So you’ve got this whole ‘cloud’ thing going for productivity, maybe even a little social networking, and if you’ve been really adventurous you’ve managed to get your feet wet with hulu. “What about gaming?” is the cry I hear from my inner(and outer)-nerd. “All this is great, but I wanna pop some heads!”

Patience my friend. Chrome OS and the Chrome Store are young. It is open to any with presumably few hurdles to jump. So we will likely see a doom-engine source port soon enough and other open sourced engines shouldn’t be too far behind once ways have been found to make them work with what google is offering. in the meantime why not browse the gaming section of the Chrome Store?

Oh right, most of the apps there are links to flash games. Well then, if that’s what’s out there and you want more than what Google is offering right now let’s go see what else is out there then.

What follows is a highly subjective list based on personal experience. Also keep in mind that because these sites are flash and chrome OS does get a bit touchy your personal experiences might vary. Lastly if performance is laggy try changing quality to ‘low’ by right clicking in game and selecting that from the resulting menu.

Kongregate:

A Game Stop owned and run site that offers a reasonably nice selection of games in most genres of your choosing. Where it seems to differ from other flash-game sites is that it offers achievements (not only for the games themselves, but achivements for beating whole series of games.) and apparently was designed ground up for a ‘social network’ feel.

I was going to put Armor Games up as it’s own entry, especially since it has a Web Store app and has, so far as I’ve been able to tell, been around longer. However most of the games i played there are also up for grabs on Kongregate (and have achievements as a result.)

Newgrounds:

Not exactly a SFW site (especially so given some of the ads that can pop up there) but a good source of gaming, flash videos (this site was around way before Youtube kids.) Also contains audio and art portal sites.

Super Mario Crossover:

Not to be confused with the outdated web app that somebody posted in the Chrome Store (no I will not link to it. It’s outdated and stolen work.) Take the original Super Mario Brothers game. Add in other characters like Link, Megaman, Samus, the contra Dude, and more besides. Turn them loose on the mushroom kingdom. Oh and guess what. You get to play as Ryu Hyabusa from ninja gaiden.

So time for reader input. What do you like to read?

Yes I realize Lifehacker did a similar number a little while back, but not all of the options given are Chrome OS compatible.