The XNA Team recently released a video that shows a bunch of clips from games that were created using XNA.  Some of them look pretty cool.  Here's the link to Major Nelson's post, which has a link to the video.

Another Flash based time waster.

Double Wires

It has been a long time since I 've owned any of the "Madden" franchise of games.  I'm thinking that maybe the Nintdo Wii might change that.

"..if you want to catch the ball, you jump up like you would in the NFL..."

I've been spending entirely too much time playing some of the original Space Quest games.  No, I didn't pull out my suitcase of fifty 3.5" disks and load the game up.  I downloaded it.  Of course if you read digg or slashdot you've probably already heard.  Over on the Abandoned Gamesroom site you can download all of the old Sierra games.  You know, they make their case that all of these are abandon ware, so there is a fine line on the actual legality of the downloads.  But I thought that I've read somewhere recently that Sierra and Target were bringing back the old King's Quest titles which wouldn't quite make them "abandon ware".  Hhhmmm....

Anyway, the games seem to hold up quite well.  I'm still enjoying them anyway.  It's funny to play these games now, and think back to when I played them the first time and was amazed at how cool the graphics were.  Damn.

Google video of SPORE, a new video by Will Wright.  It looks like a crazy game.  It looks like a game along the lines of an artificial life simulator along the lines of Sim City or Civ, with some aspects of fighting kind of like Command and Conquer, or one of that genre.  The only difference is that it looks like IT MIGHT BE fun to play and still not have to invest hours and hours to really enjoy the game.  As a husband, father of two, with a full time job and some on the side freelancing it's kind of hard to play any game that you have to put too much time into.  Sometimes a half hour of mindless game play is all that can be really squeezed into the day.  So for those days there is always Unreal Tournament or Pro Wrestling (by Nintendo).

Still, SPORE does look promising.
Here is a link to the official homepage over on EA.
Here is a review over on IGN.