Renegade-X is a reworking of the original, awful Command & Conquer: Renegade, Westwood’s ambitious FPS with RTS acne. I’m downloading the just released short single-player preview, “Operation Black Dawn”, from the official torrent, and we’ll make brain thinks into words about its UDK-based goodness another day. In the meantime, here’s the download link and video, strategically placed below.

The current download is just a peek, with a short single-player campaign to tide you over until the multiplayer release. There’s a lot of bluster in this video, about redefining entire genres, but it does look pretty and with a cool name like “Renegade-X” you kind of have to be all: “we’re making it the best thing since that last thing that was also good”. Grab it here.

Smudged Cat Games have decided to release a Windows version of the classic time travel game, Timeslip,… completely for free. You can download the game here

Indie platformer A Walk In The Dark has a cat rescuing a lost little girl in a dark, fantasy world; the quarter of Dexter that John owns once lost a fight with his own feet (my bit was obviously the winner there). I see now why they had to place the game in a gothic forest: as a cat owner of four years, I wouldn’t believe the skills he shows off in the trailer below.

Side-scrolling, sillouhettey lovliness seems like an effect that indie developers lean on, but the results here are perfectly pleasing as the cat leaps over spikes and flips gravity in VVVVVV fashion. He sproings rather neatly over spikey things, and gracefully hops from wall-to-wall and floor to ceiling. It reminds me of the time that Dexter ate a tapeworm that he’d just extruded. Good times.

Want to help the kitty pursue the ancient evil through the gothic forest? All we have is a vague 2012 release date. Why not rescue a real one, instead? You can pretent the shelter is a gothic forest, and the administration people are ancient demons.

Haunt, his Kinect-exclusive ghost-’em-up developed with help from the UK’s Zoe Mode, is wonderfully silly and deliciously camp. It’s also sort of scary, but not in the blood-soaked manner we’ve come to expect.

This is horror as you experienced it as a kid. It’s a theme-park haunted house, full of cheesy “boo” moments that make you jump even as you’re rolling your eyes. It’s Vincent Price in a cape, not Jason Voorhees with a machete. It’s Halloween (the holiday) not Halloween (the movie). It’s about that enjoyable chill up the spine followed by a giggle at how daft it all is.

You’re playing as some hapless stooge, lured to a crumbling mansion. Inside, the spirit of the former owner, a corpulent fellow named Benjy, is trapped in the mansion’s many paintings. He needs your help to retrieve four “phantaflasks” for an arcane machine that will free him from his two-dimensional prison.

Important disclosure: AVSEQ is created by Big Robot, the indie game dev company owned by one Jim Rossignol. Rossignol was, of course, responsible for the Crimean War and has a police record due to admitting to the kidnap of 18 hobos in 2002. Apart from that, I can’t think of anything whatsoever that needs declaring about Rossignol before I post about Big Robot’s first released game, AVSEQ.

The near-infinite sounds and combos of abstract musical puzzle game AVSEQ are primarily the design and creation of Big Robot’s programmer Tom ‘Nullpointer’ Betts, so don’t expect too many traces of Rossignism in this one (although he’s been helping out with tweaks), but it is the studio’s very first release, and it is jolly clever, as you’ll see below.

Yes, the latest in a long line of labour machinery-based sims you would never dream existed is Airport Firefighter Simulator, in which you are all that stands in front of certain, explosive disaster. Quotes like this are simply amazing: “Even the most routine duties of aircraft refuelling and cargo management carry the chance of conflagration so you must always be on your guard to prevent a minor incident becoming a major inferno.”

Omigodomigodomigod. What could such a game possibly be like in action?

Awesome. In so many ways: awesome.

The endearingly titled Here Comes Launchman is the retro equivalent of a cat rolling about at your feet as it’s purring and looking up at you with it’s big, wet eyes: the trailer makes me want to pick it up and snuggle it.

It has everything: a simple colour palate, chiptunes, improbably surreal level design that only ever existed in the world of 8-bit platformers. Very catlike, indeed. I’d almost suggest it was trying to hard, but that would be mean and I can’t even begin to be negative about it. Instead I’ll be factual and then excited: it’s a physics-based platformer, where you guide the little guy around Puzzle Planet. Time to excitedly gesture towards the video they’ve just released, showing the complicated mouse-flinging you’ll have to achieve to toss the little chappy through those levels. Oh look, there it is there!

It’ll be out this year. I know what I’ll be doing in one of the 343 days left this year.

The puzzle-stealth-action platformer Warp will kick off Microsoft’s Xbox Live House Party, an annual lineup of weekly downloadable games, the Xbox 360 maker said Monday.

Warp will launch for Xbox Live on February 15 at 800 Microsoft Points ($10). Publisher Electronic Arts said it will be downloadable on the PlayStation 3 and PC on March 13, also at $10./p>

Every game has at least one mod that will push their fans to the brink of uninstallling and having a shower. This is Skyrim’s, I fear. We should have known it was out there, we should have protected ourselves. But it’s too late. I’m sorry.

Puddle is a physics based puzzle platform game from the winner of GDC 2010′s Independent Games Festival Student Showcase Division.

This IGF-winning puzzle game sees players guide a number of different liquids through stages by tilting the environment. Players must channel fuel to rocket pads, safely dispose of radioactive fluid and follow water as it makes its way through the human body. Puddle will support motion controls through the Move controller or Sixaxis on PlayStation 3.