Dungeon Escape!: A "very silly and very low-budget flash tribute to the classic laserdisc games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, and Super Don Quixote". Wickedly playable.
GamesKidsPlay.net: Four square -and- wall ball -and- Red Light Green Light. A one-stop grade school recess resource!
Rules of Moopsball: Gary Cohn's 1976 Vance-ian science fiction piece -- a sort of precursor of Calvinball crossed with a medium-sized riot.
World of Warcraft, a game for the whole family.: "But, Brion - if you don't want your mother to know you were up and on the computer at 3:29 in the morning - DON'T post on a forum that she reads." She's a higher level than him, too.
Just Letters: A multi-user refrigerator alphabet game; spell out dirty words for people to read all over the world!
Destructo hits Livejournal!: My friend Stephen Swift's little doodle game gets played out in a hysterical LiveJournal thread.
The Asylum: Lead the abused stuffed animals through psychotherapy. An absolute delight.
An interview with Scorched Earth creator Wendell Hicken: This game was a constant time-waster my junior year of high school.
Freedfroid: Cross-platform clone of the C-64 game Paradroid.
William Dowling on Nabokov's "Pale Fire": Teasing out a great twentieth century literary puzzle -- who wrote "Pale Fire"? (Spoilers aplenty, so please read the wonderful novel first.)
The Die is Cast casino carpet gallery: "Casino carpet is known as an exercise in deliberate bad taste that somehow encourages people to gamble."
POWDER: A Rogue-like game for the Gameboy Advance: This strikes me as the height of madness.
magnetiX - a Magnetic Scrolls text adventure interpreter for Mac OS X: Play the adventure games from the British equivalent to Infocom. Awesome.
The economics of Nintendo: Nintendo is the most profitable console maker because it has bulletproof franchises and doesn't pay a lot for R&D. (via hello, nintendo)
The NES PC2C02 Video Card: "Imagine an NES game running natively on a Pentium CPU!"
desktopgaming: Make a "Double Dragon" screenshot your wallpaper.
Elves and Hobbits in Russian Woods: Russian's Tolkien LARPer scene. Who knew?
Kempa.com: Vinyl Video: Adam remains my hero. Wow, a huge and fascinating infodump about an abandoned byway of technology. (via Waxy)
Matthew Yglesias' greatest thread ever: I'm thinking he should try stuffing the head with garlic, but that may be zombies and salt. (Bonus points for the 2:48 comment.)
L.L.A.M.A., the M.U.L.E. card game: One of the greatest PC games of all time comes to a tabletop near you.
Destructo: A Game of Sequential Art: "What if I'm supposed to destroy a cultural movement? Or a concept? Or an emotion? I can't shoot those things with a lazer!"
More Words - Search for Dictionary Words for Word Games: Some nice anagram tools for games like Scrabble.
The Cards Speak: A poker blog. Now I will be flagged as spam forever. (via teh Torrez)
Ambrosia's GooBall: Is this Ambrosia's version of (the awesome) Gish?
The Israeli army considers D&D players a poor security risk.: This is why the Israeli Defense Forces have such poor luck fighting mind flayers.
Kayfabe Confidential: This is the most wonderfully ludicrous idea for a roleplaying game ever: the James Ellroy wrestling noir starring Classy Freddie Blassie.
Oolite - Retro space gaming with modern technology: Elite-esque gaming for OS X.
XArchon, a GPLed port of the old Apple II/C-64 game: The gameplay is so good! The graphics are so hideous.
There%u2019s Someone at the Door, He Says He%u2019s From the Future.: Two men spend two years making a random 18-year-old gamer the subject of their art project, in which he is informed he is the savior of the future human race. Possibly the greatest conceptual art piece of our time.
The 20' By 20' Room: Comedy is Easy, PTA is Hard: "So it%u2019s a real game about a fake TV series about a fake game, named after a real TV series about a different real game." Dude.
A Something Awful correspondent has worked with Uwe Boll (complete with email): "IT IS GOOD THAT H IS NOT A SUPERNATURAL SUPERHERO - BUT HE CANNOT BE ALSO TOO NORMAL - HE IS A LONELY HERO."
A Something Awful correspondent has worked with Uwe Boll (complete with email): "IT IS GOOD THAT H IS NOT A SUPERNATURAL SUPERHERO - BUT HE CANNOT BE ALSO TOO NORMAL - HE IS A LONELY HERO."
Noteworthy: A blogger's roleplaying game: Turning LiveJournal into an epistolatory RPG.
Pokemon causes cancer!: Damn that Charmander! (via Hello Nintendo)
Game databases change the way masters play chess: "'The line he played reeked of preparation,' he said." (via JJG)
Nethackgear.com: T-shirts for the truly, remarkably geeky: I would totally buy a YASD t-shirt involving being frozen by a floating eye and killed by a newt.
Stubbs The Zombie: The forthcoming zombie attack game (set in a city of tomorrow, circa 1959!) from the former Bungie braintrust.
Marathon Trilogy now free as in beer: The best FPS for the Mac, circa 1994, is available for all your retrogaming needs.
Puzzlesolver: Solutions to mechanical puzzles: If you'll go absolutely insane if you can't figure out how to balance six nails on one, go here.
Peiratikos - a weblog about narrative art: Comics and videogames and lowercase-t theory, mostly. I can get behind that. (via)
Peiratikos - a weblog about narrative art: Comics and videogames and lowercase-t theory, mostly. I can get behind that. (via)
Jamming a C64 into a joystick: The spirit of Philo Farnsworth and the Homebrew Computer Club lives on in a thirty-year-old high school dropout and former racecar designer.
Digital Press Sound Archives: WAVs, MP3s, and MIDI tracks representing my wasted youth. (Pitfall 2!)
Nethack turns 20: Happy birthday to the best computer game ever.
Catacomb: A story about MUDs and the online economy, circa 1985 (I read this when it came out, I think). (via)
Slate on JFK Reloaded: What could Ted Kennedy find so objectionable?
EA's employees filing a class action lawsuit?: Working conditions in the computer game industry can be brutal, but there must be something else going on here.
Girls as Game Designers: "When Heeter asked the audience to comment on what was weird about the game, one of the budding young game designers responded, with great disappointment, 'no one dies!'"
An academic analysis of Adam Cadre's "Varicella": "However offensive Primo seems to be, he is hardly capable of committing the ultimate evil of this world, sexual violence, thanks to his seeming asexuality." No offense to Plotkin and Short, but this is one of the few games worthy of this kind of exegesis.
ConQwest: A Big Urban Game: Big Game + Treasure Hunt + Phone Came + Semacode + Animal Totems (via)
A new winning strategy for the Prisoner's Dilemma: Cheating -- that is, coordinating your strategy with other players -- beats tit-for-tat. (via)
O'Reilly's "Gaming Hacks": Featuring Andrew Plotkin and Adam Cadre on Inform, among other things. (via)
Lew Ford, baseball nerd: Not as dorky as the Schilling-Glanville Everquest feud, but pretty damn impressive nonetheless. (see also)
Jason Craft: "Video games, comic books, popular media and literary theory."
Weboggle: Utterly, evilly addictive.
How fast do you read?: More importantly, how much do you retain?
The Order of the Occult Hand: "If true, the letters from Smith and Flanders reveal the origin of the Order of the Occult Hand. In the fall of 1965, several Charlotte News reporters had been drinking...."
Kasparov on Fischer: Is Kasparov's understating Fischer's history of complete detatchment from reality? Or did he just get crazier and crazier once he withdrew from chess?
The Beast: The Making of the A.I. game: "It was street theater and a con game and a pennant drive rolled into one." (via) (see also)
Congratulations, Kevin Britten!: I hope you make Steve Jobs give you an oversized novelty check. (here's why)
The history of probability as a single Excel spreadsheet: Wow. Just wow. There's a lot more fabulous game theory stuff at Roll the Bones, too.
Ben's Game: Raising the spirits of children undergoing chemotherapy through the power of fragging.
The Amazon kneejerk contrarian game: Find a classic that someone dissed. "I think about Kenny G., for instance. His rythmic session is much more regular, whereas Coltrane's session seems sometimes to loose the beat."
It's All in the Cards: A history of playing card design. (via)
"Baseball for the unathletic": The rise of poker and today's smart young man.
The Ladybug game: A nasty and addictive little Java applet (via)
Brettspiel Welt: Multiplayer online board games in the German style, for when you have an insatiable urge to settle Catan at 4:00 a.m. (via)
The Volity gaming framework: Communicates using Jabber and XML-RPC; the goal is to make it easy to throw together a turn-based multiplayer game in Perl.
Robin Laws' Livejournal: Laws is a designer of tremendous roleplaying games, including (with Jonathan Tweet) the utterly fantastic "Over the Edge". (via)
The Red Box: The exciting game of British budget management!
Self-esteem games: Can't you feel your esteem for yourself growing?
Viridian Room: The less aggrevating sequel to Crimson Room, this time with a scary ghost saying something in a language I don't understand!
Julian Dibbell wraps up Play Money: He did not quite earn more as a Ultima Online retailer than he earned as a professional writer, but four grand a month isn't anything to sneer at.
Andrew Plotkin responds: To my ill-informed ramblings on puzzles and puzzle games.
City of Heroes MMRPG: My legion of informers reports that it resembles "Top 10".
Samorost: A sweet little Flash game about a gnome and his driftwood planetoid. Charming and trippy.
Curt Schilling and Doug Glanville Everquest beef: Possibly my favorite bit of sports-related silliness of the last decade. Scythehands Voxslayer forever! (later followup) (see also)
Outdoor Survival: The Board Game: The game where you slowly starve to death in the wilderness!
Ricky Jay's Radio Journal: This, then, is what they invented the Internet for.
New Flash game from the "Grow" author: It's a fun little game, but not nearly as captivating as "Grow"
The return of the Paranoia role-playing game: Happiness is mandatory, citizen! (via) (see also)
That yeti is back.: I have no idea how long the link will stay fresh, but this game seems more complex and slightly less addictive than the previous yeti-abusing-penguins game.
Crimson Room: This is spectacularly bad, like a Rybread Celsius game in Flash and without the typos.
The Name of the Rose board game: But would it make Jesus laugh? (see also) (via)