Not too long ago, Jeff Atwood lowered the overall productivity of software developers everywhere when he wrote about Desktop Tower Defense, a game that he calls fiendishly addictive.

I chose not to play the game as I had too much going on. But now I have family visiting and my brother (Hey Brian!) introduced me to yet another fiendishly addictive flash game, Line Rider. Damn you brother!

It’s not even really a game in the sense that there’s no objective other than to build really cool courses. It’s quite similar to a physics drawing tool. You simply start drawing lines and hit play to watch a some little dude with a red scarf sled down your course.

engin2.162.swf (applicationx-shockwave-flash Object) - Mozilla Firefox(2)

The tools themselves are simple. You have a free-hand pencil tool and a line tool. There are 3 colors of lines you can draw.

  • Blue - Draws a line where the sledder can sled at a normal pace.
  • Red - Draws a line that accelerates the sledder.
  • Green - Draws a line that doesn’t affect the sledder.

Using this simple set of tools, you can create some very interesting courses across a limitless canvas.

I was quite pleased with myself for executing a loop-de-loop until my brother showed me some of the amazing stuff that people have put together on YouTube like these two videos:

Sadly, I am completely hooked.