Best Of Indie Games: Red Herrings and Yellow Post-it Notes

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog editor Tim W. rounds up some of the week's top free-to-download and commercial indie games, plus notable features on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.] 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 goodies in this edition include an experimental shooter from a former IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize winner, a building demolition simulator, a noir-style typing game, and a hotseat multiplayer game created by the developer of Mighty Jill Off. Other highlights include an arcade shooter with unpredictable yet beautiful enemy wave patterns, and a score-based action game that involves tapping the forehead of your unfortunate female companion for points. Here are the top titles for the week: Game Pick: 'Post I.T. Shooter' (Petri Purho, freeware) "Created for the Experimental Gameplay Project, Post I.T. Shooter has a stop-motion thing going on involving post-it notes and it works so well. Basically it’s a low resolution shooter with a stop motion-esque rendering, featuring randomly-generated enemy space invaders that will appear on screen one after another. There's not much to it gameplay-wise, but who cares when the game is that incredibly amazing to look at." Game Pick: 'Demolition City' (Joey Betz, browser) "Another physics-based tumbler by the guy who brought us Crush the Castle. Demolition City is all about blowing stuff up, and you can't really say no to that. On each of the twenty levels, the idea is to place dynamite on the structure, then press the BOOM button and watch it fall. The rubble must fall below the displayed line and not collide with any of the surrounding buildings. Short but good fun." Game Pick: 'The Great Red Herring Chase' (Greg Wohlwend and Jacob Grahn, browser) "In The Great Herring Chase, you play a detective who is trying to track down the head of a criminal organization. This will require catching his henchmen and interrogating them one at a time, so that they would cough up information that will lead you to the next suspect. At the start of each scene both you and the informant will be in two separate vehicles. You won't be able to do any driving, but you can direct the cab driver to drive faster or make simple turns by typing in the commands as shown at the bottom part of the screen." Game Pick: 'Octopounce' (Anna Anthropy and Saelee Oh, freeware) "Octopounce is a multiplayer experience for up to four players and it's recommended that you grab at least one friend before sitting down with it. The objective is to use your fellow octopodes to bounce high and grab as many fish as possible. There isn't really any scoring system however, and the game never ends, so it's more of a fun little mess-around which feels slightly Mario-like in its execution. The inclusion of a text ticker scrolling along the bottom handing out comments on your game is a nice touch too." Game Pick: 'sqr' (Andy Wolff, freeware) "Andy Wolff has created an incredibly erratic and confusing shmup in sqr which is simple yet quite beautiful looking. Made completely out of squares, your ship will automatically fire randomly around the screen at the incoming enemies. Part of its charm is the way in which the enemies appear to approach in such an indecisive manner, yet now and again they'll form pathways for your ship to drive through, then suddenly turn nasty and surround your ship. It's a bit like watching one of those simple artificial life simulators." Game Pick: 'KOI2' (Party-Tencho, browser) "KOI2 is a score-based arcade game created by the developers of Kissma, where players are required to tap the forehead of their partner as many times as they can before time runs out. A rather bland concept if not for the power-ups, of which there are plenty of it. By collecting a special item you are temporarily bestowed with a random ability to use and a costume change to match the theme as well."