Charlie the Duck

With no music, primitive sounds, and low-res (though colorful) graphics, the 10-year-old Charlie the Duck comes off as an inferior copycat of Super Mario Bros. As the aforementioned duck, you run around the sideways-scrolling landscape, collecting gems and avoiding hostile creatures--or jumping on their heads. The gameplay is passable, but the outdated graphics look like they were designed for an eight-bit console. The audio is even more disappointing. There's no music at all, and the sound effects are primitive, to put it charitably. For instance, when a bee stings your duck, you hear a WinXP-like chord. To be fair, Charlie the Duck is generally playable, but you can find much better demos, including the same publisher's sequel to this game, Charlie II. Only dedicated platformer fans will want to pay $7.50 for the full version.