Created with Game Maker, 8-bit Killer is a first person shooter done in the style of an early NES game. Work your way through Wolfenstein-style maze levels while collecting ammo and health and shooting foes that stand in your way. Great chiptune soundtrack, a surprisingly long game, and even though the visuals are retro-simple, they're charming.

An isometric shooter with strategy/tactical elements and upgradeable weapons. You are the commander of battle ants on a quest to rescue soldiers. Battle bugs using a variety of weapons, gather gold to upgrade and unlock new tools to unleash havoc on the baddies. For the record, this game is far more fun than it should be allowed to be.

An Untitled Story is a perfect blend of tough platforming challenges, intimidating boss fights, and cunning secrets, all wrapped up in a layer of childlike mysticism and rough-shorn beauty. It is a chilled-out hardcore wonderland of action discovery, plus an unidentifiable je ne sais quoi that just makes you want to drink it down in one gulp and then spit out a rainbow.

Created with Multimedia Fusion, the same toolset behind Knytt, Bonesaw is a platform adventure garnished with the occasional fisticuffs smackdown, Macho Man Randy Savage-style. You play the only remaining member of a hockey team transported to an alternate dimension by an evil referee. During your quest you'll lay to waste tons of enemies, flip switches, hop across platforms, trigger bomb-buttons, and occasionally break out the famous bonesaw for some serious fighting.

Boulders Never Die, from Brian Campbell, is a fantastic physics-based action puzzle game. The premise is quite simple: boulders never die, and you do. If the red ball touches a boulder or any of your own blocks the level is over. Points are earned each second you are alive, and to win you simply have to achieve the point goal for that stage.

A quick-draw arcade game of reflexes created by auntie pixelantie, Calamity Annie is as old-school as it gets. Face off against two dozen foes in one-on-one duel-style battles. Keep your weapon (in this case the mouse cursor) in the holster area while the screen is black, and as soon as the lights turn on, move and shoot your enemy as fast as you can. You only have three lives to dispatch all of your opponents, so there's no room for error.

What happens when a game's mechanics are affected by, well, themselves? That's what Mark Essen of Messhof Games might have been wondering when he devised the idea for Flywrench, a downloadable freeware game in which you must guide your bat-like ship through a maze of obstacles to the exit.

A remake of the classic Metroid-esque Commodore 64 game, Turrican. Plenty of vast, non-linear levels to explore, each one packed to the brim with weapons to find and swarms of enemies to use them on. The controls are a bit complex at first, so expect a slight learning curve, but it's all action from there on out.

In Iji you play as, well, Iji. Iji is a human who has been enhanced with nanotechnology after Earth is abruptly invaded by aliens. Her new nanotech field provides her with a kind of shield and also gives her the incredible weaponry that every action-platformer hero needs to survive.

Lyle in Cube Sector is a relatively old Metroidesque platformer in traditional NES style. You play as Lyle, who adventures through Cube Sector, using cubes for everything from attacking enemies to playing basketball to feeding a dog, with the ultimate goal of retrieving his cat Keddums.

Once in Space is a downloadable puzzle-platform game for Windows, created by Hempuli, that delivers both content and charm. Set in deep space, you are a lone astronaut trying to collect stars and reach the flag on different constellations of rock. You can change your gravity orientation by walking around corners, and you must be facing the arrow direction of a star in order to collect it.

Imagine if you had the heroes, enemies, backgrounds and music from classic 80s games mashed together like WarioWare gone retro. What you'd get is Rom Check Fail. The game has you moving with the arrow keys and attacking with the [spacebar]. Your moves and those of your foes change every few seconds when the game remixes everything again, so you've got to meta-game a bit in order to defeat all twenty levels. Mind-bending fun.

Remember The Lost Vikings? If not, you missed out on one of the best 2D puzzle platform games of the last 3,000 years. Seriously! The Lost Snowmen looks to continue the genre and puts you in control of three snowmen, each with unique abilities. Work together to solve puzzles and traverse the snowy landscape.

A 2D platformer created by the developer of Bonesaw for the TIGSource Commonplace Book competition. Take control over the unnamed protagonist who must travel between two worlds in order to solve simple puzzles. Impassable blocks in your way? All you have to do is die -- that's right, go step on some spikes, Karoshi style -- and you'll be transported to the flipped underworld where you'll likely find a way to get through. But be careful, as enemies in this dark realm will attach to you and steal your energy, so make your trip through the underworld a short one.

An intense Game Maker-created game of reflexes that marries Dance Dance Revolution-style button tapping to a resource management sim. Sushi orders, represented by colored dots, pass by the red and green areas at the bottom of the screen. Use the keyboard to "activate" the areas while an order is on top to fill it. Keep an eye on the bills section to the right and use the numpad to add up completed orders and charge customers what they owe. Things get frantic pretty fast, but when you get into the swing of things, there's an almost Zen-like beauty to playing.