Kongregate has been around for a while, and it’s finally coming into its own. It’s a gaming portal site that attempts to collect all the flash games on the web and wrap them up in a social networking framework with achievements, friends lists, daily and weekly challenges, and more. It’s all free to participate in, and it’s more compelling than it sounds – I’m increasingly addicted to logging in and playing a few rounds of games like Desktop Tower Defense and Endless Zombie Rampage on my lunch break or after exercising in the evenings. It’s even displaced some of my regular Team Fortress 2 sessions. Many of the games incorporate a variety of challenges and achievements into the Kongregate framework, which earn you points and cards to be used in their upcoming collectible card game. The whole premise is clever, too – they subsidize development for games, they reward game developers with cash for developing popular games, and they reward the players for helping rate these games.

I really hope this succeeds for them on a broad scale. They should work on integration with the gaming consoles to build an even broader audience. Meanwhile, if you want to give it a shot, accounts are free and take only a moment to setup. My username is Tempus on the site, and at present I’m a 4th level… space potato? Who knows what that icon is.

Oh…and this week’s challenge is to win their new Campaign Game, which is sort of a mashup of risk and chess. The chance to watch an animated bobble-head Hillary Clinton bitchslap a bobble-headed Rudy Guiliani makes it worth checking out, trust me.