If you've downloaded the free demos from the Playstation Network(PSN), I bet there's a few games that you kind of liked but can't be bothered to pay $10 for. I know I felt that way about a few games and my patience has been rewarded. I just paid five bucks each for The Last Guy, Pixel Junk Eden, and echochrome: all quality games that are starting to wash out the pretentious taste of Shadows that have been Lingering in my PS3's hard drive. The PSN often has sales like this so if you're not sure whether or not you want a title you hear about or try, just wait a little bit and you're sure to see another deal like this. At $5 these games aren't much of a risk and can be a relief to anyone who just bought a PS3 and understandably hasn’t the money left to buy themselves a $70 game. The PSN is also a good place to find games that don't fit into the usual popular genres of simulators, shooters, and racers.

I would've gladly paid $10 for echocrome if I wasn't so indecisive. Imagine that Sony resurrected brilliant nutjob M.C. Escher and hired his zombie to design a game with the same brilliant nutjobs who created locoroco. It's a 3D puzzle involving a mannequin (one of those wooden human models used by artists) who walks along a set path in an environment you manipulate. The trick is to shift your perspective of the environment to get the figure to all the checkpoints. Perspective is the most important thing to keep in mind with echocrome because as you shift the environment, some paths will merge and break, while holes/jumps will be uncovered or blocked. Considering how visual they are, it’s surprising how few games play with optical illusions. It’s good to know that there’s at least one that makes them the central point. I know it sounds like it could become too busy and annoying to pay attention to but that never becomes a problem as the art style is minimalist while the puzzle design is very complex as indicated by the template-like protagonist. In fact the blankness is one of my only complaints: this game is a moving line drawing on a white background. Although it's got plenty of style that will mesmerize you, you’ll find it hard to play for a half hour without incurring some form of snow-blindness. It would've been nice to see a "negative" video option: black background with a chalky white drawing. It also gets frustrating when the game gets picky and won't connect two paths you're trying to join. If you still can't understand what the hell I'm going on about, try the demo. The only thing the demo won't give you a good idea of is the level editor which is simple enough as long as the level you have planned is simple enough, so don't expect savethezombies created levels for a while.

Another game I was eager to get in my hard drive was Q-games' Pixel Junk Eden. The demo of their previous game (Pixel Junk Monsters) was one of the first things I played on the PS3 and the first PSN game I bought, when it too went on sale several months ago. It's understandable that I first mistook Q-games (started by the mind behind the original Star Fox and Ape Escape) for Q-Entertainment (the guys behind such trippy titles as Rez and Lumines) when you look at their names and the kind of weird/pomo games they both make. Eden is definitely a completely different creature from Monsters however in both gameplay and style. Try to imagine the original Bionic Commando crossbred with flOw and the phantasmagoric look of Rez. You play what looks like a little sea monkey that can jump and swing around from a thin piece of silk. You mostly swing around "gardens" collecting pollen and activating new plants to open up the level to further exploration. The goal is collecting: each "garden" has a few "spectra" (glowing flowers) to collect in order to move on but you'll find yourself sometimes just wanting to laze about the garden swinging and exploring rather than reaching for any sort of specific goals. This game looks amazing in HD and while it is fun enough to warrant a $10 purchase for me, it's weird enough that I would recommend for anyone else to try the demo before plunking down even $5.

The other game I decided to pick up was The Last Guy: a great title for anyone who's looked at their city on Google maps and tried to imagine it all being destroyed by monsters. It's a fun post-apocalyptic Pac-Man re-imagining that uses real satellite maps of real cities (though not specifically from Google Maps, I thought it was at first) as the labyrinths for your hero to navigate. What your Pac-guy has to do is run around the maps collecting dots... survivors hiding from zombified humans and giant pests: zombie-bugs, zombie-frogs, and even zombie-mold which is no doubt a byproduct of leaving a banana in a Star Wars lunch-box over a summer: I’ve seen it happen. As you collect more survivors they begin to trail behind you like some sort of freaky paranoia parade of the apocalypse that screams and shakes your controller when a monster draws too close. You then must drag the growing caterpillar of horrified survivors back to an area of town cordoned off as the escape zone before a monster sneaks up and scatters them back into the nearby buildings and other hiding holes. However, before you bring them back, you usually have to drag your 1000 man mob to a barrier that you can only get through with a certain amount of evacuees at your back or march them around a building whose residents are too stubborn to leave without a huge show of force. The problem is that as much as I like playing across a satellite image map, the background sometimes gets too busy for you to see approaching zombies, some of whom are also very tiny. It doesn't become a huge problem until you hit the Stop powerup at which time you can't even see the enemy move. A few powerups are also random and can sometimes make later boards unbeatable if they aren't available in the right spots. Overall it's a really fun game and definitely worth five bucks. It would've been worth the original $10 price if it had a few more maps and fixed some of the more frustrating gameplay problems.

While I don't think digital distribution is exactly the wave of the future, anyone who's been curious about some of those PSN games but worried that they won’t be able to re-sell the shovelware, need to keep all eyes peeled for sales like this. I know there's little draw for even good titles like these when they're competing for your attention against big swingers like Resistance 2 but you'd be doing yourself a disservice by missing out on some finely crafted games at a price you can get behind. Sure they don't all have specific genres (or genres that haven't been popular for 20 years) but after you went straight from Resistance to Resistance 2, you may feel like you need a break from the first person perspective. If these descriptions seem a bit too vague, I recommend downloading the free demos of any of these titles to get a good hard look at how vague these games really are. Though they're fun, there's a good reason they're $10 or less. If none of the titles above win you over, well, you may just want to stick with the big budget titles that come burned onto a disc because this is really the best they have to offer on PSN.