The best things in life are free. Sure you need your 40 hour epics, too, but those home grown morsels of gaming can be almost as entertaining. Here’s some of what I’ve been playing this week.

Pixel, the one-man team behind the amazing platform adventure Cave Story released his followup project this week. This one isn’t nearly so ambitious. It’s a low-res grayscale shooter in the Gameboy tradition called Guxt. It’s pretty old school, with no bombs, cheesy shooterpop soundtrack, and gameplay that will make you miss your NES. It’s not the masterpiece that Cave Story was, but it’s good to see Pixel at it again.

You can check out Guxt at Pixel’s site.

Clones and remakes have long been a staple of homebrew gaming, but it’s rare when a remake genuinely adds something to the original formula. There have been a lot of clones of Tempest and Tempest 2000 over the years, but Typhoon 2001 is by far the most faithful and the most fun. It doesn’t really innovate, but it does add a new look that’s clean, polished, and really captures the spirit of Jeff Minter’s Jaguar classic. It could still use some balancing, but the author is still refinining the game. If you’ve never had a chance to play T2K, or just don’t have the Jag around anymore, it’s really not a bad approximation at all. Check it out at the official site.

But my favorite freeware find of the week is a simple little arcade-style game called rhacp. I have no idea what that name means, but it’s an original take on the old “snake game” theme. The goal is to ram the little tadpole creatures with the front of your snake, which will cause it to get longer and longer. You’ll have to avoid your tail as per convention, and you’ll also have to avoid stars that you drop behind. Collecting all the dots on screen will cause the start to convert to dots. From there it becomes a game of survival. The perspective is a bit dizzying, but it couldn’t be more addictive. I’ve played this stupid game for hours this week. Check it out here.

If anyone enjoyed these and wants to see more freeware selections, leave me a comment, and I’ll try to make it a weekly thing.