Eerily Evocative Adventure/RPG Hybrid

In Daemonica, you take the role of Nicholas Fayrepoint, a sort of demon hunter-cum-private eye in a small town in a fantasy world that's subject to a curse. Your job, naturally, is to figure out what's going wrong, and set things right.

The game is in essence built as 3D RPG, with a simple point-and-click combat system, inventory, character advancement, and the like; but the gameplay is much more like a classic graphic adventure, with puzzles to be solved and characters from whom you must extract information. This is something of a happy hybrid, more free-form than a classic click-and-combine adventure but with much of the same feel--but those looking for the combat intensity of a Diablo are better off looking elsewhere.

Nefarious Plans, 1920’s Glam, and Teenage Flimflam

Dangerous High School Girls is a highly unusual game; set in a rather forbidding girl's high school in the 1920s, you lead a team of girls investigating a series of accidents, and surviving the often-nasty hazing you get from other girls. It is, thus, a story-driven game, but the actual gameplay is almost boardgame like; indeed, the graphics are purposefully designed to look like a vintage game board, and overcoming opponents doesn't rely on combat, but instead on a series of minigames that represent, in some sense, fibbing, taunting, exposing secrets, and making power plays.

Each girl has four attributes –- glamor, rebellion, savvy and popularity -- and each helps with certain techniques to expose the town's corruption "like layers of spoiled paint hidden under fresh."

The storyline guides your exploration, and most events trigger a confrontation –- your girl's skills against her opponent's. Your girl will snag up to three allies among her classmates, each with a different distribution of stats. When you're in a confrontation, you'll select the appropriate girl to deal with the situation, advancing the story if you win. If one of your girls is defeated, though, she's retired from your party for a fixed period of time. In a particularly nasty twist, the gals can pick up "boyfriends," which essentially take the hit for the young lady so that she can stay in the party if she's defeated.

The Developer Says

Dark Matter is a remake of the classic arcade game Asteroids. In 1980, Asteroids was one of the most commercially successful games and helped to establish videogames as a lasting entertainment media. For a generation of video game addicts, Asteroids will always mean simple graphics, stressful and addictive gameplay, and dreams of high-scoring glory.

Return of the Beloved Amiga Classic

Largely a remake of the much-loved Amiga game Defender of the Crown (later released for just about every platform available in the late 80s, including the NES), Heroes Live Forever updates the game with better graphics, fully digitized music, and a new gameplay element ("tactics" cards that give you special benefits during battles).

In Defender of the Crown, you play one of several great lords in England, attempting to unify the realm under your own rule. Conquering provinces produces tax revenues that you can use to increase the size of your army (but you have only one "army" which follows you, milord, about, and can purchase new units only at your castle, meaning you become vulnerable over time unless you return home frequently).

Ghosts and Mysteries with Myst-like UI

The Delaware St. John series, of which this is the first chapter, has three great strengths: beautifully painted visuals, characters you come to care about--and stories that get creepier the deeper you get into the game. Fans of adventure games and gentle horror will find a lot to like here.

Del Returns

...In another mystery/horror graphic adventure featuring beautifully painted art, enjoyable badinage between the two main characters, and a story that's likely to evoke a shiver or three. While the game can be played without knowledge of the first, you may want to start with the first episode--though The Town with No Name is a little bigger and longer playing.

Balance Real Needs, or Cynically Work to Reelection?
Game Tunnel's 2005 Sim Game of the Year

Books can be important; movies can be important. Games, however, are the degraded purview of violent male adolescents. Democracy cannot exist.

Except that it does, of course. It is not without flaw; but it's a game that every citizen of a democracy should play, to get a better gut understanding of the pressures faced by they leaders--and every citizen of a tyranny should play, to get a better gut understanding of why democracy, whatever its flaws, is better than the alternatives.

Out-Compete Those Other Heroes

At first glance, Depths of Peril is a Diablo-esque RPG. You control a single character of the usual range of classes (warrior, mage, cleric, rogue); you go out on quests to surrounding areas, slaying lots of monsters, earning XP and money that you can use to improve stats and equipment. Combat is fast, Diablo rather than Final Fantasy, and there's the same huge range of variety in equipment and magic items.

But -- layered atop this are AI opponents that remind us of the opponents in Railroad Tycoon. You control a "covenant," which consists of you and up to 5 other characters you recruit (and incidentally, you can take one along with you when you go adventuring, which is extremely useful). Each of the other covenants -- up to 5 of them -- is busy adventuring and building up their own heroes' stats and equipment while you are.

In Space No One Can Hear You Giggle

Derelict's backstory is straight out of Aliens: you encounter and board a derelict spaceship which proves to be teeming with nasty alien critters who try to eat you and whom you must mow relentlessly down with high-powered, futuristic weapons. But the Alien series is brooding, dark, and bloody, while Derelict is light hearted, well-lit, and rather charming; the aliens may want to eat you, but they're aliens out of Nick Jr. rather than Lovecraft.

Elegant Sword-Fighting Game with Outrageous Stunts

While many games indeed contain sword-wielding characters, very few make even a cursory attempt actually to simulate the dynamics of sword-fighting, nor yet to impart a sense of how it actually feels to engage in swordplay.

That's what Determinance does. True, what it simulates is less the reality of fencing that the sort of over-the-top dramatic swordplay you'd expect in Highlander or a Hong Kong action flick, but hey, that's fun. What it does, and elegantly, is allow you to control sword motions, body positions, and arm positions with nothing but the mouse and its buttons.