We here at Big Download love indie games. From telling you about them, playing them, or offering downloads for them, we are all about helping lesser-known developers get their name out into the world. Each week on Saturday, we'll give you the Indie Wrap-up, a collection of all the indie news stories and features during the previous week.

There was no big features this week, unfortunately. Most of our staff was gone at E3, after all! Just Freeware Friday was this week. However, the TOJam 2008 competition recently wrapped up, so there's a ton of games that were released this week! Dwarf Fortress also finally got the first update in the Army Arc, adding battles and wars to the historical records of the game.

Features

Freeware Friday: Off-Road Velociraptor Safari James Murff takes Freeware Friday to a new place: browser games.

Okay, so we lied. We had to make another pun, because this one was just too easy. In the TOJam 2008 competitor Cheese Blaster Extreme, you play a man with a large gun whose goal it is to destroy an army of cheese. You can see how our awful puns relate! The game itself is fairly simple, consisting of just mouse control and your goal of killing the oncoming hordes of cheese. You can control a tank along with your regular guy. The character is no pushover either, being armed to the teeth. The graphics and sound are both phenomenal, and the gameplay is just simple arena action, making this a great game to chill with.

We apologize for that pun up there. We just couldn't resist it. We promise it will never happen again. The game itself, Cheese Beats, is a TOJam 2008 competitor with lots of violence and absolutely no puns. We promise! The goal of the game is to beat the cheese against a surface to kill it. After killing the cheese, you must place it on a delicious cracker. The gameplay itself is simple, if silly, but where Cheese Beats really shines in the graphics. They remind us of Don Hertzfeld's Rejected short film, among other various excellent pieces of traditional animation. The game is small download with no install, so have fun.

Following up on their amazing work on Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, Flashbang Studios is working on their newest Unity-powered browser game. Called Minotaur in a China Shop, it has you playing a minotaur whose goal is to destroy all the precious china and shelves in the shop. Once again, it's heavily physics based as well. The trailer (pictured above) shows off some of the physics gameplay with the untextured models. It looks very interesting, and will no doubt be incredibly fun, given Flashbang's pedigree.

[Via IndieGames]

Much like another game we talked about that was a part of the TIGsource Procedural Generation Competition, Cowgirl and Gospelboy ["Sue"] is about surfing along a line while doing some sweet tricks. Unlike sin(surfing) though, Gospelboy dynamically generates the line based on the music. You can either go with the default 2 minute songs or add your own by editing the songs.all file. It's not so much a game as a fun way to relax to your music, almost as if it's a musical screensaver. This TOJam 2008 competitor was also designed and coded by the TOJam founder Nelson Yu. It's a fairly lightweight install, so enjoy!

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

This is a first for me. Over the past few months, I have espoused the virtues of a wide variety of freeware games, from shooters to strategy games. Never, however, have I talked about a browser game. This week marks the first, and definitely not last, time that I'll be showcasing a browser game. When a game is as good as Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, one must share it with everyone. Plus, with most of our staff at E3, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari is perfect for them! Just don't expect many browser games to make it onto Freeware Friday.

We here at Big Download do love a good puzzler, and this one's a doozy. Straight from the TOJam 2008 competition, Goats Amoré is a puzzler that forces you to use parts of your brain you don't normally use. Thankfully, the hilarious sound makes failure funny instead of frustrating. The goal of the game is to chase down the goat on a pogo stick that is dropping all the cheese. However, you can only get by a piece of cheese if you look like it. This seems simple enough, except for the fact that there's 4 different attributes you can change: size, roundedness, color, and texture. It'll tax your brain, but you'll have a blast. We sure did!

Noticing a trend yet? A lot of the TOJam 2008 games use cheese in their graphics, if not gameplay. That's because one of the themes of this year's TOJam competition was that cheese must be somewhere, in any form, in the game. Super Cheese Repulser is another game form this competition, and like a fair bit of the other games, has cheese and mice involved.

It's a same-screen co-op (or single-player, if you have good enough reflexed) browser game where you control two anti-gravity generators. You must push the cheese using the generators over to the mousetrap, where a random animation will play to get rid of a mouse that eats your cheese. It's a very simple maze/puzzler game, but it's a blast to play and a browser game to boot!

Chu Chu Rocket has always been a puzzler classic. Guiding your mice to the rocket and away from the cats in real-time was an extremely simple but very compelling way to challenge the mind. Mousetrap Mania, a TOJam 2008 competitor, plays much like that classic, with a slight twist. You must guard your cheese for a precious 3 minutes against the mouse horde. You can do this by luring the mice onto mousetraps scattered around the level. Once again, it's and extremely simple but incredibly fun and compelling experience. The added nuance of luring and eliminating mice only makes it that much better!

A casual puzzle game is always great for a little relaxation when stress is starting to get to you. There's quite a few of them out there, many being of rather dubious quality. TTC Crowd Control is not one of those. It is a casual puzzle game that you will relish every moment you play it. A TOJam 2008 competitor, its heavily stylized artwork and compelling puzzle gameplay make it an instant classic.

You must click and drag people to put them into their seats, get them out of the subway car, and rearrange them as needed. Some people don't like being next to others, so remember that when placing them. Also, a passenger with a ! above their head wants to get off at the next stop. There's no horrible penalty for messing up, and any points lost for an incorrect decision can be regained merely by correcting the mistake. It's an excellent way to relax and work out your mind at the same time!

With all this talk of TOJam 2008 games, we thought we'd share with you a blast from the past. Specifically, one of the games from the TOJam 2007 competition. Quiver is a Gauntlet-like game where one player controls an archer fighting off a horde of zombies created by the other player. Not only that, but it's also same-screen multiplayer and the developers are working on an improved version.

The gameplay is rather dynamic for a top-down RPG shooter. Here's why. The archer is controlled using the mouse and can go anywhere that the player right clicks on. To fire, he must simply left click. As zombies are killed, the archer gains experience and therefore new levels and skills. The dungeon master (the player creating the zombies) can create them in just about any combination anywhere on the board. Want 9 level 5 zombies in the top right to spawn in 9 seconds? Go for it! It's a lot of fun, especially when you and your friend are just fooling around.

Jesse Venbrux, that purveyor of pernicious, punishing platformers, has released a new game. Pazzon is a decidedly retro platformer that reminds us a lot of the surreal stylings of Brain-Damaged Toon Underworld. However, while Brain-Damaged Toon Underworld is still in production, Pazzon is available for consumption right now.

The game is a simple story-based platformer. You must jump around inside a dream, talking to inhabitants along the way. The sound and art design are both excellent, especially in the color contrast of the environments. Everything is also simple geometric shapes, which lends a very minimalist air to the entire game. In short, another excellent game from Venbrux.

[Via IndieGames]

There some games that are just impossibly fun to play with a friend. Cheese is WAR! is one of those amazing multiplayer games. Featuring some excellent use of physics, an interesting art style, and charming sound effects, it's a miracle that this TOJam 2008 competitor didn't get some kind of honors. But when you are competing against such a large plethora of other great games, sometimes it's hard to get recognition.

Cheese is WAR! is a multiplayer-only game where two rats try and topple a tower of cheese onto the other rat. The tower has weak points and reacts fluidly, making the game just as entertaining to watch as to play. The tower designs are also reminiscent of the Tower of Goo project. As long as you aren't touching cheese, you'll be fine. If you touch cheese, you lose one heart. Lose all your hearts, and the opponent wins. It's that simple! Just keep in mind that your projectiles sometimes explode and that cheese strands can be severed.

We do love a good business game, and that's why Der Baron Von UberCheesen Cheese Factory intrigues us so much. A competitor in the TOJam 2008 competition, it has pixel art reminiscent of the old Incredible Machine games. That's never a bad thing. Featuring a business-oriented gameplay model, it's a rather interesting strategy game to waste some time in. Your goal is to create a profitable cheese factory for the Baron, utilizing conveyors and machines to create your desired output. It plays very much like your typical tycoon game, only you're doing it with beautiful pixel artwork and an evil baron looming over your shoulder.

We've yet to run across a game with such a strange, yet oddly compelling art style as Office Smash. Featuring a strange, vivisected sort of art along with an interface reminiscent of an office workplace located somewhere in Salvador Dali's mind, this TOJam 2008 competitor easily wins over the part of us that loves the macabre and bizarre. Plus, there's no goal! We do love a good sandbox game.

Office Smash is a browser game that utilizes the Unity player to great effect. Taking your character, the diligent office worker, you must destroy as much of the cubicle as possible before your skinless alien overlord boss fires you. Everything is destructible, from the books down to the desk itself. It's a great little physics sandbox, and highly recommended to anyone with some time to waste. At least, anyone who isn't creeped out by the surreal.