8 Totally Free Games to Kick Your Boredom's Ass

8 Doodle God

Doodle God is a perfect game for when you want to zone out for a while and forget that the entire world exists. It's a simple mouse-only puzzle game, which means that you can easily play it with one hand while never losing grip of your booze or bong or genitals. The best part is that it's so straightforward, you don't even need an instruction guide -- you just combine two elements to make a new substance. For instance, air and fire make energy. Water and earth make a swamp. Now you can combine those new things to make life. Exactly the way my children were conceived.

The beauty is in that simplicity. Starting out with only four basic elements (earth, air, water, and fire), you can come up with 115 new items, including snakes, planes, and death ... there's a movie idea in there somewhere. Nah, that's stupid. Nobody would watch it.

Don't worry, if you burn through that one too quickly and need more sweet, sweet god doodling because you have problems with extreme narcissism, there's always Doodle God 2, with 196 combinations, and Doodle Devil, with another 100. It may sound too simple to even bother with, but trust me, when you want to relax and dick off for a while with minimal effort, it's absolutely perfect.

7 Paladog

This one is a little more involved. The story is that one day God got tired of all the greed and violence of man, so he destroyed them, passing their intelligence along to animals. Eventually, demons got mad about whatever it is that demons get mad about ... I assume pretty much everything. Demons are rude assholes. So they attacked the world. The only one who can stop them is you: Paladog!

So basically the way the demons have decided to take over the planet is to send an organized line of zombies, skeletons, walking TV sets, and lots of other insane creatures at Paladog's fort. Paladog fights them off, using magic spells and his army of animal friends, which he purchases with food ... because they're animals and they like food. Duh. After each level, you can buy items and gear from the shop, as well as unlock and upgrade army units in the upgrade screen. Meanwhile, Paladog fights, recruits, and levels his way through waves of undead creatures, punching them right in their stupid zombie faceheads.

6 Infectonator 2

Infectonator 2 is kind of the opposite of Paladog. In this one, your goal is to turn the entire world into zombies by spreading their plague or virus or ... whatever the hell it is that turns people into zombies. If the 1970s had any say, it would be consumerism. In this game, it's a virus shooter, followed by a chain reaction.

The virus hits a few regular people, turning them into zombies right off the bat. Then they all run around like sightless morons, biting people they run into. Then those people either die when they run out of hit points or become infected themselves. Each zombie only has a limited time that it can stay "alive," so you have to be strategic in your aim.

The above picture is only the second area. As you progress through the game, you'll be trying to infect cities with hundreds of little screaming people. In between levels, you can use the money you collected (because what zombie doesn't love collecting coins before he keels over?) to upgrade your zombies and virus and even unlock and upgrade special zombies like Santa Claus and Michael Jackson. I won't give them all away, though -- that's half the fun. Well, that and screaming, "Suck it, bitches! You suck my infection! I am the Infectonator!"

Once you beat that, fear not. There are six versions of this game.

5 Burrito Bison Revenge

Burrito Bison Revenge is a launcher game. If you've never heard of one before, it's exactly like it sounds: You launch a character into the air and see how high and far you can make them fly. Usually there are obstacles in the air and on the ground, and you can land on or fly through power-ups and money.

When he comes back down, he can land on cops, which kick his ass and make him stop shooting through the air, or he can splash dive gummy bears because ... well, why the hell not? He is a wrestler, after all. Did I not mention that? I probably should have mentioned that. He's a wrestler. It all makes sense now, doesn't it?

Just like all of these games, you can upgrade all kinds of things between rounds, adding rockets and speed and corrupt cops. Don't try to make sense of it, man. Just launch the goddamn bison and squish gummy bears. It's fun. If you're not into bison, then here's a slightly different launcher with a penguin.

4 Upgrade Complete

I'm going to say something that sounds face-fartingly obvious. Then I'm going to explain the really, really obvious thing because it turns out to not be quite as obvious as you might think. Here I go: In Upgrade Complete, the object is to upgrade everything.

No, really, every motherfucking thing. Not just the little ship that you use to play the game, but everything: the font, the graphics, the logo, the copyright notice, the ability to save the game. Adding a mute button so you can turn off the music. Everything.

The actual "playable" part of the game -- that is to say, the section that has action -- is only there for you to earn money, which is then spent on the upgrades. It's an ingenious idea for a game, and I enjoyed the festering shit out of it. My only complaint is that it doesn't take very long to beat.

Oh, wait, here's Part 2 with a billion more things to upgrade.

3 Caribbean Admiral

There are two things I hate in a game: zombies and pirates. Strangely, I have both of those things on this list, because I'll give most every game a fair shake before throwing my dinner at it and screaming, "This is bullshit! You're not my mom! You're just a stupid game!"

Caribbean Admiral is a fairly simple hybrid of basic buy low/sell high trading and turn-based RPG. During the non-battle parts of the game, you buy products at one port for as low of a price as you can find, then take those by ship to another city where hopefully they're buying at a much higher rate. While at the port, you can repair or buy more powerful ships and upgrade their stats, allowing you to carry more cargo or more implements of pirate assfuckery.

That's the turn-based battle part. The screenshot above shows two ships squaring off, but as you progress in the game, you and the enemy will obtain larger fleets. It's not a terribly long game, but you can easily kill an afternoon with it, annoying your co-workers or housemates by screaming mixes of cursing and "ARRRG" after every cannon blast. Or maybe that's just me. I never trust a game to fully entertain me, so I have to add my own brand of fun.

Bloons is one of my all-time favorite series of browser games. They're tower defense games, which means that you're setting up buildings or characters in defined spots along a path, and they will attack anything that walks down it. In this case, it's monkeys who are extremely pissed off at balloons for some reason. I don't know why, but that idea is one of the cutest, stupidest things I've ever laughed at.

As balloons float by, your stationary monkeys throw darts, boomerangs, and shurikens to pop them. When you need more firepower, there are airplanes, pirate ships, cannons ... basically all the things you'd expect a monkey to construct in order to pop balloons in real life. If a balloon makes it past your defenses and out the other side of the map, you lose a life. Reach zero lives, and you lose the match.

And yep, everything is upgradable. Well, not everything. We kind of ruined that word with Upgrade Complete, but you know what I mean. The great thing about this game is that there are so many of them, as you can see on Ninja Kiwi's homepage. The one in the screenshots is Part 5, and even outside of the numbered versions, there are spinoffs and game packs that add more levels. You can easily spend weeks or months on this series alone. And if that isn't enough for you because you're a greedy bastard, try my other two favorite tower defense games, Kingdom Rush and Gemcraft.

1 Epic Battle Fantasy 4

This one is a full-on game. It has a plot, interaction with NPCs, a full party of characters, quests, a leveling system, equipment upgrades, crafting, battles ... it's a classic RPG style that's a perfect cross between The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Final Fantasy. The Zelda section is what you'll find outside of battles. In order to reach this chest, you'll need to find the hammer. In order to reach this section of the map, you'll first need to cool the lava with the ... lava ... cooler thing.

Battle is a classic turn-based system all old-school RPG players are familiar with. It comes with attacks, magic, summons, limit breaks ... pretty much all the stuff you're used to from the classics, but somehow pulled off in a way that doesn't feel old or stale.

All of the healing and buff items are things like candy, chips, and energy drinks. The armor and weapons are presented like costumes. For the longest time, I figured it was done that way to make them all look and feel like little kids, until they started a conversation about a party member's huge boobs. It's seriously fun, and it's brought me hours of joy when I otherwise would have been bitterly weeping in the darkest corner of my closet.

If you're more into a traditional, less cartoony RPG, I highly suggest Legend of the Void 2. It's darker and has more of a Dungeons & Dragons style than candy-eating children with adult breasts.

John is an editor and columnist right here at Cracked, with a new article every Thursday. You can also find him on Twitter and Facebook.