Diplomacy has been around forever (well, since 1959 to be precise) and is often named as one of the finest board-games ever made. There have been tools to play it online since before the WWW, and there have been a couple of (abysmal) computer games based on it, but now there’s a reasonably good graphical, www-based version in development on sourceforge. You can check out the official homepage, which has some screenshots to give you a sense of it. Anyone interested in playing if I bring up an installation of this on my server? I’d love to get a game going. The rules are drop dead simple and if you like something like, say, Axis and Allies but without the luck and dice rolling, chances are high you’d really like it. Any takers?

If you enjoyed diablo or diablo II, check out fate, a nearly perfect homage to diablo with a nice dash of the roguelike mixed in. What a bargain this is – $20, a relatively small (120MB) download, and it’s easy as pie to mod. Superb! I’ve been addicted to it since it shipped last week. PC only, and it’s the wild tangent stuff, which was for a long time spyware. They’ve since cleaned up their act but your spyware blocker might complain. Act as you see fit, meanwhile I’m on level 15 and me and my small horde of summoned skeletons are kicking ass and taking loot.

If you’re on a windows machine, check out nullpointer, another example of a fine shmup for your friday fun. This one has excellent graphics, a modestly clever scoring mechanic, and does not have the immediately relentlessly difficult gameplay that some of the asian ones I’ve linked to in the past have. Enjoy!

I collect old games, and games in general, though not in a particularly organized way. Check out what This person’s done though – talk about taking one’s hobby to the extreme. There’s everything from a Commodore 64 to an xbox in that collection, and most everything that came in between. It’s really pretty impressive.

Imagine running around in a 3D world building stuff out of legos. Then go download blockland and have fun playing around. This is actually pretty cool stuff and is perfect if you’re looking for something non-violent for your kids to dink around with on the computer. It’s also free and built on garagegame’s Torque engine, so in theory should work on all platforms, though for now the main developer is only releasing win32 binaries. There are links in the forums to OS X binaries that others have put together. I’m testing this on my home windows box, I might pop up a server for folks to play with during the day while I’m at work.

Check out everyvideogame.com, which lets you play a ton of old school arcade and 8-bit console games right in your browser using client-side Java. Who can resist 10 minutes of ms. pacman action on their lunch break? I just wish the graphics window was a bit larger.

My birthday is in March. I’m giving you forewarning now so you can begin saving. As you know, I like gaming, and I am an exercise nut. As you also know, I’ve been waiting for the perfect peripheral to combine these interests, and have blogged a number of candidates over the years, and I’ve been using a dance mat and playing DDR lately despite how foolish I feel doing it. Now there’s an even better candidate which recently won an award at the CES in Las Vegas – the Kilowatt. It uses the principle of isometrics to give your muscles a workout, and works with any game, on all platforms. I so want one of these. They’re also going to make an attachment for it that adds an exercise bike onto it.

I’m kidding about it as a birthday gift of course (it’s $1200 plus shipping), though I do really want one, and if I can swing it $$$-wise and the exercise bike attachment comes out I will in fact get one. There was also more promising news from CES in this regard, as Konami bought a struggling exercise chain in Japan and is releasing a set of products related to software and hardware they’re installing in the chain, things like attachments for your existing exercise bike, games aside from dancing that work with your dance pad, and more. Seems like a small niche of interest to me is expanding, which is of course great from my perspective.

If so, you are obligated to visit this site and download the pixel-perfect remake of the classic Bruce Lee game for the Commodore 64. Despite the painful graphics (the pixels are as large as pencil erasers, for pete’s sake) it’s still as fun now as it was back in the day, in 5 minute bursts anyway. PC only but the requirements are so low I suspect a non-powermac could run it in emulation.

Gametunnel has a great article up which covers many of the entries to this year’s Independent Games Festival. As I’ve mentioned before, IGF tends to have more interesting and novel games than the stuff you’ll find on the shelves at best buy. This is mostly PC-based stuff but there are also some java and web-based games that are worth a look. My favorite so far is Avencast, a diablo-like rpg.