1-Man Team

Iji is a nice, nostalgia-inducing game of a type you don't often see any more -- a 2D platform shooter. There's some story in which the eponymous character, Iji has to make her way through an underground research facility that's been taken over by aliens, but what's more important is eight weapons, an RPG-like system to improve your character (and what you choose to uprgrade can make one character quite different from another), lots of secret areas, and multiple story paths.

Clean Asia! is a hardcore shmup that consists wholly of boss battles, carried in what appears to be vector graphics. There are three levels (called Thailand, New Korea, and China, hence the title), with different boss behaviors for each. What's unique and original about the game, however, is that your objective isn't so much shooting enemies as smashing enemies into debris, and then collecting that debris magnetically.

Cactus! Cactus! You wicked alchemist, you mercurial son of a bitch! You're too fucking good!

This is a shmup made in 12 hours that can be played in a minute. It's the latest in a long series of shmups made by this prickly, lone genius that takes a tired genre and deconstructs it with the delicate care of a surgeon back by generous morphine. Have you ever tried morphine? I worked at a hospital one summer... that first minute, its like this game.

Knytt is a small, freeware platformer created by Nicklas 'Nifflas' Nygren as a follow-up to his indie hit Within a Deep Forest. Players take control of a small creature that has been kidnapped from its home by an alien who promptly crashes his spaceship on another planet. In order to get back home players must explore the planet in order to find the scattered parts of the crashed ship. Nygren has said that he takes inspiration from the games of Fumito Ueda -- Ico and Shadow of the Colossus -- as well as fellow indie developer Clysm's Seiklus, and those influences are obvious. However, Nygren's game sets itself apart in its unique use of minimalism, which gives the game its distinct feeling. In short, Knytt is very likely one of the most balanced games to have been produced by the indie scene up to this point.

In Brent Anderson's Snowball's Chance, you play through a series of levels as a snowball. You start typically at one corner of the screen, and somewhere there's a goal you have to get to--sometimes by hitting switches and unlocking them first. The problem is that you don't move with the arrow keys; this game is somewhat billiards-like, in that you nudge your snowball with the mouse pointer, and can increase or decrease the force of your nudge. Some obstacles (like open water) cause insta-death, while wandering opponents can reduce your size. And you're slowly melting (more rapidly on some terrain than others), so you can't tarry.

You could almost call Orbital Trader a casual game for geeks. It's a space trading game--you start with a small starship, move from one planet to another buying and selling stuff. You're limited to a single star system (no FTL here), and planets move over time, and you're restricted to transfer orbits, so closer planets are a lot easier to get to. Each planet has only a single commodity, and it's easy to find destinations where you can make a profit (mouseover your planet, and you'll see what its commodity fetches everywhere else in the system). And that's--really about all there is to it.

Doing the Impossible

Today, first-person shooters take millions of dollars, years, and huge teams to develop, right? It's just impossible for a lone-wolf developer to create an FPS that's compelling.

Well, maybe not--if you concentrate on innovative gameplay instead of polygon count and particle effects. That's what Rune Trollebo has done.

Developed by Steve Ince and based on his own web comic, Mr. Smoozles Goes Nutso is a cheerfully arcade-y 2D game with strong "adventure game" aspects--that is, success is dependent more on solving puzzles than on mastery of the interface. It boasts attractive comic-style graphics, well-written and often amusing dialog, and surprising depth of gameplay -- light-hearted gaming madness.

Distinctive, Surrealistic, Serene (and at $7, a bargain)

Some games, like Myst, feel like art because of the nature of their audio and visuals. Kalimée is of this type. The visuals are simple, but nicely textured 3D, and inspired by the surrealist painting of Salvador Dali; the music is excellent and peaceful ambient techno.

That's Gibbage as in "gibs," from "giblets"--the body parts strewn across the screen in FPS games like Doom and Quake.

Gibbage is a truly odd and heart-warmingly gory game that combines the mechanics of retro platformers with the aesthetic of the modern first-person shooter. The graphics are cartoony, and would not look amiss on a NES or pre-CD-ROM PC; the gameplay is deathmatch shooting madness. Your avatar runs and leaps about, gathering powerups and dispatching your foe with massive firepower, a 3D game's gibs replaced with pixellated blood.