Here we have our console gaming setup, consisting of a couple of XBoxes, a Gamecube, a PS2, and a Dreamcast. You can see Dan’s XBox with case on the left—it unzips so you can plug it in without taking it out of the case. The term "XBox Assless Chaps" was used to describe the case.

Perhaps as a replacement for Summer Games 2005 (at least for some of us), the EMB staff got together for the EMB Boston Gaming Weekend 2005. Woohoo! For some EMB writers it was the first time they had ever seen each other in person.

When Ryan and I first stopped into Jeff (and Erin’s) apartment, the gaming immediately started. We started out with a little bit of Sega Tennis on the PS2, then quickly moved to Wrath Unleashed. Sega Tennis is a pretty fun game, it’s very easy to pick up and the players had some cool and very realistic moves; probably the only thing missing were cut scenes of players getting pissed and yelling at the line judge.

Wrath Unleashed is basically a mix between a turn-based board game and 1-on-1 fighting game. I’d give it high marks except it took way too long to complete a 3-player game; by the end we just wanted to get it over with. Jeff had to keep Ryan from spilling his coke into the controller to get us to stop playing.

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Some of the first games I played with my father on our Atari 800 were the text adventures created by Infocom. I’ve got mad nostalgia for games like Zork, Enchanter and Planetfall and their interactive stories are just as interesting and engaging today as they were back in the 1980’s. About three years ago I was thrilled to hear that some fella put all the classic Infocom games on a telnet server for anyone to play from a computer on the internet. You could even save your game on his server and come back later to finish. It was probably a major undertaking on his part and I for one played through several games using his server.

I hadn’t visited his site in a while and the other day I got the urge to check out the sequel to Planetfall. When I went there I was met with the following:

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Nice building… Bad roof… Great parking… Hm.

I’ve officially given up on Summer Games 2005. Instead, I’ve decided to go with my gut and play through Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath again.

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We interrupt this website to bring you an important news bulletin.

Dan, long an outspoken opponent of MMORPG’s and their place in the gaming community, has begun playing World of Warcraft.

For more on this story, we go live to Stormwind where a press conference is already under way…
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Recently at work I had a revelation: no, I didn’t find a likeness of the Blessed Mother in my screensaver (although i did find a likeness of a naked Paris Hilton in a co-worker’s IE cache, but I’m sure that was an accident). This revelation had to do with a more everyday occurance.

I was sitting at my desk - trying to coax out an extinct piece of hardware from within the depths of an old tablet with nothing but a broken chopstick, half a pair of scissors and my rudimentary understanding of physics and geometry. As I stopped to take a break and curse the fellow who ever thought using obscure (European even) parts was a swell idea - it occured to me that I was taking part in evolution. Not the spectacular kind, mind you - more like the common ‘natural selection’ part. As in - I will not select this manufacturer… again….ever.

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I felt a need to slake my thirst for global industrial domination last week (and more importantly, to do so cheaply), so I purchased a copy of “Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion” with a crisp and fresh $10 bill. “Who is Chris Sawyer,” you ask? The box tells me he’s the genius behind Roller Coaster Tycoon, but as I have no real way to verify this claim I leave it to you to wonder who he is. It seems to me he’s a person who wished he was Sid Meier, putting his name on a box and what not and trying to make straight men go gay for him. Unfortunately for Chris Sawyer, I’m not ready to go gay quite yet.

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CDW (Computer Discount Warehouse) has decided to stop selling video games. You heard it here first! Twenty seconds of Google searching didn’t uncover this story anywhere else, so it must be exclusive.

Ok maybe this isn’t particularly newsworthy. But, this is meaningful in another way: perhaps this is a sign of the end of an era of PC games as we know them. As consoles gain more and more popularity perhaps this is adversely affecting traditional sales of desktop PC games.

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