MANILA, Philippines ? Apart from secretly checking up on your friends and taking numerous inane yet strangely compelling quizzes, Facebook is also a treasure trove of some highly addictive games.

The addiction starts pretty innocently. You get a status update from a friend saying ?{name} has just gotten a high score of in . Try to beat him/her!?

Out of curiosity, you click on the game, start playing, and suddenly, you do beat your friend?s high score. This triumph whets your appetite, and pretty soon, your competitive streak kicks in and you just want to beat everyone on your friend?s list, especially that annoying friend in your list that you added out of politeness.

You pretend to be effortlessly garnering those high scores, when in truth, it has become your life?s work, and death to anyone who even remotely distracts you while you?re hard at work kicking Facebook butt. Interestingly enough, most of the top scorers in my roster are those who work in an office. Makes me wonder if their bosses know how diligently they?re working on that sales report.

Below are the top five that have kept me riveted and up all night.

Typing Maniac

Back in high school, I was something of a typing savant. I aced my typing classes and joined (and won) the Hyper Typer contest because I wanted to win a box of 3.5-in diskettes (the ?90s equivalent of a USB flash drive).

Yes, that was my lame claim to fame. Typing Maniac brings back the memories of my Hypertyping glory days. In Typing Maniac, you quickly type the words printed on descending parchment scrolls (don?t forget to press Return after each word!), before it accumulates into a huge pile of paper which will lead to your downfall.

As your level progresses, the words get longer and drop faster. This game has been responsible for many up-till-3-a.m. nights, with me pounding furiously at my keyboard, screaming creative expletives at my screen. It?s also led to a cramped back and even a left hand that had gone curiously numb after level 42.

Typing Maniac also made me consider removing my brothers from my friends list when they temporarily beat my high score. I used to be complacent, but after I had dropped to fourth place once, I am now currently trying to hit an obscenely high score to prevent others from topping it.

Waka Waka

To be completely honest, Typing Maniac was the only game I could be bothered to fanatically play on Facebook until this assignment came along. I decided to check out the other games and stumbled upon Waka Waka.

It?s basically a rip-off of Pac-Man (the famous ?80s game, not the boxer), except the little yellow blob continually goes ?Waka waka waka waka...,? hence the name. The maze leaves me slightly claustrophobic and panicked, especially when backed into a corner by the other multi-colored monster blobs.

Colorful expletives are too much of an effort here, where I am reduced to high-pitched screeches that wake up the dogs. It?s deceptively simple, using only the four arrow keys on your keyboard, but there?s something about it that is utterly frustrating and surprisingly difficult to master. It?s truly a testament of a great game that years later, Pac-Man and its subsequent copycats still manage to hook you.

Pixel Ranger

Pixel Ranger is a shooting type of game that requires a little more manual dexterity and coordination. In this game, your character is a flamboyantly dressed cowboy made up of tiny colorful pixels. Your objective is to break the other pixel monsters and gather the fallen pixel bits and use it as ammo.

The game is over once you run out of ammo, aka pixels, so you have to strategize and try to hit as many pixel monsters as you can with just one single gun blast. Controls get a little tricky as you have to use two keys for moving left to right, one key for jumping (as there are monsters attacking you from the ground as well), while trying to move the crosshairs with your mouse and clicking to fire all at the same time.

While I can muster enough finger dexterity to play a mean game of Typing Maniac, my eye-hand coordination is still sadly lacking for the likes of Pixel Ranger.

Word Challenge

This is a morecutesy version of an old favorite, Text Twist. In the game, you are given a jumble of six words and your task is to form as much words as you can given the time constraint while trying to guess the six-letter word to earn you a bonus round. The bonus round, interestingly enough, is a bunch of jumbled letters requiring you to form a name of a person in your contact list (a challenge for those with friends in the thousands already). For someone who reads voraciously, it is embarrassing that Word Challenge has categorized me as having the vocabulary skill of a cheerleader based on my score. Now I only need the cup size and perky personality to match.

Who Has The Biggest Brain?

By the name of the game alone, there is a certain pressure to step up and bring your A-game. After all, nothing is as humiliating as being categorized as having a brain as big as a flesh-eating slug or a poo-throwing primate. Who Has The Biggest Brain? is a puzzle game testing you in four aspects of brain power: Calculation, Memory, Logic and Visual. I?m sure my parents will find it highly comforting that after sending their daughter to 17 years of school, her brain size is approximately that of an Average Joe?s. This is highly competitive ground, especially when after seeing the guy who cheated off on me throughout high school has the brain of an alien life form, while I am one notch above a space monkey.