Insect Warrior Tactics

Remember a few years ago when there was a spate of animated movies featuring bugs? There's a reason for that, actually; it's fairly easy to animate chitonous creatures in 3D, since the body sections are rigid. And it's also fairly easy even for an indie developer to use 3D, if what they're animating are bugs. Which no doubt was one of the reasons Wahoo/NinjaBee chose insects for the heroes of this title. The choice is a fortuitous one, though, since it lends itself to the developers' light humorous touch -- which was very evident in their earlier (and excellent) tycoon game, Outpost Kaloki.

Band of Bugs is a "tactics" game -- like Final Fantasy Tactics. Played in isometric 3D over a square grid with elevation differences, each turn you select one of your characters, move it, deliver an attack (or use a skill), and optionally change facing. Elevation and attacking from the rear or flank provide bonuses. Different bugs have different capabilities, and effective use of combined arms (that is, combining different capabilities for maximal impact on the enemy) is very important.

The game contains a 20-level campaign game, a configurable skirmish mode with several different maps, and three stand-alone levels; it also allows multiplayer online play, either over a LAN or the public Internet. And there's a level editor so you can build and share your own levels (a handful available at present on the developer's forums).

On the whole, it's a charming, quick playing, occasionally humorous and entertaining little title in a genre that's no longer widely supported.

Make New Friends and Learn Their Secrets

Georgina Okerson specializes in light adventure games with anime-style graphics that are designed to appeal primarily to a young adult female audience (but that are perfectly enjoyable by those of us with a Y chromosome). In Summer Schoolgirls, you play a recent high school graduate going to an orientation program at an women's college, where you meet your roommate and the other girls in your dorm.

It feels something like a "choose-your-own ending" book, in that your choices are mostly multiple choice, although between classes, you can choose where to go on campus. Each of the five other girls in your dorm has a secret, and your goal is to make friends with your roommate, and discover hers. There's a little bit of puzzle-solving, in figuring out how to go about uncovering her secret (or those of the other girls), but this is not a game to trick up hardcore adventure gamers; rather, it's designed to appeal to a broad audience.

The "What Ifs" of World War II

Making History is more than a wargame; it's a grand strategic military, economic, and diplomatic simulation of the entire globe, starting in 1934, and going on until the end of the Second World War. If that happens, of course.

As such, it addresses one of the central failings of most WWII games; it doesn't lock you into a historical straightjacket, with Russia inevitably coming into the war even if the Nazis don't attack, and with the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor on inevitable schedule. Instead, you can play with all sorts of what-ifs: What if France had resisted the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1934? Or if Italy had gotten pissy about the Anschluss? Or if the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had stood firm behind Czechoslovakia in 1938?