Welcome to the weekend! As a broke-ass Bay Area bum I’m usually hard up for cheap entertainment come week’s end, and so I thought I’d take advantage of my friends at NERDSociety to share some of my favorite free time-wasters for your gaming pleasure. To kick this feckless Friday feature off properly, we’re posting it almost two days late. This will happen again!

Trying to get a fresh start by opening your own business can be a tough sell these days. The economy has slipped into recession and you’re fresh out of prison, a small business owner struggling to sell imported fine china out of a tiny shop so cramped you can’t turn around without tipping over a table full of priceless flatware. To make matters worse, impatient yuppie yokels demanding you fetch them their teacup or serving dish of choice right now play hell with your ulcers, and the state-mandated anger management classes aren’t helping. Also, you’re a minotaur.

Minotaur China Shop is a quixotic indie game from Flashbang Studios, developers of previous hits like  Jetpack Brontosaurus and Off-Road Velocirator Safari. Flashbang employs the Unity engine to create physics-based time-wasters you can play in your browser during a lunch break, and Minotaur is no exception.

You take the reins of a chimerical convict turned business-minotaur who must quickly and carefully navigate his tiny workspace to satisfy customers while minimizing the amount of collateral damage caused by his mythic girth. Knock over too much merchandise and your long-suffering bovine will erupt with berserker rage and become retard-strong, ripping apart the cozy establishment in whirlwind of fur, fangs and fine china. Thankfully the insurance providers of Grecian myth were unfamiliar with the term “risk management” and you managed to secure reliable insurance despite your lengthy prison sentence, so past a certain point ripping apart your own tawdry imports will actually net you substantial profit when you cash in the policy.

And therein lies the beautiful dichotomy which makes this game worth blowing five minutes of your day; Minotaur encourages you to sink mindlessly into standard time-management game mechanics (a la Diner Dash or Cake Mania), allowing your frustration at poorly-placed displays packed with delicate dishes to grow and grow before pushing you to finally unleash your pent-up rage and frustration at an economy in the shitter, an unwinnable war on two fronts and the ridiculous non sequitur of a mythological monster selling dishware. And when the red haze finally clears and you tally the books at the end of a wonderfully destructive and cathartic day you’ll have made more money committing insurance fraud than you ever could have going straight, because Minotaur rewards you for giving in and stepping outside traditional gameplay mechanics. To write more would only keep you from clicking through to the Blurst games portal, loading the plugin and enjoying the game.

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