Grey Matter is an anti-shooter, which means that you can't actually shoot. You are the bullet, and you attack by directly colliding with the exposed brain-meats of your enemies. It looks great and sounds even better. The gameplay has all the depth of a modern professional shoot-'em-up, thanks to the combo system. Grey-Matter is perfectly playable without using the Trinity Attacks, but if you do employ them, it becomes almost like a hyperactive, twitchy puzzle game.

The 4th in a series of Great Escapes by Mateusz Skutnik and the Pastel Games crew, The Great Basement Escape is another short and fun room escape game in the same whimsical style that we have come to love and expect from the series.

Celebrating 0.25 years of Link Warble Dump Friday, bringing you banana boxes full of games wrapping 6.5 times a year. (Note: Due to an unfortunate alignment of Jupiter and Mars, you must multiply every calendar-based figure I speak of by eight and ignore all words that begin with the letter 'W'.) Oh, and happy Halloween!

A new Bart Bonte game has just been released, this one a sequel to an entry from our "ball physics" competition a year ago. Factory Balls 2 is a unique and original puzzle game in which you must match a target ball by adding elements from those given, one at a time. Order is important, and so you must plan your moves carefully.

Nion is a stylish arcade-style game that incorporates a number of gameplay modes, including puzzle, accuracy, speed, survival, and several combinations of the above. It's built around the simple mechanic of shooting shapes that hover around the top of the screen.

Ghostscape, a new escape game by Psionic, is just chock full of supernatural goodness. You play a veteran investigator of the occult who, upon hearing rumors of a haunted house, cannot stay away...and what a paranormal gold mine it turns out to be! Chairs and cups move as if grasped by some invisible hand, mysterious diary entries litter the floor, grotesque paintings adorn every room. And then, of course, there are the ghosts.

Boohbah Zone is a surreal journey-- wait, no, it's not really a journey. It's more of a... thing. A thing with lots of colors. Well, it's kind of like a webtoy, but you actually do stuff in some parts of it. Interactive art? You know what, forget classifying it, Boohbah Zone is an extremely bizarre collection of game-like scenes where you play with color, sound, and flobby-looking hippopotamus-like people things.

10 Gnomes episode 10: Seashore is the tenth installment of hunt-and-click gnome-finding from the indefatigable Mateusz Skutnik. That means if you've been following the series from the beginning, you've already ferreted out 100 gnomes. A hundred gnomes!

Thank you for your interest in the the Numbskull puzzle playset from Nitrome toys, the makers of the Twang construction set, Final Ninja combat gear, and In the Dog House sliding puzzle game. This manual will teach you how to use this playset, unleashed just in time for the Halloween season.

A follow-up to the original Draw Play, Draw Play 3 retains most of what made the original so interesting and introduces a more action-oriented approach to gaming. Like any platformer around, you control a little character who must jump and run to the flag at the end of each stage. The catch is that in Draw Play you create the platforms. Make stairs, hop from ledge to ledge, or use the pen and push yourself up as you move.

Now it's time to break the rules. A little. This edition of Weekend Download highlights winners of the 2008 Unity Awards, games created using the Unity plug-in that are playable right in your browser window. Technically they're browser games, but since you have to download and install something, they're downloads, too.

Tasha's Game is a whimsical platform adventure about a woman rescuing her friends and co-workers from evil black tentacles with the help of her magical flying cat Snoopy. Did I say "whimsical"? I meant "insane".

Four very different games in this edition of Link Dump Friday, enough to appease the hungry appetites of RPG fans, tower defense masters, action gamers and anyone looking to give their reflexes a little test or two.

At first glance, Off Balance looks just like all those other maze games where you move your mouse from Point A to Point B without hitting any walls. And indeed, that's the general idea. You control a preternaturally cheerful ball of cotton on a mildly psychedelic quest through 25 stages full of obstacles. The trick is in the steering.

An attractive, isometric block-shifting puzzle game about patience, spacial skills, and not getting your feet wet. All you have to do is position the wooden blocks so that they form an unbroken path from one bank to the other. There aren't a lot of tricks after you learn the basicsm, just pure, solid puzzle-solving.

Created by the Fox Network as a companion game to the Web series of the same name, The Cell is a lengthy, highly entertaining adventure through an elaborate dungeon complex. Our hero, Spence, must complete a series of increasingly bizarre and dangerous challenges as he ascends to the surface. And he needs your help to escape.

At long last, after a year and a half of waiting, Tucker Bowen has released Something Amiss Chapter 3, the final installment of his truly excellent point-and-click adventure saga. This chapter finds the intrepid escaped test subject Alice back in custody, awaiting her fate at the hands of persons unknown.

Grave Shift from Tangerine Pop Games provides all that plus a little puzzle solving, item collecting, door unlocking, and a dose of Halloween-esque spook for good measure. On the trail of the White Warlock who has covered the land in darkness and stolen the king's crown (it hides his bald spot, you see), you must trek through graveyard and tomb, keeping your health and courage up while avoiding snakes, zombies, spiders and plenty of other baddies.

Hunted Forever is a cool new action platforming game from Pixelante Game Studios. The plot is sort of like The Most Dangerous Game with the addition of a huge flying death machine armed with lasers, bombs, and swarming buzz-saw droids. Your job, as the silhouette of a man having an extremely bad day, is to escape from said death machine through forests, caves, and underground laboratories without getting turned into Fried Crispy Human Flakes. To put it mildly, the odds are against you.

You are a plucky gun turret in the center of the screen that has to survive while bad guys attack you from all sides. Rotate the turret with your mouse and shoot the black-and-white enemies by clicking. If you see a coloured orb, do not shoot it. It's a power-up. The game is so very good in virtually every aspect of its design despite the lack of sound effects.

I'm going to preface this Link Dump Friday with a stern warning: there's a pun at the end of the article. I know I know, puns are like kryptonite for some people, but I just couldn't resist. You know those moments when you're writing, a sentence pops into your head and immediately afterwards you realize you were being "clever" without even realizing it? Yeah, it was one of those. So read on, play some games, and when you reach the end, don't say I didn't warn you.

Talesworth Arena: Death Watch, by Mr. Jinx, is an RPG with a strong focus on one-on-one combat and a cool industrial fantasy setting. Choose one of three characters (Engineer, Psionic, or Juggernaut) and battle your way through 10 levels of deadly gladiators with a combat system familiar to anyone who has played a MMORPG.

Neutral Halloween mini-game is what I'm calling this cute and easy escape game with a Halloween theme (well, it used to have a Halloween theme. The pumpkin has been replaced with a piggy bank now.) It features the same excellent implementation features of all the other Neutral games, along with simple yet appealing and effective graphics. I'm sure you will find this one worthwhile of your time!

It is a classic horror scenario: the car broken down in the middle of the road, the swirling snow and biting cold, the beckoning light visible just over the hill. A house! Oh, thank goodness. But what's this? The lights are on, cheery fireplaces crackle in every room, yet no one is there. You call out a hello, but your voice echoes unanswered through the hall. How strange.

A clever world domination simulator, in the form of a humble real-time strategy game, in which you can test your schemes and stratagems without the nagging twinge of guilt that comes with executing legions of henchmen. The game has some of the highest production values you're likely to find in a Flash game, with some decent animation, a healthy dose of humor and a startling amount of high-quality voice acting.

Karoshi is a platform/puzzle game where your goal is the exact opposite of most such entertainments: you have to die. Throw yourself onto spikes, zap yourself with electricity, smash yourself with a falling safe. It's like an extended version of the cathartic moment when you get finally get sick of Mario's empty-headed cheerleading and just hurl him off a cliff.

In this blue-colored world (you know, 'cause of oceans and stuff), we have people that bake bread, people who build buildings, people who stack things on top of other things. We also have people who make games. Everyone fills their little niche in the grand scheme of things, but only one of the above listed folk have a Link Dump Friday. Can you guess which one?

An arena shooter even casual gamers can enjoy, a sort of mash-up between Asteroids and Space Invaders where you pilot a tiny craft against waves of incoming enemies (which happen to be aliens and geometric shapes). Power-ups appear from time to time to give you a hand, but otherwise its just you and your reflexes keeping you alive.

Dr. Ichie's Room is a solid escape game experience from Japan with polished and appealing graphics, logical puzzles and no pixel hunts necessary. Although the game is from Japan, there are English translations included for all descriptions and explanations, making this Weekday Escape a worthy investment of your time.

As the title implies the field before you is not empty, but hides balls. Your colored box along the edge of the playing field can fire a beam in the direction of your mouse, ricocheting off of any hidden balls and exposing them. Clicking the mouse will clear these balls from the screen, and the onslaught of balls will inch its way down the field.

An anagram puzzle game from Martin Sears, presented with the distinct flavor of British educational programming. Don't be fooled by the charming hand-drawn appearance and the curiously twisted vignettes between levels; don't worry if the first few levels seem too basic. This turns into a serious brain-twister.

Meat Boy is a platform game that dares to ask the question "What if the main character from Knytt or N was made of bits of sticky, gooey raw meat?" And even though you never wanted to listen to the sound of meat slapping against solid blocks over and over again, when you're playing Meat Boy, you probably won't mind.

The fourth in the "Core" series of point-and-click adventure games created by John Feltham has just been released. Soul Core is similar to other games like this, and yet introduces a unique concept as well. Use your mouse to add items to your inventory; click on inventory items and drag them to the game view to use them. Try to complete the game with 100% "soul" rating.

Ticket is a brand new game from the talented room escape designers at Gotmail. Like so many of their games to come before, this one features the same highly detailed, gorgeous pre-rendered scenes and the same point-and-clickery puzzles one would expect to find in a game of this nature. The only downside? There is no English version, so that will surely turn off a few.

If you ever sat outside on a warm summer's night (or a cool winter's eve, I suppose), stared up at the sky and thought "Boy do I wish I was that big ball of rock in the sky!", this edition of Link Dump Friday helps fulfill that wish!

Monster Basement 2 is every bit as entertaining and well-made as the original; like the first game, it is extraordinary for its thought-provoking plot and tense, eerie ambiance. Patrick Majewski, from Godlimations, has spared nothing in bringing his tale of monster-against-man-against-monster to life.

Dogfight 2 is the newest entry into Rock Solid Arcade's quality series of arcade-style airplane fliers, which includes the first Dogfight and the previously-reviewed Stunt Pilot. Once again, they have based some nail-bitingly tough levels around the tricky but satisfying flight controls from classic DOS game Sopwith. All told, a difficult game with high production values worthy of your time investment.

Matt Sandorf: Journey to Endless Entertainment is not just an artistic point-and-click game. It is an advergame—a promotion for the Sony empire from music to gadgets to games. It was created by Rodrigo Roesler, creator of the very popular Trapped series of games, and this one follows similar construction.

The Japanese Map Game (for lack of a better translation) is a Flash-based guessing game where you choose regions of Japan and add their population to a counter on the right. The goal is to fill the counter to the outlined squares without going over!

There is something oddly compelling about gnomes. They are cute, mythical creatures that spark the chemistry in our brains that control imagination and curiosity. Perhaps that's why when someone hides a bunch of them within a series of interactive images we jump to task of finding every one of them.

As promised last week, I now present to you Link Dump Friday: IDUNNOWHATEVERLOL Edition! I apologize if a very light arcade/mouseplay feeling comes across when you play these games. Rest assured, however, that it's not a theme. Just a... flavor.

Worry not about secret codes or enigmatic messages; Lab Escape simply requires you to take stock of your surroundings and act accordingly. This isn't a bad thing, however; it's kinda nice to take a break from more fantastical situations.

The perfect escape for a coffee break: easy enough to be finished quickly, interesting enough to engage (and perhaps revive?) the mind. I do wish that the game had included some sort of music or soundtrack, but the graphics are well-designed and the overall package good enough to overlook such a minor flaw.

Room escape fans will be pleased to learn of a brand new installment available to play in the T2B Escape series. The new game, T2B Escape 3, features similar artwork, some pixel hunting and the lack of any backstory as in previous games, but that shouldn't stop all the room escape fanatics from enjoying another T2B Escape experience. Go forth, point-and-click your mouse, and escape!

Welcome to Loops of Zen. Here at Loops of Zen, your worries shall be forgotten. Nothing will threaten you at Loops of Zen. This is Loops of Zen. You don't need to win at Loops of Zen, but if you wish, you can ascend to higher and higher levels of complexity. This is Loops of Zen.

"Z-Rox" is what happens when a punk music fanatic invents a startlingly pure and original puzzle game concept, but just can't help topping it off with a creamy dollop of vanilla Xtreme-ness. It won't throw you into a mosh pit, but it will test your visualization skills over the course of 100 devilishly simple levels.

If you're unfamiliar with the Hoshi Saga series, then you're in for a treat as there are now 3 full games for you to experience. For the uninitiated, Hoshi Saga is a simple game of discovery. One part point-and-click and one part puzzle game, the objective in each stage is to find the star. How you go about doing that is different for every level. The task is up to you to figure out how.

The plan for this week's Link Dump Friday was to have a ball/bouncey theme. Then all these non-bouncing games came along, I got carried away, and suddenly we're left with a set of games that are great fun but, sadly, do not adhere to my original plan. Next time I'm shooting for a theme along the lines of "idunnowhateverlol"!

Save Kaleidoscope Reef, from the team that brought us Anika's Odyssey, is a new arcade game with an environmentally friendly message embedded beneath its gorgeous exterior. A tropical reef thriving with aquatic life is in danger of being destroyed by pollution. Rebuild the underwater sanctuary one screen at a time by grabbing floating polyps, placing them on rocks, and feeding them until they bloom into lush coral.

In the Dog House is a cute sliding puzzle game that tasks you with sliding rooms around a grid to create a path from dog to dogfood in the kitchen. To encourage the pup to move, simply grab the bone and drop it somewhere in the house. You'll also have to contend with mechanical contraptions such as elevators and security gates, not to mention the tempting distractions of a cat!

Play as a weakly little microorganism in a big world (a Petri dish?) filled with other microbes and bacteria, and it's survival of the fittest in there. This is Darwinian fighting style at its most primeval. Binding to proteins, self-replication through division and eating other microbes... these are your signature moves.

Simplicity reminiscent of an Orisinal game but with visuals and sound you might expect to find in something more old-school. Backed by an enjoyable physics engine and a simple but well-executed concept and virtually no down-time, Gravity Hook is a simple, grappling hook arcade game that borders on clinically addictive.

White Zone is an intriguingly different sort of room escape game; it does not take place in any sort of concrete space. There are no walls, no ceiling, no door; instead, the player is faced with a few pieces of furniture—two chairs, a television, and a dresser, to be exact—arranged in a circle, seemingly suspended within a white void. Some forgotten corner of the Matrix? Perhaps.

The National Gallery of Art has an extensive online interactive art exhibit which is geared towards kids, but is fun for all ages. A few of the applications available stand out and include themes such as Jungle, Still Life, and especially the great interactive Dutch Dollhouse.

Japanese Mahjong is a completely different game from the tile-matching Mahjong Solitaire. A cross between Gin Rummy and the fictional Dragon Poker, this is one game that will definitely take a while to learn, and even longer to master.

Say hello to Campaign, a mud-slinging, fact-spinning, smashmouth brawl of a turn-based strategy game where victory is achieved only through beating your opponent into submission. Diplomatically, of course.

Mallet Mania is Nitrome's newest production, a Marble Madness-type puzzle game. By using what appears to be a wireframe croquet mallet, you whack your ball with varying direction and power to guide it through maze-like levels to the goal. Stating the obvious but still worth noting, Nitrome once again stays with its tried-and-true pixel graphics and vibrant color scheme.

Look into my eyes. THESE eyes: O_O You are getting sleepy. Very sleepy. Soon, you will be under my complete control. Ok, you are under my complete control. Now I will snap my fingers and you will continue reading this screen. Then you will click and play every game below. And you will enjoy each one. Snapping my fingers........ NOW!

Twibik is the latest abstract puzzler from Tonypa. The game takes the tried and true matching mechanic we've all grown to love/be-addicted-to and gives it a fresh spin. You must get rid of tiles by matching similar ones sharing a row or column, causing them to vanish. Your options tend to vanish as well; like all Tonypa games there is a trove of challenge lying underneath the simple exterior.

Find key, then find door— Kagi Nochi Tobira— How hard could it be?

Global Player Reloaded is the sequel to Global Player reviewed back in 2004. The sorting game involves directing multi-colored crates to their correct destinations by clicking on arrows and other gizmos. Reloaded comes back at you with new content and gameplay that'll keep your eyes darting and your brain sizzling. Because logistics makes brains sizzle.

Zeebarf returns and you'll be pleased to know that his work just keeps getting better. Your job is to guide opportunistic exterminator Reemus and his ursine companion Liam through a series of eight oddball misadventures on a quest to... well... do something or other. Go to a castle and save the world, I guess. They get sidetracked a lot.

In Another Side, you inexplicably find yourself confined within a dollhouse-like room, a pretty little place marred by the giant wall of rock that exists in place of a door. That's right, there's not even a door to unlock! But there's plenty to explore and examine.

Orphan Feast is a hilariously macabre action platformer with great design and story, created by Robox Studios for Adult Swim. You are the gruesome Creaky Tom who has been given the odious task by Oliver Twisted to snatch up children so they can be ground up into pies for greed and "culinary perversion." Probably not a game to play with the little ones. ;)

Battalion: Nemesis is a respectable attempt to translate the fast, accessible brain-play of Advance Wars to the realm of free online games, without directly treading on Nintendo's intellectual property. The gameplay is like a complex version of Rock-Paper-Scissors played out on a chess board, with major emphasis on positioning and choosing the right unit to do the right job.

This week on the official LDF Paragraph of Miscellany, I would like to discuss an advertisement poster I saw in a mall over the weekend. Pictured was a fancy hotel room with every amenity you could want, and just below, this simple phrase was printed: You see a room. I tried typing "enter room" (you know, in my mind), but apparently the door was shut, locked, and the key hidden so well no amount of drawer opening could uncover it. Darn.

Bucketball is a brand-new physics-based game from Arseniy Desrosiers and Florian Himsl. If you've already guessed that the general thrust of the gameplay has something to do with "buckets" and "balls," then congratulations, your amazing brain is way ahead of the curve. It's a simple idea game of skill, but to complete the game is anything but simple.

Aether is a gloriously imaginative and atmospheric puzzle adventure game in which you swing through the stars to reach several different planets, each with a unique puzzle to solve. The designers have made a truly compelling experience, and it's a fantastic artistic endeavor. You can also just spend some time flying through space or the clouds, the music and movement are so relaxing.

A deeply satisfying escape game presented by Place of Light, you must find your way out of what is undoubtedly the oddest bathroom you've ever come across; codes and secret panels grace the toilet, gems are scattered across the floor and weird golden masks watch over the sink and bathtub. Perhaps it's the work of some eccentric, puzzle-obsessed billionaire....who has, um, slipped, hit his or her head and forgotten how to escape? Yep, that must be it.

Bloons Tower Defense 3 has finally been released after months of anticipation from all the hardcore Bloons fans out there. Picking up where Bloons TD 2 left off, the new game features even more tracks (eight in all!), new monkeys (towers) and upgraded gameplay mechanics.

There's been an accident in the slime factory and now it's up to you to clean up the mess. In each level you must collect all of the puddles of goo and direct them down one of the available suction vents to make it all go away. To do so, you'll have to push boxes out of the way and mind the arrows which allow you to travel in one direction only.

There is something about Sid Woo's Bounceroid 2000 that makes it so completely JIG-like. Elegantly simple in design, modern, stylish and enjoyable.Bouncing balls against paddles have come a long way, and gone through all sorts of fancy incarnations. This game is back to the basics and has an original take that makes it unique.

Survive as long as you can in Rapid Wars, the new addictive arcade shooter by Jussi Kari of ooPixel. Borrowing the two-fisted Robotron mechanic, and with a nod to Geometry Wars, Jussi creates gameplay that is frenetic, addictive and fun.

Ta da! Back with another Link Dump Friday! Showing you our collection of fabulous games this week will be me, the guy whose face is trapped in a square to the left. Playing the part of the contestant will be you, people reading this text! We still don't have any volunteers to play the excited armadillo sitting in the corner eating cereal, though...

Onekey is a character-based platform game played with only "one key", and thus the mystery of the title is solved. The catch is that you can't affect the main character directly. Instead, you control various objects in the environment while he blunders around falling off of things. This is a good one.

Play as a row in a database where your objective is to fight the other rows to decrease their numbers and increase your own. It's a numbers game, pure and simple, and by not pretending to be anything else, mySQLgame has managed to take the ubiquitous browser-based MMO and distill it down to the very essence of the genre.

Miniature white gnomes have been spotted all over the city for half a year now, and their number only appears to grow. Their presence seems permanent, and there is no apparent end to them. Join us in trying to find them all, please.

This week, we present the exclusive debut of a super-duper, extra-special room escape game, one we can guarantee that absolutely no other website has yet featured. Don't you feel special? To all the JIG faithful, we present to you the world premiere of.... Casual Gameplay Escape!

Is anyone tired of Portal-inspired games about some faceless dude stuck in a sterile laboratory environment full of death traps yet? I know I'm not! Here's another one, comin' atcha! Control a smoothly animated silhouette of a man who is trapped in the middle of a giant maze full of spikes and shifting blocks. Alter gravity by rotating the entire room 90 degrees at a time!

An ingenious piece of alternative history interactive fiction created by Adam Cadre. In Varicella, you have the pleasure of abandoning your usual scruples to play one of the most delightfully nasty antiheroes that I've come across: the eponymous Primo Varicella, Palace Minister at the Palazzo del Piemonte, and a tremendous opportunity awaits you. Can you seize the day (and the throne)?

A unique new anti-shooter game of collection and avoidance by Felix Reidl. You have two minutes to collect as many yellow squares as possible, while various gun turrets try to mow you down. Whenever you start to feel overwhelmed, you should hit [Space], which instantly ends your game and adds up your score. If you don't hit the space bar in time—and this is important—you don't get any points. You have only one life, and if you die, your score is zero.

A new action puzzle game from NinjaKiwi, Boombot is beautifully simple and well-executed. Your job, as some sort of evil omniscient explosives technician, is to maneuver an itty-bitty robot called Boombot to the exit of each level. Aside from the black bombs under your control, you'll have to manipulate TNT, oil drums, and explosive Senso-Gel to clear all fifty levels.

Just like the previous two Link Dump Friday features, this week we have a boatload of games to keep your fingers twitching. Unlike the previous articles, however, this one has a tasty breakfast treat I have long been calling for: WAFFLES!!! *confetti*

A sort of physics-based puzzler, Putt Base tasks you with holes that would make a mini-putt master balk, and then asks that you complete each with a hole-in-one. Sound impossible? Don't worry, to your credit you get to edit the course to your liking with a limited number of several different blocks that can change the direction your ball travels, give it a little boost, or nullify the bounce while increasing momentum.

Fresh from the Tonypa laboratories, we find ourselves with Wiclimo, a game of experimentation and discovery. Scattered across each level is an array of shapes in varying colors. As you move your mouse across the shapes, you'll eventually find one that will give you a "ping." That will be your starting point.

Diversity is more of an escape-the-house game, rather than escape-the-room; in order to finally achieve freedom, the player must exit first a bedroom, then an office, then a nursery and finally a bathroom. This aside, Diversity is a well-executed, if fairly standard, point-and-click game, no doubt inspired by the classic Crimson Room.

Ragdoll Cannon 2 is, rather logically, the sequel to Ragdoll Cannon (as teased by the release of Ragdoll Cannon 1.5). That's some no-nonsense naming, there. What designer Johnny_K might lack in titling, however, he more than compensates for in gameplay.

It doesn't take long to get addicted to Pixel Field, Tonypa's perilous pixel pointing action strategy game. If you remember playing the original, you'll be even more excited about this latest evolution to hit your browser, as the game has been totally revamped with a new soundtrack and 30 all-new levels added.

In last week's Link Dump Friday, I thought it was a phenomenal feat to feature six games in one article. Well, looks like we've done it again, and this time there are pirates and aliens, too! Still no waffles, sadly...

Upon first beginning PonPon House 2, you may find yourself with a strange sense of déjà vu—those rounded, almost huggable graphics, those cutely surreal furnishings, they just seem so familiar. The whole experience is gentle and dreamy, without any sense of urgency or danger.

Coign of Vantage is the latest in Bobblebrook's collection of worldly, sensitive casual games, and the gameplay mechanic couldn't be more basic. An icon appears on your screen, shattered into a cloud of its component pixels, and your job is to reassemble them into the original picture. To do this, just point at the correct location.

All the room's elements (including a toy train, several mysterious cabinets and a bevy of cute animals) seamlessly synthesize into a series of intriguing but gratifyingly logical puzzles; to top it off, the graphics are nicely designed and pixel hunting is conspicuously absent. Perfect!

Arijigora is a point-and-click puzzle game from Japan starring stick figures against a diabolical biological creature. Click on the right items, and with the right timing, to save the stickman race from the threat to its existence. If you're familiar with the Hapland series, then you'll feel right at home with this new game from author Hozo, who even gives a nod to Rob Allen's original as the inspiration behind this one.

Monster Basement is a chilling room escape game that injects mood and atmosphere into what is often an almost apathetic genre. The motivation to leave is made all too clear; this room with its vampire flies, blood stained meat hooks, and grotesque abominations sitting in fluid filled beakers, scares the jebus out of you, and as you slowly work through a way to leave this terrible place, things aren't likely to get better either.

Now Boarding is a tycoon-style resource management game where your job is to run an airport, overseeing everything from flight routes, which passengers go on which plane, and even where to put the soda machines! The daunting task of shuttling people across North America has been pared-down to a simple interface that's as easy as matching letters and clicking cities on a map. Now Boarding is remarkably scalable, meaning you can create as complex or simple of an experience as you desire, giving a world of options to those who wish it and nothing more than a simple time management game to those who don't.

Link Dump Friday? More like Link Deluge, AMIRITE?! Six really great games, a few of which are heavy-hitters and will take away your afternoon without apology, and a fun Flash animation. Could Friday get any better? Well, maybe if we had some waffles...

A sequel or upgrade to the original Protector, a tile-based tower defense strategy game focused heavily on upgrading. In fact, Protector 2 has only two basic units; a mage and a warrior (although both can be heavily upgraded into different classes). The mage and warrior both have strengths and weaknesses, the most prominent being the low damage but high range of the mage (and vice-versa for the warrior). But through an amazingly deep system of experience levels, class choices and skills, these two units can be configured into many different sub-types.

Mystery House: Escape from Beginning Room is an unusual room escape game, but not a long one. Introduced in this game is the concept of "inspirations", which are actually little ghosts in the room you must collect to reveal clues that help you escape.

Cow Room Escape is a significantly more difficult room escape game than its hard-shelled brother. For this game's ultimate combo-lock puzzle, you're looking for several different colored coins and you will really have to use your wits if you are to find them all.

Although it's a rather drab looking room, the puzzle contained within it is pretty sweet and it shouldn't take you more than 10 or 15 minutes. The room descriptions are all in Japanese, but thankfully you won't need them. Just be sure to click all sides of every object and you'll be out in no time.