Match-3

According to Tim Conkling, its designer, Corpsecraft is an RTS-Match 3 hybrid; but actually, the RTS-ish gameplay is closer to that of Rescue Rangers or Steam Brigade than it is to, say, Warcraft.

Each player has a base at opposite sides of the screen, and builds units (various types of zombies, for the most part) and dispatches them to attack the enemy. They stagger across the screen, fighting each other, the ultimate objective being to reach the enemy base and destroy it (over time, with repeated attacks). There are several different unit types (introduced over a number of levels in the soloplay game, so you may learn their characteristics more readily), each with different characteristics.

Petri Purho is the master of the fast-developed little indie game with just a little bit new to say, and Planet of the Jellies is a good example. The gameplay is basically a cross between a "falling blocks" game (of which Tetris is the canonical but by no means the only example) and the "match three" game.

Little aliens dance back and forth across the screen top, Space Invaders style (but in a Dean Martin-cool sort of way, with brightly colored two-stage animations and a lounge music score), but they don't drop bombs. Instead, you can click on one to have it drop to the ground, Tetris style, and if you get three adjoining, they disappear and score you points. It's non-trivial to plan your drops, what with the shifting alien ranks, and the game is lost when an alien reaches the ground--or more likely, intersects with the top of one of the piles you've built on the ground and haven't managed to get rid of yet.

In the tradition of Flash mobs (which are going to be tracked by the NSA and headed off at the pass, going into the future) and Ghandi (dead) comes Police Brutality, a game by Jason Rohrer that explores how vocal dissent can disrupt police's efforts to taze people. The game has you, as the lone leader, shouting. As you do, other people are galvanized, and become available to shout, or move, blocking police. The goal is to prevent anyone from being evicted from the premises; you achieve this by playing the numbers of the crowd against the lesser numbers of police, divide and deter.

Audiosurf is nominated in three categories for this year's Independent Game Festival Awards; grand prize, audio, and technology. It's an interesting combination of a music visualizer and a match-three game, with elements of a racer.

When you start a game, you're asked to select a piece of music, with the application defaulting to your "My Music" folder (but navigable anywhere, including to, say, a CD in the drive). Once selected, it builds a race track from your music track; I'm not clear on the algorithm involved, but "intensity" corresponds to slope. The point here is that the same piece of music creates the same track, so that if you select, say, "It's Better at the Matinee," the track you're presented with will be identical to the track generated by someone else who selects the same song on his own machine.

Splume was created by Steve Swink and Matthew Wegner of Flashbang Studios. It is, in essence, a variant of Bust-a-Move (or, if you prefer, Snood), but with interesting level progression.