Ok this one is a doozy. If you grew up in the 80’s and think the string of arcade games Williams put out then (Robotron, Defender, Stargate, Joust) represent the finest the form had to offer, you’re going to love Gridwars. It’s actually a clone of a small game that comes with the new Xbox 360, and its spiritual predecessor is William’s Robotron with slight shades of Atari’s Tempest. You need a dual stick controller to really play this, like a usb connected ps2 pad, though you can play using the keyboard. You move in any direction with one pad whilst shooting in any direction using the other. Various geometric shapes spawn and attempt to smash you while techno plays in the background and the screen pulsates with your activity. It’s still in beta but even in its current form it’s essentially perfect. I’ve been completely mesmerized by it since I stumbled across it. Horde those smart bombs, you’re going to need them!

[this is win32 and mac only, sorry linux folk]

This is flash-based so it should run anywhere. It’s a simply shoot em up that evokes the old ‘airborne’ game from the 80’s, except you’re mobile instead of being stuck in the middle of the screen. In GunMaster, you’re a marine. You have a variety of guns. Move around with the keyboard, use the mouse to aim, and blast anything else that moves. The graphics won’t win any awards but the gameplay mechanics are solid. Simple and fun. Check it out.

[via bluesnews]

On February 14th, Sony Online Entertainment is going to make a limited free edition of Planetside available. If you’re not familiar with it, Planetside is a massively multiplayer first person shooter set in a science fiction universe. It’s basically the only legitimate game of its kind. There have been a few other attempts in the genre but none by anyone with the deep pockets required to really make a go of it, except for the upcoming Huxley, which I am hoping turns out pretty well.

Anyway I played Planetside during a 14 day trial a couple of years ago and found it pretty fun, just not fun enough to drop $14 a month on. If you’re a fan of games like Battlefield 1942/Battlefield 2, or just like first person shooters and are intrigued by the notion of playing with thousands of people at the same time, this is definitely up your alley. You can read up on the details of the offer in this post on the Planetside forums. I’ll post again once this is released – I definitely will be signing up for it.

Check out http://c64s.com/, which has a Java – based Commodore 64 emulator that lets you play a large selection of classic C64 games in your browser, and which also does a ‘game link of the day’ thing on their homepage, which is fun to stop by and check out for a little walk down memory lane now and then. If, unlike me, you didn’t grow up with one of these machines, you might find the graphics and sound outdated enough to put you off, but if you give a few of these games a chance you’ll find that there are awesome gameplay mechanics underneath the crufty skin – things like Commando and the Bouler Dash games, Archon, and Bruce Lee are all still fun today.

I’m an avid World of Warcraft player, along with 5 million or so others as it turns out. If you play, you may note that Blizzard re-uses a lot of art assets – many objects in the world share the same icon, and even some abilities share common art assets. One of my Tauren Druid’s powers, for example, shares the same icon as a quest-related drop (bear tongues). The icon looks nothing like a bear tongue – in fact it’s a bear’s head.

This used to be more common than it is now – with each subsequent patch Blizzard seems to be adding in icons for objects, and what this suggests is that the resource lack is one of art production time. It seems to me there’s a relatively simple solution to this – let the players create the content. Publish the specifications (color palette, file size limitations and so on), hold contests, and let the playerbase develop the art. You could even let the community vote on who wins the contest. It’s a win for everyone – Blizzard can spend its art creation time building genuine new content for the game, it can encourage community engagement in the development of their virtual world, and it solves the problem of bear tongues looking like bear heads. This is a successful model in many other contexts, from the slashdot community to the infinite variety of modifications built on top of the various FPS engines, to Second Life where the entire model is built on player content creation. It also potentially helps Blizzard identify a pool of new talent to hire, again a model used extensively by the first person shooter genre where successful map makers, texture artists, modelers, sound engineers and even entire modification development teams have been hired by the game publishers to produce new commercial content.

There’s no two ways about it – print, broadcast and online videogame journalism is largely crap bought and paid for by the publishers. Enter The Escapist. If you can get past their retarded ‘we think we’re a print magazine’ website design and its 6pt type (which you don’t dare enlarge since it completely destroys their layout if you do) you’ll find an absolutely superb webzine that regularly updates its content (1 major and one minor update a week) and is written for an adult demographic by adults who aren’t posing as adolescents. A sample from this week’s issue to whet your curiosity, from a piece on the impact of videogames becoming a mainstream medium:

From a cultural analyst’s perspective, it’s almost painful to watch a unique, complex subculture get swallowed up in America’s hegemonic mainstream. Something may be gained, but something will definitely be lost.

Check it out for more. You can sign up via marketing free email, and if you’re so inclined you can download each issue as a pdf instead of reading it on their site.

(And yes, I’m painfully aware of what’s being lost as the transition to mainstream medium has been taking place. I’d say something snarky like ‘all we need to do is destroy EA and their endless sea of sequels,’ but they’re a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself).

So aside from laying around sick for most of my vacation, I did manage to accomplish a few other things, mostly before I fell ill. I solved two games, Call of Duty 2 and Gothic II Gold (which includes the Night of the Raven expansion pack). Call of Duty 2 was superb. It brings basically nothing new to the first person shooter table, but it’s consistently entertaining, superbly executed, has excellent graphics, and absolutely fantastic audio. In fact the closest it comes to innovating is in the audio department – it’s the most immersive first person shooter I’ve played and this is largely due to how well done the audio is. It’s quite nerve wracking to play, as your teamates shout in anger or pain, bullets whiz by, things blow up around you, and the screen shakes with the impact of various explosions. The multiplayer is a letdown though – very few maps, spastic bunnyhopping gameplay, and rampant cheating. I barely bothered with it. Highly recommended nonetheless – best shooter I played this year by far.

Gothic II goes down as one of my favorite games of all time. I loved the original and the sequel is more of the same plus better graphics, a longer story, and a much larger area to explore. I got to the end of chapter 5 when the game originally shipped then went through a machine rebuild and lost my savegames due to a snafu during the rebuild. When I started playing the gold edition I wasn’t sure I would be able to play through so much of the content again, but the expansion pack material plus the quality of the game made it if anything more compelling than the first time through. If you’re not familiar with the series, imagine starring in a mediocre quality epic fantasy novel, with full speech for the characters in the game, a somewhat living world (people wake up, go to work, eat, sleep, argue, wander around, remember you if you do them harm or help them), a huge 3d world to explore, arcade combat tied to your character’s statistics, and a variety of skills you can learn (alchemy, different schools of combat and magic, animal skinning, lock picking, plus several others) and enhance over time. The plot won’t win any awards but it’s at least equal to most of what the genre typically offers and it features a nice twist at the end that sets things up for Gothic III, which will ship sometime this year.

If you played the original but not the expansion pak, it’s worth a look. The pak adds another large region to explore, fleshes out several factions, fills in some holes in the plot, and re-balances the combat and experience system to make things more challenging towards the end of the game. An unfortunate consequence of this is that things are much tougher in the beginning.

The game series is consistently criticised for its control scheme. It never bothered me. Maybe it’s because I play so many games and find it easy enough to adapt to a variety of control schemes, but I don’t even get why people complain. It takes less than 10 minutes to adjust and it’s not like it’s complicated – compared to, say, trying to master the control system in something like Tekken 5 or insert your beatemup of choice, it’s trivial. The game is also available for under $20, and you’d be hard pressed to find a better entertainment value. All told I spent almost 40 hours running around inside gothic II’s little world, and I loved almost all of it. Check it out if you’re a fan of fantasy rpgs.

Check out Super Mario Wars for a quick mario deathmatch fix. Mario with guns? Not quite – run around trying to leap on the heads of your opponents, grabbing powerups and avoiding environmental hazards taken from mario’s 2d adventures. It’s a bit…hyper for my taste, but it’s fun in 5 minute doses. It’s available for PC, linux, xbox, and Mac (check the forums for the mac version). Free, open source, fun.