Joe Danger

Super Mario and Zelda may have gotten more attention, but for those who grew up on Nintendo's original NES console, ExciteBike was equally iconic. Racing a motocross over jumps was awesome — but the ability to create your own tracks, even without being saveable on such a primitive system, was straight-up amazeballs. Joe Danger maintains that sense of exhilaration and wonder by crossing ExciteBike with the physics-based, community-driven, side-scrolling platformer LittleBigPlanet to create an addictive and engaging hybrid. Though not a racer per se, speed is as important as reflexes, tricks and exploration. There are several ways for the titular stuntman to complete every level, multiple challenges to beat to open up new ones and bonus points for style. But where Joe Danger really lands its jump is its ability to create and share your own cartoonish tracks, daring gamers to trump the creators' own vivid imaginations — you can even edit levels on the fly — and make the game play essentially limitless. This impeccably produced PSN download was coded by four-man British micro-studio Hello Games, making Joe Danger another gold star for the indie scene.