Imagine that your favorite relative has died and has left you something very special. Now imagine that the something special is the family ghost and only you can see him. That’s The Blackwell Legacy; the Blackwell women can all see Joey but nobody else would believe them. Joey isn’t just any mutigenerational legacy, but he’s a crime-fighting, mystery-solving spirit, and you can solve the mystery in The Blackwell Mystery--and now in Blackwell Unbound, the prequel to the earlier game.

You can also enter our “Have You Seen a Ghost?” contest for a weekly opportunity to win both Blackwell games or a $10 gift certificate for other purchases at Manifesto Games.

We just launched a new site, which we invite you to check out. It's called Play This Thing, and it will feature one cool game each day--free games, interactive fiction, mods, and weird stuff like alternative reality and "big urban" games, as well, of course, as independent games.

Why are we doing this, and why is it separate from the Manifesto site?

For a bunch of reasons.

For one thing, when we launched the Manifesto site, we expected it to be a content-and-community site as well as an online retailer. That hasn't turned out as well as we had hoped; "The Word," our pages with reviews and articles about games, never got a lot of traffic--and in any event, reviews there sat a little uneasily on a site that was trying to sell you stuff. It was also not updated frequently enough to draw much repeat traffic--and perhaps was too much inspired by print magazine reviews. Online, where a demo download is a click away, short squibs are perhaps more useful than lengthy reviews--quick reading, and enough to give you a sense of whether it's worth your time to check the game out.

Game Tunnel recently posted their Top 100 Games of the last 3 years, and it was interesting going down the list--both because, well, I'd put some games a lot farther down, and some a lot higher up... And in general, I think there's not enough attention paid here to wargames, adventures, turn-based strategy, and 'serious' games, and perhaps too much to fairly pedestrian shooters, arcade game retreads, and rather dull casual games. But interesting nonetheless, since Game Tunnel also focuses on indie games, and it's intriguing to see their somewhat different take on the field--and encouraging to see that almost half of the games in their "top 100" we carry.

#1: Mr Robot

#5: Mexican Motor Mafia

#6: Jets 'n Guns

#8: Outpost Kaloki

#9: Global Defense Network

Wow. That was a lot harder than it should have been. Urban Legend's developer has their own unlock system. They sent us a little script to generate unlock codes for their game, and said "use this!".

Sounds simple. How hard can that be? Three days hard, apparently.

Normally what we do is generate a bunch of codes ahead of time, upload them to our server, and dole them out to purchasers one at a time. (If you're logged on, click "my codes" at the top of the page--that'll give you a list of all the unlock codes you've received for games you've purchased). In some cases, developers have their own code generation system which requires a second piece of data, like a user's name. No problem there; we generate a few hundred codes using names like "manifesto1," "manifesto2" and so on, and upload them. But Urban Legend wants a "system id" that's pulled off the user's machine--meaning we can't generate arbitrary codes ahead of time. The user has to supply the system ID, with the code generated afterward.

PeaceMaker Wins "GaCha" Award

Recently, PeaceMaker received the "Best Transformation Game" award at the Games for Change conference in recognition of the light (and enlightenment) it casts on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Congratulations to the folks at Impact Games.

The Word To be Revamped

Will be making some major changes to The Word soon, providing reviews and articles on a much more frequent basis, and in a rather different form. To that end, if you're interested in reviewing games (not just ones we carry, but just about anything that isn't from a major publisher, or too much on the casual side), drop us a line. At least initially, pay will be in the form of the eternal gratitude of the masses, though. Still, could be fun.

More about the revamp when we're reading to announce it... And expect some other interesting news from us soon, too.

Arctic Stud Poker Run has recently been updated to version 2.0--and the price has been cut by $5 to $19.99. The new version features new game modes, progressive betting, no-limit Poker and "All-In" options, new bot settings, user-customizable controls, remote server controls, new game duration options, additional incendiaries, secret incantations, instant access to online games, enhanced AI, and expanded documentation. (If you bought the game previously, visit the game's page, and download the 'demo' and install it--you'll wind up with the full game, because it uses the same activation as the old version.)

1893: A World's Fair Mystery has also been cut in price from $19.95 to $14.95.

Pumpkin Games, the developers of Alien Abduction, have decided to offer the game for free... The "download" link on our page now gives you the full, free game.

Also, we're now offering the Mac version of Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa--and the Linux version of Lux Delux.

Updated: We also now have the Linux version of H-Craft Championship up.

As an experiment, we've put up a web version of Bullet Candy. It'll let you play the game (well, the demo, which has no time limit and contains a tasty number of levels) in the browser, without having to go through the download and installation process.

Some caveats:

• It only works with Windows.
  
• IE users will be prompted to allow installation of an ActiveX control.
  
• Firefox and Opera users will be prompted to allow the installation of the OSA Kit Pro Player.
  

Give it a shot... And if you have any problems with it, please let us know in the comments.

Click "Play" to go:

NPR's All Things Considered recently ran a short segment about independent games, with commentary from Eric Zimmerman and me--and quite a lot of attention paid to The Shivah.

Also, The Vintage Gamer, a podcast, recently ran an interview with me--it's more about tabletop than digital games, but might be of interest.

Just up is a video interview with me at GDC on the Game Zombie site.

I received the Maverick Award at the Game Developer's conference last week (news story here); this is the speech I gave at the awards ceremony:
================
I'm of course delighted, gratified, and terrified to be here... Terrified because I'm self-effacing enough to feel that my modest accomplishments hardly qualify me for so august an honor, but delighted also that the development community so clearly sees that we we're trying to accomplish is important.

A dozen years ago, in an article in Chris Crawford's Journal of Computer Game Design, I asked whether the new interactive medium of games would ultimately become, like the written word, one that illuminates and helps us understand our world, or like television, one of deratiocinated pabulum, to the detriment of our culture and intellectual life.

Patrick Dugan (pdugan) has spent quite a lot of time over the last few weeks putting together a cool gameplay video for Play With Fire. He writes:

After ten hours of technical set-backs, ten hours of capturing, five hours of processing, and then editing dispersed over three weeks, we have it.

It could be better, but I think its well past the point of diminishing returns for getting people to try the game. Hopefully this'll lead to sales.