Rokkitball I applaud for being an original idea, or at least one that people aren't used to. The game is a 3-D multiplayer where you have to guide a ball into an enemy's goal. The catch is that the player with the ball is temporarily unarmed, and everyone else has a rocket launcher they can use to stop the opposing player. The game becomes part team-based FPS and part soccer simulator and was a good thirty minutes of fun.

But as fun as Rokkitball is, it's hard to guess the intended audience. Sports fans? FPS fans? Both? The other games on Instant Action seek to similarly bridge the gap between divergent gaming niches, like casual and hardcore gamers, and the results are likely to be missed by both groups.

, one of the leading voices of casual gaming, describes casual games as historically being "easy to start, free or inexpensive, reveal complexity gradually, not frustrating, offer non-violent themes and have short-play sessions." All of these qualities describe the games on Instant Action, with the exception of the non-violence rule. Yet, the graphical complexity is superior to most casual games and the games' content is focused on genres more associated with hardcore games than casual.

The site's unclassifiable games make them unique, but also lacking in qualities necessary to capture certain shares of the market. Fallen Empire Legion, for example, strikes me as a watered-down version of Tribes 2. But trotting out such knockoffs won't likely draw many of the hardcore crowd. The games aren't complex or original enough to appeal to the hardcore game demographic so they need to stay attractive enough for the casual game audience. And while the last few years have proven that casual gaming is a growing industry and casual games don't necessarily have to be kid-friendly, brightly-colored fluff, I don't know if casual gamers are willing to pop in to Instant Action to spend their time on declawed 3-D action titles.

If some of these games ring familiar, it may be because Instant Action is the work of GarageGames, the purveyors of the multi-platform game development technology Torque Game Engine. Marble Blast, for example, was a free game included on some shipping Macs for a while. And others, like Think Tanks, have been around as Mac shareware for years.