That's Gibbage as in "gibs," from "giblets"--the body parts strewn across the screen in FPS games like Doom and Quake.

Gibbage is a truly odd and heart-warmingly gory game that combines the mechanics of retro platformers with the aesthetic of the modern first-person shooter. The graphics are cartoony, and would not look amiss on a NES or pre-CD-ROM PC; the gameplay is deathmatch shooting madness. Your avatar runs and leaps about, gathering powerups and dispatching your foe with massive firepower, a 3D game's gibs replaced with pixellated blood.

2005 IGF Award Winner
Reinventing the Platformer with Physics

At first glance, Gish might appear to be a classic arcade-style game, something like Sonic or Mario Brothers. First glances can be deceiving: yes, this is a sidescrolling platformer, but the actual gameplay is very different, because it's based on a physics engine. Gish, the tar ball who is the title character, needs to get momentum to get up and over objects, controls how high he jumps by compressing and extending himself, can move objects by gaining momentum and running into them, walks on walls and ceilings by making himself "sticky", and so on.

2D Platformer with the Attitude of Doom

In Glow, you play a badass guy with a sword invading the depths of Hell, apparently because your equally badass wife is so badass that Satan has taken a fancy to, and abducted, her. As you might expect in a platformer, there are secret areas, carefully timed leaps, puzzles, and so on, but as you might expect from the theme, there's also quite a lot of frenetic combat with the minions of Hell--not just with the sword, but a pistol and a slew of magic spells (which you pick up over time) as well. As a result, the feeling is more like that of Doom, or Crimsonland than, say, Super Mario Brothers.

An interesting juxtaposition, in fact.

Platformer for Golden Agers?!?

Picture someone playing a platformer, and what do you see? Probably a teenage boy, sometime in the late 80s, with the controls of a SNES or a Genesis in his hands. Its a game style that seems very much tied to a particular time--and a particular demographic.

Now take a look at Granny. Suppose you wanted to sell a game into the casual market, where the typical purchaser is an older woman. Presto, take an existing and well-established game genre, and make the protagonist an older woman! Who, on each level, has to rescue all the dear little stray kitty cats and water all the flowers. While evading enemies, of course.

This is either one of the most cynical marketing ploys the industry has seen--or else an admirably successful attempt to expand the market for a much loved genre beyond its stereotyped market. Or, perhaps, both.