Trauma Studios, developers of Desert Combat, one of the best FPS mods of the past several years, signed a contract with Digital Illusions (developers of the Battlefield 1942 games) to produce a commercial mod for ‘an upcoming product.’ Since as far as anyone is aware DICE has only one product upcoming, Battlefield Vietnam, it seems likely that’s what the mod will be for. On the one hand this is great news, the developers of Desert Combat deserve to be rewarded for their excellent work – their mod is arguably more fun than the original Battlefield game, and they’ve been regularly updating and adding content to their mod for over a year. On the other hand, I’ll be bummed (but not surprised) if the superb and free Desert Combat falls by the wayside.

Breaking my own pattern, I’m posting not one but two fun friday links. Got a hankering to be anywhere but work and a computer that’s sufficiently concealed from the view of the others around you? Get thyself over to the addicting games website and spend a few minutes entertaining yourself.

Now this is sweet. The old classic boardgame Axis and Allies, developed in java for all platforms. Anyone care to take me on? You have to be russia 😉

Kidding aside I would love to try this if anyone is up for a game.

Check out this excellent new mod for battlefield 1942. It mixes realtime strategy play with the fps action of bf1942, and they’ve managed to make destructable buildings, something I didn’t think could be done with the bf engine. Well worth checking out despite some first-release glitches.

A group of developers has been working on what is essentially a tribes clone. It’s free for the download and since it’s based on the versatile Torque engine it should ultimately be available for PC, Mac and Linux. I played around with it this morning. For a free game it’s definitely worthy though the maps are a little bland and not every weapon seems to have sound yet. I may play around with this and get a server running at work just for something to test with. Worth checking out if you’re a fps junkie like me.

I’m willing to bet that anyone who owned a commodore 64 back in the 80’s played the sword of fargoal at least once, and I know the folks I hung around with played it constantly. No one I know ever actually won, but now you can finally achieve Fargoal nirvana, or at least try, with this recently released Fargoal remake for the pc. I admit I was skeptical, but it turns out to be a nice blast from the past playing this again. (and no, I have not yet won, though I have gotten pretty deep into the dungeon several times now).

I still maintain that any fan of twitch arcade games owes it to themselves to get crimsonland installed on their machine. I can’t stop playing this game, the death of my machine has kept me away from it for about a week now and I’ve got a serious jones going for it. Meanwhile though I discovered another worthy challenger to the throne. Feed that twitch jones, support your local shareware authors today 😉 (the game’s great btw, better graphics than Crimsonland too….though on balance I would take Crimsonland over it, it’s still a superb little game).

I grew up playing the classic old ‘twitch’ arcade games like asteroids, galaxians and star castle. Some of them I still play to this day using the m.a.m.e emulator. Sadly this genre of games is mostly out of favor. The big publishing houses that own the rights to them have pumped out ‘inspired by’ modern versions of some of the classics over the years, but mostly these versions have been ‘inspired by’ a desire to make a quick buck and have had mediocre to poor gameplay. Leave it to the shareware scene to produce something truly excellent. If you ever played Robotron and liked it, there’s a very good chance you’ll really like Crimsonland. Great graphics, simple control scheme, pulse pounding action, and it’s over in 5-10 minutes per game. It doesn’t get much better than this in the twitch gaming scene. Blast through survival mode and see how long you can last, or check out quest mode and get an introduction to most every weapon and power up in the game.

PC only though, sorry folks.

Today’s link is to a new abandonware games archive. Home of the Underdogs has been around forever, unfortunately to cover their bandwidth costs they’ve had to embed all kinds of advertising crap in their site. This new one has none of that going on, plus their server is tons faster. Have a hankering to replay some of the old games you used to love? Check it out. I’m grabbing x-com gold.

Half life was one of the best first person shooters ever made. It’s going on 4 (or is it 5?) years old at this point and it’s still the number one online game, which is amazing when you think about it. Shortly after it was released the developers (Valve) announced they would be producing a commercial ‘Team Fortresses 2’ game, which they proceeded to show at several E3 expositions, but to this day they’ve never released anything aside from repackaging of the original Half Life and various Mods sold in shrinkwrap. So everyone was surprised when they announced a couple of weeks ago that not only had they been working on a sequel, it was almost finished and would be in stores no later than this fall.

Shweeet!

I’m trying not to get too excited about it since Unreal 2 and Unreal Tournament 2 were both big disapointments, but damn I hope they do it right. More than any other developer, Valve ‘gets’ online gaming. They’ve done a fantastic job encouraging the developer communities and the breadth and depth of the mods available for their engine are testimony to that. To this day I miss playing Frontline Forces (sadly now defunct), and I am occasionally tempted to reinstall Half Life so I can play mods like Day of Defeat and Firearms, but the damned engine is getting so creaky – if you look at the maps with a critical eye you realize just how low polygon they are and you can see the limitations on texture resolution and size. It just looks, well, bad, compared to the Quake III engine or Battlefield 1942, and I can’t bring myself to get it running again.

Anyway what got me going on this topic is these screenshots I