Space Shooter with Clever Increase in Challenge

Where Scavenger excels is in its difficulty system, and its level of polish. The controls are very smooth--everything is controlled with the mouse, and the levels introduce new features and problems gradually. Scavenger's difficulty system is particularly clever: rather than simply making enemies more numerous or powerful, each difficulty level ads some new feature to complicate your life. For example, at the second level, there's gravity, constantly dragging you down to the bottom of the screen, so you must be firing your jets periodically to prevent contact with lower walls (any wall contact damages your shields); at the next, you have a limited amount of fuel for each level, and have to husband it carefully. This considerably increases the game's replay value--playing it on a higher difficulty level presents new challenges, not just more stuff.

System Shock Meets Alien

Just a few years ago, you would not have been surprised to see a game like this getting cover treatment from the major PC game magazines. It's a nicely polished oblique-overhead third-person shooter set in a mining colony on Ganymede (one of Jupiter's moons) that is under attack by alien critters. The story line is nicely done too, with good voice acting and a real sense of tension and a colony under siege; naturally, weapons get more powerful over time, and NPCs work with you in later levels.

Amoeba Shmup

Singularis is a sort of shmup for amoebas. You play Proto, a protozoan with the unlikely ambition of becoming the most powerful being in the universe. Initially, you can do nothing more than move (which, in the default control scheme, you do by choosing direction with the mouse and pressing the Up arrow to move forward, or the Back arrow to move back). Later on, you gain additional abilities, including cilia to let you row yourself forward more quickly, and -- I did call it a shmup -- a gun. Or if you prefer, the ability to shoot destructive viruses at enemies.

SiSSYFiGHT 2000 is, like, an intense war between a bunch of girls who are all out to ruin each other's popularity and self-esteem. The object is to physically attack and majorly dis your enemies until they are totally mortified beyond belief. You'll never come out on top without making the right friends, so be careful who you're nice to. Because in the end, only the shrewdest will survive with their social status intact!

Classroom Doodles Come Alive in a Top-Down Shooter

Like everyone else, no doubt you've doodled little things on lined papers during boring classes. Maybe you doodled hearts and ponies, but more likely spaceships or airplanes. Matt Lucas apparently doodled soldiers and guns, at least by the evidence of this game: the graphics are pencil sketches, the background lined notebook paper.

Gameplay is simple, old-school shooting action; move your soldier with the WASD keys, shoot with the left mouse button or throw a grenade with the right, grab power-ups by walking into them. As you move across the map, you encounter enemies; if it moves, shoot it. Later on, you get to control a tank, and a helicopter. Simple fun, and the nature of the graphics is always charming, and sometimes rather humorous.

What happens if you are computer science student at Stony Brook, you're a serious fan of old NES and Genesis sidescrollers, you have a somewhat twisted sense of humor, and you have way too much time on your hands? Well, what happens is something like Sludge Crawler.

Smugglers 3 hearkens back to an earlier generation of 4X space exploration and conquest games. In a way, it's the sort of game I might have played on my old Apple II--but of course much prettier graphics.

You're a starship captain during an interstellar civil war, belonging to one of four factions in the war. Your primary activities involve trading (including smuggling illegal goods, if you so choose); accepting combat missions in support of your faction; or becoming a pirate and attacking planets. As usual in games like this, you start off with a tiny ship, and progress is mainly in the form of earning enough money and rising in rank so that you can get bigger and better ships.

This optional add-on expands the basic full version of the most-popular space trading game Smugglers 3 by many exciting features making it a must-have for everyone.

Arcade Puzzler with Unusual Gameplay
And at Three Smackers, Can You Go Wrong?

In Brent Anderson's Snowball's Chance, you play through a series of levels as a snowball. You start typically at one corner of the screen, and somewhere there's a goal you have to get to--sometimes by hitting switches and unlocking them first. The problem is that you don't move with the arrow keys; this game is somewhat billiards-like, in that you nudge your snowball with the mouse pointer, and can increase or decrease the force of your nudge. Some obstacles (like open water) cause insta-death, while wandering opponents can reduce your size. And you're slowly melting (more rapidly on some terrain than others), so you can't tarry.

MS Paint Meets Lemmings

In this ingenious little puzzle platformer, you need to guide a crew of little characters ("notes" whom "DJ Sonoro" is trying to steal) to the level's exit. You do so by painting--connecting ramps with orange paint, walls with red paint, jumping platforms with blue paint, and so on. But you have a limited quantity of each type of paint for each level, and have to be careful, particularly as DJ Sonoro (the enemy character) has a gun which he can use to destroy orange platforms (but not yellow ones). Painting is straightforward; select a color, hold the left mouse button, and draw.