I have posted numerous times about my love for browser-based games. I enjoy playing them and the look of the games just hits all the nostalgia spots on my brain and soul.
I grew up with console games and have owned just about every generation, but my first true love was computer games. I’m not talking about the games where you need the highest-of-high-end graphics cards and all the RAM available in your county to play. I love simple games like Solitaire, Mahjong and games of that ilk.
This past weekend, I was searching the interwebs for some fun browser-based games. I found a few sites that had a handful of games, but I came across Plays.org, which had an epic amount of games. Their category list is massive and filled with fun games. They were even adding new games as I was browsing the list.
I used to play a lot of browser-based games in-between studying for an exam or at the tail-end of a workday while I was waiting to leave work. Sudoku was usually my go-to game to waste a few minutes.
Browser-based games are free and can run on basically any computer. You don’t need an expensive gaming computer, which is a huge bonus. They are even cross-platformed, so you can play on your phone.
Many people believe that gaming has no benefits. They think that gaming a lot will mean a decline in eyesight, weight gain, and many other health issues. Good news for those who enjoy gaming: this isn’t true! While too much of anything can be a bad thing, regular gaming practice could actually be good for your health. Here’s an idea of how moderate gaming could be good for your health:
Improved Cognitive Skills
Gaming has been closely linked to improved cognitive skills. When gaming, you need to think about your strategy and what you’re going to do next, which can lead to improved problem solving skills. It can also help you to concentrate and focus better in other activities outside of gaming. Many people also find that their hand eye coordination and reaction times improve with regular gaming.
As your child develops, they’ll start to learn how to use their vision to process information that they react to with their hands. This sounds complicated but it’s actually something that we all learn at one point in our lives. For example, when you pick up a fork and see food, we understand how to move the fork and pierce the food so we can eat it. Children don’t understand this from an early age and it takes a bit of practice for them to build up that muscle memory that helps them use a fork.
This hand-eye coordination can take a while to train up, but there is a couple of fun and entertaining ways to help your child improve their hand-eye coordination. Since it takes a lot of practice to master, we suggest trying to get your child to practice this as soon as they can.
There are all kinds of things that rewire your brain. Education. Therapy. The stick in Men in Black that makes you forget you ever saw aliens.
But now you can add gaming to that illustrious list.
Brain Plasticity
Our brains have a remarkable capacity to reorganize themselves in response to new stimuli. If you practice the guitar for six months straight, you’ll develop new pathways that help you play it better. Similarly, if you keep hammering away at French, you’ll eventually learn the language.
There are lots of reasons to love video games, and if you’re a gamer, you probably don’t need us to tell you why. Still, here are a few reasons why video games give us so much joy.
However, despite the many highs that video games can give us, there are a few guaranteed annoyances that only we, as video gamers, will fully understand. They can take us out of the game, give us reason to grate our teeth, and quite possibly make us throw our gamepads across the room too! Here are just a few of them.
As a bona fide sports fan, you love the rough and tumble of watching and playing real sports. There’s nothing like getting the guys together and shouting at the TV, or trying to put new knowledge into practice. So, the idea of esports might not strike a chord. Isn’t it a load of nerds playing video games? Although it started that way, the industry has morphed into something much bigger, something that is rivaling the world of traditional sports.
Here are the reasons behind its rise. Get ready to see a lot more of them in the future because these The Motley Fool stats don’t lie.
They’re Not Elitist
The mobile phone. What once was a giant brick, with the capability to make bad phone calls, and cost a fortune, is now a handheld computer. They are, in fact, faster than the atari from back in the day. So it is little wonder that the mobile gaming market has been racing along the rainbow road of the gaming market – and leaving consoles in the dust.
The global gaming market, as a whole, is worth more than $120 billion. Mind-boggling – but what is even more of an achievement is the mobile gaming market accounts for $55 billion.
Big numbers.
I’m a big fan of time-wasting casual games to play on my phone and tablet. I’m probably ‘too much’ of a fan as I’m usually playing five or six games at a time throughout the day. I’m usually only playing them for a few minutes at a time, but I’m often nose-first in my phone while watching television.
Since I play so many of these games, I feel like I am a good judge of quality of these time wasters. Many games have came and went off my Samsung devices, so these are five games that I’ve been playing for awhile and don’t see future uninstall in the near future.
These games can be found on Google Play (and possibly the Apple App Store). I’m not an iPhone or iPad guy, so I can’t comment if the releases are different on that platform. I enjoy these games on my Android devices and think the developers really knocked it out of the park with these mobile games.
A long weekend in front of your computer is much better than an evening with Netflix, isn’t it? It’s you, and the elements. While most of us consider the PC to be the stalwart of the gaming experience, there’s a lot to be said for the Mac. And there’s a lot to be said for staying in, shutting the curtains, and getting engrossed in a fantastic game. Yes, there are those who are uninitiated in the ways of the weekend indoors, and for those people, here are the best Mac games to get stuck into on a long weekend…
Portal 2
When was the last time you had an app that was truly fun? We’ve played all the apps in the app store already, from Angry Birds to Tower Defense games, and nothing seems to really keep our interest. That’s because you forgot about the one classic that can never
die – solitaire mobile.
We all remember playing on our PCs back in the day. Solitaire was the game to play! Everyone wanted to get to the animation at the end, finally crack the code, and we all learned a thing or two about how to play solitaire along the way. Now, nobody has the time to sit down at a PC (an alarming majority of the country doesn’t even own a “PC”
anymore!)
If there is one debate in gaming, it is the age old PC vs. console argument. Each of these gaming platforms has their pros, as well as their cons. Each also has its own league of fans behind it. The truth of the matter is that when it comes to whether PCs or consoles are best for gaming, it depends on personal preference, like many things in life.
The fact is that when it comes to ease of use, games consoles tend to be easier to use because they allow you to relax on the sofa while you game. Whereas PC gaming requires you to sit at a desk, using a computer, but that doesn’t mean that consoles are better than PCs, because it’s not just about ease, it’s also about the quality of the gaming and the complexity of it, too.