Realms of Arkania is classic hardcore role-playing, flip3D style intermezzed with isometric combat screens and you can get this for a ridiculous cheap price now.

So far gog.com is only releasing DOS or Windows based games. For some games I wish they’d add Amiga games to their line-up simply because many Amiga games were better than their DOS conversions, just take a look at highly regarded Hired Guns. in case of Hired Guns you feel that the developers were a team of Amiga enthusiasts. The DOS version feels bland and rushed compared to the shiny and atmosphere-oozing Amiga version.

Either way, for DOS games Good Old Games are packing their releases up with a copy of DOSBox pre-configured and ready to install and run. For Amiga versions they would probably have to pack up a copy of WinUAE to assure a hassle-free experience. Not sure how that would work out.

Chrome installs right onto your system from the website and then takes over (or if you are cynical: steals) all the bookmarks, history, passwords etc. from Firefox (to make your life easier). It then opens with a slick and slender window that lacks all the tackiness of a plugin-convoluted Firefox. When opening a new tab it shows a neat history list with thumbnails of your most recent visited websites. Chrome starts up as fast as a finger snap! Maybe even faster! Can it get any better?

Starting to like what I see I went on to visit some of my favorite websites (the ones I usually have auto-opened in Firefox by using Tab Mix Plus). First let’s visit Lemon64! I’m a classic game nostalgican (hard to see by the look of this site huh?) so I like all those websites that are about old computers and old games. But what happens then? Chrome doesn’t seem to like that site very much but instead tells me that I should go visit other sites …

Ok, I thought, maybe some problem with the website. Let’s visit Lemon’s sister site Lemon Amiga …

… no go says Chrome! Slightly disgruntled I walk on to check out some other important sites and open mobygames.com, old-computers.com, gamedev.net and even iht.com. The result? Aw Snap!

Ok I said, this isn’t good! What about Flash Blogs? I went and tried some of the more famous Flash blogs’n'sites … bit-101.com, grant skinner, papervision3d, john grden, gotoandplay.it … the list goes on and on, Chrome forces the same design (and the same content) onto these sites, it looks like this:

… This is clearly too monotonous for my taste so I recon Chrome isn’t as shiny as it advertises. My sligthly slower starting Firefox with a kilo of plugins at least let’s me read the sites that I want to read so I’m back to that one until Chrome is not beta anymore (in 4 years?!?)

A valuable resource for everyone who is thinking/planning to write a roleplaying game … Indie developer Planewalker Games who are currently making their debut RPG The Broken Hourglass are publishing precious bits of insider information about their game engine called WeiNGINE. The Broken Hourglass is a computer roleplaying game with a strong visual relation to late nineties RPG pearls like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale or Planescape: Torment (who all were based on the Infinity Engine).
Some examples of their articles: Inside the Engine – Introduction to Items, Inside the Engine – Introduction to Sprites, Rules and Mechanics – Group Skills … and there’s a whole lot more when navigating through the links at the bottom of the pages. I kind of soak up such detailed information on game/RPG design as such things are sparsely seeded on the web (you will not see such information leaking from commercial developers!)

Developers can introduce their creations and find other developers – both professional and hobbyist – to get working together on a project. Games made in Flash are welcome and there’s even a category for it.

Introversion
Cliffski’s Mumblings
GameProducer.net
Lemmy and Binky
Reality Fakers
Zoombapup
BoneBroke
They Came from Hollywood
gusmueller

This shoe designer is a nice example that shows that Flash really needs to support 3D! Imagine you could freely rotate and texture the shoe model! Wouldn’t that be cool?!