Now Updated to Version 2

Vicky: What's that? It looks like Final Fantasy.

Me: No, it's a game called Aveyond.

Vicky (after watching for several minutes): It looks fun. Can I play?

Vicky's right; Aveyond does play a lot like Final Fantasy--maybe about V, since the graphics are 2D sprites in an oblique overhead view. It's a game you wouldn't be surprised to find on your SNES or Genesis.

Insect Warrior Tactics

Remember a few years ago when there was a spate of animated movies featuring bugs? There's a reason for that, actually; it's fairly easy to animate chitonous creatures in 3D, since the body sections are rigid. And it's also fairly easy even for an indie developer to use 3D, if what they're animating are bugs. Which no doubt was one of the reasons Wahoo/NinjaBee chose insects for the heroes of this title. The choice is a fortuitous one, though, since it lends itself to the developers' light humorous touch -- which was very evident in their earlier (and excellent) tycoon game, Outpost Kaloki.

Band of Bugs is a "tactics" game -- like Final Fantasy Tactics. Played in isometric 3D over a square grid with elevation differences, each turn you select one of your characters, move it, deliver an attack (or use a skill), and optionally change facing. Elevation and attacking from the rear or flank provide bonuses. Different bugs have different capabilities, and effective use of combined arms (that is, combining different capabilities for maximal impact on the enemy) is very important.

The game contains a 20-level campaign game, a configurable skirmish mode with several different maps, and three stand-alone levels; it also allows multiplayer online play, either over a LAN or the public Internet. And there's a level editor so you can build and share your own levels (a handful available at present on the developer's forums).

On the whole, it's a charming, quick playing, occasionally humorous and entertaining little title in a genre that's no longer widely supported.

- 3D RPG/Adventure game from the third person view.
- Incredible story taking place on a historical Earth in the 1930's.
- Each chapter includes many beautiful areas.
- Special rules system adapted to a real-time setting - including 8 base skills and 9 derived skills.
- Fast paced combat in a rich and detailed world where dialogue interaction and story play equally large roles.
- Classless system allows the user to customize their character however they want as they advance to as high as 100th level.
- A random item generator allows the player to find literally thousands of different weapons and items.
- Special subgames which are included in the story and could be played as independent games.
- Many items to upgrade your skills.
- Many spells that evolve and grow as your characters' abilities increase.
- Many enemies to challenge your combat and spell-casting abilities.
- Simple and intuitive gameplay with a clean interface.

Is it possible to design an online game so that communication, community, story-telling, and the genuine playing of roles is core and essential to the experience?

Of course it is. You just won't get the $40m budget you need for a big commercial title out of the philistines who rule our industry today unless you want, in essence, to imitate World of Warcraft.

Enter Skotos, and Castle Marrach.

Eerily Evocative Adventure/RPG Hybrid

In Daemonica, you take the role of Nicholas Fayrepoint, a sort of demon hunter-cum-private eye in a small town in a fantasy world that's subject to a curse. Your job, naturally, is to figure out what's going wrong, and set things right.

The game is in essence built as 3D RPG, with a simple point-and-click combat system, inventory, character advancement, and the like; but the gameplay is much more like a classic graphic adventure, with puzzles to be solved and characters from whom you must extract information. This is something of a happy hybrid, more free-form than a classic click-and-combine adventure but with much of the same feel--but those looking for the combat intensity of a Diablo are better off looking elsewhere.

Out-Compete Those Other Heroes

At first glance, Depths of Peril is a Diablo-esque RPG. You control a single character of the usual range of classes (warrior, mage, cleric, rogue); you go out on quests to surrounding areas, slaying lots of monsters, earning XP and money that you can use to improve stats and equipment. Combat is fast, Diablo rather than Final Fantasy, and there's the same huge range of variety in equipment and magic items.

But -- layered atop this are AI opponents that remind us of the opponents in Railroad Tycoon. You control a "covenant," which consists of you and up to 5 other characters you recruit (and incidentally, you can take one along with you when you go adventuring, which is extremely useful). Each of the other covenants -- up to 5 of them -- is busy adventuring and building up their own heroes' stats and equipment while you are.

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.

The Metropolis of Games?

Like Fritz Lang's silent film masterpiece Metropolis, ETROM is set in a future world controlled by oppressive governments--and like Metropolis, its palette is dark and sinister, and its aesthetic pregnant with a sense of incipient revelation.

Atmosphere, indeed, is where ETROM excels; some reviewers have dinged it for a "difficult to follow story," but in fact, that's untrue. Rather, it is an ambiguous, somewhat inexplicable, highly evocative story--the kind of story you'd expect from Borges or Philip K. Dick, not from pulp sci fi.

The First True Interactive Drama

For decades, true interactive fiction--an application in which characters' responses to a player's input are determined algorithmically rather than via prescripted sequences, and in which valid stories emerge regardless of player action--has been a holy grail for AI researchers, digital artists, and game developers alike.

Most attempts to solve the problem have been "top down," that is, attempting to handle all sorts of stories, all sorts of personalities, and all sorts of potential actions. The results have generally been never more than mildly interesting.

Andy Stern and Michael Mateas, however, chose to try to solve a specific problem, rather than the general one. They chose a story with one setting (an apartment), two NPCs (a husband and wife), one basic conflict (their marriage is on the rocks), and a limited time frame (you are a friend of the family, visiting them over the course of an evening). By narrowing the focus this way, they were actually to solve the problem. Not, to be sure, in a way that solves the general problem--but in a way that makes of Façade the first really interesting work of true interative fiction.