So they did it with Major Stryker, Bio Menace, Xenophage, and Stargunner. Now the good folks over at 3D Realms have decided to release Alien Carnage as freeware.

Originally titled Halloween Harry, the aim is to guide the hero through sewers, factories, and office blocks killing zombies with a variety of weapons and rescue hostages before they turn into one of them. Alien Carnage featured digitized music, crisp VGA graphics, and excellent cut-scenes.

Because of 3D Realms' policy of releasing their old titles as freeware every year, we might be seeing Mystic Towers, Hocus Pocus, Realms of Chaos, Death Rally, and much of their other older titles.

Dr. Janet Coyle received a Wii for Christmas and realized that it could be useful in treating stroke victims. The idea proved to be so effective that people like Walter Rowry were up and around a week after having a stroke. Mr. Rowry was happy to use the Wii unit to bowl and regain the use of his left arm.

Link to article

Today Blizzard announced their new and much awaited new project: StarCraft II.

Among the features highlighted, Blizzard mentions new units for the same three races from the previous game, new gameplay mechanics and a new 3D engine.

By the screenshots on the website, I wouldn't say the graphics are much better than those seen in Warcraft III. To be honest, they just look a polished version of the first game for me.

Would it be that Blizzard is aiming on gameplay rather than graphic gimmicks?

I just put a new update out which mostly focuses on improving and extending the forums. There are also many fixes to problems that have been brought up. These things range from the MobyDark theme, to the search engine, the submission process and some of the backend things admins need to do. Check the changelog for a list of changes.

A few year back our very own Jim Leonard created a program called 8088 Corruption which would display full motion video on an 8088. Recently, he did a talk at NOTACON/Block Party where he went into detail about the project. A video of his talk has been posted at archive.org. While not specifically game related, it's certainly interesting. I think a lot of our classic gaming readers and former demo scene folks will enjoy it.

There’s an interesting front page article on Gamasutra, misleadingly titled Why Action Games Suck (And What To Do About It) - really more of a call to game developers to make gaming accessible to people with disabilities. The author’s contention is that many action games “suck” because they are far too difficult for the beginning or average player, even on so-called easy settings, and even more so for people with motor disabilities. Not meaning to trivialize that last, I would include those of us who are getting older :-( and no longer have the visual acuity and reflexes for difficult action games. Or just sucked at them from the get-go, like me!

(I would also refer everyone to THAT game - title of your choice – that you had to quit playing because you couldn’t make the jump to the right spot on the ledge/tree branch/whatever that was required of you…)

Do you think game developers have a responsibility here? Or is it a case of buyer beware?

That lovable piece of black plastic and rubber, the ZX Spectrum, recently celebrated its 25 birthday, and the community celebrated by announcing the 12th iteration of the annual comp.sys.sinclair crap games contest. The idea is to, inspired by the classic Cassette 50, write a game which can't be considered good by any standards.

You have until the end of the year to come up with a suitably crap game, to be submitted at the official contest page, or you can look at the results of the earlier competitions for some inspiration.

And don't worry, qualifications, originality and experience are definitely optional in this case.