Kyle over at JayIsGames sums up this great hybrid tower defense/shooter game well:

While I'm not the world's biggest fan of either strategic defense games or platform shooters, Eternal Red just seems to work so well that it quickly becomes a difficult game to put down. Instantly it grabs you with its simple yet dark and foreboding artistry: everything save the moon in the backdrop is done in black shapes outlined with red, and these wonderfully morose visuals are backed up with a macabre kind of techno soundtrack that manages to combine the oppressive mood of the setting with the intensity of the action. And that action is quite awesome.

http://armorgames.co...lay/2818/eternal-red

Ok here's a really nice new Tower Defense game called Warzone Tower Defense.

Very nice smooth graphics and animation, nice range of weapons and requires real strategy.

Also has a few TD features of note:

• you can place walls and adjust route of enemies -- i always like this feature, adds nice strategy element.
• you have some direct-application weapons -- i'm not a huge fan of this weapon style, which adds an arcade-like element to the game.
• multiple maps to choose from

http://www.madcowint...ctive.com/TDWarzone/

Tech Cult has compiled a list of the 150 best Flash games. As a testament to the quality of this list, many of these have already been mentioned on DonationCoder!

It was a long and exhausting task: playing hundreds of online games for hours in a row, day after day. It was hard, but someone had to do it. The result is the list that you will find below. Enjoy!

http://www.techcult....t-online-flash-games

Yes, they even have a Commander Keen port.

Today on freewaregenius.com, Samer introduces us to Hedgewars, an extremely faithful and polished clone of the terrific Worms game series.

WEBSITE: http://www.hedgewars.org/

Hard to say it better than Samer did:

Description: Hedgewars is multiplatform, a free turn-based blast-em-up in the vein of Worms. It features a wide range of weapons, multiple maps, and excellent graphics and audio. Offers single player, multiplayer, and (in theory) multiplayer over the internet modes.

If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many Worm clones and offshoots here’s the reason: Worms is an extremely playable, fun game. Although there are many freeware Worms clones but many of these are DOS games that lag behind in their production qualities (and/or do not readily run on XP/Vista), which is why Hedgewars was such a fantastic find for me personally: it offers excellent graphics and sound and excellent playability and physics.

In contrast to Worms variations such as the brilliant Soldat (which abandoned the turn-based model in favor of real-time gameplay), Hedgewars is a very faithful adaptation that sticks to the turn-based model and recreates most of the original elements, from the wacky range of weaponry to the destructible environment, and even the cartoonish look and feel all the way down the little one-liners that the characters utter at the end of each turn.

The good folks over at The Independent Gaming Source have announced the results of their recent Demake Competition.

If you're like me, you may be wondering what a "demake" is. Well, the word comes from the idea of reversing the process of "a remake" by taking a newer game and "demaking" it into a retro, ~8-bit style game.

http://tigsource.com...demake-compo-results

The top 3 games are:

• Soundless Mountain II - (demake of Silent Hill 2)
• Gang Garrison II - (demake of Team Fortress 2)
• Aquarium - (demake of Aquaria)

This one was mentioned on JayIsGames.com today, but i think it deserves a bigger write up.

It's a beautifully animated military game that borrows elements from Tower Defense games and RPG games.  Your units do battles mostly on their own but you have to make careful decisions about what weapons and units to use and when.  Clever idea and beautifully done.

http://www.crazymonk...ames.com/Shadez.html

StaceyG over at JayIsGames.com points us to a beautifully stylish flash "adventure" game today, called Mr Coo: El Laberinto Esférico.

You might want to click the "English" button at the start if you want to play in English since the native language is Spanish, though in truth the words aren't that important, and you might enjoy not understanding the words.

It's a very simple point and click adventure with no inventory and very few places where you actually choose an action to perform, and there are a few action sequences.

But mostly it's just an incredibly well animated and stylish cartoon mystery.

http://www.mistercoo.com/laberinto.html

This has to be one of the slickest and most polished flash shooter games I've seen.  It's extremely well done, and highly playable.  Reminiscent of the arcade game Robotron, but with greater depth.

http://www.rocksolid....com/games/robokill/

I love these tower defense games.  This is a pretty nice one, with smooth flowing enemies that move in different ways, and a nice clean upgrade system.  Plenty of strategy here.

http://www.flashninj..._Tower_defense_2.php

A recent discussion with mouser about the need for more games that focus on hillarity over skill brought it to my attention that there has been very little mention here of one of my all time favorite games -- Kingdom of Loathing.

The Kingdom of Loathing is a web based role playing.  The gameplay is primarily single player, as your character proceeds to acquire equipment, food, booze, and meat (the game's currency) as means to progress on various quests.  In that regard, it's pretty standard as an RPG.  Where it's truly uncommon is its character -- from the character classes to the areas to the enemies, everything is an extremely absurd parody of something. It's funny, irreverent and generally fun.

There are also some multiplayer aspects to it, as you'd expect from an online game.  The economy is purely player driven, most items in the game able to be bought and sold player to player.  It features a chat where players can communicate in real time, clans for players to team together to help one another out and some simple player versus player mechanics.

Whether you just sit back, relax and play it casually or delve deeper into the economy or making faster, more effecient "ascensions", there's plenty to do.  New items are added constantly and new quests and areas are added every now and then as well.  I've been playing KoL for a little over two years now and am still amused enough by it to continue playing for years to come.  If you do sign up, look up "Terrae", that's me!

This game is getting mentioned all over the place in the last few days.  I finally gave in and tried it, despite what sounded like a boring concept to me.

Truth is, it's done very well and is a fun way to practice your typing.

The concept is very simple, you and other people online type the same block of text to advance your cars along a line.  The fastest typer wins.  Very low tech visuals but it's a very clean interface and the multiplayer part just works well and helps motivate you.

The best part of it is probably that the text you type is selected from books and movies, and after you complete a "race" the page tells you about the text you just typed.  It's a great way to make it more entertaining.

http://play.typeracer.com/

I read about "Untitled Story" on JayIsGames.com, which gave it a glowing review.  It's really charming and immediately reminds you of the terrific Knytt Stories and Within a Dark Forest series (by a different author) that we have posted about before.

http://www.helixgamesinc.com

Who knew! Nice capsule summary of each included. Check out the comments section for more sites.

http://www.dailybits...ry-gamer-should-know

Today is a great day for those of you who love the genre of Tower Defense flash games, with the release of Flash Element TD 2.

JayIsGames.com has a nice long write up about why this is such a good thing, so i'll just let you go and read it there.  It's a very nice game, with some new ideas and a ton of personality and strategy.

http://jayisgames.co..._tower_defense_2.php

Direct link to play game: http://www.casualcol...s/Flash_Element_TD_2

Very cool flash game that has some of the "replay" theme of one of the past JayIsGames.com competitions.  Fun stuff.

http://www.nekogames...008/01/cursor10.html