Several years ago, I found myself being insanely driven through the streets of Coventry in the Midlands of England – often, it seemed, over the exploding torsos and cracking limbs of pedestrians – towards Warwick University. Why? Microsoft was launching its XNA Creator’s Club – a service, backed up by a suite of tools, which would allow coders everywhere to make games for the Xbox 360.

At the time, the company was happy to suggest this initiative would lead to nothing less than 'the YouTube of videogames', a notion backed up by speakers including Peter Molyneux, Rare's Nick Burton and various computer science lecturers, one of whom used far too much Clip Art in his PowerPoint presentation.

In the build-up to launch, Microsoft put a lot of time and effort into selling Community Games, the platform that would eventually emerge from the Creator’s Club. Since then, however, the service, recently rebranded Indie Games, has been left, by and large, to fend for itself.

And yet Indie Games is studded with uncelebrated gems, so on and off over the next few months, I’ll be highlighting a few of the more interesting titles available. And I'm starting with a handful of entries that actually seem to be a bit of a cheat.

The promise of Indie Games is that anyone who knows even the slightest thing about computing can knock something together if they read enough online tutorials. I like to picture most of the games being constructed in a setting that resembles Matthew Broderick’s bedroom from War Games. That said, I’m kicking off with a series made by Arkedo, a tiny, but fiercely creative French developer that has already released two games – Nervous Brickdown and Big Bang Mini – for DS.

That output may have positioned the design team somewhere between the high-colour innovation of Treasure and the endless polish of PopCap, but for the Arkedo Series on Indie Games the focus seems to be on refinement rather than experimentation. The three games released so far don’t do anything particularly groundbreaking. They instead work within established genres to provide some enormously satisfying results. That’s more than enough for me.

For more about the studio, read our new interview with its head, Camille Guermonprez, right here.

Arkedo Series 01 – Jump!

Lurking beneath Jump!’s glossy retro coating lies a devious time-trial platformer, a concept by regular collaborator and officemate Pastagames. In it, an 8bit Indy knock-off called Jumpman – now there’s a name that comes with expectations – must dodge spikes, outrun collapsing ledges, and escape from mechanical crabs as he rushes to defuse a selection of bombs. Levels steadily increase in complexity without ever relying on cheap tricks, and with no save system, the focus is firmly set on paring your playthroughs down through repetition and experimentation.

Arkedo Series 02 – Swap!

Swap! takes its most obvious cues from block puzzle standards like Intelligent Systems’ glorious Panel De Pon. Why not? If you’re going to wear your influences on you sleeve, there are worse places to take those influences from. A fairly straightforward scrolling-block title in which you swap coloured tiles either horizontally or vertically in order to create matching rows or columns of four, you might initially wonder what the fuss is about. Two hours later, however, you’ll almost certainly still be playing, and therein lies your answer. Swap! May be basic – though arcade and challenge modes add a touch of depth – but it’s definitely not a game to fire up while you wait for a bath to run.

Arkedo Series 03 – Pixel!

Pixel! is probably the best of the bunch so far, spinning its simple 8bit pleasures out into a more sustained campaign, and backing the whole thing up with a luminous monochrome art style. Playing out on a series of fairly classical scrolling platform maps in which there are enemies to jump on, staircases to scamper over and clouds to hitch a lift with, part of the fun comes from simply playing spot-the-influence. Pixel the cat is the perfect hero for such an adventure, since his charm, built from a collection of tiny glowing dots, ensures the game never has to rely on the strength of its references alone. Warm-hearted yet devious, this slick throwback sets a promising standard for any future entries.