Creature Labs, the Cambridge developer of Creatures, is gone.

(From NTK.)

Take a Nintendo NES. Turn it into a PC case. Download a NES emulator. Try and explain your behavior to normal people.

(From Memepool.)

Way of the Samurai, a game for PS2, seems to apply an interesting brute-force branching approach to its storyline, with apparently intriguing results:

Some players may be turned off by the game's simple looks and occasionally cumbersome control, but sticking with Way of the Samurai reveals considerable depth. The area around Rokkotsu Pass has a great many events to get involved in, and the attention to action and consequence is surprising. For example, in some games, the blacksmith would simply refuse to perform a service you couldn't afford. Here, he does it, finds out you stiffed him, and then tries to kill you. You can fight back, of course, but knocking him off means no sword repairs for the rest of the game. Many other events are structured in a similar way -- it's that added layer of consequence that makes it worth playing so many times.

Sheldon Pacotti, the writer who worked on Deus Ex 1 and 2, has written an article for Salon.com about the possible implications of current technology.

Tobe already made an obscure reference to rRootage, or rather about BulletML on his site two days ago and so was incredibly underwhelmed when I showed the game today. He even found a shoot-em-up you can play in a browser by the same guy in Japan.

A blog's not a blog if it doesn't link to some other blogs. So there.

rRootage.

Defeat autocreated huge battleships. Shootem up game, 'rRootage'. The barrages are created by BulletML and Bulletsmorph. How to play Control your ship and avoid the barrage. Use the laser gun to destroy the battleship of the enemy." Acknowledgement libBulletML is used to parse BulletML files. Simple DirectMedia Layer is used for the display handling. SDL_mixer and Ogg Vorbis CODEC to play BGM/SE. Mersenne Twister to create the random number.

The latest tech and the oldest gameplay. Yum.

(From Antifactory.org.)

Andrew Phelps started a game blog called "Got Game?" on Corante on March 25th. He says:

What this blog is focused on:

1. Emerging Gaming Technologies.
2. Emerging Social Phenomena Surrounding Games. 3.   Emergence of Games as a Societal Medium. 4.   Emergence of Games in Academia.

What this blog is not: A Game Review Site. A Game Technology Site.

The man has a much clearer sense of mission than me. Writes longer blog entries, too.

His April 1st entry compares on-line multi-player games with social software, and notes how some things that are hard in conventional social software (setting up a teleconference), are easy in entertainment software (organizing a coordinated attack in an MMO).

This article reports how Industrial Light and Magic used Unreal Tournament to previsualize Rouge City in Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence.

Can You See Me Now? is a chase game. You are dropped at a random location in a virtual Rotterdam. You use your arrow keys to move around the city. You can chat with other players by typing messages. On the real streets of Rotterdam up to three runners - equipped with handheld computers and Global Positioning Systems - are trying to "see" you. To do so they have to get within 5 metres of your location. Once they see you, you are out of the game. Good luck.

Read all about it.

A nice example of the convergence of play, technology, and the real world. What could you do along these lines if everyone had GPS-enabled cell phones?