As many of you know, for the past what, two years+ now, I've been working on a book to be published by No Starch Press and distributed by O'Reilly online and at bookstores everywhere in October 2007 (tentative, but looks likely). One of the issues I and my co-author, Matt Barton, have been struggling with with the publisher has been titling this potential opus.

The third annual 7DRL challenge is coming! What's a 7DRL? Why its the Roguelike communities answer to the annual IF Competition and the NaNoWriMo thats what!

The date for this years 7DRL is from March 10th to March 18th, you get 168 hours to write a Roguelike.

The rules are simple:

Well, it's finally over: Check out the results of the 12th annual IF competition. As you can see, there were plenty of entries and plenty of judges. The winner (no big surprise) was Emily Short, a very notable IF author whose game "Floatpoint" scored 113 points. Runners up include "The Primrose Path" by Nolan Bonvouloir and "The Elysium Enigma" by Eric Eve. Even my own humble entry "The Initial State" didn't fare as poorly as I feared, but came in at #28 with 63 points. Download them all and revisit the days when Infocom was king.

06/28/2006 - UPDATE - LAST DAY IS THURSDAY, 06/29/2006, SO VOTE NOW!!!

Please VOTE for entry 1, 2, 3 or 4 by responding in this thread. I'll keep a running count. Pay attention to the LOGO more than the extraneous stuff at this point. Choose your favorite logo for the Website, branding, merchandise, etc. Basically the best all around choice. If you have ideas how to use the other two entries, we're all ears as we like them all! (and yes, please vote for your OWN if you want)

[NOTE: This will be updated as new entries are submitted!]
Number 8Do you have ideas for Armchair Arcade's new logo? Do you know someone who would like to design a logo for us to look at? What follows are some very rough ideas of our own. It would be great if we could all work together to see what we like and dislike about various concepts and ideas. As we get closer to issue 8 and our first print issue, it's important we finalize a really clever logo design. The only requirement is that like the current placeholder logo, it has "Armchair" on top and "Arcade" on the bottom, and we're allowed to use it for any purpose without restriction. Bonus points for "Videogames and Computers" under the logo. Of course it needs to be a high resolution original file, preferably vector, or something we could recreate ourselves if it's not. Bonus points from me if it can somehow relay that we're about both Videogames AND Computers, and bonus, bonus points tying together classic, modern and future. If videogame-like characters could somehow interact with the Logo, even better, though they'd have to be original for us to use them. While we can't give anything away at this time, we'll give full credit for full usage rights and maybe something like a signed copy of our first print issue. Thanks!

Namco's Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga Anniversary Arcade MachineApparently, just for registering your free copy of Microsoft's Visual Studio Express at this Website enters you into an interesting drawing for a full-size Namco Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga anniversary arcade machine, t-shirt or Atari TV game. The intent seems to be to spur "arcade game" development.

According to the Website: