In anticipation of the release of a sequel to one of the best FPS series, tribes, Sierra is releasing the original two games for free as a means of marketing the sequel which is due this fall. You can get Tribes 1 and Tribes 2, the entire games. Somehow I never caught on to the Tribes scene, I was playing Quake engine and then Unreal Tournament engine games during their heyday, but both of them are still played today and my guess is with their free re-release they’ll see a surge in servers. Plus there are a wealth of mature, polished mods for each (tribes 1) engine (tribes 2). Anyone up for some TeamSpeak action this weekend in Tribes 2?

If you grew up playing zoomie games on your Atari 2600 or Intellivision, then Classic Gamer Magazine is for you. 2 issues are available so far as downloadable PDF’s. Get your nostalgia groove on 😉

Most folks have probably stumbled across the Home of the Underdogs at some point – it’s the definitive abandonware download site on the net, with literally thousands of games available that are no longer being published. It’s a wonderful resource, but unfortunately in order to pay the bills they’ve been forced to use increasingly…invasive advertising schemes, to the point where it’s a hassle to get stuff from them. Today I happened across an alternative site, XTC Abandonware. They don’t have the comprehensive selection of content that Underdogs has, and they seem to lack any of the Mac content, but there are more classics there for the grabbing than any one person could play in a lifetime. Go grab yourself a copy of the original warlords for example, and enjoy one of the better strategy games ever made. A weekend of enjoyable gaming is but 539k away 😉

(For Mac users, I’ll note that most of the games are sufficiently old that they’ll run just fine under Virtual PC, with no performance issues).

The game business increasingly looks like the movie business – 1000 clones of a succesful formula for every 1 interesting game. The Independent Games Festival is one of the places where you can still see creativity in abundance. Gamespot is running an article covering this year’s IGF finalists that’s worth a look. I’ve tried many of the games – so far my favorite is Bontago, but Starshatter is also pretty cool.

It’s interesting to note though how the two games I’ve enjoyed the most are variations on known themes – Bontago is a clever variation on the tetris school of puzzle games, and Starshatter is a well executed space sim. So while I laud IGF for encouraging creativity, I still gravitate towards known game types, while things like Facade, which really does push off in new directions, interests me on an academic level but not so much that I would actually play it. I guess Electronic Arts, purveyors of the same fine game tropes year after year, really does know their customers 😉

For the second time that I’m aware of, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York is putting part of its collection of videogames on display. I missed the last exhibition, but a couple of my friends went and loved it. While I can play all the games on display using M.A.M.E., but there’s definitely something to be said for playing using the original hardware. Anyone interested in a trip to NY for some nostalgia-filled gaming fun?

Leylines is similar to Age of Wonder or Warlords. It’s a bit more involved than the one I posted last friday, and well worth checking out if you’re running Win32 and looking for that friday gaming fix.

Games Workshop is probably best known for their Warhammer miniatures game and its spinoffs, but actually they’ve been making games for decades, and used to have a line of more traditional paperboard counter wargames. For a kick you can download one of them, The Battle for Armegeddon and it’s supplement, and print it out yourself and play. The game got a good review on the Boardgamegeek, and it’s very tough to get ahold of on ebay. Go forth and conquer 😉

This week’s friday fun link is The Battle for Wesnoth, a free, cross platform strategy game that’s most similar to the older Warlords games. If you loved Warlords I or II on the old os 7 era macs, chances are you’ll like this. Note that the graphics are equivalent to those of the older Mac era too, so you need to look beyond the visuals a bit, but the gameplay is solid fun and it’s got cross platform networking built in too. Anyone think they can take me?

If I had to pick my top 5 games of all time, the original x-com would definitely be in there. Sadly, after the demise of Microprose the license has been horrendously mismanaged and there hasn’t been a good x-com game since the first sequel. There have been a couple of commercial games that aspired to emulate x-com but none have been particularly good, Jagged Alliance 2 being the lone exception. Tonight I stumbled across not 1 but 3 promising looking efforts to recreate x-com for the modern age:

• ufo 2000 takes the media from the original game and has made a multiplayer version of the tactical combat engine from the original game. This looks very promising and I would love to play against someone. It’s open source and comes precompiled for Windows, dunno if someone has gotten it going on Macs but the linux client works.
• Project Xenocide aims to recreate the entire x-com experience from scratch, geoscape, research tree, tactical combat, craft interceptions, everything. They’re hoping to ship by the end of this year and what they have so far looks great
• Last and in some ways most impressive, UFO – Alien Invasion is based on the quake II source code from Id Software. It’s the most impressive looking of these efforts by far, and has a team working on it that have previously completed at least one project. The only downside is that so far they haven’t added destructable terrain, though there is some hope they will in a future release. If you’re going to check out just one of these though, this is the one to scope out now, it’s the most playable 1 player experience

I should mention that the original developers of x-com went on to make a play by email game called laser squad nemesis that has a good implementation of a similar tactical combat engine. It’s missing a lot of things from the original x-com, but it’s been around for a couple of years now and they’ve been steadily adding features. Soon it will have a solo game and elevation levels, and at that point, I’ll be buying.

…goes to a a rogue-like of course (lately I’m most partial to T.O.M.E. but you can pick from among dozens – ADOM, Angband and Zangband are all particularly good). But that’s not what I want to mention with this post. I stumbled across a very cool 3d action game called Neverball. If you’ve played Super Monkey Ball on one of the various platforms that support it you’ll be immediately familiar with the gameplay (or if you knew someone who had one of those old Labyrinth table games) – you must tilt the playing surface such that a ball that rests on it makes its way to the exit, picking up bonus objects and avoiding various hazards as you do so. This is amazingly polished for a free game. Don’t be put off by the spartan webpage design, the game is great fun and well worth the small download. The early version of a minigolf game based on the same engine is worth grabbing too. These are available for Mac, PC and Linux so pick your version and get rolling.