The arcade games business has grown rapidly during the last couple of years and is still expanding quiet quickly. Nowadays the arcade games are also known as causal games. The so called games for non-hardcore gamers have seen a surge in sales when Nintendo Wii came out. With its user-friendly controller and a $249 price tag, it's a booming success. For example, on the week of Thanksgivings (the so called Black Friday 7 day holiday), Nintendo has sold more than a million of Wii's.

With the Wii, you can actually play free online games. Just point your browser to http://playedonline.com and use your Wiimote as the mouse in hundreds of awesome flash based games. It's really surprising how unintentionally Nintendo made a console that can handle so much.

First of all, it is a gaming console that allows you to play games using motion sensing technology. Then it has all these neat community tools that let you create a 3D Avatar and use it in your games. These avatars are also how people see you while playing online games. On top of that, there are several Channels that let you read news and watch weather forecasts.

But the best feature of all for arcade lovers is the web browser. It support full YouTube integration and lets you play pretty much any Flash Media. Meaning that you can play flash movies and games.

Here's what you need to do:

Launch your Wii, press the Opera Browser button.

Once loaded, point it to http://playedonline.com

There, use the Wiimote to navigate through the different menus and whatnot, find your favorite genre. With flash based games these are usually Strategy, Shooting, Puzzle, Arcade, Sports and Adventure genres, but from time to time you see something totally unique and exciting.

Now, when you've decided what to play, simply click on the name of the game. It will start loading automatically. Please be patient as sometimes it takes a while for these fairly large files to load.

Also, the Wii's browser is a bit outdated right now, so don't be too terrified if a game doesn't run. You can always try another one. And remember ? you can play online games for free here! So by not paying anything, you don't really lose anything, right?

The other thing about playing arcade games on the Wii is that using the Wiimote it becomes a very emerging experience, even with the cartoonish graphics. And considering that most of these games require you to only make a single click, it's a great way to simply get away from it all. And you also bump up your arm when swinging the Wiimote.

Although you can easily play all of these free arcade games on your PC. And they are just as good on that ?platform?. But Kudos to Nintendo for bringing free arcade entertainment to the living room ? if only there was more innovation amongst other games hardware developers.