In Yume Nikki (Dream Diary), you're cast as a young girl living in a small apartment. There is very little to do in your room, but fall asleep and an entire dream world is yours to explore. The Z key can be used to interact or gain new effects. Certain locations beyond each door may yield more than one effect for the player to discover. Press 9 to wake yourself up. Use the desk in the room to save your progress, and hold the escape key for more than two seconds to exit the NASU console game.

Acquiring the bicycle, lamp and knife should be at the top of your list, as these items will double your character's speed, light up dark areas and allow basic attack moves to be executed. Nearly all locations are wrapped around, hence walking in one direction endlessly will always bring you back to the starting point.

Installation instructions are provided in the zip file. Dream Diary does have a proper ending.

Cave Story is a freeware sidescrolling platformer title created by Daisuke Amaya, art-name Pixel. You control a cute little amnesiac who runs around helping out these rabbit-ish creatures called Mimigas while trying to find your way out of the giant cave inside the floating island which makes up the game's setting.

You can expand your health meter by collecting Life Capsules in similar fashion to Metroid games, while you can get stronger by collecting energy to boost your firearms' output. Each weapon can be built up to the maximum level fairly quickly, but taking damage will drain energy from its experience meter, sometimes causing it to level down. Given how quickly they power up this only tends to be an issue during boss fights, and even then there's usually plenty of opportunities for collecting more weapon energy.

The game has loads of secrets, too. For a freeware Japanese platformer, it's fairly lengthy and has quite a large amount of text. We're also talking three very different endings, plenty of plot, and quite a cast of charming characters. It really is a superb little gem.

Yahtzee continues to impress with 1213 Episode 2, a platformer made using the AGS engine. Our clueless protagonist can now be made to run by holding down the shift key, and the environment is no longer limited to a grayish shade.

There is some backtracking as 1213 can only carry one item at any moment, but fortunately less time is required to travel from place to place thanks to his newfound ability.

Pen Pen Xmas Olympics is a skiing game with seventeen events consisting of slaloms, downhill races and ski jumps. In the first two categories, players must attempt to reach the end of each track under the qualifying time to progress or lose a credit if they fail.

Use the cursor keys to control the protagonist's speed or direction of travel, and press the space key to jump over obstacles.

Dirty Split is a point and click adventure game in the style of LucasArts' Monkey Island series, featuring gorgeous artwork, a catchy soundtrack, professional voice acting and decent writing. Take control of a private investigator named Baxter as you attempt to solve a criminal case, which will require trips between three different cities in order to gather new clues and evidence.

Torque is a new arena shooter by the developer of Frozzd and the Karoshi series, where players assume control of a rotating ship engaged in an intergalactic war with a nameless alien race. Use the cursor keys to move, hold the Z key to concentrate your fire in one direction, and press the space key to pause. The F4 function key can be used to switch between windowed and full screen mode.

Note that the multiplier resets back to one whenever you lose a ship.

Ablation is basically a four color vertical shooter with an interesting concept. Touching a white bomb neutralizes all projectiles, while activating a black one destroys every object in range. Collect power-ups for a firepower upgrade. Hold the control, Z or space key to shoot, and use the function keys numbered 5 and 6 to switch window sizes. Press the P key to pause the game.

Black pixels do no damage, though contact with a white pixel will cause your ship to lose one power-up degree. Destroy an enemy's weak point for a special core bonus.

Musagi is a fairly sophisticated music editor and synthesizer which is more polished than most shareware or commercial products available in the market. The program comes with a broad range of instruments, from predefined retro sounds that can be customized to a MIDI interface and a WAV sampler.

Even if you're not a composer and do not hook up your musical instrument to record tunes on your PC or use the keyboard to play them, you can ignore the more advanced sound-editing features and start composing a nice melody right away.

Be sure to read the text file in the documentation folder, then check out the nicely written step-by-step tutorial that will guide you in composing your very first tune. - Lim-Dul

Flywrench is a short action game by Mark Essen which involves using the cursor keys to navigate around mazes. Tap the up arrow key repeatedly to fly upwards, or hold the down arrow key to row. Use the left and right arrow keys to direct your ship's direction.

Certain obstacles can only be passed through by holding down an arrow key. Later levels include moving obstacles or switches, but restarts are quick so very little time is spent on waiting for your ship to respawn.

Iji is an action platformer which took Daniel Remar four years to make, where players assume control of the titular character as she learns how to cope with waking up to find her world taken over by an alien race. Guided by her brother who speaks through the research complex's loudspeaker system, she has to find a way to convince an alien leader to retreat and save humankind from total annihilation.

Iji's skills can be upgraded by acquiring nanofields left behind by the aliens, then spent on cyborg stations to increase any of her seven basic stats. You can only acquire a maximum of five nano points per sector, and one nano point is awarded whenever your nano gauge reaches its limit.

Progress is saved automatically after the completion of each Sector, but not before boss fights. This is also one of the very few games which offers multiple storyline paths in relation to how much the player resorts to violence when dealing with the adversities they face. There are ten sectors to play through in total, not inclusive of the secret levels which can only be unlocked once certain requirements have been fulfilled.