Forget that punk Ecco; in Laser Dolphin, you're a dolphin with a frickin' laser strapped to your back--a lean, mean, marine fighting machine dealing death to all sorts of evil sharks, turtles, and aliens. Or to put it another way, this is an entertaining, cheerfully off-beat sidescroller with some 70-odd levels, in which level design--ringing the changes on just about every possible problem the palette of the theme and the obstacles the game includes can offer--is a major strength.

What's your goal? Well, aliens have kidnapped the Prime Minister (of what nation it isn't clear--Oceania, perhaps; we have always been at war with the aliens). And only Laser Dolphin can save the day. Okay, its thin, but sidescrollers aren't about deep emotional story-telling, anyway. Go, Laser Dolphin, go!

None Dare Call it XCOM

...Because that's a trademark owned by Atari. But Laser Squad Nemesis is the true intellectual and gameplay heir of XCOM: UFO Defense (published in Europe as UFO: Enemy Unknown), the best-selling and best-loved computer game of 1995. No surprise there; Julian and Nick Gollop developed both games. But as is typical in this industry, they signed away all IP to get XCOM published.

Okay, so Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 it's not, but Lemonade Tycoon is a cute, cheerful little sim/tycoon game in which you start with a little lemonade stand in Da Bronx, and try ultimately to become a multimillionare lemonade magnate with branches all over New York City. Try not to overstock on supplies on those rainy days...

Slyly Self-Referential Puzzle Platformer

In Lighthouse Lunacy you play a fella named Fred who runs around a lighthouse--actually, along platforms fixed to the site of a lighthouse, jumping from one level to another. The puzzles mostly involve getting boxes to the bottom of the tower--which sounds simply, but actually some of them are fiendishly difficult. Luckily, this is quite a polished game--you have any number of retries, and if you fail sufficiently often, the game will show you the solution.

The puzzles themselves are well executed--the developer is obviously a student of the genre--but what really makes the game shine is the framing device. Fred is quite aware that he's in a video game; he's moonlighting for extra cash, and is employed by "the game designer," a shadowy figure at the top of the tower who makes his life a living hell by facing him with these damn puzzles. Between levels, the two bicker enjoyably with each other--so enjoyably, in fact, that getting to the next such segment is a draw to completing the puzzles.

A text-based, multiplayer, online role-playing game, Lovecraft Country has a social rather than combat-oriented focus. The theme and objects of the game are to experience horror genre thrills in settings inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft and authors who have followed in his style.

Maybe They Should Call it "Risk Plus Plus"

Just about everyone who's a gamer has spent a lot of time hurling dice about and conquering the world in the classic game of Risk--and many of us have spent a lot of time playing it solitaire in one digital implementation or another, because it's a quick, fun way to kill fifteen minutes before your next meeting or the like. But when you come down to it, the problem with Risk in a soloplay environment, particularly, is that it's the same thing all over again. Same board, same AIs--and it does pall after a time.

That's the genius of Lux Delux. The game itself comes with a whole slew of different maps--along with a pretty decent random map generator. It also comes with a bunch of different AI "personalities" who play quite differently. And there's a "plugin manager" that allows you to download literally hundreds of fan-created maps from Sillysoft...as well as a map editor that lets you create your own. Plus, for coders, there's an SDK that allows you to create new AIs or random map generators.