Published by
timothy on
Dec 01, 2011
First time accepted submitter treellama writes “Nearly 12 year since Bungie released the source code for Marathon 2, the Aleph One team is thrilled to release version 1.0 of the Aleph One game engine. Aleph One is a Free software, cross platform game engine that supports all three original Marathon games with enhancements such as OpenGL and Internet play; as well as numerous third party mods known as ’scenarios.’ Easy to install full versions of Marathon, Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity, now featuring high resolution graphics and modern widescreen HUD support, can be downloaded for free from the project website!”
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jjp9999 writes “Anyone who remembers Eye of the Beholder should be glad to know a group of developers is trying to bring back the first person dungeon crawl genre while holding true to the classic style. Legend of Grimrock is still in its pre-alpha state, but could breathe new life into a genre that many a geek still remembers fondly. The game gives players control of four characters as they try to escape a prison labyrinth. The graphics and lighting are what you’d expect from a modern game, but early videos show it doesn’t stray too far from everything that was done right by Eye of the Beholder.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
jjp9999 writes “Anyone who remembers Eye of the Beholder should be glad to know a group of developers is trying to bring back the first person dungeon crawl genre while holding true to the classic style. Legend of Grimrock is still in its pre-alpha state, but could breathe new life into a genre that many a geek still remembers fondly. The game gives players control of four characters as they try to escape a prison labyrinth. The graphics and lighting are what you’d expect from a modern game, but early videos show it doesn’t stray too far from everything that was done right by Eye of the Beholder.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Electronic Arts has announced that the popular 1993 cyberpunk game Syndicate is getting a remake. This time, instead of being a tactical action game, it’ll be a first-person shooter, and co-op play is planned. The Guardian’s games blog sums up what the new Syndicate will need in order to succeed: “The biggest challenge will to replicate Bullfrog’s brilliant story-telling and its keen eye for cyberpunk details. The original titles were also fascinating for their amorality – players were neither rewarded nor penalized for gunning down civilians or destroying vast areas of real estate, reflecting the wider themes of urban nihilism and social breakdown. Fans certainly won’t be appeased by a vaguely near-future shoot-’em-up with some hackneyed hacking mini-games tossed in for cyber-credentials.”
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Published by
timothy on
Jul 22, 2011
bhaak1 writes “The first — and hopefully annual — NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament called Junethack started last Sunday and runs until the end of August 14th.This tournament features Vanilla NetHack and several of its forks: SporkHack, UnNethack, AceHack and as a special bonus game — never seen on a public server before — NetHack 1.3d, the first version of the game called NetHack, released 1987. There are various achievements to gain, even for those poor souls that can’t win this complex and sadistic game. The source code of the tournament management and website software is available for hacking on GitHub if you prefer hacking code to hacking monsters.”
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An anonymous reader writes “30 years ago this month, Nintendo released Donkey Kong — an iconic arcade machine that put the company on the video game map and introduced Mario. Technologizer’s Benj Edwards celebrated the anniversary by rounding up some of the game’s odder sidelights. For instance, it was originally going to be a game about Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyl — and among its stranger offshoots was a pocket-sized game in which Donkey Kong and Mario faced off in hockey.”
Gamasutra has a more detailed article about the game’s development.
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An anonymous reader writes “Somehow my brain, so addled by pop-culture and videogames, drew a link between the alteration of the game-play mechanics in a 20-year-old series, and growing up. I want things to be how they were. I want to play the games I played when I was a child, only I want them to be new. Naturally, this just can’t happen. Things will never be the way they used to be. Summer days are no longer spent running around outside before collapsing on a sofa to try to beat Labyrinth Zone; instead they’re spent in a sweltering office full of morons who watch The Apprentice. Life has changed. Circumstances have changed. Even if the perfect 2D Sonic game were released tomorrow, it still wouldn’t feel right, because I’m no longer the person who played those games.’”
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An anonymous reader writes “To celebrate the opening of their hackerspace, Sprite_tm of SpritesMods hacked an old 1943 arcade machine to record its high scores, as well as post them on Twitter, via a newly added TCP/IP stack. The bus-tapping module he added to the machine lets him read the full contents of the Z80 logic board’s memory, allowing him to store high scores for posterity as well as add an Ethernet interface. The device should work on any Z80-based machine, which makes it easy to add these same capabilities to any old arcade cabinet.”
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AndrewGOO9 writes “The Smithsonian American Art Museum, in recognizing that electronic games are a part of our artistic history has now unveiled the 80 games out of a proposed pool of 240 that will be included in The Art of Video Games exhibit running from March 16, 2012 to September 30, 2012. While the winning games (PDF), as voted by gamers and art enthusiasts alike, are all stand-out titles, it goes without saying that this a huge step in the recognition of video games as artisitic masterpieces.”
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ZorbaTHut writes “I’ve been playing a lot of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup lately. It’s a great example of a roguelike (and open source, too). But I can’t stop thinking that perhaps ‘roguelike’ is the wrong term for the genre. ‘Roguelikes aren’t about dungeons. They’re not about text-based graphics, or random artifacts, or permadeath. … Roguelikes are about using an unpredictable toolkit with complex interactions in order to overcome unpredictable challenges.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
