Arcadia

The gameplay is simple, like a sock, and also like a sock, it can be turned inside-out. People or robots are coming down a conveyor belt. Click to slam down your machines, killing the people, building the robots. A partnership for a better tomorrow.

You can get a refreshing sense of pace out of mastering this, the efficiency you take in to maximize your score -- leave no robot incomplete or human alive. It's kind of chilling, in a totally innocuous, Habbo Hotel-esque pixel-sprite kind of way. As you the player internalize the efficiency you need to thrive, you become more roboticized. The use of complementary play modes could be extremely interesting until you realize it's the same mechanic, same dynamic, just different aesthetics. So you have to wonder, would this same vibe come from a different mechanic?

Overall, a solid arcade game with a clever subtext, with some leverage between them.

A simple, clean little game, Floating Light is a level-based Flash title in which you must blow a bubble to each level's exit, avoiding the walls (which pop the bubble). You blow by moving your mouse pointer (an arrow), clicking the button to exhale, as it were.

Very simple structure, but curiously engaging, and a nice minimalist/ambient musical score. Scads of levels, and should you run out, there's always Floaty Light 2.

"Fairies in Arcadia" is something of a pun here, since "arcadia" is a term we use to mean "games of a style you might find in the arcade" and, of course, has the conventional meaning of a place of peace and simplicity. It's apt in both senses, since The Great Tree is a simple skill and action game with a charming aesthetic -- and more depth than most games sold into the casual market, though without the degree of challenge that core gamers might prefer.

Relativistic Asteroids is just Asteroids -- but with (some) relativistic effects added -- specifically, length contraction and time dilation.

As your ship accelerates, the little triangle that represents it visibly shortens (length contraction), and if you rotate, contraction is retained in the direction of motion, but not the others.

Time dilation isn't particularly notable--except that your bullets travel a shorter distance (when fired in the direction of motion), presumably because, in their frame they "expire" more quickly relative to the reference frame.

Oil's Well Redrilled is a re-make of the old Sierra game from 1983, created by FireStorm Productions. You should be aware of peak oil, because it you're not this game is just a hack-ish time-waster (and you won't survive the next decade). If you are, this game becomes ripe with metaphor, furling out to a meditative exercise on the nature of the beast, the hunger we share with it, and how we got to this point.

Perhaps the fact that I like this game as much as I do says more about my lameness than anything else. See, shameful as it is to admit, I suck at most shmups. I mean, I like the genre conceptually, and I like the fact that some create beautiful, almost abstract visuals during gameplay, and I appreciate the intensity of attention they demand to play well, but the sad fact is that I'm a 40-something gamer who cut his teeth on Panzerblitz and not Zaxxon, let alone Space Giraffe. I just don't have the reflexes nor the long-honed l33t sk1llz to do more than flail about and die ignominously in most shmups. But I can actually play Crusaders of Space 2, and enjoy it.

In Pillage the Village (billed as "the prequel to Defend Your Castle"), you are a disembodied hand (Dungeonkeeper-style) grabbing defenseless peasants, flinging them into the air, watching as they subsequently plummet to their deaths, then riffling their bodies for loose change.

What's notable is the stages you go through while playing the game. At first you think, "This is funny, in a sick kind of way." And then you start to think "Yes, but it's much the same thing after a while, innit?" -- at which point a new sort of villager (like, say, the fellows with the parachutes) show up, or you're given an upgrade to a new 'spell' you can use to kill the little fellows (plummeting anvils anyone?). Which re-awakens your interest just enough to keep on going, until at some point you realize, "Hmm... Some actual thought has gone into the gameplay here."

Mars Miner is essentially Bomberman with somewhat improved graphics, designed for PCs, and with pretty smart level design. Either this sounds interesting already, or else you have no idea what I'm talking about. (Or you didn't like Bomberman, of course.)

You may, from your youth, remember ball labyrinths: wood boxes with knobs on two sides you use to tilt a platform above the box, with the platform consisting of a wooden maze--with holes or slats in some areas which your ball, if you aren't careful, will fall through. You start at one location on the maze, and by tilting it carefully, try to get your ball to the exit. (The things we used to do for entertainment before videogames...)

Hazard Ball obviously owes a debt to those old puzzles; you control a ball in a maze, with the arrow keys; it has a degree of momentum, and the longer you hold a key down, the faster it goes, which is useful getting up ramps and such. Points are earned for collecting (running into) jewels and other objects, and there's the whole panoply of things you expect in straightforward videogames: gates opened with keys found elsewhere, powerups that give you special abilities, hazards, moving opponents who try to damage you or knock your ball into a hole or an opening into space.

Yes, the basics of the gameplay derive from Defender--it's a sidescrolling shmup in which you can 'flip' your ship to move and fire either right or left, and enemies approach from both sides of the screen. But Alien Abduction features trippy late-80s graphics, excellent sound and music, 30 levels, and 3 gameplay modes.