A Humble Voxatron Debut

You have a day left to get the latest Humble Bundle offer. As per usual it started off with one independent game (with Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac and Linux versions of each game), this time its “Voxatron Alpha” by Lexaloffle Games. You don’t actually buy the game to get the game. Humble Bundle is a charity drive, and you can split your payment between developers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Child’s Play Charity. Voxatron Alpha is a randomly generated, Legend of Zelda-esque dungeons flavoured with Minecraft with a bit of run ‘n’ gun action added to a RPG progression, yeah its packed. An update at Halloween added a lot of content. As happened with previous Humble Bundle deals, it stopped being a single games and other indie games were added to make a bundle. The current line up is Blocks That Matter by Swing Swing Submarine, The Binding of … There’s more

Microsoft Game Room, stepping away from the Xbox

Microsoft released their Game Room yesterday as part of their “House Party” (or “Block Party” if you live in the USA) event. Apart from some intriguing teething problems its been an interesting experiment. Essentially Game Room is a MAME type emulator of arcade games (currently limited to Atari and Konami cabinets from the late 70s and early 80s) as well as the Atari 2600 and Intellivision consoles. And these seem to be the original ROMs based on the ROM boot sequence some of the games show. The emulation is wrapped up in a customisable virtual arcade for your avatar and friends avatars to roam through. The games are OK, but the brilliance is in the execution. When you first start (provided it can connect to the game room server, that’s where the teething problems lay), you can demo the games, usually for about 10 minutes (or less if you leave … There’s more