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Cave Story. What a fresh new game. Wait a sec. It isn’t new? What do you mean? When did it come out? 2004? What?! How did I miss this gem?

It’s all the best of 8-bitness without having the annoyance of blowing on NES carts. What is a home-brew homage to many different games, including Metroid and a long-lost Sierra game, Zeliard, brings to the modern age a bit of that nostalgia for simpler times. It feels 8-bit, but it isn’t quite as rough around the edges.

[via: Play This Thing]

Over on Wired, Clive Thompson explores the ever-increasing phenomenon of voice chat in on-line games. After all, for games that don’t have it built in, such as WoW, it’s almost necessary to use it when joining a guild.

Yet, somehow it changes how people act or speak. An interesting commentary on the state of gaming. Me, I think it’s a great thing to have, but then again, I don’t have a squeaky 11-year-old voice …

Yes, you, too can download and enjoy them. 100 games for free, legally.

Now, I’ve played many of these before, unfortunately a lot of them I can’t play on my wonderful little Macbook without booting into Windows.

Some are Flash-based, some are Java-based, so YMMV when it comes to playing these.

What’s even better is checking out the growing comments section that adds probably another hundred more.

Well, David’s gone and done it again. Another notch in the addictive TD-style games that have led to the demise of a great deal of my productivity. This outing brings us Vector TD. If you haven’t seen this type of game before, well, I’m sorry if I am the one that is ruining your chances of getting any work done today.

Inspired by a Warcraft III map/mod, Element TD, the entire point of the game is to just build towers and kill the un-ending swarm of “creeps” slowly making their way across the map. Simple, right? But, like anything good, the simplicity is deceiving.

It’s pretty sad when my work desktop computer is better for gaming than my own home PC. I can rock out some of the newer, as in the last couple of years, games but nothing new. I do want to upgrade, but it’s just not happening any time soon. Perhaps a MacBook Pro with Bootcamp and XP would be best … Any suggestions?

Now, since it’s not a full-on notice from Blizzard, I’ll caveat this that it could still be rumour. I mean, after all, the “everything Blizzard will be MMO” notice was shot down (although, who knows, press spin is a funny thing). Via Kotaku, Australian Vivendi office tipped atomicmpc.com.au that starting today you can pay a $25 fee to transfer a character between your own accounts or to another realm.

ch-ch-check-it-out.

UPDATE: confirmed!

Ah, the laughing stock of the game development world. How easy it has become to make fun of the never-ending wait to see the next Duke Nukem game. I wonder what has happened since the original announcement. If only there was an easy way to find out.

Oh, wait! There is!

[Aeropause]

According to a recent presentation to “Wall Street”, Vivendi is saying that all existing Blizzard franchises will be going the MMO route. I’m excited to see a Diablo “Online”, that’s for sure. After the roaring success I suppose it can’t be to surprising that Vivendi wants another $99,000,000/month income stream.

[Aeropause, 1up and Shacknews]

Kotaku has a bunch of new BF2142 screens up for drooling over. Haven’t been keeping a close watch on the “series” myself, but I sure do like me some laserguns and mechs. Not a new theme, by any means, what with Planetside and Tribes out there. Guess it might be time for me to upgrade my shitbox so I can jump into another tactical fps and frag some robots and get my ass handed to me by twelve-year-olds.

Fileplanet has decided that we need to all go back to class, ol’skool style. Download demos for your fav classics such as Diablo and Duke Nuke’em 3D. Then you can bust your ass trying to find a real, actual full copy of them all. Oh, wait, you can …