101 Free Games #7: SquareOff and Toribash

SquareOff may just be the best designed five-meg, head-to-head flash game ever.  You draw a square / rectangle, and it goes flying across towards your enemy.  The bigger the square, the slower it goes.  If you hit an enemy square with your own square, they cancel each other out, and get smaller.  Take out the awful music, and you have a seriously *mint* piece of work.

Toribash, on the other hand, is a very different kettle of fish.   It’s a turn based head to head fighting game, like Street Fighter 2.  That’s right, turn based.  You control the joints of your rag-doll fighter against another rag-doll fighter, driven by someone one the other side of the internet.  It is meticulous, particular, obsessive, and really, really fun.

To expand on it, however, the game lets you record replays in the single-player “sandbox” mode.  Why not make it a game of throwing replays at each other, instead of working joint by joint?  It would be a competition both of who could make the best moves, and who could pick the best moves.