Here are some nice little Halloween-themed games for monsters of all ages!

Taurus Media – This site has two portable Halloween games, one based on Bejewelled named, naturally, BeGhouled. And the other called Monster Frenzy where the one-eyed monster character from Monster Inc. has to feed monsters fruit matching the color of the monster. Just a note, if you want to exit the game, you have to press Esc while playing the game; in other words, not after the game is over. Both are non-violent fun! While you’re at the Taurus Media site, check out the other two free games you can download: MegaBot (a mario-like scrolling game that I have yet to test out) and BubbleEscape (based loosely on Missile Command but instead of shooting missiles you shoot at escaping bubbles aiming for the ones that have aliens (Boblins) inside them in order to rescue them…a creative way of using shooting in order to SAVE lives! This game is really fun!).

Halloween Tetris – a small Tetris clone for Tetrisaholics. I’m not a Tetris fan but I tested it out quickly and it’s a single executable and portable. Only 348 KB and for Windows only.

Check out these designer flash drives from mimoco. They have a two Star Wars models of Darth Vader and Chewbacca (which looks kind of funny) with two more planned for release but whose identities are unknown at this point.

If they could only come out with a Gumby flash drive; that would be nice. iPod has a Gumby skin, but if you ask me – it doesn’t even remotely look like the Gumby we know and love! It’s not even green!

A while ago I tried out TiddlyWiki after reading about its virtues – a single HTML file with a blog-like interface that could be edited through your browser and carried around on your USB drive. Great for to do lists and all kinds of things. Sounded pretty cool, but I just didn’t get it at first. And I’m a programmer to boot – how embarrassing!

Anyway, truth is I didn’t spend enough time with it. That’s me: if software isn’t intuitive enough for me to understand within 60 seconds, I get frustrated. It’s a bad habit but thankfully in this case I tried it again and I’m now addicted to Tiddlywikis. It’s actually so easy to use that I wonder why I had problems understanding it in the first place!

While I’m still using Mempad for general note-taking, I’m finding TiddlyWiki very useful for organizing research on a single topic and for organizing large projects. It’s also great for to-do lists!
There is a site that allows you to host your TiddlyWiki for free at Tiddlyspot. You can easily download your page to work on it offline and to carry a backup on your flash drive.

This isn’t a portable game (but you can bookmark this site in your portable FireFox browser!), but in case there are others out there like me who love the old arcade games the most, I thought I’d pass on this site that has about 300 classic online games from Nintendo:

updated: http://www.virtualnes.com/.

There is nothing to download; both the NES emulator and the ROMS are online. Lots of memories here and lots of games to choose from!

Here is a site hosting a small (313 KB) emulator for ColecoVision ROMS. You can also download a free ROM package full of arcade games like Centipede, Frogger, Fury, Burger Time, Tapper, Football, Jungle Hunt, Baseball, Galaxian, Zaxxon, Star Trek, Super Donkey Kong Jr, Popeye, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Time Pilot, Cosmo Fighter, Qbert.

WEBSITE:
http://tripletsandus.com/80s/80s_games/coleco.htm.

Great games and a great little emulator. I couldn’t get some games to work but I didn’t spend too much time trying to figure it out either – most work just fine. Cosmo Fighter is a lot of fun! I haven’t had a chance to try them all out; there are enough games included to have a blast all weekend!

Here is another collection of portable applications to check out:

http://www.winpenpack.com/main/index.php

This Pong remake is Far Out!! A truly pychedelic experience! As much as I love classic Pong, I will admit that even I get bored sometimes waiting for the ball to reach my paddle as it can get quite predictable when you play a lot. This game allows you to manipulate the ball’s trajectory to keep you continuously on your toes and allows you to control/adjust a mezmerizing background. The music is pretty awesome too!

From the website:

In the game you can inject plasma fluid into the environment, create a vacuum from your paddle, and blast shockwaves into the playing area. All these abilities have fluid-based kinetic effects on the ball, making Plasma Pong a fast-paced and exciting game.

You can download a no-install version from the website (select the zipped version) at www.plasmapong.com.

You can see a whole bunch of cool screenshots here: http://www.plasmapong.com/screenshots/.

It’s Thanksgiving Day here in Canada; if your family is like mine and always asks you, “Can you fix my computer?” everytime you come for a holiday visit, here are a few good games to sneak onto your flash drive to make it look like you are “fixing the computer.” Might as well have fun as you’re tweaking mom’s computer!

Like Breakout? Here is one small clone – 5 K!! It’s DOS-based, so the graphics are pixelated. And even better – no sound so you can really play incognito! Download Blockage here.

I couldn’t find any turkey games, but here is a portable game from the poultry family called Chicken Invaders. This game comes with an installer so you can install it to your PC then copy the files to your flash drive (I guess you could also install it directly to your flash drive). It’s a funny game based on Space Invaders except instead of aliens, it’s chicken dropping eggs on your spaceship.

And finally, here’s a Ferrari car racing game called RunOut that is 16 MB. Again, it comes with an installer, so just install it to your PC and then copy the files to your flash drive – it plays great off the flash drive and you can adjust the game window to be able to play the game and fix a computer at the same time

Don’t forget to check out the GAMES page on this site for more games to bring with you and have a Happy Thanksgiving/day off for those of you celebrating it!