Spring Break is here. This is awesome. Sun and fun with friends, nine glorious days of freedom from the daily rigors of schoolwork — and the chance to sleep, yes, so many opportunities to spend your new found liberty curled up under the covers. But what about the free time? Those hours not spent snoring the day away?

You could always play a game, right? The expanding popularity of internet-based gaming portals like Kongregate provide endless entertainment for the gamer with a couple of minutes to kill and a computer nearby. Sound like fun? Read on to see why you may not need one of those fancy (expensive) consoles at all to have a good time.

Calling Kongregate popular might be a bit of an understatement. Check out its tagline: “22, 765 Online Playing 12,806 Games!” Those numbers could very well change in the next few minutes, but the point remains the same: there’s a hell of a lot to do at Kongregate, and the vast majority of it is great (and free!) fun.

All of these games run on Adobe Flash, a multimedia platform prevalent across many sites throughout the internet. Even if you don’t recognize the name, you’ve likely seen Flash being used in some capacity, whether it was for fancy graphical effects or even some silly advertisement on the side of the page. The main OU web site even uses it front and center to cycle through the latest news items, as an example. The beauty of the Flash platform is how widely it has spread. All modern web browsers support it, meaning all you really need to play a flash game is an internet connection and a computer that doesn’t date back to prehistoric times.

Kongregate collects these Flash games from many different developers all across the internet and presents them in a neatly-designed web space complete with a rating/ranking system for individual games, community forums and chat rooms, and even an achievement system that should be familiar to anyone who enjoys the same meta-gaming on an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. It’s a well-rounded website in every regard, and honestly the only flash-gaming website I like to visit. Registration for an account is completely optional, which makes it even more ideal for a quick way to pass some time, as there’s nothing stopping you from diving in to the game of your choosing.

Not all of these games are created equally, of course, but it’s pretty simple to separate the best from the rest. Anyone out in the audience have a game they’re particularly attached to? I’ve lately been enjoying Terry Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back, though it might be a bit macabre and masochistic for some tastes.

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flash games, kongregate, pogo