Here's a fun Breakout Flash game that uses individual pixels as "bullets." Simply knock a few loose, and they become extra balls for your paddle. Pretty soon the screen fills up with wonderful colors. Nice take on the classic arcade hit. Via Boing Boing.

OK first of all where did this come form all of a sudden?
Secondly, I cannot afford yet another open source handheld already!

GamePark's GP2X Caanoo handheld hits this August, picks up where the Wiz left off.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/12/gameparks-gp2x-caanoo-handheld-hits-t...

Alcazar - The Forgotten Fortress
(Activision, 1985; ColecoVision)
via Retro UprisingI'd like to provide the latest update to my list of working emulator sites for various platforms. All of these enable play directly within your browser, so there's no sticky business of downloading software and finding the necessary game files to get it all going. These are all great sites and we should all show our support. This is the "July 2010" edition of the list and, naturally, I'd love to keep adding to it, so suggest away. Here goes:

* 2600online.com - Play various Atari 2600 Video Computer Systems games
* Another World (aka, Out of this World; 1991)
* Atari.com - Play select Atari 2600 and Atari arcade favorites
* BBC Micro News - Parrot - News stories and a speech synthesizer directly from a cluster of BBC Micros
* c64s.com - Play various Commodore 64 games
* First-Person Tetris (NES version)
* Freearcade.com (Scott Adams section) - Play various Scott Adams/Adventure International text adventures
* Google Pac-Man - The popular browser-based re-imagining of the classic arcade game
* JEMU - Emulate and play on the Acorn BBC Model B, Amstrad CPC464, Dick Smith VZ-300, Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, Sinclair ZX80, and Sinclair ZX81
* JSVecX - Play GCE/Milton Bradley Vectrex games in your browser
* nintendo8.com - Play Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/Famicom games
* Play Infocom Adventures Online
* The Gallery of Zork - Play the Infocom games online
* Retro Uprising - Play a wide range of videogame and computer systems (arcade, Atari, Coleco, Nintendo, Sega, etc.) in your browser and through a custom software interface
* Sandy White's Ant Attack
* Sarien.net - Play Sierra adventure games
* SC-3000 Survivors - Play Sega SC-3000/SG-1000 games
* Timex/Sinclair 1000 Emulator
* Virtual Apple 2 - Play Apple II and IIGS games
* Virtual Atari - Play Atari 2600 games
* vNES - Play Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/Famicom games
* ZX81 Software, Books and Hardware Collection - Play ZX81/Timex Sinclair 1000 games

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about what makes games fun. I've read quite a bit on the topic, including Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Design, and of course there are plenty of great articles on Gamasutra and in Game Developer magazine. However, it seems most people who bother with the subject end up with some very general criteria (just challenging enough, lots of rewards, etc.) rather than contexts. My primary thought here is that whether a game is fun or not may have little to do with the actual game. Rather, it's the context of the game and the gamer that's important. Even something like good marketing and packaging can have more to do with making the game fun than anything done by the developers or designers. However, the focus here will be on the social contexts that are often taken for granted by even the best game designers.

Tass Times in Tone Town (Activision, 1986; Apple IIGS): From Virtual Apple 2I'd like to provide the latest update to my list of working emulator sites for various platforms. All of these enable play directly within your browser, so there's no sticky business of downloading software and finding the necessary game files to get it all going. These are all great sites and we should all show our support. This is the "May 2010" edition of the list and, naturally, I'd love to keep adding to it, so suggest away. Here goes:

* 2600online.com - Play various Atari 2600 Video Computer Systems games
* Another World (aka, Out of this World; 1991)
* Atari.com - Play select Atari 2600 and Atari arcade favorites
* c64s.com - Play various Commodore 64 games
* First-Person Tetris (NES version)
* Freearcade.com (Scott Adams section) - Play various Scott Adams/Adventure International text adventures
* JEMU - Emulate and play on the Acorn BBC Model B, Amstrad CPC464, Dick Smith VZ-300, Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, Sinclair ZX80, and Sinclair ZX81
* nintendo8.com - Play Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/Famicom games
* Play Infocom Adventures Online
* Sandy White's Ant Attack
* Sarien.net - Play Sierra adventure games
* SC-3000 Survivors - Play Sega SC-3000/SG-1000 games
* The Gallery of Zork - Infocom museum and plenty of games to play (click on "The Canon")
* Virtual Apple 2 - Play Apple II and IIGS games
* Virtual Atari - Play Atari 2600 games
* vNES - Play Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/Famicom games
* ZX81 Software, Books and Hardware Collection - Play ZX81/Timex Sinclair 1000 games

It's Mario! It's Samus! It's...er, everybody! Trust me--you had better check this out. You'll kick yourself if you don't get a chance to play before the copyright police get on it: Super Mario Crossover. Now, I'm going to spend the rest of the day playing this.

I've often been struck at how central maps are to gaming. I say "gaming" there instead of "videogames," because we all know that maps are also critical in tabletop games such as wargames, role-playing, and of course boardgames like Risk.

In the interest of sharing, I'd like to provide my current list of working emulator sites for various platforms. All of these enable gameplay directly within your browser, so there's no sticky business of downloading software and finding the necessary game files to get it all going. These are all great sites and we should all show our support. I'm dubbing this the "November 2009" edition of the list and would love to keep adding to it, so suggest away and when I do the next edition, I'll expand it. Here goes:

* 2600online.com - Play various Atari 2600 Video Computer Systems games
* c64s.com - Play various Commodore 64 games
* Freearcade.com (Scott Adams section) - Play various Scott Adams/Adventure International text adventures
* JEMU - Emulate and play on the Acorn BBC Model B, Amstrad CPC464, Dick Smith VZ-300, Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, Sinclair ZX80 and Siclair ZX81
* nintendo8.com - Play Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/Famicom games
* Play Infocom Adventures Online
* The Gallery of Zork - Infocom museum and plenty of games to play
* Sandy White's Ant Attack
* Sarien.net - Play Sierra adventure games
* SC-3000 Survivors - Play Sega SC-3000/SG-1000 games
* Virtual Apple ][ - Play Apple II and IIGS games
* vNES - Play Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/Famicom games

Finally, don't forget the Games section right here on Armchair Arcade. Enjoy!

Call for Papers:

Rhetoric/Composition/Play: How Electronic Games Mediate Composition Theory and Practice (and Vice Versa)

Computer and video games continue to inundate the entertainment market, and culture along with it. Traditional text games, adventure games, first-person shooters, the immersive worlds of role-playing games (massively multiplayer or otherwise), simulations, “casual” games such as solitaire, and even web advertisements posing as games have formed a landscape rich with opportunities to examine composition-rhetoric’s history, theory, pedagogy, and practice, where scholars can use, examine, and imagine the impact of games and gaming on writing.