It’s probably obvious by nowthat I have a soft-spot for quick and easy browser-based games. One of the benefits of these is the variety. There’s no need for a big budget and so a much lower barrier to entry than most games – leading to some interesting and innovative games by new designers.

Here’s a rather different top ten: bizarre browser games. This collection celebrates the weird and wonderful mishmash of games available on the Web – all of these are “off the beaten track” but also very playable and surprisingly addictive.

Makibishi

Makibishi is a mouse-based puzzle game where you have to think outside of the box to make sense of the clues.

After a somewhat bizarre intro, you can click on the red parasol to move into a cityscape where your goal is to find the five dummy dolls (pictured on The Bingo Map). Watch your mouse pointer to change to show you what you can interact with. Click on the … er, people … for clues and other items to change the world. The Bingo Map shows you the bad guys: dummy dolls that you need to find. Don’t give up too quickly, once you explore around the area and begin to see how the puzzles work, it begins to make some semblance of sense. Kind Of.

Note: The initial “broken television” intro screen seems to be lasting for a long time at the moment. The game will load, but you have to be patient. Hopefully this is a temporary issue.

http://comic.makibishi.co.jp/

Good Night!

Go to bed!
Good night! is an odd little puzzle game where your goal is to find coloured dots. Click around the area and look for spots that match the colors in the row above the image. Once you have found all four red dots, you can enter the red picture frame. Putting the picture into the frame opens up the next room on the left. And so it goes until you open the yellow picture frame to find the key for the rabbit.

http://skyrabbit.jp/a017.htm [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

Exotic Dishes of Kunark

The exotic dishes of Kunark are quite the rage in Qeynos: the salty and tangy flavors of these foreign dishes transporting the adventurer back to the wild lands to relive the excitement of travel, the sound of the waves crashing and the wafting scent of succulent petals.

You can get Succulent Brutemarrow Infusion and Spiced Hornet Legs on every street corner but the most divine seafood cuisine of the Sathirians is still not available in the city: the refreshingly sharp-flavored Magma Fish dishes.

Magma Fish Reduction, tender fish fried quickly with smoldering material to make a spicy and succulent morsel, brings a warmth to the body and soul so focused, it’s as if you have an aura of heat around you.

Fiery Magma Infusion, a simple broth which is traditionally drunk like a hot tea, wakes up the mind and enhances perception, so much so that adventurers swear they are able to do more damage while the infusion digests. [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

The following is a quick list of heat resist gear available to the general public.

These are all items that can be collected solo or, in the case of the Apron, with a T7 group. There are a number of high-end drops from raids and TSO set armor which have good heat resists, some of which can be purchased, but this table is aimed at the cheap adventurer looking to get a heat resist jump-start without spending a lot of cash.

The minimum level required for the item is adventurer unless marked with (TS) for those items which have a minimum tradeskill level. [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

Jolt Online Gaming have announced Legends of Zork! a multi-player browser game based on the original Zork series from Infocom. I’m faintly amused by the responses of “hey, what?” from the under-20 crowd. It seems to me you shouldn’t be allowed to play MMORPGs (previously known as graphical MUDs) if you never experienced the interactive fiction games that started it all.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Zork was a text-based interactive fiction game based on Colossal Cave Adventure (best remembered for its maze of twisty little passages, all alike).

Zork was written in the late 1970s by a group of MIT students for the PDP-10. They used zork as a holding name for all their programs that weren’t ready for release, but this time it stuck. The programmers later decided to call the game Dungeon but the name only really became used in an unofficial FORTRAN port of the game by a programmer at DEC who wanted to run it on a machine smaller than a PDP10. The original MUD (multi-user dungeon) in Essex was named as a tribute to Dungeon. Due to trademark issues, Infocom launched the game under its original nickname, Zork.

>read label
Taken.
!!!!FROBOZZ MAGIC BOAT COMPANY!!!!

Hello, Sailor!

Tim Anderson wrote a detailed history of Zork in which he reminisces about writing the game and the unexpected results and popularity.

The History of Zork

In early 1977, Adventure swept the ARPAnet. Willie Crowther was the original author, but Don Woods greatly expanded the game and unleashed it on an unsuspecting network. When Adventure arrived at MIT, the reaction was typical: after everybody spent a lot of time doing nothing but solving the game (it’s estimated that Adventure set the entire computer industry back two weeks), the true lunatics began to think about how they could do it better.

And thus, Zork was born.

But it’s not just a piece of gaming history any more! [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

The continuing adventures of Paxmar, the furious pacifist. She’s level 25 now and has finally written more in her diary, backtracking to Game Update 48. Maybe if she had a laptop, she’d update more often!

Previous installments:

1. The Furious Pacifist – Introduction
2. The Isle of Refuge
3. Paxmar Smells a Rat
4. It’s a Wide World
5. Paxmar Goes Abroad
6. Tempest Chaser

I haven’t written much recently but in dark times I find it difficult to commit words to paper and I’ve seen some very dark times recently. I suppose I should just write it out and get it over with. The Seeress, my good friend Ealaynya, was murdered. When I heard the news, I rushed straight to the Temple of Life, hoping against hope that it wasn’t true. Her body had been left lying where it fell. The sight of her mortal shell rotting shocked me to the core and the scent will haunt me forever… I feel as if I shall never inhale clean air again. I left the Temple and resolved to leave Qeynos, in hopes of ridding myself of the memories haunting every corner of the city.

I made my way to Qeynos Harbor where a gnome was recruiting workers for the Dedicated Individuals Recovering Technology of Yesteryear. To be honest, I didn’t much care where I went as long as it was far away, so I agreed and found myself en route to the Desert of Flames via a magic carpet! That shocked me out of mourning, as you can imagine. I realized that Ealaynya would be disappointed in my moping around doing nothing and I resolved to work hard for my new employers. [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

This story of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign gone horrible wrong is not new but it is so funny, I can’t resist the urge to share it.

Vecna was a wizard who discovered the secrets of immortality by becoming a lich and later a god. Important to the story is that he left behind two artifacts, his left hand and his eye. These were items of power but to use them, you had to attach them to your body. To use the Hand of Vecna, you had to chop off your left hand and place it on the stump, whereupon it would automatically graft itself to your arm. Similarly, the eye would be placed into an empty eye socket to give the user magical powers of sight.

The Game Master was Mark Steuer, who wrote up this account of his players in a small games press magazine. It has since become a D&D legend and is often used as a rite of passage for new D&D players (see the adventure based on this encounter, below).

Here is a transcript of Mark Steuer’s account of the game:

Many years ago (back when we all were still playing D&D™), I ran a game where I pitted two groups against each other. Several members of Group One came up with the idea of luring Group Two into a trap.

You remember the Hand of Vecna and the Eye of Vecna that were artifacts in the old D&D world where if you cut off your hand (or your eye) and replaced it with the Hand of Vecna (or the Eye) you’d get new awesome powers?

Well, Group One thought up The Head of Vecna. Group One spread rumors all over the countryside (even paying Bards to spread the word about this artifact rumored to exist nearby). They even went so far as to get a real head and place it under some weak traps to help with the illusion. [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

Harvesting has come gained new popularity with the Signature quest A Gathering Obsession which starts in the Village of Shin.

This quest can now be started at level 5, so you can update the quest while you are gaining tradeskill experience. Your progression of the quest is limited by your level cap: as you increase in level and thus would be able to gain the skills required to harvest in the next tier, you will be able to take the next stage of the quest. Note that you will receive the quests whether or not you have the individual skills required to harvest the nodes.

Qho Augren, swimming in a pond at -27,10,-108 wants you to collect harvested materials for him to inspect – but not just any harvested item will do. You need to have very specific items from the right tier and in some instances from a specific zone which you must harvest yourself, in the order that he wants them, for a total of eight harvesting runs.

Luckily, I’ve already collected a number of resources on MMORPG-Info to make this a bit less painful.

First: make sure that you are using the best tools to speed up your harvesting ability by looking at our Harvesting Tools Reference. As level 70 is required by the quest, you should be at least have Sandalwood Tools made by woodworkers (reduces harvest time by 2.0 seconds). If your artisan level is 66 or above, you should be using Overclocked Tools made by Tinkers (reduces harvest time by 2.5 seconds and a bonus to skills). [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.