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Simple Side-Scrollers

• And Yet It Moves

Side-scrollers are the 2D games, epitomized by Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog in their younger days. But mention them to newer gamers who cut their teeth on 3D action games like Castle Wolfenstein, and you'll get only a blank stare. I mean, blanker than usual. And Yet It Moves offers proof that simple 2D side-scrolling games still have plenty to offer.

The typical side-scroller puts a character in an underground labyrinth from which they must escape by running, jumping, and solving the occasional puzzle. And Yet It Moves similarly starts off with a young man trapped in a cavern. Instead of being made out of the usual Lego-like blocks and hackneyed texture mats--so 20th century--this cave is fashioned from crumpled paper. The character is made from simple line drawings.

Despite its simple graphics, And Yet It Moves is not a simplistic game. It makes gravity a key element by allowing you to rotate the world. (That explains the title, which is based on Galileo's defiant heretical claim that the earth revolves.) A false turn can send our young hero plummeting onto spiked rocks or put him in the trajectory of a falling boulder. In the second level, solving puzzles requires an understanding of the laws of physics evoked by each turn of the earth. The game is clever in concept and ground-breaking in design.

• Flow

Even more abstract and just as fascinating is Flow. This game is reminiscent of Edwin A. Abbott's classic Flatland, a mathematical novel about creatures in a world where a third dimension is unknown. Flow is certainly the most relaxing game you will ever play that involves killing other creatures. In it, you are some sort of microscopic life form that looks vaguely like the petroglyphs drawn by cliff-dwelling tribes. You swim though a primordial soup looking for smaller forms of microscopic life to consume. Your goal is simple: Eat and evolve. Other creatures are obeying the same primordial mandate, of course, and they're bigger than you are. There are no sudden movements, and the mechanics of the play assure that each move made by the abstracted creatures is as graceful as the soothing background music, even while they are being eaten.

• Double Wires

The best part of the Spider-Man movies is when Spidey shoots webbing around so he can swing from one building to another. If your swing gene is itching, scratch it with Double Wires, a Macromedia Shockwave game you don't even have to download to play--though you may need to download the Shockwave player. Double Wires has a sparsely drawn, vaguely humanoid figure who also can shoot sticky strands from his wrists as he swings among abstract blobs. You shoot the strands by placing your cursor on a blob and clicking. It's harder than it sounds. And more fun, too. Think of it as a game that offers only the good part.

• Tumiki Fighters

Like Rrootage below, Tumiki Fighters comes from Japan by way of ABA Games and the Acid-Play free game site. (Check it out!) In this side-scroller, you pilot a fighter plane headed in one direction while fending off enemy planes of all sizes going the other way. You shoot. They shoot back.

Sounds pretty conventional. What makes it outstanding is the artwork, in which everything is constructed out of the simple shapes of kids' virtual blocks. Each time you destroy an enemy aircraft, it falls apart. Any parts that you can scoop up become part of your airplane--no matter how unaerodynamic it may appear--and adds to your firepower.

• Fly Guy

Fly Guy is a laid-back side-scroller that has absolutely no point--which is the point. It is simply about a character who soars without need for balloons, planes, or feathers. The antithesis of today's 3D photorealistic games, Fly Guy consists of black-and-white line drawings that look as if they were created by James Thurber. (The humorist's art style was so simple that after he became blind he could still draw dogs, provided someone else made a dot for the dog's eye.) Fly Guy features a balding, portly man in a suit with pants hitched up who looks '30s-ish--the decade, not the age. He starts off bored, waiting at a bus stop. But as soon as you start playing with the arrow keys, he rises in the air with a gracefulness that belies his every pudge.

As a sprightly piano plays on the sound track, you guide Fly Guy among clouds, a duck, an ever-wise holy man, a boxer, and an alien on a flying saucer, with whom Fly Guy trades some guitar licks. There's not a whole lot more to it, just a few surprises and more creatures and objects floating through the air--or water. It depends. The game has the look of an elaborate, interactive New Yorker cartoon. The whole experience is so wry and laid-back that it makes snails seem hyperactive.