Top Internet Pastime Games to Relax and Unwind

Tonight I beat Rancid, at level 471, the evil raccoon from a little game I play on the Internet, who wants to lay a nice layer of concrete everywhere without thinking about all those poor little vegetables and animals whose land he would take away. It's quite satisfying, I've been trying for a fortnight now.

I admit it, even I am not immune to the so-called pastime games that are all over the internet, in fact I would even say that I use them immoderately as I always have one at hand to which I dedicate at least half an hour a day. But I tell myself to console myself a little that I need it to relax after a busy day. It's only five lives, which it takes to finish them and afterwards you have to wait some time to get them back and be able to play again, so there's no danger of you getting hypnotised and spending who knows how long on them.

But these are mere illusions.

In the meantime, keep an eye on the leaderboard. In the beginning there are many of your contacts playing there, then as you go from level to level they get thinner and thinner. So in the beginning when you beat a few, you share, share, share all happy thinking: ‘Here I've got you, and I want you to know it’.

Then one day an annoying thought occurred to me. I looked at the leaderboard and realised that there were only two of us left at that level playing and I thought of my contact: ‘always here playing, but doesn't he have a life?’ Gosh, what if someone had thought the same thing about me? But I do have a life, I said to myself, and a satisfying one at that, but since then I haven't shared any results on the games I play.

From morning to night

The alarm clock rings, I get up. I always set it a little early because I like to linger in the bathroom before tackling the day. And it's time for my mobile phone and my first game of Burraco, for those who don't know it, it's a very intriguing card game that also gives me some satisfaction as month after month I always occupy the top places in the rankings. And you can swear that at any time of day or night you will always find someone to play a good game.

Sometimes, however, it is the situation that makes me laugh when I think about it. In the morning around 7 o'clock, sitting on the toilet playing cards. And I think that maybe my opponent or opponent is in the same situation as me at that moment. Isn't it comical? Two adults, (yes because this game is mostly for adults, or rather for old people, as I say) on the toilet in the morning playing cards. I remember the good old days when we used to take a good book to the toilet in the morning.

Well, if you digress and want to remain technological, you could also do it now, you can read books galore on your mobile phone. But for me the game is better. It lasts little, about ten or fifteen minutes if you find an opponent who has to think about 30 seconds every move he makes, and then you look at your watch, if you have time left you do another one, otherwise you finish preparing and leave.

However, there is much more to be said about this game. First of all, there is no chat in comparison to the pattern games, but there is in this one. I find it annoying, at least when I play I only think about playing, chatting distracts me and doesn't allow me to follow well the scheme I've proposed. On the other hand, many people like this. A greeting is fine, a good morning to which I always reply, but then that's enough. And being a woman unfortunately, all you have to do is answer the greeting and the usual questions start. What's your name, how old are you, what do you do for a living.

At this point it was necessary to find a solution, so I put an avatar of an old man, in the male description, and fortunately the usual requests have almost disappeared. Almost though, someone still insists and at that point I fire off a nice ‘I'm 78 years old’ and as if by magic everything goes silent. And, I say, wouldn't it be sooner for all these curious chatterboxes to go to some dating chatroom and ask all the questions they want?

Then there are various other times in the day when playing a little game for 10 minutes serves to distract and relax you.

But the evening is the real star for this kind of thing.

After dinner, having tidied up the house, watched the news (because it is always good to keep up to date with what is happening in the world), you feel like turning off the TV because you don't find anything satisfying and at that point you either watch a film or a TV series on one of the platforms that are available now or you go to the PC and find something to pass a couple of hours. And it's at this point that if you don't decide on a release or a film that you immerse yourself in an online role-playing or multiplayer game, or strategy or war.

Role-playing games

There are so many role-playing games on the internet and playing them means pretending to be someone else, although this is a generic definition but one that fits all types of role-playing games.

So you are in a fantasy world, often like the world of Lord of the Rings, where you can be an elf or a dwarf or a hobbit or many other fantasy races. These games are usually played through a forum and wearing your character you find yourself interacting by writing with many other players and this creates situations where the player's imagination is the key to the success or otherwise of your character. And being interesting by being able to totally identify with the character you play is the real fun of these games.

In these games, congregations or guilds are formed that players aspire to join, but you have to be good at it. However, this type of game is no longer very fashionable, preferring the general public to play different games.

Online multiplayer role-playing games

You play online games on your PC, but in this case you make a character and see him/her directly on the screen moving, acting and performing all the actions you want him/her to perform, all this in a fantasy world populated by monsters, fairies, orcs etc etc.

There is a fantastic game that has fascinated millions of people all over the world and it has also fascinated me.

My kids gave me the game for Christmas and honestly I didn't really want to play it, it didn't inspire me that much. In fact, one of my sons installed it and played it. Then I decided to give it a try since he assured me it was very intriguing. So I made myself a character, a gnome, or rather a little gnome, and I started playing. The scenery was very nice, it was a landscape with lots of snow and sometimes it even snowed. The game at the beginning is very simple, you have to do the quests that are assigned to you and during which you find items that you need to get better clothes, better weapons etc.

But the great thing about this game is that along with you doing the usual missions and being at your level there are many other players and so you can interact with them, make a kind of alliance and share the loot from the missions. Everything is much easier. As you level up, the world in which you move expands tremendously and a lot of new scenarios and new things open up that make you really enjoy the game.

You can join a guild, which would be a congregation of people who help each other to get through the more difficult stages of the game or to do raids, which are real dungeons with really strong monsters and it's hard to beat them even if there are several of us. But these give you armour or weapons that are really valuable.

You can also make a profession so that you can make some coins by selling what you recover and thus buying what you need. There is even an auction inside the game where you can find everything.

However, it would take a lot to talk about this game, there are so many and varied things you can do in it.

However, you make friends and maybe play it together for a long time and it's nice in the evening when you're playing to put on your headphones and talk to them.

Strategy games

Of strategy games there are many and some really good ones. I, however, want to tell you about my personal experience with a strategy game.

You have to choose a race, there are 3 of them, and at that point you have to do the tutorial that explains a bit how the game works. But right after that it's nice to jump into a few games, usually one-on-one. At first you always lose, unless you find a neophyte like you, then you slowly learn the strategies and start winning some matches.

The matches usually last about twenty minutes to half an hour at the most and the secret is speed. The speed you use to construct the various buildings that will allow you to have more powerful units. Speed in gathering resources without which you cannot do anything. Speed in making defences that will at least allow you to overcome the first attack.

It is a game of speed. Multi-player games are a lot of fun, normally the most popular ones are three-on-three. How many nights have I spent with this game. But I really had a lot of fun. When you find companions with whom you get along well and who are at the same level of play as you, it often happens that you win almost every game and that is when you are recognised as a formidable opponent.

Also in this game, there are congregations called clans and there are prestigious ones that everyone aspires to join, but where joining is very difficult because they only take really strong players. These clans often organise wars with other clans and you have the chance to see your comrades' matches live.

War games or shooters

I don't have much experience with this type of game, but as far as I know it has quite a following of players.

The one I tried was a team game. You are a soldier, equipped with a rifle, hand grenades and other types of weapons, and together with other players you are inside a scenario that is usually not very big, a few streets, several buildings you can enter, and you have to try to kill as many enemies as possible without being killed. It's not very easy and at the beginning you try to put yourself in a sheltered place waiting for some enemy to pass by, but then that gets boring and then you go off on the hunt.

Also in this game there are clans and normally when you join one of these the players in a game are your clan mates with whom you normally talk to via microphone and headset, so it's easier to coordinate attacks. There is usually a team leader who leads the group and gives information about what we have to do. I didn't play it for a long time because I found the type of game monotonous. That is, almost always the same map, almost always the same things to do. Simply put, it became boring.

I know of other games that have more variety than this one but I don't know the subject very well so I just talked about what I played.

Conclusion

This is only a partial and very limited overview of the games that are on the internet, there are so many of them and of all categories.

However, I am reminded of a very funny moment from my internet experience many years ago. Back then, there were also games on the forums, which could be of many types, but many of them were really games of skill: very simple games, but they kept you busy in the sense that there was a leaderboard and you had to achieve a certain score to enter.

They were really fun, too bad you can't find any more. Or at least I, even though I looked for them, couldn't find any more.