I never played Popopop 1, if there is one, but I can’t imagine a game much more simple than this. Just drop detonating balls next to balls of the same color to pop them. I feel like someone out there is getting way to much pleasure playing this game.

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Side-scrolling funage for a rainy, lazy day. I’ve been putzing around on this and sipping nettle tea. Moles are cute.

Wheeeeee! This game is so freaking fun! You move your cursor over each dot to make them split into four smaller dots ad infinitum.

Do people still play miniature golf? We’ve got so many gizmos and gadgets to distract us in our own homes these days, it’s a wonder anyone still pays money to hit a ball into a fiberglass clown’s mouth. While Mini-Putt doesn’t have the colorful and often surreal obstacles that make put-put so absurd, it does satisfy the urge to hit balls into holes and it preserves at least some vestige of a cultural phenomenon soon to go the way of drive-in cinemas.

I usually root for the dragons in humans versus dragon scenarios, but this game is rather satisfying.

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Mini Train taps into the joy that we all felt as children when playing with blocks and choo-choo trains. If you’re having a boring day, this should help pass the time.

Stackle is a flash game where you have to stack pieces as high as you can before they all come tumbling down — sort of like Tetris mixed with Jenga.

Persuasive Games has just released a version of its game Airport Security (in which you play a security gate officer checking irritated passengers while adjusting to ever-changing and arbitrary TSA regulations) for the iPhone. The game, now known as Jetset, uses location-awareness to detect which airport the player is nearest to unlock various ‘souvenirs’ which can be sent to friends via Facebook.

Woah, we’ve gotten to the postmodern phase of flash game history where social commentary, appropriation of ironic DIY style, and surrealist absurdity are the order of the day. That said, Jason Nelson’s i made this. you play this. we are enemies. is pretty fun, if you manage to see through the frenetic aesthetic to figure out what’s going on.

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As Internet-savvy as President-Elect Obama is, I wonder if he’s played the hilarious flash game, Super Obama World, a Super Mario-esque spoof in which Obama must defeat lipstick-sporting pigs and money-hungry lobbyists roaming around the icy tundras of Alaska while collecting flag pins.

Don’t Shoot the Puppy is one of the more difficult flash games out there, sure to engage you for hours. Strategy is the key, but quick reflexes and a photographic memory don’t hurt either. It’s rare that a computer game challenges the intellect and hand-eye coordination to this extent.

Woohoo! Another flash game that actually tests your cognitive abilities. LightBot is a difficult, but satisfying game in which you direct a little robot using a system of simple commands in order to light up various squares on a grid. The first few levels guide you through the seemingly easy process, but when there are multiple sets of directions requiring you to write what are essentially codes, it can get pretty hairy.

Oh boy, Robokill is one of the best flash games ever. It’s a bird’s-eye-view shoot-em-up where you’re a mercenary robot sweeping through a space station that has been overrun by evil, hostile robots. The game is incredibly detailed, and has the best graphics of almost any other flash game. No wonder people aren’t buying game software for their PCs anymore.

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Epsilon is a cool game inspired by the activation of the real-life particle accelerator, the LHC, in the CERN lab in Switzerland. The aim of the game is to move ‘portals’ around to move a particle, which obeys laws of physics, so that it hits tokens and lands into the wormhole in each level.

Knuckleheads is a pretty fun little side scrolling game where you’re a pair of Mexican-wrestler-looking things attached to each other by a chain. You swing each other around to move and hit floaty capsule things for points, and you can change the length of the chain to get over various obstacles, but watch out for the bats.

This neat little game may fool you into thinking it’s educational because it looks like microbes crawling on a periodic table. However, it’s really just good, mind-numbing fun. The object of the game is to control the white bacteria thingy with your mouse and move it to the little squares that appear on the screen. Each time you do this, exponentially more little red bacteria thingies appear. If you touch those, you die, and to make matters worse, you grow in size until you hit the boxes, so you have to move fast.

Here’s another variation on that sled widget everyone was obsessed with a while back. Rollercoaster Creator challenges you to come up with rollercoaster designs that not only get your rollercoaster train from start to finish, but also to pick up coins that are suspended in the air. Be warned: it can get pretty challenging.

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The Last Canopy is the sort of game that really hits the spot when you’re not looking for fancy visuals, just a chance to blow up some spaceships like in Space Invaders. In this game, you’re a little fairy boy with butterfly wings. You fly through the forest, blowing up some yellow machines that look like bulldozers and dump trucks that shoot lasers. There’s no real plot explanation, but it seems that the goal is to save an injured bird.

There’s a Gordon Ramsey video game. Seriously. It’s called Hell’s Kitchen, after his TV show. The game features a computerized version of the famed, potty-mouthed chef shouting at you as you struggle cook dishes and serve them to an restaurant full of impatient diners. The sister game should star Jamie Oliver, and the aim should be to slaughter as many chickens as possible.

It sure can be disheartening when the flash games making the blog and e-mail rounds are simply too difficult for you. Luckily, Swedish game developer Kian (a guy’s name, not a company) has created You Have to Burn the Rope, a game that a player has to try to lose, which is possible. Of course, if you really can’t even beat this game after a few earnest attempts, you might feel even worse about yourself.