For those of you out there who enjoy a good roguelike game now and again... I would urge you to check out A.D.O.M. The learning curve is steep (brutal actually) and your characters will drop like flies but it is a hell of a game:) The author is working on a anew version of it called JADE and is actually updating his bloody website once in a while.

     Chiprj seems to be the latest victim of the MMORPG bug. He was taken up with World of Warcraft. Alas poor Yorick I knew him well...      Time for an intervention.      Chip is far from the first casualty to the Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) industry. When I was in Korea we had legions fo guys who were totally addicted to EverQuest. These soldiers would leave work, (often not even changing out of uniform)...

     I got the expansion pack for Warhammer 40K : Winter Assault a few days ago and have yet to able to use the damn thing. I am not alone in this as many gamers who purchased this pack have the exact same issue. This is a great example of how copy protection schemes can backfire on a developer. THQ/Relic were so concerned that people would pirate their expansion pack (made alomst entirely from independant modders work and simply repackaged neatly BTW), that they apparently h...

NextGen has a great interview with Greg Costikyan about the future of software and game development/distobution. A little Stardock-plugging excerpt:   I think we will launch with a hundred or more titles. I'm not relying solely on broadly populist products although we will certainly be carrying those. We'll also be looking at, for example, war games where there is a consumer following but which rarely has much in the way of retail distribution any more. For example, companies ...

     I love Thomas Biskup's free RPG ADOM . It is a lovingly crafted masterwork which has a depth of gameplay I have never seen anywhere else (and thats saying something). The man is a saint for providing the world with this product for nothing besides postcards.      All that being said though I have one and only one complaint about his free ice cream (for those of you who don't know "free ice cream" is something of an in-joke here at JU) : ...

For those who may have given up on checking the ADOM site, Thomas Biskup has made a small update here with promises of more.

     I can picture it now... you load the code into the compiler, hit compile, go get a beer and a jagerschnitzel, come back and release an updated version of ADOM! The world would rejoice. At least update the bloody page Thomas! Grr...  

     I previously wrote this article regarding my concern about kids playing World of Warcraft unsupervised. After nearly 19,000 unique hits it ranks as my most widely read article to date. The debate in the commentary was fierce as people who have never read my blog assumed that since I had dared to write anything that didn't reflect gaming in a saintly light that I was in fact some sort of homebrew Jack Thompson-esque game hater.      I thought...

            I would like you to meet two friends of mine : Thomas and Dane. Different guys living in different parts of the country. Let me tell you about Thomas first ok?                 Thomas started from almost nothing and worked his ass off to get where he is today. Homeless and alone he struggled as an orphan in a hostile and uncaring place. The only thi...

     Look Galciv2 Beta 4 just came out Thursday night. Already tons of bug reports and feature suggestions have been posted on the forums with answers direct from the devs! My god there are game companies out there who will go months to years without showing their faces on their own forums! (I'm looking at you, Atari, THQ, Relic, and Microprose!).      Not only are the devs responding but they have already relased a new build! Thats why Brad and ...

Fanboys and girls it is time to start your Betas! Galciv2 Beta 4 is out! Feel free to leave your commentary on it's lusciousness. I am downloading mine now... *Update V2.0 : Galciv2 now functioning. They fixed the install.  *update : Spoke a bit too soon I guess.. the version now available through Stardock Central appears to be corrupt. My error log is in the commentary now.

Just drooling over some Xbox 360 specs and such  here when I noticed this strange footnote :   *Free Silver membership requires a broadband Internet connection and an Xbox 360 storage device (hard drive or memory unit). Korean players under the age of 14 and players who have previously been banned from Xbox Live are ineligible.   Odd that it is just Koreans under age 14 who are banned. What bizarre incident did I miss here? Chiprj probably knows... If you k...

A follow-up to Amitty's article ...   A few days ago I posted this bit regarding the start of an email exchange between anti-violent video game zealot Jack Thompson and the creators of Penny Arcade. Well Jack has escalated this by sending a very misleading letter to the Seatle PD trying to have the PA guys arrested (for god knows what). I have taken the liberty of reproducing the letter PA posted since they are having server issues right now.     This ...

This is an email I wrote to anti-violent video game "crusader" Jack Thompson ( jackpeace@comcast.net ) after reading about an exchange between Jack and Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik (Gabe): Mr. Thompson,      I find it humorous that gamers have overwhelmed your offering of $10,000 to produce a video game annually with www.childsplaycharity.org . Frankly I think your 10K offer is quite paltry and also fairly disingenous. Truly you are a strange, small, and helpless ...

     I am a gamer and my wife is decidedly not. Nonetheless she makes an effort to play a few games with me. Lately though it seems as though game developers are going out of their way to keep her from finding any appeal in their products.      Our favorites are games that support local multi-player in cooperative mode. The most notable of these in recent days has been Gears of War. Gears has a simple split screen coop view and a solid system of ga...