These would have been breaking news, oh, a year or two ago, but I just found out about them. Still, worth passing on for others who haven't seen them yet:

flOw

This is a game developed by a USC student as part of an MFA thesis, and it was recently picked up by Sony and ported to the PS3 platform. It's beautifully done, and is a great example of how an independently produced game can make it big. (This sort of path from personal project to platform game is still rare, though the big console makers are increasingly turning to independent game producers for material.)

You can play flOw online and read more about flOw and its creator, Jenova Chen.

Line Rider

This has been around for a while, and the latest version is on the "official line rider site," but I actually prefer the earlier, slightly simpler version hosted on deviantART. The idea is exceedingly simple: Draw a sloping line, click the play button, and a little sledder rides down your line. The charm is in the fact that you can learn to play it in three seconds, but what you can do with it is wide open, as evidenced by the number of Line Rider videos on YouTube. I don't quite know what to call it -- it's not a puzzle, since there is no particular optimal solution, and I'm not sure it qualifies as a game either..... It makes me think of the idea of "microworlds" -- self-contained simulations that allow experimentation, a bit like Geometer's Sketchpad or Interactive Physics (or one of my old favorites, Sodaplay), though I suspect the physics in Line Rider is only vaguely related to the real world. Or maybe it should be categorized a very very simple programming language....

Scratch

Speaking of simple programming languages, the folks at MIT are still making programming environments for kids, building on their seminal work creating tools like Logo and Lego Mindstorms. The latest effort is called "Scratch," and it's kind of like Lego Mindstorms without the Legos -- instead of bricks, you control "sprites" on part of the screen, all through drag-and-drop programming commands. It's way cool, and my only complaint is it's available now only as a downloadable application -- it's just shouting for a javascript/web version. I'm not volunteering to do that, mind you....!