A Command Directive Says There's No Such Things as Flying Saucers, Soldier

Devastro is, at its core, a level-based top-down shooter in which you control a squad of soldiers destroying ETs and blowing up their UFOs. Your soldiers level-up during play (in RPG fashion, and you may find yourself replaying a level in order to avoid the death of a character you've worked to upgrade); main weapons are guns and grenades, though you get to control some cool vehicles in later levels.

The combat is rarely as intense as in frenetic overhead shooters like Crimsonland or RIP, but Devastro has something those games lack: actual humor. It seems the Army isn't too keen on acknowledging the existence of UFOs, though it understands the importance of wiping out the alien invaders. The story is carried through a series of comic-book-like cut scenes at various points in the game, and is amusing enough to keep you engaged and eager to wipe out those evil enemy saucers Sir! That don't exist. Yes Sir! Ready for deniable action Sir!

It's Free

Disaffected! is an anti-advergame, if you will, in which you take the role of a Kinko's employee who is not all that interested in working and is faced with a constant stream of increasingly annoyed customers. Gameplay is somewhat similar to the old arcade game Tapper, or to games like Diner Dash, in that you must run around attempting to satisfy the demands of your customers--although in Disaffected!, sometimes your character just doesn't feel like working or gets confused...

Cheerful Arcade Fun
2006 Adultswim.com Award Winner

A 2006 IGF finalist and winner of the Adultswim award (sponsored by Cartoon Network), Dodge That Anvil! is a game in which you play a bucktoothed bunny trying to harvest carrots and other veggies as anvils drop from the sky. Why? Well, um.... Does it matter? This is cartoon logic here.

Each level, you must harvest a quota of carrots (extra points for more); radishes give you points you can spend on equipment, like hard-hats that save you from one anvil-strike, and veggie magnets that let you collect plucked vegetables by moving near them instead of through them. Just about every level adds some new type of obstacle, powerup, or other feature--in other words, enough variety to retain your interest as the game progresses.

2004 IGF Winner For Innovation in Audio and Innovation in Digital Art
Now Free!

From Digital Eel (oft-time IGF nominees and creators of the excellent Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, among other games) comes this oddball circle-shooter. The basic gameplay here you've seen before: You are shooting from the edge of a circle at something in the middle, and you have to zip around the circle (using left and right arrow keys) and firing madly, trying to keep the thingie at the center from touching the edge.

But in Dr. Blob's organism, the circular thing you're firing around is a petri dish... some kind of nasty and potentially lethal organism is attempting to escape.

The Best Puzzle Game of All Time

Or so says the Mathematics Association of America, and who are we to disagree?

To call it a puzzle game is inadequate, however; the DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) games are sui generis, and about the only quick way to describe them is as "Gauntlet meets Sokoban."

Caravel Games describes the DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) series as "dungeon crawls for thinkers," and that's what they are--an oddly compelling combination of puzzle solving and the dungeon experience.

Victory Through Superior Programming

Once upon a time in the dim mists of history, when geeks wore pocket protectors and shivered in over-cooled machine rooms filled with mainframe computers, running racks of punch cards through readers and poring over accordion-folded printouts, Silas Marner wrote a game for Xerox PARC's PLATO computer system called RobotWar. And it was good.