In one word, DeathSpank is staid. Heck, it might as well be a platonic form: the action-RPG-est action-RPG out there. Whether this will appeal to you is largely a matter of genre allegiance, because it’s good for the polish and bad for the novelty. Either way, DeathSpank is a solid game if you’re in the market to hit things and level up.

Are you passively suicidal, but just don’t know how to take that single step to go pro? Dejobaan Games has found a way to literally do just that. Share their Reckless Disregard for Gravity by stepping off future superstructures without the inconvenience of permanent death. Wrap that up with the highest tier comedy writing, and this game will delight casual and hardcore gamers alike. So throw yourself off something tall. It’s fun!

Strange Attractors 2 is a top-down game about navigating an avatar from place to place using attraction and repulsion mechanics. It wasn’t the only game in the PAX 10 to use the environment to pull and push the player around, but it was the only one to use gravity to model those forces. So instead of using specially designated objects, everything in the environment pulls and pushes everything else. Controlling the game is like controlling the gravitational constant. It defaults to 0, but you can turn it up high, or flip it into negative numbers using the two mouse buttons.

We talked to Christoper McGarry of Ominous Development about how Strange Attractors 2 grew out of the first game, their distribution model, and the charmingly tortured cries of the game’s enemies. Hit the jump for all that and then check out the demo.

Longtime readers may recall a post bemoaning that cooperative multiplayer is hard to come by and harder to do right. Schizoid disagrees. It’s a top-down two-player game where each player controls either a red or a blue avatar. Enemies are color-coded too, and colliding with like-colored baddies destroys them while other colors destroy you instead. You arguably could control both avatars (and there’s a game mode called Überschizoid that lets you try just that: one analog stick per avatar), but it’s not recommended unless your corpus callosum has been severed.

Schizoid is presently available on XBox Live, though the XBLA strictures on demos don’t allow multiplayer. Still, you can fake it by grabbing a significant other and snuggling together to share one controller on Überschizoid, so give it a shot anyway.

We talked to Schizoid’s Richard Garfield about the game’s roots, cooperative gaming in general, and digital distribution. Hit the jump for the details.

Four Swords was a grand ambition that created a uniquely fun social environment and foreshadowed DS wireless connectivity. Sadly, the charmingly retro graphics, bitterly competitive gameplay, and clever use of hardware peripherals were completely overshadowed by technical kludge and ridiculous expense.

The game follows the exploits of traveling salesman, brain aficionado, and zombie everyman Stubbs as he chews his way through the 50′s town of Punchbowl. Along the way, he makes friends (the hard way) and undergoes a journey of personal discovery where he learns that most of his body parts explode when thrown.