Alt+Escape: TinyTrials

Welcome to Alt+Escape, our weekly pick of browser-based games to help you start your weekend a little early. Check back each Friday for a new game!

TinyTrials

Unlike last week’s Alt+Escape, there’s nothing particularly arty about TinyTrials, a collection of rapid-fire mini-games from Flash portal TinyMania. In fact, after a quick perusal of the other games on the site (including Beach Bar Babe and Chocolate or Sex Pinball) you realize that most of them could rightly be classified as “pretty goddamn stupid.” But you know what? Sometimes your afternoon needs a little dose of stupid.

TinyTrials takes snippets of lame but addictive games from TinyMania‘s library and mashes them together in quick succession a la WarioWare. Each mini-game lasts from 1 to 30 seconds – some rounds are over in a click or keystroke, while others give you a set time limit to complete as much as you can of a given task, from eating a steady supply of fish falling from the sky to throwing bananas at fez-wearing monkeys. Many of the games fall under the “mouse dexterity” category, so laptop users should think twice about playing with a trackpad – it gets annoying far more quickly than it would otherwise.

Not every game is fun, of course. A recurring celebrity-silhouette-recognition had me reaching for the “back” button every time it popped up in the queue, and some of the puzzle-based games felt out-of-place. There’s also an online leaderboard system that somehow feels more frivolous than many of the mini-games themselves. But the best thing about TinyMania is that it doesn’t linger on its successes or its failure – it just presses on to the next round. Which, incidentally, you might find yourself doing if you have some time to kill.