When I haven't got much time to play but not really enough to do anything else either, I tend to go for IL-2 on my desktop (where I can use the joystick) and FTL on the laptop. The great thing about both is that you can play without much care and still progress: in FTL you can unlock stuff for future playthroughs, and IL-2 campaigns apparently react to the sorties you fly (throwing the completely empty sky at you for a mission or two if the enemy has sustained heavy losses in previous ones, for instance).

:) That can happen in GOG forums...
Beasts had great music! .... what a sentence... The beasts were highly cultivated in their forests, there was Bach and Mozart studied at young age... Ehm.

Chaos Engine is a great game. But it's also quite hard :)
Maybe I can get into Earthworm Jim 2... Never did play much of PC's action games when I was younger.

Thanks a bunch!

Btw. FTL is quite a game. I have it installed and expect to get into it some day more heavily.
BUT for me, an old idiot, that does not count as a simple game...

hey that really is simple! That might be nice, and 50% off... Don't tell my wife! I already bought 2 games today :p

Run 'n gun FPS with cute atmosphere, and available here on GOG: Lovely Planet

Mm that's exactly what I have been thinking. I mean it's great these games exist where you do have background story and all kinds of things to consider. There are so many different gameplay styles available. Indie is great!
But for me who has been playing games nearly 30 years now, and I think this might apply to a lot of gamers like me, sometimes you just want to blast shit apart. Just go and .. well... go. :)
I mean playing with a joystick using just one or two buttons and up/down/left/right is part of the gaming history and don't think it should be forgotten. Because it can be great fun too, without too many things to consider. I still don't know what a lot of the games were about back in the day. Or there is just a sentence in my mind... Like, okay, Battle Squadron, fight the Evil Empire, and that's it, you just shoot and collect power ups to the weapon and gain points. That's the limit of what needs to be thought :)

Volgarr is great, but its made for manly-men with according difficulty setting straight from 80's ;)

Giana Sisters, Milk mine defender, Spelunky, Warhammer 40 Killteam, Trine 1+2, Broforce - few games my kid has been playing and are straightforward enough..

Really early on the space limitations simply didn't have room for story, so often that was put into the manual. I remember reading quite a bit of story and background for Megaman X for example, but in the game you get like 2 paragraphs of dialog from Vile and that's it until you run into Sigma. Yeah SNES might have had room for the story, but like Earthworm Jim to properly illustrate it, it wouldn't have been easy or well done. Quite often even DOS games didn't have the story included in the game, one of the large annoyances of the Pool of Radiance DOS games. "You overhear some rumors, look up page xx and read rumors 6,7, 17 and 22".

Then there's DOOM, one page backstory you can skip and get straight into the game. Same with Wolfenstein 3D.

I think we lost some big important things the last couple generations as the more powerful hardware has let them concentrate on graphics over story and mechanics, much like how Hollywood is, with Terminator 3 being a prime example. Part of the commentary they say there's like 30 or 50 wheels coming off the 18 wheel truck during the explosions...

Then transformers...

Now i want to gargle with bleach...

heh :)
Yeah too much either way is too much, eh?
I remember Pool of Radiance and that rumor thing. Was kinda hard, when you had a pirated copy of the game, copied from a friend's disks. :) Probably annoyed a lot of pirates back in the day :)

On GOG, you can find "Race the sun". You are a solar-powered plane, and the sun is setting. You race toward the horizon, to get a few more minutes of sunlight. If the sun sets, you die. If you stay in the shade too long, you die. If you hit something, you die (or you are slowed down, the sun sets, and THEN you die)

3 commands : Left to skim left. Right to skim right. Spacebar to jump, if you grabbed the "jump" bonus. No speed control, your speed goes up until you crash and burn, or until you shed some velocity because you scraped a wall. The racing field changes every day. RUN!

Simplest game I found here (apart from the power-ups you can grab, I just resumed the whole game), but one of the most addictive I know. A game is 10 seconds to 3 minutes long, but I always wanted to make that one "last" attempt at breaking through those moving blocks on the 3rd level, or trying this tunnel that seems to go through the mountain, or grab a few more cristals to break my high score.
And that comes from someone who normally dislikes racing games, and despises leaderboards. :)

Mutant Colossus from Outer Space, it also has hillarious b-movie quality.