzying. Use the mouse to move the red dot around the screen to collect all of the black dots, marked with a plus or minus sign, without touching anything else.

Here is another mouse cursor game that is nicely put together. Simple, minimalist graphics with levels of increasing difficulty, 20 in all. Guide the mouse cursor to the goal, however the control of the mouse is reversed. Simple and straight forward, Reverse is yet another short little diversion to cleanse the palette of your brain. Created by Moba...

Squares 2 is an addictive action Flash game with a phat beat. Very similar in concept (and sound) to Manuel Fallmann's Bubbles collecting game, Squares 2 has you collecting all the black squares while avoiding all the red ones. The game is extremely easy to pick up and play, and good fun for a quick diversion or two.