May
31
2011
31
2011
Bringing Old Arcade Machines Into the Internet Age
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 ...
May
06
2011
06
2011
Smithsonian Unveils ‘Art of Games’ Voting Results
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 ...
Apr
27
2011
27
2011
Roguelikes: the Misnamed Genre
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 ...
Mar
29
2011
29
2011
Ultima IV — EA Takedowns Precede Official Reboot
Kevin Fishburne writes "According to posts at the Ultima fan site Ultima Aiera, both the browser-based Ultima IV Sega Master System emulation at Master System 8 and the IBM-PC port at Phi Psi Software have received cease and desist letters ...
Mar
02
2011
02
2011
Futureproofing Artifacts: Spacewar! 1962 In HTML5
trebonian writes "In 1997 we posted a playable version of the Spacewar!, the first graphical computer game. Spacewar! was written by Russell et al at MIT in the early '60s. We did not re-implement the game. Rather, we found the ...
Feb
25
2011
25
2011
King’s Quest III Remake Released
Beetle B. writes "Not being content with remaking Sierra's King's Quest I, King's Quest II and Quest for Glory II, the Anonymous Game Developers Interactive have released a remake of King's Quest III. Sure, the graphics may not appeal to ...
Feb
21
2011
21
2011
The Legend of Zelda Turns 25
harrymcc writes "The Legend of Zelda originated 25 years ago today, when Nintendo released the original game for its Famicom console in Japan on February 21st, 1986. Benj Edwards is celebrating with a look at some of the franchise's odder ...
Feb
04
2011
04
2011
Super Mario Coming To the 3DS
RedEaredSlider writes with news that Nintendo is working on a Super Mario Bros. title for their 3DS handheld, bringing the classic franchise into the world of 3-D. The announcement came at the end of a lengthy conversation about the creation ...
Jan
27
2011
27
2011
The Rise and Fall of Graphic Adventure Games
The Opposable Thumbs blog has a detailed retrospective on almost three decades of history in the graphic adventure genre. While this type of game has fallen from favor in recent times, many classic titles made indelible marks on the memories ...
Jan
11
2011
11
2011
Hank Chien Reclaims Donkey Kong High Score
An anonymous reader writes "If you can say anything about Hank Chien, it's that he evidently doesn't take defeat very well. Sure, he knew not so deep down that his Donkey Kong World Record score wouldn't last forever, but he ...
Jan
02
2011
02
2011
Super Mario Bros. 3 Level Design Lessons
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Significant Bits about how the early level design in Super Mario Bros. 3 gradually introduced players to the game without needing something as blatant and obtrusive as a tutorial: "Super Mario Bros. ...
Dec
03
2010
03
2010
Pac-Man’s Ghost Behavior Algorithms
An anonymous reader writes "This article has a very interesting description of the algorithms behind the ghosts in Pac-Man. I had no idea about most of this information, but that's probably because it's difficult to study the ghosts when I ...
Nov
20
2010
20
2010
Chess Terminator Robot Takes On Former World Champ
Zothecula writes with this excerpt from Gizmag "For almost as long as we've had computers, humans have been trying to make ones that play chess. The most famous chess-playing computer of course is IBM's Deep Blue, which in 1997 defeated ...
Nov
17
2010
17
2010
Crazy Taxi Arrives For PSN, XBLA Version Coming Soon
Today a remake of the Dreamcast classic Crazy Taxi launched on the PlayStation Network, with the Xbox Live Arcade release coming November 24th. The graphics have been updated to 720p, but licensing issues for the soundtrack and some in-game locations ...
Nov
10
2010
10
2010
Nintendo Seeks To Trademarks "It’s On Like Donkey Kong"
eldavojohn writes "Nintendo has requested a trademark on the phrase 'It's on like Donkey Kong.' The phrase has been used in everything from rap to television in modern culture. From the article: 'The makers of the classic video-game franchise have ...
Nov
01
2010
01
2010
Typewriter Hacked To Play Zork
UgLyPuNk writes "Typewriters that can type by themselves are one thing. Typewriters that can type by themselves and play Zork are totally different — the stuff that dreams are made of (at least the dreams of little girls who spent ...
Oct
02
2010
02
2010
Retro Gaming Technologies Released Before Their Time
Barence writes "Motion-sensing golf game controllers that appeared 20 years before the Nintendo Wii and the 1980s handheld console that operated on solar power are just two of the gems unearthed in this article about retro gaming secrets. Davey Winder ...
Oct
02
2010
02
2010
Lost Online Games From the Pre-Web Era
harrymcc writes "Long before the Web came along, people were playing online games — on BBSes, on services such as Prodigy and CompuServe, and elsewhere. Gaming historian Benj Edwards has rounded up a dozen RPGs, MUDs, and other fascinating curiosities ...
Sep
22
2010
22
2010
GOG.com Not Really Gone
gspr writes "On Sunday, Slashdot and many others reported that DRM-free games site GOG.com was shutting down. Now the site is back, revealing that it was all a hoax. According to the site: 'Now it's time we put an end ...
Sep
22
2010
22
2010
Elo Chess Rating System Topped By Proposed Replacements
databuff writes "About six weeks ago, Slashdot reported a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performed better than the official Elo rating system. The competition has just reached the halfway mark and the best entries have outperformed Elo ...
Sep
20
2010
20
2010
Return To Castle Wolfenstein Source Code Released
geefau writes with news that id Software has released the source code to Return To Castle Wolfenstein (single player and multiplayer), along with Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory, under the GPL. The linked article notes that "these only include the game ...
Sep
19
2010
19
2010
DRM-Free Games Site GOG.com Gone
An anonymous reader writes "Just a day after adding a new game and a handful of promotions, GOG.com, a seller of classic games in a DRM-free format, has closed shop, leaving only a sparse placeholder page and a mention on ...
Sep
07
2010
07
2010
Breathing New Life Into Old DirectDraw Games
An anonymous reader writes "I bought a bunch of old Wing Commander games for Windows, but they use DirectDraw, which Microsoft has deprecated. They don't work too well under Windows 7, so I ended up reimplementing ddraw.dll using OpenGL to ...
Sep
02
2010
02
2010
The Best Video Games On Awful Systems
Buffalo55 writes "For the most part, classic games manage to reappear on different systems. Just look at Nintendo. The publisher has done an excellent job bringing NES, SNES, Genesis and even old school Neo Geo titles to the Wii's Virtual ...
Aug
28
2010
28
2010
What Pinball Looks Like When the Stakes Are High
siobHan writes "The PAPA World Pinball Championships recently concluded in Scott, PA (near Pittsburgh), as covered on Slashdot already. The organizers recorded full 1080p/60 HD video of the playfield during the final games, and have uploaded the entirety of the ...
The Protomen - Rock Music and Mega Man Combined.
An Irrelevant Take on the Zombie Goodness of the Walking Dead
Halloween Fear Fest - Mega Shark VS Giant Octopus
Amnesia: The Dark Descent will induce heart problems.
Redline - 7 Years in the making and damn, it looks good.