I.T. Kid

A miner in a warren of tunnels, a scatter of gold nuggets and a clock ticking down towards zero. Gold Diggers is FreeOnlineGames' 2008 arcade chase, and it is as plain as its premise: steer the little digger through the corridors of earth, sweep up every nugget you can reach, and finish the level with more score than you started with. A life bar, a score and a forty-five-second timer sit along the bottom of the screen, and the level counter only ever goes one way.

The tension is the clock. Forty-five seconds is enough to take the easy gold and not enough to be greedy, so each level becomes a route you learn -- which tunnel to take, which nugget to leave. Run out of time, or lose the last of the life bar, and the run ends where it stands. FreeOnlineGames published it in 2008, one of a long line of quick browser arcades the studio put out, and the loop holds up.