It’s sometimes hard to believe that my earliest truly memorable gaming experiences revolved around mono-color text. It may surprise folks that the form, interactive fiction, is still going strong. In fact there’s an annual competition and this year’s winners have just been announced. You can download them from the IF site, and you can also review this year’s submissions. I’ll confess, I rarely play these anymore, though I usually check out the contest results each year. While I’m hardly a graphics snob (I still play super nintendo games and arcade games I played in the 80’s, for example), I find I rarely have the time you need to devote to this form. It’s unfortunate, in that they’ve evolved and become rather sophisticated in style, evolving with their audience I guess. There’s an irony lurking here, in that I suspect these would actually appeal to a lot of folks who wouldn’t be caught dead with a PS2 controller in their hands. If the notion of interacting with a novel appeals to you, check these out and give one a try. The software is available for win32 and MacOS, and for most of the offerings there are ways to get them running under Linux as well.

The latest version of one of if not the finest game series ever, Civilization IV, is on sale for the next 2 days at gogamer.com. I held off on buying it at first because early reviews were super positive but also mentioned a lot of bugs, and from the looks of things they simply rushed it out to get it out in time for Christmas. The developer has a decent track record of patching things post-release, so I figured I would hold out for a deal like this and pounce on it. Which I’ve done.

If you’re not familiar with the series, Civ IV has been around for a long time, roughly since ’92, and versions of it have run on a number of operating systems over the years. It’s even run on some consoles. It’s a turn-based strategy game where you try and shepard your civilization from the dawn of time up through the near future, managing your citizen’s military strategy, economic, political, and philosophical development whilst competing with the other civilizations. I’ve had a version of it running on each of the computers I’ve owned basically continuously since my first copy for my Mac IIsi way back when. My favorite remains Civilization II – III added lots of eye candy and some helpful automation for your settlers and not a lot else. This time around they’ve again gone nuts with eye candy (civ moves to 3d) and completely refashioned the combat model – no longer will a horde of spearman sink your fleet of battleship, nor will your tanks fall to the cavalry of your opponent. It’s also completely extensible this time around – xml data files, all the art binaries exposed, and python for introducing new program logic. I can guarantee there will be some completely awesome mods for this engine in a year’s time – the folks over at Apolyton and elsewhere are already tearing the engine apart. Imagining that perfect lord of the rings strategy game you’ve always wished someone would make? I bet they’re already working on it.

Meanwhile as I mentioned the critics have basically loved the game and the new changes despite some reservations about bugs, and the first patch is due within a week or so. Gogamer has it for $37 shipped, which compares pretty nicely to the list price of $50. Here’s a box shot/link to amazon.com for more info if you’re interested:

If anyone else picks it up and would care to play some multiplayer, I’m game. I call dibs on the Romans, we’ll see if starting with written language is as useful as it was in previous versions.

So everyone and their mother (including mine) is infatuated with sudoku puzzles these days. There was a point during our annual camping trip this summer when three guys were sitting there on a beautiful sunny day trying to work out their sudoku puzzle instead of, say, jumping off the dock into the lake. They’ve never grabbed me, but maybe they’re your cup of tea. If so, check out this well done web-based sudoku puzzle site.

Ok, band together and buy me a Gamepark GP2X. I came close to buying its predecessor, a simple little handheld that had a decent screen and could play a lot of emulation stuff, old NES, gameboy games and so on, several times over the past couple of years. This time around it’s got excellent media support included, mp3, ogg, mpeg video and so on, along with even better emulation support. All for under $200 shipped. The only thing it’s missing is networking, but for the price I’d take one just to play all the excellent old SNES rpg’s and some mame stuff. It’s interesting to see their approach to a handheld as compared to Sony and Nintendo. Their hardware is cheaper and it’s very developer friendly, they work closely with the community, and the hardware has no DRM or copy protection mechanisms. The end result is a vibrant developer community producing all kinds of applications for the device. Mind you most of the stuff you’re seeing there is for the original GP32, but given that Gamepark is following the same strategy as last time but with a more capable device, I’d expect even greater support going forward. It just started shipping this week. Lacking one as a christmas gift, I’ll have one by late winter.

What if I was to tell you there was not one but two free online anime-themed golf sim/rpg games? Chances are you’d be pretty surprised. We have the overwhelming popularity of asian MMORPG’s to thank for this. These companies are still trying to figure out how to crack the North American market and so far their strategies have largely involved variations on the ‘eh, we will give it away for free for now and figure out how to charge for it later.’ As far as I can tell this hasn’t worked out for them yet, but hey, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If you’re into golf these are both worth trying. Your options are Shot-online and Albatross 18 – Realms of Pangya. Care to guess which of those has the more over-the-top anime look to it? It can be worth getting over the aesthetics of the games though – I’ve been a fan of the long running Hotshots golf series and these games are both thematically similar. Once you get over the anime look, at core they have fun twitch-based arcade style golf gameplay. If that sounds like it would appeal to you, check em out, all it will cost you is some time.

It’s not what it sounds like. It’s friday so it’s time for a fun link, check out the flash-based puki, a simple, stylish little corridor shooter that runs nicely in your browser. Don’t blame me if your boss catches you goofing off. You’ll note mine won’t because I checked it out on my lunch break 😉

Enjoy!

Ok this is pretty cool. I’m longtime fan of M.A.M.E and occasionally daydream about building myself one of those excellent MAME cabinets you might have happened across, but time, money and other priorities have always kept it as mostly a pipe dream. This christmas might change all that for me as Target will be carrying a pre-built arcade cabinet for around $500 that has a large collection of Midway games on it. The cabinet also has a collection of AV inputs on it so that you can connect some of your other equipment – videogame consoles and so on – to it. No word on whether the controls built into the cabinet can be easily connected to any add-in equipment is my one concern with this unit. Hopefully my local Target will get one in stock so I can check it out in person. Siblings note: you all could also band together to get this for me for xmas 😉

So a best selling Russian cross-genre computer game – Space Rangers 2 – has been released in the US and almost no one seems to know of it. This post is my attempt to rectify that since the game is absolutely fantastic. Simply put it’s one of the finest computer strategy games I’ve ever played, and it allows tremendous freedom in game play styles, has a wealth of different game play modes (turn based strategy, RTS, text adventure (!), rpg), most of which you can choose amongst, ie you’re not forced to play the modes you don’t care for. I’d go on and on about the game, but really I can’t say it much better than Bill Harris did in this post on his blog. I’ll also note that gogamer.com has it on sale for $28 for the next 72 hours. If you’re a pc gamer and a fan of turn-based strategy and rpg’s, you simply can’t pass this one up, assuming you have a DVD drive on your machine (the game ships on DVD only).