Flashes of Brilliance: Basketball

You, a basketball, two minutes, and any number of strangers. The gameplay of Basketball is fairly well summarised in by the above screenshot: really, it’s more about your ability to work out the parabolas than anything else.

Online contests begin every 2 minutes and 45 seconds, and last for 2 minutes. While you wait to join a round, you can engage in some single-player practice. The particularly compelling point of the online play is that after each shot, your ranking is compared to the competition on a histogram. At the end of the round, a leaderboard is displayed, leaving the winners to bask in glory and represent their nation (as the game automatically shows your country’s flag). No account is necessary, and age, gender, and name entry is optional.

[Basketball via Reddit]

Flashes of Brilliance: Continuity

Sometimes, a game comes along with a simple, yet refreshing, new take on an old staple. In this case, the staple is the typical platform genre, and the twist is that you move the landscape around like a jigsaw puzzle.

It’s that simple, but it’s that brilliant. Continuity is a free Flash game developed by a group of Swedish students, and is a work in progress. With 30 levels so far, there’s about an hour of puzzling to be done. The 30 levels range from extremely easy to ridiculously difficult, although they can be skipped. The controls are as basic as can be, with the arrow keys used for navigation and the spacebar used to slide the pieces of level around. If the sides where two pieces meet don’t match, you can’t pass between them.

Expect more levels soon.

[Continuity via Destructoid]