Gratuitous Tank Battles highlights this week's Best of Indie Games

This week on "Best Of Indie Games," we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week. The delights in this edition include a run-and-gun shooter for the Xbox Live Indie Games service, a turn-based farming simulator from the recently-concluded Ludum Dare 23 competition, a fantasy interactive fiction by Adam Cadre, plus a top-down adventure game played in a tiny, tiny world. Here's some recent highlights from IndieGames.com: Game Pick: 'Exponential Invasion' (Danny Perski, commercial indie) "Danny Perski's Exponential Invasion is a smart, fresh mix of puzzle and strategy. Players must add their numbers together to make larger sums, while strategizing how to move and how to ration numerical troops such that multiple enemies are overtaken." Game Pick: 'SEAL Team 12' (Social Loner Studios, commercial indie) "SEAL Team 12 is an overhead-view run-and-gun shooter that brings to mind arcade classics like Commando and Total Carnage. It doesn't take itself very seriously, and the between-level dialogue sequences are actually pretty entertaining." Game Pick: 'Super Strict Farmer' (Benjamin, browser) "Made for the most recent Ludum Dare, Super Strict Farmer did rather well in the polls for a reason: it's hyper-addictive. At first glance, it looks like your average turn-based hardcore farming simulator." Game Pick: 'Endless, Nameless' (Adam Cadre, freeware) "Adam Cadre's first new game in years, the excellent Endless, Nameless, is a vast, demanding, fantasy text-adventure that will indeed remind you of the earliest attempts at interactive fiction." Game Pick: 'Save Your Folks!' (ilikescifi, browser) "Save Your Folks! is a short, physics-based, tower-toppling puzzler, where you have to set off the bombs in order to manipulate the tower to fall down without letting any of the debris hit the tiny people, running around at the bottom of the screen." Game Pick: 'Nomolos: Storming the Catsle' (Gradual Games, commercial indie) "From its soundtrack to the background graphics, Nomolos exudes a strong Castlevania vibe -- it's briskly paced, and there's a decent amount of variety in the level design and the boss encounters." Game Pick: 'Fallen City' (Big Robot, freeware) "A cutesy-looking offering that was the result of a commission from Channel 4, Fallen City will have you taking command of a troop of Angries, a blocky cadre of characters, even as you attempt to turn their run-down home into something that their hypothetical children will be proud of." Game Pick: 'It's a tab' (brackcurly, browser) "Brackcurly's top-down adventure It's a tab rightfully earns top marks in both innovation and theme Ludum Dare 23's 'tiny world' competition. Players are sucked into a tiny pixelated world by a mysterious force and must escape before going crazy." Game Pick: 'Lilac.27' (oddgoo, browser) "Lilac.27 is a third person shooter, set on strange, alien planets. You are a cosmonaut named Lilac and you are out to defeat all the galactic vermin." Game Pick: 'Balloon' (nekonote1, browser) "Composed of simple drawings that look as though they came straight out of a children's book, Balloon is one of those pint-sized point & click games that require you to solve the puzzle in each screen before you're allowed to progress to the next." Game Pick: 'Chuck Darwin's Extinction Squad' (PikPok and Adult Swim, commercial indie) "Chuck Darwin's Extinction Squad charges players with rescuing an endless procession of endangered animals by bouncing them to safety via trampoline. It's like a manic version of the Game & Watch game Fire." Game Pick: 'Gratuitous Tank Battles' (Positech Games, commercial indie) "Described as 'not-exactly-a-sequel' to Positech's previous game Gratuitous Space Battles, Gratuitous Tank Battles takes a more active approach to combat, blending elements from the strategy, simulation, and tower defense genres." Game Pick: 'Pendulous' (Do Better Games, commercial indie) "Boasting a unique clockwork theme, Pendulous challenges players to swing from anchors and roll across shifting pipes throughout fourteen included worlds."