Pong

Pong is where video games more or less began, and its two-paddle simplicity has aged remarkably well. Slide your paddle up and down — mouse, finger, or arrow keys — and rally the ball back and forth against the computer; you score when it misses, it scores when you do, and the first to seven takes the match. The one piece of technique that transforms it is that your paddle is a bat, not a backboard: catch the ball on the paddle's edge and you fire it back at a sharper angle, which is how you pull the computer out of position instead of trading lazy centre hits forever. Between shots, drift back toward the middle so you can cover a return either way, and read the ball's bounce off the top and bottom walls to be waiting where it lands rather than chasing it. On Hard, keep varying your return angles so the machine never settles into a rhythm. It plays free in the browser on desktop or mobile, with your win count saved for next time.