Abstracting hardware: obsolescence obsolete (with OnLive)

Most everyone has heard the news of OnLive, the new cloud-based computer gaming platform. I’m not here to regurgitate that for you. Instead, I intend to give it some context. Cloud computing is all the rage right now. With netbooks growing in popularity, all sorts of Internet-based services are popping up to make the experience of owning a netbook more rich. OnLive applies this model to PC gaming while...

The Space Game: a deep Flash RTS

The Space Game is a deep and satisfying RTS developed on Adobe’s Flash platform. It has a bit of a tower defense flavor with the resource collection of an RTS. You start with a solar station which provides you with energy to use for building resource collecting structures. Then, you must build lasers to protect your resource collection structures from pirates trying to destroy them. The graphics are simple but...

Gaming’s underground: an indie games primer

Like most commercial artforms, video games have a vibrant community that exists outside the commercial realm. People are making games that are less influenced by the marketability of the graphics, the concept, and the gameplay conventions—and in many cases they are not influenced at all by these factors. This gives developers and artists a blank canvas to create games that you could never find on the shelf at...

Three great gaming blogs (two new to me)

Awesome gaming blogs are coming out of the woodwork. I have found two excellent blogs in the past week that were not at all on my radar before. The first is Play This Thing! That’s their exclamation, not mine, but it is well-deserved nonetheless. The blog covers games that are otherwise starving for coverage. They cover indie games of all kinds including downloadable games, Flash games, and even board games...

Purchase and download old PC games on the cheap

Good Old Games is a digital download service offering PC games that, while they aren’t going to tax your new GTX 295, are some of the greatest titles of their time. Fortunately, they also won’t tax your wallet much. We’re not talking Ultima 2 or anything like that. Everything I’ve seen on the site was published in the last 15 years, and the quality of the games shows through in spite of the...