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There are literally THOUSANDS of games out there that do this with even greater lag than that. They are usually focused around people that only have time to make a few moves per day. So you get a certain number of moves that you can make at any time during the day until you run out of movement points. You regenerate so many points per day. As a result you usually log in once a day or less to make your moves, and then wait for everyone else. Any of these would work just fine from anywhere inside the solar system and hour or more delays.
http://www.travian.com/
http://www.urbandead.com/
http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl

etc... etc...

Graaaagh!

I thought that would be a reason to pick up the pitchfork... real geeks play Eve.

Geeks play Urban Dead, graargh. Real geeks play D&D through IRC. Libertarian nutjob geeks play Eve Online. Communist geeks don't play due to being unable to afford a computer. And geeks with troll blood - undoubtedly the result of the afromentioned IRC sessions getting out of hand - play with themselves while posting to Slashdot.

And a real geek doesn't pick up a pitchwork, he builds a Transformer to wield it for him. Nothing says "I hate you" like having a 20-ton rhinocerus-shaped killer robot with a flamethrower and a ballistic pitchfork for a horn charge your ass.

http://urbandead.com/ Zombies and survivors in a bleak text based post apocalyptic struggle, with player created wiki and a huge number of players. http://nexuswar.com/ Angels and Demons fighting for the future of the next universe in a browser based graphically light role playing game. (Very fun, a bit like an old school pen & paper rpg with a couple thousand of your closest friends.)

KoL was fun, but the lack of interaction with other players made it a bit boring after a while. Urban Dead is much simpler, but has a great many more metagaming possibilities. Some of my friends have been killing humans in the zoo in the name of animal rights, for example.

http://www.urbandead.com/

it's a free browser grid-based MMORPG about humans trying to survive in a zombie apocalypse.
There is no NPC in the game, both zmobies and harmans are played by live players.

BARHAH!

not entirely the same, but http://www.urbandead.com/ allows you to play as a zombie or human, zombies just spend action points to get up, while humans turn into zombies and have to be revivified with a syringe by another human player.

dedicated zombie players can get the ability "brain rot" to eliminate the chance of being revivified against their will except in certain buildings when a generator is running.

I've had a lot of fun playing Urban Dead (http://www.urbandead.com/), which is a web-based multi-player zombie game. Your character can be a human or zombie. Humans can be killed and become zombies. Zombies can be revivified by specially trained medics and become human again. Your character is pretty useless at the beginning, but it can level up and gain many new skills. There are about 500K registered characters/players, so there is a good amount of activity.

I tried Nation States. I played it for a month or so. I don't consider it to be a game.

For those of you that haven't tried it, basically, you create a country, and every day you answer a couple of multiple-choice questions about how the country should be run. You also get a description of what state the country is in - whether it's a police state, whether crime is high or low, and so on.

The thing is, the questions are simply static questions people have made up. One answer will make your country slightly more liberal, one country might make crime go up a bit, and so on. There's absolutely no depth to it, it's just a fancy way of saying "please choose between making your liberal score + 1 and making your crime score -1". That's not a game, that's just a questionnaire asking you "Still liberal today? Yeah? Guess I'll tell you your country is liberal again then."

I'm right with you when you say that games don't necessarily take a lot of time to play, but Nation States is hardly a shining example. Try Urban Dead or Kingdom of Loathing for examples of non-time-consuming games.

Is there no flash support for the DS version of opera? Even if there isn't, there are quite a few browser based games that don't rely on javascript or flash. I realize that these games may not appeal to the typical console gamer but nintendo has already expressed that they want to draw in non-traditional gamers and there are quite a few people playing games like http://www.urbandead.com/ and http://www.fallofnations.com/ These games already work on browsers for Palms and Windows Mobile so they should work on the ds.

Sounds like a beefed up version of Urban Dead.

Urban Dead gets no love? That webgame is truly infectious -- what with its "243,575 dead and rising" :)

Likewise, AC. I've got better things to do - like hunting zombies and cooking Lucky Surprise Eggs.

$XP = $XP - $headshot_ammount;
if ($XP < 0) $XP = 0;

if ($headshot_ammount > $XP) $XP = 0;
else $XP = $XP - $headshot_ammount;

Has no one considered that an excellent way to keep this genre viable would be to popularize it on the web?

For that matter, MUDs - basically the MMO analogy of text games - could also be moved to the web.

AJAX technology makes both of these possibilities much more feasible. Is no one taking advantage of these possibilities yet?

A popular link going around a few years ago was "the Hamlet text game", which was playable through a web page. The author apparently had a generic framework for making web-based text games, called "Nondescript." I'd always expected to see it catch on more - but apparently it hasn't, and the author's site is gone now.

With the web being so ubiquitous, and non-intimidating to so many, there's a huge potential to take these games back into the mainstream. Add the ability to create games that have light text interfaces (like maps, so that players don't have to press N a hundred times), and the potential for the genre to be revitalized is considerable.

In fact, it's already being done to some extent. Kingdom of Loathing is essentially a single-player text RPG, save that it has stick-figure graphics, integrated chat features, and some (optional) PvP features. Urban Dead is a web-based MMO which uses only text and a simple map. (Peasant's Quest also deserves mention.)

These games have a considerable following; but they're reinventing the wheel. If the previous generation of text-adventure and MUD authors could pull their heads out of 1984 and think about merging their experience with the modern, accessible technologies of today, we could find text games once again catching on like wildfire, this time through the magical power of the interweb.

That's based on something by Kevan, who also did the Zombie-based MMORPG Urban Dead.

For any fan of zombies (or killing them) there's a great game...http://urbandead.com/