I spent much of the weekend, aside from doing chores and working on fulfilling orders for Job Wanted, playing just the demo versions of some truly awesome games.

Small Rockets makes Master of the Skies: The Red Ace and its even better sequel, Red Ace Squadron. The fees to register them are very reasonable, considering the terrific detail and playability of these WWI dogfighting games. (And I don’t even like flying games…but these are easy to fly and addictive.) One note: the only Tucows download site that seems to work is the UK one. Most of their games are rich in graphics and fun. (Check out their kayaking game for some truly awesome visuals that would make an excellent screensaver.)

Sean O’Conner’s Windows Games score highly with me for one reason: you can play them in a window. I’m the kind of guy who likes to have a small, easy-on-CPU-memory game running in a window while I’m surfing, chatting or working in Quickent, but aside from Solitaire most games want to run fullscreen and require all of your attention. So I was gladdened to find Sean’s games, all of which are small but very addictive. The best ones (that I’ve played so far) are Rats, where you have to exterminate rats before their offspring overrun your maze, and Mother of All Battles, a Risk-like wargame played on a map which changes with each game. The games can also be played on a Pocket PC or Handheld PC, and are coming soon for Palm Pilot. You can also download all of the games in one packet and/or register them all to save on the purchase price.

Sheesh…with this kind of plugging, I wish they were paying us for the links. (Sadly, I didn’t see a reseller program.) I’m just passing along links to the games I’m playing right now.