Never mind those adorable little tykes dressed like puppies or pumpkins. Forget cartoon ghosts or happily grinning scarecrows. If you like your horror visceral and bloody, we've got the game for you. Point-and-click adventure game Asylum 626, the follow-up to Hotel 626, is now accepting patients.

Broken Picture Telephone is a participatory writing/drawing game based on the old favorite playground game Telephone, that's chock full of hilarious random divergences and oozes fun like bacon oozes grease!

Metaplace is a browser-based community of user-created virtual worlds that also serves as an online games platform. Metaplace gives you the tools you need to create just about anything your twisted head can conjure — from casual social lounges to games both basic and complex — all with an extremely flexible set of building tools. If you can surf the web, you can use Metaplace, and this level of powerful simplicity makes it one of the most attractive virtual world communities around.

We're reaching into the vault of yesteryear -- providing, of course, your definition of yesteryear is a 2005 point-and-click adventure game about supervillains by Nick Bounty, the author of A Case of the Crabs and The Goat in the Grey Fedora. Some of you will be familiar with this strange gem of a title, but if you've never checked into the Brain Hotel before, there's no time like the present to make your reservation.

Are you ready for some hilarious multiplayer wordplay? See who can come up with the best acronyms in this resurrection of the classic Acrophobia! To us, Acrobabble represents the finest in CRAB (Creative Reverse-Acronym Building). You might even say Acrobabble is a COWARD (Cavalcade Of Words And Random Definitions). But I think we can all agree it is a DAWG (Darn Awesome Word Game).

Hotel 626 is an amazingly innovative, beautifully-produced nightmare of a game. After "checking in" (giving the website your name, email and creating a password), you are immediately whisked away into the opening movie: your awakening, in the middle of the night, in your room at this hellish hotel.

In the simple and kid friendly Tree House Defense, another fun game on Whirled by Three Rings, made by Bill Robinson, protect your tree house from bullies, skateboarders, skunks, and other assorted neighborhood menaces. If you find that some of the elaborate tower defense games are bit too eye glazing and forbidding to get into, then this cute and simple game is a great place to start. So, it's probably not for the seasoned tower defense veteran.

They say that good things should never end. Take orange, for instance. The orange is infinite. Scroll down into the orange. It's ok, the orange won't hurt you. Perhaps it would be best just to give into the orange. Play. Grow things, drop things, poke things.

From Kyle Gabler comes an experimental massively multiplayer online word association "game". To play, all you have to do is read the word (or words) on top, then type in the first thing that pops in your head. Human Brain Cloud collects these associations and dumps them into a database viewed with an interactive squishy set of blobs. It's a fascinating experiment that just so happens to be an addictive game to boot.

Game-Pure has released an update to their Oshidama series, this one is a collection of levels for the month of July. There are 6 fresh new levels to play and you can compare your relative success with them against others who have tried. As with the June collection, mousing-over each screenshot in the level select menu shows how many have tried the level ("challenger") and of those, how many were able to clear it.

Two updates to the orb-nudging arcade game Oshidama have been released. Oshidama Plus adds a wonderful Time Attack mode that lets you race against yourself for a better score, while Oshidama Monthly goes episodic with regular releases of extremely challenging puzzle-type levels. More Oshidama is always a good thing.

Yahoo! Mail Ultimate Championship Games is a series of four short mini-games created to promote the improved Yahoo! webmail service in the UK. Each one has a distinct e-mail theme and is incorporated in a slick, nighttime gameshow-like style complete with videos and a futuristic neon-purple interface. Master the surprisingly entertaining mini-games while accidentally learning about Yahoo! Mail's new features.

The irresistible webtoy Line Rider has returned, now in a delicious "beta 2" flavor! The update fixes a few rough spots in the interface and adds some much-needed tools to the mix. Those of you already hooked on Line Rider will appreciate how much easier it is to create a masterpiece with the new additions, and first-time players will see just what all the fuss is about.

BrainBall is a collection of ten smart-making puzzle games that give your gray matter a workout every day of the month. Featuring logic, number, memory, spatial orientation and many more, BrainBall keeps the same types of games for one month but changes the content every day. Not only is your score kept and compared to other BrainBallers, but you can uh... what's that called? Learn! You can learn, too!

SissyFight 2000 is a free online multiplayer shockwave game that lets you take part in a good old fashion schoolyard tease-fest. Take your slandering skills to the playground and whittle down the self-esteem of the other girls by using scratches, grabs, teases, tattles and more. The game plays out in a series of rounds and works a lot like a complex version of rock-paper-scissors. The only difference is the loser of this game runs off crying.

Perfect for the impending holiday season, It's a Wonderful Internet is an interactive narrated storybook. Take in some soothing music as you listen to a classic holiday tale (tongue-in-cheek style) about a geek whose life is a little too dependant on the internet. Flip through the pages and interact with the scenery, and when the narration ends move your cursor around the pictures for some nice surprises.

Get Hostile is an abstract strategy game based on the board game Acquire. Like most great strategy games of its kind, Get Hostile packs an enormous amount of possibilities into surprisingly few rules. The object is simple: finish with the most money. However, there are many ways to do this, and not every strategy fits every game.

You know the feeling when you return from the restroom and all your co-workers' brains have exploded, and they have all been transformed into blood-thirsty zombies, infected by an intergalactic computer virus disguised as check-this-out mail attachment? This is it.

In the Calucci game you play the role of a Mr. van der Berg, a key witness in the prosecution of a ficticious mob organization, the Calucci family. In return for identifying the family's boss, Paul Calucci, you are granted protection with a new identity and residence in a community far away. Unfortunately, you no sooner get inside your new home and someone comes a knocking on the door. What will you do?

Heavy Weapon is a side-scrolling arcade game from Popcap that requires Java and Windows. As with all good arcade games, the concept is simple with gameplay being easy to pick up but difficult to master. Overall, the game serves its purpose as an arcade game with addictive gameplay. The player will likely enjoy an increasing adrenelin rush as the enemies gradually become more aggressive.

With the rustic point-and-click adventure game, Sancho's Island, you have the opportunity to accompany Sancho and Don Quijote on their adventures—if you can help Sancho straighten out his family matters and prepare for the quest. You may even win an isle to rule, even though Sancho isn't sure what that is.

Seeds of Imagination can be classified as an interactive toy; a charming diversion that doesn't seem to have any purpose other than to delight and entertain, and possibly even to educate us while we play. Create a beautiful flowing plant simply by planting a seed and 'talking' to it as it grows.

A fairly decent, fairly standard point-and-click game of the escape-the-room variety that is 50% hunt around to find the missing pieces, and 50% solve the puzzle with the pieces. Attic Escape will keep you busy for about 20-30 minutes, depending upon your skill level with this type of game.

Direct from Mars comes this wacky collection of games on an equally wacky website. Disguised as a Martian gameshow: Know Like an Earthling, the site offers Australian's a chance to win fabulous prizes by becoming a membership (sic) to enter candy wrapper codes and, of course, play 30 silly games. You don't have to live in Australia for the latter.

The chips were reset for the last time today and it looks like Last Call Poker is making its last call in keeping with its namesake. I will be sad to see it go as it was a brilliant game with a great community. Kudos to 42 Entertainment and, in particular, Jane McGonigal for the phenomenal experiences being created in the area of immersive and pervasive play.

Well, the folks at the BBC are building themselves quite a reputation. All the point-and-click games they turn out are just golden. And The Seven Noble Kinsmen is no exception; possibly their best work yet. SNK is a murder mystery in six (6) acts, all of which are now available to play.

Toulouse is played with three to five human or computer players, and a well designed interface and beautiful presentation make this web-based version user friendly and highly enjoyable. The folks at AsoBrain.com have also recently added the option of playing with up to two expansions to the original board game, making this as involved a Carcassonne experience as one could hope for.

This Texas Hold'em poker game offers something a little different than most games in this category. Launched sometime in late September, Last Call Poker combines elements of alternate reality games (ARGs) and online poker tournaments to do its bidding for Activision's soon-to-be-released wild west video game, Gun.

"Climb the slopes of Opniyama (yama means Japanese mountain) and take part in this interactive play while adding to your liking of the trees with the landscape! Discover the jokes of this vertical world! Direct your misadventure and hoist towards the higher plates while launching the hook!"

A game that makes excellent use of Flash video (FLV) segments to form an engaging interactive narrative, A Race Against Time puts you in the driver's seat of a brand new Saab 9-3 SportWagon on a mission to Hazard Point. What could possibly go wrong?

Picross is pixel painting for the logic minded. The recent entry for Alien in the Room: Reloaded had a puzzle in it that was called Picross. This entry is for everyone who enjoyed that puzzle. If you have also enjoyed the Sudoku and logic puzzle games, TylerK's Picross offers a visual twist.

As the world mourns the passing of this great pop icon, one cannot help but wonder why he was taken from us at such a ripe young age. For someone whose life had enriched all who came to know him, and whose music had filled so many hearts with love, the sudden death of Jamie Kane will echo tears of sadness throughout eternity.

A while back I posted a DHTML version of the classic meditative strategy game, Mahjong Solitaire, as it was the nicest version of the game I was able to find. Until now. Enter bijvoorbeeld multimedia's rendition of the game, and it's done in Flash. From Amsterdam, this version of Mahjong Solitaire...