Terrorist Takedown is what's called a "rail shooter." That means it's a shooting game in which you are basically "on rails," with very little freedom of motion, your job to shoot just about everything in sight. There are people who love this sort of game. There are also people who think that, in a world of FPS games and military offshoots like Battlefield 1942 the style is too retro for words.

Psychic Detective Graphic Adventure
From the Creator of The Shivah

Dave Gilbert continues his career as the auteur of a new school of old school graphic adventures with The Blackwell Legacy, the first of a series of planned games featuring freelance writer Rosangela Blackwell.

In this first outing, Rosangela comes to grips with her powers--or affliction, as it may be--and is forced to deal with a haunted dog run in Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park. Helping her out is the mysterious Joey Mallone, a fedora-wearing ghost whose dialog is straight out of Raymond Chandler and who has apparently been haunting her family since the 1940s.

Medieval Real-Time Strategy With Clever AI

The Dark Legions is a surprisingly polished RTS game developed from a "lone wolf" developer--Marcell Baranyai did almost everything, from its 3D engine to its graphics and sound design, a pretty amazing effort.

Innovative it is not, particularly; fans of Warcraft and Age of Empires will find it familiar, and easy to pick up and play. There's the usual resource extraction, building construction, and combat you'd expect in an RTS title. Where Dark Legions shines, however, is in its AI--computer opponents have some tricks up their sleeves (like sending slaves behind your lines to extract resources near your camp before you exploit them) that you haven't seen before.

If you're in the mood for an RTS fix, this game may be just the ticket--and at a reasonable price.

The Eternal City is a long-running multiplayer prose game, developed and administered by Worlds Apart Productions. It is being published online by Skotos Tech under license.

You are the leader of a powerful Order of Sorcerors. Having defeated mankind's greatest enemy, the Demon Hordes, you retreat to Haven for a life of peaceful seclusion.

One day, after many decades, your retirement is shattered by signs of an old, familiar danger: the Demons have returned! You return to find the Order slaughtered, monstrous creatures roaming the landscape, and humanity on the run.

Crime Tycoon

In The Mastermind, you play a mobster building an empire of thieves, drug sales, and legitimate business for laundering your ill-gotten gains, while staving off (or crushing) competing crime bosses.

An excellent concept, and it's perhaps surprising it hasn't been done before.

For a low-budget title, The Mastermind has surprising strategic depth; you have a huge number of options, in terms of equipment to buy and mobsters to hire, businesses to take over, crimes to commit, and cops to bribe. Despite the complexity, the interface is quite intuitive, and a tutorial works to teach you how to use it tolerably well.

Control Winds and Currents with the Mouse

Set in the world of Homeric myth, The Odyssey is a level-based casual game in which you have to guide your ships from one end of the level to the other in the face of monsters, storms, and other obstacles. What's interesting (and innovative) about it, however, is the control scheme--you move your ships by holding down the mouse button and drawing in the water to create currents, and by changing the direction and strength of the winds by moving the mouse within a wind-control region of the screen.

Rabbi Stone Has a Crisis of Faith

Before we go any farther, please notice the headline. When was the last time you heard a game described in remotely similar terms?

Shivah is the Jewish mourning ritual. For a week after a family member's death, the family stays at home, receiving visitors, and mourning the deceased.

Rabbi Stone, this game's protagonist, leads a small and declining congregation on the Lower East Side. He receives word that a somewhat disreputable former congregant has died, and left his small estate to the synagogue. Though he himself is close to losing faith in God, he views it as his duty to investigate, and perhaps to comfort whatever family members this man may have as they sit Shivah.

Vikings are Cooler than Worms Anyhow

A Tale of Three Vikings is a classic cannon game. If you've played one of the many versions of Worms, you're familiar with the gameplay; you have a cannon whose elevation you can alter, enemies approach from screen right, you blow them up. Over time, you advance your cannon to the left, until you've completed the level, and move onto the next one.

It's a time-tested and entertaining style of game, but also one that works far better in 2D than 3D, and in the world of big-budget games, 2D is dead. So bravo to Total Gameplay for reviving it so elegantly in this tight little title.

2006 IGF Finalist

A finalist at this year's Independent Game Festival, The Witch's Yarn was nominated for Innovation in Game Design. Its elegant control method is a milestone for interactive fiction. In the first minute, players are ably immersed in the story, regardless of their ability with computers.

Players become the director of a lighthearted stage-play. They select the actors who create scenes to advance the plot. Different actors create different scenes. So each choice is very important. With the rewind feature, the player can experiment with various actors to solve dramatic conflicts. By doing so, they'll explore many perspectives on this hilarious world of witches, retail, and family disfunction.