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.

"Defender Clone" Doesn't Do it Justice
Now Free!

Yes, the basics of the gameplay derive from Defender--it's a sidescrolling shmup in which you can 'flip' your ship to move and fire either right or left, and enemies approach from both sides of the screen. But Alien Abduction features trippy late-80s graphics, excellent sound and music, 30 levels, and 3 gameplay modes.

The Risks of American History

American History Lux, like Sillysoft's Lux Delux, uses the rules of Risk. But in this case, you play through a series of maps representing American wars (from the French and Indian War through the Iraq War), with armies and geography that shape the experience into a reasonable recreation of those wars. Not an intensive simulation, in other words, but something that does give a cool sense of historial progression. Before each level begins, you're presented with a little bit of information about the war (and a link to Wikipedia if you want to know more).

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.

Dragons and Unicorns Meet... The Space Shooter?

Archmage is a classic vertical strolling space shooter--except that instead of controlling a spaceship, you control a dragon or unicorn, and instead of shooting at enemy ships, you're shooting at a variety of fantasy beasties--using spells instead of science fictional weapons.

Innovative? No--but the controls are smooth, the bosses are interesting, and its graphically appealing--cute, in a word.

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.

Buy This Game and Get Plasmaworm as a Free Bonus

Yar, well... It's Tetris.

Well not quite; none of the Tetris shapes, instead a fall-from-the-sky, match-three-stacking game like, well, many others--except that there are five different game modes that introduce new features, like jokers, bombs, hidden blox, frogs, fireballs, slot machines, "wild" blox, and boulders.

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.)

Death and Beauty

It's a paradox that the shmup--that old-school genre of frenetic space shooting--can create visuals that come closer to the status of abstract art than any other digital form... If you could ever look up from the intensity of combat long enough to really notice them.

Bullet Candy is a case in point; frenetic space mayhem, and beautiful imagery.

Charlie Knight, its creator, is clearly a long-standing enthusiast of the genre; he's created a highly polished, well executed examplar of the form, complete with "Minter levels" as an homage to Jeff Minter's landmark games. Shmup fans will find a lot to like here; novices are advised to turn the difficulty down as low as it will go (which isn't much).