multiplayer

Flat people of Multiwinia! Fight!

Multiwinia is a frantic, fast-paced real-time strategy game in which armies of "bloodthirsty little stick men" duke it out in epic battles across a Tron-like landscape. The game shares the same retro, silly aesthetic as its solo-campaign predecessor Darwinia--with graphics and sound effects that are simultaneously savage and whimsical--but the gameplay is definitely geared toward multiple players (AIs or online opponents), with over 40 different maps and six game types that will feel familiar to multiplayer fans: Domination, King of the Hill, Capture the Statue, Assault, Rocket Riot, and Blitzkrieg. Veterans of the RTS genre may find the … Read more

Multiwinia released for Mac

Last week I wrote a post about a great deal from Ambrosia Software, which has now sadly lapsed. But the the silver lining to that cloud is that with the end of the sale comes the release of an all-new Mac game: Multiwinia!!

Multiwinia is a ferociously fun real-time strategy game with cool stylistic graphics and challenging gameplay. Those of you who have played Darwinia, also from Ambrosia, will recognize the scenery at once, but that's where the similarity ends.

Multiwinia is a geometrically-shaped 3-D land populated by the two-dimensional stick men from Darwinia, except now they're not … Read more

MMOs to help futurists solve world problems?

As has become increasingly obvious over the last few years, games are being used more and more as tools for helping people and organizations work their way through all kinds of problems and scenarios.

That's been the reasoning behind the steady growth of initiatives like the serious games movement, whose practitioners promote the idea of deploying games in education, government, military, and other sober institutions that need new ways to resolve troubling issues.

And now it appears that an august group of futurists is hoping that they can employ large numbers of people to play collaborative games in search of solutions to some of the world's most vexing problems.

That was the word Tuesday from the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank that focuses on identifying the directions that mankind will take down the line. … Read more

The future of multi-player casino gaming

Thanks to cues from the game industry, certain areas of today's casinos can sometimes resemble arcades. But most of the digital advances to slot machines and the like so far have been limited to the individual units, not elaborate networks.

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, given the boom in multi-player popularity for online games involving wagers or otherwise. So casino gaming developer IGT wants to cross that bridge with its M-P Series of multi-player table games, which would link 12 machines for communal competitive play, according to BornRich.

We're not sure how popular this … Read more

Power Downloader plays a free online multiplayer game

With Thanksgiving over and the biggest shopping day of the year under way, Power Downloader decided he would avoid the throngs of people and have a quiet day at the Powerlair. After going through his usual maintenance tasks to speed up his computer and check for spyware, Power headed over to Download.com to find a new game to play.… Read more

'Halo 3' beta coming May 16

Are you ready? If not, maybe you'd better get ready to be ready.

That is, of course, if you're one of the millions of fans of the Halo franchise. Because on May 16, Microsoft's Bungie Studios will finally open up the Halo 3 multiplayer beta.

To participate in the beta--which will only cover the multiplayer aspects of the game--players need to have purchased a specially marked copy of the action game, Crackdown, or have won a spot through any one of a series of regional contests.

Those who do have a spot will be able to log … Read more