Originally designed as a learning experience from a designer who wanted to learn Flash and JavaScript, The Human Brain Cloud is a brilliant stroke of simplistic game design and high-brow fun for those of us who still remember Scrabble nights with fondness. The ‘game’ starts out with a player typing in the first word that comes to their mind, allowing other ‘players’ to then begin associating other words with the original subject, creating a lovely (and large) mind map of words and bubbles. For instance, “pizza” might be associated with “cheese”, “Italy” or even “yummy” by other players, creating a sometimes humorous look into the inner workings of word association on the human psyche. Some interesting statistics have also popped up, as of this post, The Human Brain Cloud consists of 209644 unique words, 1934531 connections and 171984 humans , not bad for an experiment from a first time Flash scripter.

Brilliant: The Human Brain Cloud

It’s only a matter of time before the benefits of web 2.0 are recognized and adopted by the games industry, and those times they are a coming. Kongregate is a flash games hub with social networking-style community features allowing game developers to connect and interact with players and players to easily connect with and play against their friends. Developers are free and welcome to add their own games to Kongregate (great for online RPG, RTS and casino games developers)and are even compensated via shares of any microtransactions or advertising revenue while keeping full rights to their games. A great start to the future of casual social gaming.

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Line Rider, the highly addictive sledding flash “toy” created by a student for illustration class, which then went on to become an internet sensation, will be making it’s way to the Nintendo DS and Wii consoles thanks to inXile. Line Rider allows a user to sketch out lines which is then transformed into a sledding course, allowing an ultra cute character on a tobaggon to sled his way down, crashing, banging and flipping on the lines you’ve just created. A perfect fit for both Line Rider and the hardware, I’m highly looking forward to these coming out!

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Galactic Gravity Golf is absolutely one of the best Flash-based games I’ve played in ages. The interface is completely slick and the game play, though simple, is challenging and always good fun. Come on, who doesn’t want to play golf in outer space with comets and planets and black holes? Enjoy a few rounds of galactic golf-based simulation via T45OL, a great source of flash-based games from mini-golf, to Real-Time Strategy and a great poker game or 12.

Play more: Galactic Gravity Golf

Line Rider is a brilliant little flash application which was actually a project for a student’s illustration class, thus not officially a ‘game’ so to say. Though it’s not meant to be a game, users are getting hours of fun out this intuitive and beautifully simple physics, illustration, cartoon, project whatever-simulator. The user simply draws a series of lines, in any form, direction and angle, then clicks play and a little tobogganing cartoon dude goes nuts, shredding the lines which are now rendered as gnarly slopes. After about my 30th track, I had to sit back and take a break in order to actually finish writing this post.

Watch the ultimate Line Rider flip course after the jump..

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Publishers take note quickly cause here’s an idea that needs to be developed! 24 year old student of design, Patrik Berg created a brilliant prototype for a musical video game named Wicki! Wicki! where the player ‘scratches’ along to various electronica and hip-hop tracks using a special turntable peripheral. To create the peripheral, Berg merely refinished an old Technics turntable, mounting an optical mouse as a pickup, which was then hacked to be controlled by a PC running a Flash game developed by Berg and his school team. So far only used in a school competition, this is definitely a fun little game for those budding DJs out there who are tired of scratching up their record collections.

Read more: Wicki Wicki – DJ game controller and prototype | Hyper Island