So this morning I woke up not really able to sleep and was looking around on the internet for something to do. I just so happened to stumble across a little 2D Flash game which was in a way DOOM! Being a oldschool DOOM fan I thought the best thing to do would be to test it out and see what its made of and if it is worthy of having the DOOM name attached to it.

I was pretty impressed that it was able to load up the entire game in about 15 seconds and was able to start playing. It even let me pick my difficulty and had a large portion of the music from the game (everything from the sounds to the level music playing).

The game itself looked and felt a lot better than I was expecting when I entered the first level. While I was only able to go to the left or right (and jump of course), the details and he models of the guns, bad guys, and myself were so crisp it felt like they had been taken right out of the original game and stuck into what I was playing.

I would also like to mention that while the little levels didn’t look like they were similar to the original game (I don’t really see how they could be in 2D)… I was very pleased at how your objective was the almost the exact same. You simply need to get to the exit button killing anything that gets in your way and if you are lucky stumbling across a secret or two in the process.

Even though this post won’t be as long as they usually are, being a big DOOM fan I just couldn’t resist taking some time out of my morning to talk about this nifty little game I just so happen to find. I am sure some of you are wondering where you can try out this as well so fear not… I do have the link for you to go play it! If you wanna try it out for yourself, just make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed and CLICK HERE to go enjoy this little game.

Computer historians and researchers at Portsmouth University in the UK are developing a software emulator that will recognise and play all types of videogames and computer files from the 1970s through to the present day. Remember all those videogames from your childhood and teenage years? Want to play them all again, without having to download umpteen different emulators? Of course you do!

“Early hardware, like games consoles and computers, are already found in museums. But if you can’t show visitors what they did, by playing the software on them, it would be much the same as putting musical instruments on display but throwing away all the music. For future generations it would be a cultural catastrophe,” according to Dr David Anderson from Portsmouth University, who is heading up a remarkable new project to save all the digital info and games created since the 1970s.

“A vast bank of information needs to be catalogued and stored,” adds researcher and computer games expert Dan Pinchbeck.

“Games particularly tend not to be archived because they are seen as disposable, pulp cultural artefacts, but they represent a really important part of our recent cultural history. Games are one of the biggest media formats on the planet and we must preserve them for future generations.”

Digital black hole

Computer historians Dr David Anderson and Dr Janet Delve see the project as a “rescue plan to recover and safeguard the rapidly vanishing technology and cultural information about the generation born and brought up in the digital age.” They are aiming to build “the world’s first general purpose emulator” which is described as “a piece of software which can recognise and ‘play’ or open all previous types of computer files from 1970s Space Invaders games to three-inch floppy discs.”

While there are many emulators that are specific to certain types of media or platform, the unique selling point of this massively ambitious project is that it will be able to emulate media in any format. Aiming to ‘rescue’ digital files from a black hole, the initiative is part of the Europe-wide KEEP project (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable), with the objective to “develop methods of safeguarding digital objects including text, sound and image files, multimedia documents, websites, databases and video games. ”People don’t think twice about saving files digitally — from snapshots taken on a camera phone to national or regional archives,” comments Dr Janet Delve.

“But every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the technology used to ‘read’ it disappearing altogether. Former generations have left a rich supply of books, letters and documents which tell us who they were, how they lived and what they discovered. There’s a very real risk that we could bequeath a blank spot in history.”

Every computer file recoverable

By 2010 the amount of digital information created worldwide “will be equivalent to 18 million times the information contained in all the books ever written.” The researchers note that “Britain’s National Archive holds the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopaedias of information in file formats no longer commercially available” and add that “research by the British Library suggests Europe loses £2.7bn each year in business value because of difficulties in preserving and accessing old digital files.”

“We are facing a massive threat of the loss of digital information. It’s a very real and worrying problem. Things that were created in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s are vanishing fast and every year new technologies mean we face greater risk of losing material,” says Dr David Anderson.

Throughout gaming history there has always been those gaming titles that showed lots of promise. But some of them never live up to their hype and die off with most people soon forgetting about them and never returning to play them. The guys over at IGN.com have come up with a list of the top 10 video games that showed such promise but failed to live up to their hype causing them to flop and being quickly forgotten by most gamers. Below is the list of the top 10 video game flops!

10. The Atari Jaguar
9. Shenmue
8. Lair
7. Messiah
6. Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness
5. Driv3r
4. E.T.
3. Superman
2. Daikatana
1. Pac-Man

The games highlighted in bold are games that I myself have played at one point. If you would like to read their reasons behind why each of these games made the list, you can read the whole article HERE provided by the guys at IGN.

Video games have come a long way since they have been around and are getting more and more realistic with every new title that comes out. But most people don’t realize that back in the “old days” video games had quite a different look and feel than they do now. Here I am going to show you what is considered the world’s first video game!

In 1958, Dr. William Higinbotham was working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on a simulation of bouncing balls and missile trajectories that could predict the paths objects could take. Suddenly, it hit him: why not apply this to tennis? He created Tennis for Two, which depending on your definition could be considered the world’s first videogame, in October of that year.

Designing the circuit board and its components took Higinbotham a few days, and building the machine took about three weeks. On October 18th, 1958, hundreds lined up to play the newly christened Tennis for Two. It used a whopping five-inch oscilloscope screen, and featured play mechanics pretty similar to 1972′s Pong, though the game was viewed from the side of the net rather than an overhead vantage point.

Why didn’t he patent the technology? Well, Tennis for Two used designs extremely similar to what Higinbotham had created in his federal-owned lab, so any patent would have had to belong to the government. Owning the right to every video game eversounds pretty sweet right now, given our monstrous debt, but that’s really neither here nor there. So if this game doesn’t look too appealing to you or something you think you could play for hours at a time… just be thankful that the video games we have come to love have made such big progress as they have since their start!