Rescue: The Beagles

This Is An example of just how dramatic a game name can be when coupled with intelligent colon placement. Rescue: The Beagles was developed for - and subsequently won - Pie Independent Gaming Source's Procedural Generation Competition (tigsource.com/features/ pgc), which challenged freeware game designers to create a game that makes new content every time it starts. If you look around, you'll see not one, but four of these games have wormed their way into this month's Freeware. Rescue: The Beagles stands above the rest in its delicious polish, addictiveness and sheer pulse-pounding feel.

Pie story is thus: a cargo plane carrying a shipment of beagles to the dastardly CutLab animal testing facility in the Amita Range has crashed, and a pair of plucky animal rights activists have been dispatched to save the stranded beagles from CutLab employees looking to take them back.

Pie game is set across three moving mountain ranges, with little beagles toddling around seemingly ignorant of their peril. You have to jump between these ranges, using parachutes and ropes to scale or drop large distances, taking care not to fall to your death. Oddly, letting a beagle run off the screen or touch an enemy also kills you.

On the way, you pick up owls that can be used as weapons against CutLab employees. These guys range from the scary-sounding yet bumbling Biohazard Doodz, with their horrible mechanical voices, to the genuinely terrifying Vivisectors, who chase down the beagles and scream "DOGGIES!" in a voice that can only be described as ball-quaking.

Not only does Rescue: The Beagles have a delightful visual style, it also has a great soundtrack, with thick, juicy 8-bit tones that give the game a deliciously bassy excitement, so much so that on my first few playthroughs, I managed to die because I was so pumped up by the music. Woof!