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) : ...

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 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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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.

     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 ...

            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...

     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 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...

     I was over browsing the EBGames site and swearing to myself that MS simply doesn't know how to manage gamers when it comes to the 360. I mean who the hell waits this long between game releases?      Then my hypocrisy hit me full in the face as I was checking the ADOM site (again) in hopes of some small shred of an update from Thomas Biskup. He only keeps a few of his "blog" entries on the main page so the real story is in the version history ...

This is what laughingly passes for a recently released list for the 360 over at EBGames.com:          More than a full month since a game release for a brand new platform? Is it any wonder they are taking so much heat over the lack of backwards compatibility? If you don't give users new stuff to play you had better let them play their old stuff at the very least. At the time of this writing two of our big favs (World Series of Poker and Battlefront 2) ...

     For those that don't know Infinium Labs is a running joke in the gaming world. Started by a guy named Bachus it was initially supposed to produce a next-gen gaming console appropriately named "Phantom" Nearly 5 years later this is what they came up with so far.      5 years and we get a keyboard on a hopped up lazy susan? Who the fuck is still giving this clown money? The folks running this company already have several ruined companies and t...

     Just a quick followup to this article I wrote a while back concerning World of Warcraft and kids playing it unsupervised. PWOT has posted the following video of a WoW "gay bar" . While I personally find the whole thing hilarious it is indicative of the sort of thing that goes on on WoW servers from time to time that many parents simply would never have thought about since WoW is just a game to them. I laughed my ass off though.        ...