At this year's IndieGamesCon, event organizer GarageGames pulled back the curtain on one of its most ambitious projects, IntantAction.com. Announced earlier this year and meant to fill the void left by traditional casual gaming portals, InstantAction aims to provide hardcore gamers bite-sized nuggets of addictive, skill-based gameplay.

But as I came to find out, InstantAction is more than just a standard gaming portal. When it launches next year, the site and its free memberships will offer up a variety of community features that rival those of Steam Community and Xbox Live. Beyond mere friends lists and profiles, InstantAction promises a party system that will allow players to form a group without entering a game, and then let them move from game to game without having to reinvite everyone or reform the group. Furthermore, inviting others to the party is a simple matter of pasting a link in an IM or e-mail.

Better yet, this all occurs in a web browser, meaning it will be accessible from almost any location with a computer. That means no more waiting to get home from work to play a quick game with your friends, no more fussing about as you all decide you want to play a different game and have to invite everyone all over again.

Best of all though, GarageGames is working with a variety of independent developers, such as Wideload Games, to get a number of different titles and genres on the service. Below are some of the InstantAction-bound games I experienced during my time at IndieGamesCon 07.

Cyclomite by Wideload Shorts

The first product to emerge from Wideload Games' Shorts division, Cyclomite is the poster child for InstantAction. The concept is a simple one--rotate the center wheel to match the colors of its pipes with the incoming colored orbs--but the execution is anything but casual.

Much like Bizarre Creations' Geometry Wars (PC, X360), Cyclomite takes it easy on players at first, with only two colors on the wheel and a few incoming orbs. However, the action quickly ramps up. More and more colors are introduced, and before long, players have a huge backlog of mismatched orbs obstructing their pipes. Matching a properly colored orb to a blocked pipes reduces the cloggage, requiring careful attention to the oncoming balls. As the garbage lines grow and grow, the game demands more strategy as the blockage threatens to snare more orbs if rotated at the wrong time.

At seemingly random intervals, the wheel's colors rearrange themselves in a new order. It's both a blessing and a curse: there's a chance the new color will absorb one of those mismatched blobs, but it's more likely that the shift will temporarily result in even more blockage.

Along with its single-player component, which allows players to pick their beginning difficultly from the start, the game also features four player co-op and versus modes. Though only announced for InstantAction at the moment, Wideload tells Shacknews it hopes to take the game, which was demonstrated with an Xbox 360 controller, to other platforms.

AstroMiner 3020 by Tapout Games

Reminiscent of HAL Laboratory's Kirby Canvas Curse (DS), AstroMiner 3020 has players drawing lines to direct colored asteroid ore into the proper receptical. The game features a wide range of selectable locations across the universe, each with a different arrangement of asteroids and moving bins. Only three lines can be drawn at a time though, calling for lots of fast movements, especially if players aim to get all the bonus points acquired by clicking on ore to speed up its descent and collecting the pickups scattered throughout the levels.

Hit the next page for more InstantAction games, including Screwjumper, Virtual Dude, and Marble Blast Online.