Here’s a cool website – a compendium of games which while originall commercially released have since been released for free to the public. Many have also had their source code released in one form or another. Some of these releases have led to excellent modern implementations of old, classic games, whilst others are languishing. Find a local programmer and incent him to get to work on one of your old favorites. Me, I’d love to see a project manager take over the Freespace 2 project – technically some of the stuff that’s been released using that code is excellent, but it’s all over the map, and from an outsider peering in, it looks like they need a project manager to bring order (and discipline) to the chaos. Which is a shame, since it’s the finest space sim ever, by a long shot.

Think old school. Think classic arcade and console games. Then think Robotron 2084 with just a dash of Tron Deadly discs. Got your imagination running? Ok now go check out Doomed!. Was it anything like you imagined?

It’s nearly perfect. My only complaint is it’s a bit too easy, once you clear a few levels and build up your stats. Here’s hoping they make another version. I’d love to have the original .fla files for this, it’s ripe for tweaking.

Pivotal games announced that they’re releasing the source code to the RTS Warzone 2100. This is excellent – the game, released years ago, was one of the best RTS of its generation, right up there with Total Annihilation in my opinion. Fans have been trying to score the source code for at least 3-4 years now, it’s really fantastic that they’ve managed to do so. Let’s hope this leads to good stuff, like what we’ve seen with the doom and quake source releases.

I give you a free win32 conversion of the classic old games workshop game Heroquest. It runs much better than the other available version, which was written for DOS over 10 years ago. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Heroquest is a poor man’s Dungeons and Dragons, played on a board with miniatures, and was originally published in the UK by Games Workshop then brought to the US by (Hasbro? Milton Bradley?). You can review the boardgamegeek.com entry if you’re interested in more background, or just grab the download from the link above if you want to tinker with it, it takes 5 minutes to review how it works and get down to playing.

Check out Piecepack.org. Some clever boardgaming fans have designed a set of universal boardgaming components you can print out on your inkjet printer, and then held a series of design contests for games that use the components. There’s also a wiki that lists all the games available for the system as well as hosting a ton of other info. It’s all free – the only requirement is a printer and some toner or ink, and some friends to play with. If you’re not the type to spend the time to make up your own pieces, you can even buy preprinted sets and even sets made out of wood.

What if you were a huge fan of the original 2D Zelda games on the NES and SNES? What if you thought the 3d versions released on the N64, while good, betrayed the spirit of the original games? If you were an enterprising programmer, you’d get to work on a re-imagining of the games in 2D. Cool, cool retro gaming fun to be had here, though the game’s not yet fully developed there’s still enough available to get a sense of it. Check it out if you grew up developing claw hands on the original NES controller pad 😉

I’ve talked about the exult project a couple of times here – the reverse engineering of the original Ultima 7 so that you can play it on modern machines, including Linux and OSX. It’s a fantastic project and anyone with even a passing interest in computer role playing games is well advised to check it out. Anyway, there has recently been a new project undertaken by many of the members from the original Exult group to port the Ultima 8 engine. Not only will this enable modern players to play another of the seminal RPG’s from the golden age of Origin, it will also enable (possibly anyway) folks to play the Crusader series of games. The project is still in its early stages, but there are some screenshots on the Pentagram website to wet your appetite.

My absolute favorite genre of game is the first person action role playing game. From Ultima Underworld 1 and Underworld 2, to System Shock 1 and 2, to the more modern Gothic, I’ve absolutely loved these games. The most recent release in this category is Gothic 2, which is an absolutely superb game. It can now be had for a mere $20. Anyone with even a passing interest in this type of game should be all over this deal. It’s PC only mind you, and needs a reasonably powerful machine to run it with all the options turned on. If your machine fits the bill I can’t recommend it highly enough.

So one of the cooler things to come out of E3 is free access to an upcoming mmorpg. For the 3 days of E3 you can play the alpha version of Guild Wars online for free, just head on over to their site and download the software. Their system is unique among MMORPG’s in that they’re not intending to charge a monthly fee and they’re streaming new content on a regular basis down to the client. The download is amazingly small as a result, it’s easy to get up and running. Mind that this is Win32 only. If you grab it and head online, look out for Tempus, that’ll be me 😉

My guess is that virtually everyone is familiar with the Internet Movie Database, but many may not be aware that many similar websites exist, each focused on a particular niche. Things like comics.org or Mobygames.com’s database of videogames. Anyway for a little friday fun I’ll point out the existence of the ipdb.org – the internet pinball database. When I was a kid we had two pinball machines and a jukebox in the basement, courtesy of my dad’s fond memories of the nickel and dime pinball machines of his youth. Kudos to any hamilton who can find either of the machines we owned in the database – while my memory of one of the machines in particular is pretty good, I can’t remember it’s name and have only a vague sense of when it was manufactured (late 60’s?). If you can find it, please note which one it is here. And for anyone else, if you messed about with pinball in your youth or have a fondness for it, it can be fun wandering through ipdb.org checking out the machines you used to play. Plus if you’re clever you’ll grab a definition file for them and get yourself a copy of pinmame so you can play a simulation of them on your computer.