Another variation on the tetris theme today – Blocksum, which is this clever, fun arcade puzzle game. Blocks with numbers in them rise slowly upwards. You can link blocks together to create sums – if enough blocks with equal sums are adjacent they’ll disappear and you’ll get points. It all seems simple enough till the pace increases and blocks with ever increasing initial sums start rising up. This is a great little diversion that takes a bit more skill than, say, solitaire. Windows only, free, for the downloading, and well worth a look.

Originally spotted over at the great Indygamer blog

There’s a great, short write-up about Doujin shmups over on The Independent Gaming Source that’s worth a look if you grew up in the 80’s on a diet of quarter munching arcade games and are curious about how one of the genres that started in that era has evolved over the years. Since I can’t point to a resource about shmups without also pointing at a fun shmup to try, take a look at Warning Forever, windows only, free, and great fun.

Blizzard has added a cool new feature to their website to support World of Warcraft – the armory. It’s basically an online character sheet interface so you can show folks your character in the game. My main these days is Siven, a Dwarven Paladin who’s just about to hit level 60 and who has finally been able to make the trip through the portal into the expansion pak content that was released around Christmas last year. Check him out, and look him up if you happen to be hanging out on the Blade’s Edge server.

They’re still working on the armory and it’s been a bit flaky, so if you try to check out Siven and it fails, try again later.

I’m a big fan of shmups, a legacy of a youth spent in arcades. Today’s find is the most recent release from Binary Zoo, Echoes. Take one part asteroids, one part robotron, and one part techno soundtrack, mix with simple, stylized graphics, add a healthy dose of frenzied pacing, and you have echoes. It’s terrific, the best of Binary Zoo’s releases thus far. Check it out – pc only, works with mouse/wasd or joypad, though joypad works best in my opinion.

Note that to get it running I had to muck with Windows DEP (Data Execution Prevention) settings and add Echoes to the exclusion list. Thanks Microsoft, for your arcane, crummy OS.

Civilization is the second finest computer game ever made (X-Com being the finest). If you’ve never played it and you like strategy games, well, you’re missing out, and the barrier to entry just got even lower – go check out Vox Imperium, an impressive implementation of the core gameplay elements of the civilization series that runs right in your browser. Make sure you’re using a modern browser to check it out, as usual I’ll recommend Firefox.

If you grew up playing quarter munching arcade games in the 80’s chances are good you have a taste for a well designed shmup, and if you do, you owe it to yourself to check out Shoot the Core and most especially their database of available shmups, currently listing 950 games and growing all the time. My fave for today is APOCALYSPE: DEUS EX MACHINA, a robotron-inspired 8 way shooter.

Almost all of this stuff is for the PC, sorry mac/linux folk. A lot of it is also demo or commercial, but there are free and open source ones in there and some of the demos are very generous. Besides, some of them are well worth the purchase price.

Enjoy!

A computer adventure game, that is. The genre has mostly died off in the commercial space, but there are still plenty of fans, and Indy Gamer blog has pulled together a list of the top 20 free adventure games for folks to check out. Some of these rival the quality of commercial releases, and many of them are worth a look if you’re a fan. These are mostly PC only, sorry mac folk.

The indygamer blog is a pretty cool source of news on independent games development if you’re a games geek like me and such things interest you, by the by.

So over on the superb boardgamegeek.com there’s a long list of free computer implementations of boardgames. This is a great resource and there’s plenty to choose from, from old classics like risk to more recent games like settlers of cataan. Many of these are windows only, but just as many are browser or java based and thus run on all platforms. A few I’ve played and enjoyed include Pioneers (a settlers of cataan clone), SpaceHulk-SP, Invade Earth (a risk 2210 AD clone), and Heroquest, an amazingly complete clone of the old Heroquest dungeon adventure game. There’s tons more at the link above and the chances are good that there’s a board or card game to your taste.

So there is now a public beta for the upcoming Lord of the Rings MMORPG. I signed up a couple of weeks ago and got my access key last week, and I spent a good bit of this weekend playing it. If you’re interested, you can sign up for your own on this page.

While it’s definitely still rough around the edges – there are periods of intense lag that I can only resolve by logging out, there are tons of little scripting errors which lead to ‘general error!’ messages while doing quests and investigating things, and the character animation seems off and somewhat disconnected from the world, it’s still very fun. It’s also cool just to be able to run around inside a 3D version of middle earth, and the graphics are very good, definitely a step above Worlds of Warcraft from a technical perspective. Art direction on the other hand, I’d still give a very hearty nod to WoW.

I can sum the gameplay up with: it’s a competent copy of WoW and the diku-derived gameplay that preceeded it. It doesn’t add much new to the experience but the setting and the competent execution make it worth checking out.

I guess the highest praise I can give it is this: I’ll be buying it, preordering in fact, to take advantage of the $9.99/month subscription offer if you preorder, versus $14.99 if you don’t.

You need a PC to play. If you decide to download the beta, do yourself a favor and use the torrent link. Their downloader stinks.

I’ve mentioned periodically how the PS2 is currently the best bargain in videogames. It’s nearing the end of its mass market commercial lifespan, and this, combined with the fact that it has sold the most consoles by far of its generation (by 1/05 it had already topped 100 million consoles sold) has led to an abundance of inexpensive used games. Today’s example is Call of Duty: The Big Red One, a World War II first person shooter. I got this game used for $12 shipped on ebay. It took me a couple of weeks to play through it. On a scale of 1-10 I’d give the game a 7. The graphics are solid for a PS2 release, though any PC fps fan would find them crude. The gameplay was a mix of mostly on foot infantry combat with occasional vehicle-based missions, ranging from tank and armored personal carrier to a fun and novel B17 Bomber mission where you’re tasked with moving between belly, tail and nose turrets to fend of waves of German fighters, then jumping into the bombadier’s position to bomb German industrial targets. You’re accompanied by squadmates through most of it and while they’re pretty stupid they are occasionally helpful and more importantly they rarely got in the way. The game features some really excellent set pieces as well – things like storming German 88 emplacement positions, holding fortifications until reinforcements come up, or rescuing downed airmen. The infantry set pieces are really the best part of the game, in fact.

One of the most interesting things about me having enjoyed and finished the game is that it led me to pick up a couple other PS2 FPS games – basically it convinced me that despite the relatively crude graphics and the fact that you have to use a joypad instead of a mouse and keyboard for controls, the console FPS can be fun. There’s also a wider variety of fps game types on the consoles than there are for PC.

To sum up – the game is well worth trying if you’re a wwII or fps fan, and you definitely can’t beat the price.