Facade is an artificial intelligence experiment by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. Within this architecture they have built a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, in which the player experiences a story from a first-person perspective.

The character you play is a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Tripfs marriage. No one is safe as the accusations fly, sides are taken and irreversible decisions are forced to be made. By the end of this intense one-act play you will have changed the course of Grace and Tripfs lives, motivating you to re-play the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out differently the next time.

Somewhere between a video game and a drama, Facade takes advantage of voice acting and a 3-D environment, as well as natural language processing and other advanced artificial intelligence routines to provide a robust interactive fiction experience. Using full typed sentences the player can coach the couple through their troubles or drive them to be more distant from each other.

This work is unlike hypertext narrative or interactive fiction to date in that the computer characters actively perform the story without waiting for you to click on a link or enter a command. Interaction is seamless as you converse in natural language and move and gesture freely within the first-person 3D world of Grace and Tripfs apartment. AI controls Grace and Tripfs personality and behavior, including emotive facial expressions, spoken voice and full-body animation. Furthermore, the AI intelligently chooses the next story 'beat' based on your moment-by-moment interaction, what story beats have happened so far, and the need to satisfy an overall dramatic arc.

The player can take an active role in the conversation, pushing the topic one way or another to provide an interactive stage-play. These stage-plays are saved as scripts which can be saved after the game is finished.

In Alter Ego, you start off the game by answering a few questions to deduce your personality. Gameplay basically revolves around the use of a tree diagram. You can choose life experiences to explore from this diagram by clicking on the icons. These are social, intellectual, emotional, physical and familial (faces, brain, heart, x-ray and family, in that order).

The hourglass describes your current stage in life and the bar chart shows some stats about your alter ego.

Noiz2sa is another excellent shooter from Kenta Cho that features abstract shapes to shoot at. It doesn't sound particularly interesting at first but once you dig in you'll find that it is just as addictive to play as the rest of his games.

The red dot located inside your ship is the object that you need to protect from an endless barrage of bullets. Each stage consists of ten sections, and your current progress is conveniently displayed on the top right. A boss awaits at the end of each level if you manage to survive that long.

flOw's play structure and aesthetic design are simple and intuitive. The player begins the game as a small, white, worm-like microorganism on a bright, two-dimensional plane. Using the mouse, the player can guide the worm. Clicking and holding down on the left mouse button accelerates the speed of the worm.

The objective of the game is to guide the worm to eat other microorganisms and evolve. While many of these microorganisms are defenseless, there are certain types of multicellular organisms that will attack the worm. To defeat these enemies, the player must guide the worm to eat the glowing cells that make up the bodies of the enemies. Different types of enemies have different ways of attacking the worm, so the player must determine a particular strategy to defeat each one.

Early on in the game, the worm swims in brighter, shallow waters. To progress into deeper waters, the worm must eat red microorganisms. Alternatively, blue microorganisms enable the player to backtrack. Players are capable of customizing the physical appearance of their organism based on the gameplay.

There are currently two creatures available to play. The first is the worm phase in which the player's avatar evolves into a multi-segmented worm. If the worm defeats the last, worm-like enemy on the final bottom level, the worm floats to the top, is reborn as an infant jellyfish creature and the background screen changes from blue to orange. If the jellyfish replays all levels it will return to the surface and begin life again as a worm but not before fighting a boss, which turns out to be the first worm-like creature you were previously.

Continuity is a puzzle platformer in which you have to arrange pieces of a level while playing to reach the key that will unlock the exit door. You can switch between sliding tiles and moving your character around at any time (by pressing the space key), although players won't be allowed to pass from one card to another if the corridors going out of each don't match.

There are roughly thirty levels to figure out in total.

Elements is a strategy-based fantasy card game that features both single-player and online multiplayer modes, deck building options, and no micropayments needed for acquiring new cards.

There are twelve elements to specialize in, and you can customize your deck even further after winning matches and spinning for rare cards. The objective of the game is basically to reduce your opponent's hit points to zero and win the duel before he does the same to you. An elemental master can also lose the duel if he or she runs out of cards to play.

The tutorial does a great job of easing new players in quickly. You begin each round by placing pillars to generate quantums, which are then used to cast spells or summon creatures to do your bidding. A white bar will appear under the quantum cost of a card if you have enough quantums of the right colour to put the card into play.

Fractal Fighter is a new vertical shooter by cactus which features a limited palette of only two colors. Each boss consists of different weapon parts that the player has to destroy in sequence, randomly created using a tree generation code. A commendable effort especially when considering that the author spent less than a day to create the entire game from ground up.

Unlike some of the popular multiplayer RPGs these days, Jick (real name Zack Johnson) first created Kingdom of Loathing as a simple game that had stick figures for character illustrations, seemingly random items and odd combat encounters with inhabitants of the land. KoL now boasts over a hundred thousand active users - an amazing achievement for a game which looks and plays exactly the same way as when it started out five years ago.

Nomltest FS is one of the best Space Invaders clone you'll ever play, although you won't think it likely from looking at the screenshot. Although the graphics are nothing special, what makes Nomltest FS unique and addictive are the cool gameplay modes. Best of these is the 'eat bullet' feature. You can 'eat' enemy bullets by capturing them, and holding down both shoot keys expands your eat radius (although slowing you down). Shooting bigger enemies are worth more points, but you can get huge bonus points from clearing whole waves of smaller enemy ships.

While the graphics is not much to look at, the gameplay is very fast and furious, and the music is quite catchy.

rhacp is a brilliant variation of Snake by Crostar, a regular 3Punge competition participant and also the creator of Round and Round. This particular effort uses 3D models, but retains much of the gameplay elements from the original.

The objective of the game is basically to swallow other enemies which resemble shorter versions of your creature. If any of them touches other parts of your snake's body besides the head, mines will begin to appear from the end of it's tail. Touching these mines causes the current game to end instantly.

The number of enemies to eliminate in order to progress is shown at the upper left side of the screen. Collecting all round objects will make every mine in the vicinity disappear, clearing your way when the area is getting a little too crowded.

Only the arrow keys are used to control movement. Press the Z key to start from any level. Continues are unlimited.