I’ve recently returned a bit to video games. My brother pointed me to Kongregate, which is a game site chock full of Flash games. The site does several good things making finding good games easier. For example, there’s a system of achievement badges. The best games get badges, which you can collect by achieving certain things in the games. Collecting the badges is fun and encourages trying new games. It’s a pretty smooth site, highly recommended.

My recent favourite has been Cursed Treasure — Don’t Touch My Gems, which is a really addictive and fun tower defense game. If you’re unfamiliar with the genre, it’s all about defense — waves of enemies try to attack you and you must beat them by building gun towers. This is a fairly innovative variant on the theme.

The difficulty is also well tuned. Beating the levels is generally easy, but achieving perfect results is just hard enough — it takes many tries on the more difficult levels, honing the strategy. However, it also gets easier as you keep on trying, as you gather experience and can improve your skills. So, eventually, you’re bound to know the level well enough and have enough bonuses to manage the perfect play — and once you play all levels perfectly, you’ll score 30 points and the final achievement badge.

It’s a dangerously addictive game, though, so be warned.

(The Kongregate links here are affiliate links — if you click on them and register, I’ll get some points, which as far as I can tell are completely useless.)