Archive Newsletter 01/18/09 - Click here to view this in your browser!

It's been about a year since I sent out our last 'monthly' newsletter. Oops! We'll get back on track this year. Promise! ;)

If you forgot what this newsletter is all about, it's the Archive newsletter covering new free games on Archive Games, SimWorld updates, EATV anime happenings, and anything else going on in the Archiverse.

We're excited to announce that Qwak has joined us on Archive Games! Qwak is an arcade action platformer where you (and optionally also a friend) guide your duck through 70 action packed fun and challenging levels! You can explore six visually stunning worlds and find tons of hidden items like jet powered boots to help you.

Here's what people are saying about Qwak:

"Instantly playable, beautifully simple, maddeningly addictive, and packed with features."

"You'll be totally engrossed as that dangerous addictive factor kicks in."

You can download Qwak via Archive Games! Click here to go to Qwak's Archive Games page!

In the last newsletter, we announced Archive Games 1.0... now a year later, 2.0 is now available! 2.0 brings an all new and improved user interface & web site. There's even a Linux version available! But the best part of all: a whole bunch of new games available on Archive Games 2.0:

Free Games Available for Download Now on Archive Games:

	Overflow - Tax your brain with this unique puzzler in which you must redirect the flow of water to safety. Using your mouse and a steady hand, draw bridges and barriers to divert and block the onslaught of water. Draw your way through the 25 vividly surreal levels, set against the clock with limited resources and fiendish obstacles. In addition to the puzzles, the game also includes a freeform sandbox mode where you are free to play with the water physics.
	Take Down Online - Take Down Online is a combat oriented FPS still early in development, but frequently updated by the developer. It is MMO-like in the sense that the game focuses on a single-server where players congregate that supports many players. The developer is first focusing on implementing gameplay, and will then focus on graphics. While it's still early in development, this game shows a lot of promise! Already it has command point based gameplay, classes, vehicles (helicopters & humvees), and other features being added by the developer!
	Space Pizza - In the future, all pizza is delivered via space ship. As the newest pizza delivery driver, it is your mission to deliver pizzas without crashing into any number of conveniently placed obstacles... all while under a time limit. Fast paced and fun, play this 500kb game!
	OpenLieroX - OpenLierox is an extremely addictive realtime worms shoot-em-up backed by an active gamers community.
	NetHack - Nethack, which has nothing to do with the Internet or with hacking computers, is a turn-based single player RPG that is by far the most open ended RPG you will ever play. You can do almost anything and, what's more, the game's response actually makes sense. Each level and game is randomly generated. Pick one of 13 classes and 5 races and go off into the depths in your quest to find the Amulet of Yendor!
	Glest - Glest is a free 3D real-time strategy game, where you control the armies of two different factions: Tech, which is mainly composed of warriors and mechanical devices, and Magic, that prefers mages and summoned creatures in the battlefield.

Expect to see even more games in the coming weeks!

We are making good progress towards the V5 release of SimWorld - now in private beta for Windows & Linux. For more information, see these threads:

• Overview of SimWorld V5 Features
• Underground Building, Jarclogen's Map, and SW Linux
• Interview with GDN

Our TFC server predates The Archive itself, dating back to HT-Mod days. Unfortunately, with less and less interest in TFC, the server goes unused while consuming precious CPU & RAM resources. Thus, with a heavy heart, I have decided to decommission the TFC server. It will still be available for events and one-off games, but it will no longer run 24/7. This will allow us to re-allocate the resources to another project, perhaps to a dedicated SimWorld server, as well as freeing up more resources for general server tasks such as web page serving. At its peak, the TFC server was certainly one of our mysterious successes: I ran it for individual games, and on one occurrence forgot to turn it off -- much to our surprise, a month later we found an entire community had been built up around it! The TFC server both drew in many new users to The Archive, and provided a great way for Archive members to blow off steam after working on Archive Projects. Unfortunately, the userbase for TFC is now all but gone, and the computation demands on our server hardware are higher and higher, necessitating its decommission. Farewell TFC, you will be missed :(

EATV streams Anime and Gaming video direct to you! For more information on what is currently playing, see our series description page and Neo's most recent EATV Update.

For those that don't visit the forums regularly, here are some interesting forums threads from the past few months to check out:

• What's your favorite DS Game?
• Cool TF2 map by Archive member Original
• Got an idea for a good arena TF2 map?
• Crazy Chrono Trigger Description at GameStop
• Tyranic makes cool things for the MUD

Over at DevJournals.com, we've got several journals being updated! Check them out:

• Akashik, a web comic
• Nobu's Dev Journal

The Archive's most popular feature is still its exhaustive file database. Here are some cool file uploads from the past month:

• A bunch of new AMVs :)

We also run an IRC server and maintain a quotes database. Here's a random recent quote from the database:

<Zabin> And my scalp is numb.
<Zabin> Just thought I'd let you know.
<Sim9> Side effects of IRC include numbness of scalp, drymouth, and vaporization. Before using IRC, talk to your doctor.

If you have comments, feedback, suggestions, or submissions for this newsletter, please post in this thread. The next issue will be out in around a month, but we hope to see you before then at The Archive! :)