Your Daily World-Conquest Fix

Aevum Obscurum is an online-only multiplayer game of world conquest. Played on a map of Europe (though other maps can be downloaded and used), each player starts with a single province, a small army, and a treasury. Your ultimate goal is to become the dominant power, controlling much of the map.

Online only? Yes; its primarily a multiplayer game, with up to 50 players possible in a single instance. You play your moves, send them to the server--and when all players moves are in (or the deadline hits), the sever resolves players orders. You then view what happened last turn, and plan your moves for the next. Games can be started either in long-term or "blitz" mode; in blitz mode, turns update every few minutes, while in long-term mode, they update every day or so.

Risk In the Ancient World

From developers Sillysoft comes a new installment in their series of history-related Risk-like games. In Ancient Empires Lux, the first scenario starts in ancient Sumeria, and the last with the Roman empire; in between are the Indus Valley civilizations, the Babylonian empire, China under the Zhou (and later under the Han), the Greek city states, the rise of the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great, and the Maurya in India.

In each scenario, you can play as any of the contending powers--with the interesting twist that since there's generally one power set up as more likely to win, you earn more points playing as one of the less powerful contenders.

Deep, detailed simulation? Well, no; this is a Risk-like game, after all. But it's colorful, there is a sense of history, and kids, at least, may learn something from it.

Not infrequently, you run into somebody posting about whether or not open-source development can possibly work for games, and usually concluding that it can't. Very likely the poster has played NetHack, but I guess Rogue-likes don't count. But. What about Battle for Wesnoth?

Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based fantasy game in which you control a set of heroes and armies, building up over time to defeat AI-controlled opponents. A slew of campaign and scenarios in the game itself provide probably hundreds of hours of gameplay, but an active community provides innumerable new mods and campaigns you can download. It's been localized for something like 20 languages, and ported to just about every viable OS still in active use. And it is, of course, utterly free, both in the "free like beer" and "free like freedom" senses; the source code is open and available.

The text adventure--once the purview of geeks and computer scientists seeking to push the edge of mainframe computing technology; now an arena for serious writers and academics looking to explore the intersection between literature and interaction.

Case in point.

Book & Volume is a Z-engine game--implemented using the same technology that Infocom used, back in the day. Too retro for the conventional market, but finding another outlet: it's a highly literary work with serious artistic ambitions, recognized by the Iowa Review of all things--a journal you probably have never heard of, unless you are a short fiction writer, desperately trying to find a venue for your work in a world where markets for short fiction are few. And if, say, you are an obscure SF short story writer with credits in the degraded pulps, and find that Z-machine games are appearing in the effing IOWA REVIEW, you think.... Well, this isn't the world I grew up in.

Fun with Physics

The name may make BCS sound dull, but actually, it's quite entertaining--and quite innovative. In a series of levels of increasing difficulty, you're challenged to build increasingly complicated bridges, then drive over them in a train--and if you haven't done a good enough job, watch it collapse. The key is that it's in 3D with a robust physics engine that simulates the stresses on bridge members in detail, and provides a nice view of the occasional disasters. It's no surprise that BCS won the "audience choice" award at the 2003 Independent Games Festival. (Mac and Linux versions, too.)

Cosmic Encounter!

Cosmic Encounter! For those of us who encountered the game in our youth, the words have something of the ring of "Oklahoma!" The ebullient American spirit! The vast vistas of, um, outer space. The late nights in dorm rooms or at science fiction conventions studying cards and back-stabbing allies... A brilliant game then, and in its Internet version, a brilliant game still.

The Best Puzzle Game of All Time

Or so says the Mathematics Association of America, and who are we to disagree?

To call it a puzzle game is inadequate, however; the DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) games are sui generis, and about the only quick way to describe them is as "Gauntlet meets Sokoban."

Caravel Games describes the DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) series as "dungeon crawls for thinkers," and that's what they are--an oddly compelling combination of puzzle solving and the dungeon experience.

Real-Time.. Risk? Meets 4X??

Imagine playing Risk in real time, with new armies showing up continually and attacks occurring as fast as you and your opponents can order them. Or imagine a 4X space conquest game stripped down to the barebones essentials. With graphics that look like they come from a minimalist shmup. With games typically taking 5 minutes, and playable online against up to 11 other players...

Sounds wild? It is, and you've just imagined Galcon.

2005 IGF Award Winner
Reinventing the Platformer with Physics

At first glance, Gish might appear to be a classic arcade-style game, something like Sonic or Mario Brothers. First glances can be deceiving: yes, this is a sidescrolling platformer, but the actual gameplay is very different, because it's based on a physics engine. Gish, the tar ball who is the title character, needs to get momentum to get up and over objects, controls how high he jumps by compressing and extending himself, can move objects by gaining momentum and running into them, walks on walls and ceilings by making himself "sticky", and so on.