Since it launched on Android a few years ago, Google’s Chrome browser has gotten faster, lighter on the memory usage and great for keeping your different machines connected through tabs and more. The power of Chrome’s sync service has, in the past, led to some pretty cool experiments that bring your smartphone or tablet together with a desktop machine to play a game together. These games are all performed using no wires or anything like that and rely on Chrome sync between your devices. Now, there’s a football (sorry, soccer) game available for Chrome.
As an Englishman, it’s understandable that I have perhaps had enough of the World Cup thanks to our poor performance in our first two games, but still the show must go on and we’ll continue to see some good soccer from the world’s best teams. Google’s latest Chrome Experiment is dubbed “Kick with Chrome” and is broken into three games, Infinite Dribble, Space Kick and Shootout. They’re simple sort of arcade games, but it’s certainly interesting to see the game work in tandem with your desktop PC or laptop over the internet. A nice distraction for when you’re waiting for the next game to start, or lamenting a loss.
There’s a multiplayer element to the games and you can sign in with your Google+ account for a little extra fun. My favorite is perhaps the Shootout game, something the England team ought to use to sharpen their accuracy, maybe? Either way, all three games are a good deal of fun and while the multiplayer element feels a little fiddling, it’s a great show of different web technologies all coming together. Web technologies on display here include webRTC Data Channel, Mobile Accelerometers, WebSockets, HTML5 Audio, Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Fullscreen API and Vibration API. Take a look at the games at the source link and let us know which game is your favorite.