Ever wonder what you’d get if you combined the look and feel of EVE Online with the real data? The answer is Universe Sandbox:

Best astronomy gadget I’ve seen in a long time. Very nice!

Carl Sagan once said, “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.” But if that’s true, doesn’t playing Universe Sandbox mean we are… playing with ourselves?

Thanks Giant Army / Dan Dixon!

Otomata is a really cool sound tool/game made by Batuhan Bozkurt that lets you produce chaotic tunes using only squares that go in specific directions. Take a look:

This is fun!

via reddit

Hold on tight, this is important.

If you hold down Left Arrow while watching a video (in the new player), you can play a snake minigame:

The video has to have focus/be ‘active’ in the browser first; the easiest way to accomplish that is to pause and resume the video, then holding down left arrow — or pausing, holding down left arrow, then hitting space to resume the video.

Not that you’d need to play Snake while watching this interesting talk on MINIX 3 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

Super Mario Bros. X is a massive project that blends elements from Super Mario 1, 2, 3 and World. It has many power ups, such as the Hammer Suit, Tanooki Suit, Kuribo’s shoe, The Billy Gun, and many old and new Yoshis. You can also play the game with a friend in the 2 player co-op mode, where the screen seamlessly splits and combines as the players separate and rejoin:

SMBX is most notable for its extensive editor that allows you to create almost any kind of level that you can imagine. The real time editor lets you edit the level while playing it! You can also create your own episode using either the SMB3 or SMW styled world map, or you can create a Mario 64 style hub level and have the players collect stars to advance.

Download the game here!

Honorable mentions to Super Mario Crossover which brings characters like Mega Man and Link (and their abilities) to Mario.

Here’s a taste of an amazing fantasy scene made by Finn Meinert Matthiesen using CryEngine 2, the graphics engine behind Crysis (click the images for larger versions):

I want to clarify (to avoid misunderstandings) that this project is just a personal realtime fantasy environment art project for my application for employment. It’s NOT a mod project and i’m NOT planning to release a playable version of this virtual environment. There are rumors that this is a fantasy mod for crysis. This is NOT true. I repeat – it is just a personal art project, although the scene is a playable realtime environment.

Thank you very much,
Finn Meinert Matthiesen

Credit: Finn Meinert Matthiesen aka. MadMaximus83 (deviantART profile)

Whether or not you’re a gamer, if you’ve been following the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” prophecies over the years, you’ll undoubtedly have noticed that incompatibility with today’s popular games has been a significant obstacle to wide-spread adoption among the young, gaming crowd; the sons, nephews, brothers and sisters who are their families’ go-to IT guys. The people who are asked, ever so often, “What should I use?”, “What’s best?”, “What do you use?”. Their response to these questions might soon change; Valve is going to release Steam for Linux:

If Valve makes Steam on Linux a success, many of the people who are on other platforms today because they practically don’t have a choice will give Linux on the desktop a second thought, and might just recommend it to others if they stick with it. By now, there are plenty of other reasons to recommend Linux on the desktop as a serious alternative, after all.

But okay, let’s not kid ourselves. PC gaming is a much smaller market than console gaming, and adoption among gamers surely wouldn’t cause the Year of the Linux Desktop by itself. The side effects, however, will be interesting to observe. If Valve ports all of their games, including the Source engine, to both Mac and Linux, there could very well be a shift in the industry, away from the DirectX monopoly, that will benefit both Mac and Linux and widen public interest in the development of OpenGL. Not a significant shift on an Xbox scale, perhaps, but enough to shine a spotlight on Linux. That spotlight could be what Linux needs to gain momentum with the gaming generation, and, as a side effect, in general. A snowball, if you will.

Word of mouth is the most powerful kind of marketing, after all.

Shatter is an awesome, modern take on classic brick-breaking games like Arkanoid and DX-Ball:

Shatter also sports one of the best soundtracks that I’ve heard in a video game. An entrancing mix of 80’s new wave, stadium rock and intergalactic space rock opera.

Shatter is available for Windows (on Steam) and Playstation 3 (on PSN)
Website | Soundtrack

If you play video games, you probably know the Call of Duty series of games. If you play games on the PC, you probably also know that Infinity Ward, the company behind Call of Duty, decided to leave out dedicated server support in their latest installment, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. You’ve probably complained about this, and you might even have decided that Infinity Ward isn’t getting your money at all.

Here’s why they don’t care:

Epic Games just released the Unreal Development Kit, a fully-featured SDK based on the award-winning Unreal 3 engine that powers a wide range of today’s most popular games; and it’s free for educational and non-commercial use — wow!

There are some rather heavy licensing fees once you start making money from your game — $0 (zero) up-front, and a 0% royalty on you or your company’s first $5,000 (US) in UDK related revenue, and a 25% royalty on UDK related revenue above $5,000 (US) — though, if you take into consideration that you can upgrade to the real Unreal engine licensing and skip the royalty fees once you reach fame and fortune, the Unreal Development Kit remains extremely attractive for any kind of game development.

Have a look at the list of features and the showcase, or just skip everything and grab it!

Small Worlds is the twisted, Braid-like Prince of Persia remake I never knew I wanted to play. It’s completed in roughly 15 minutes, but they are worth more than the 4-6 hours you usually spend per contemporary run-at-the-mill let’s-do-everything video game.

One of the worlds in Small Worlds

It is literally what it says it is; a game containing small worlds that you explore — with a delightfully twisted ending, too. Simple, beautiful. Play it.