VoipBuster beats SkypeOut’s rates – Engadget – www.engadget.com

That’s pretty impressive. Head over to VoipBuster to download the client (Windows only I’m afraid). This is the deal. You download, install, register. You buy a single Euro’s worth of credit on their system, and you get free phone calls to a list of over 20 countries. Landlines only though. No idea how they do it, but as Engadget points out, free is a good price.

I think this is great, and I’d definitely use it if I had somebody to phone. But for receiving incoming calls, I’d recommend the Gizmo Project over Skype, as it’s (a) Open Source (Skype isn’t), and (b) It seems to support other standards like SIP phones, etc. out the box. The only thing Skype has up on GizmoProject is that Skype has a Linux client, Gizmo’s one is still on it’s way.

So You Wanna Be a Game Designer.
That’s the headline of an interesting read from Gamespot.

You have to admit, anybody that’s played a game at some point in time say to themselves “Man, I’d have done this and this a bit different in this game, it’d be *so* much better.”.

Well, go read that article, then head over the this slashdot article for some amusing comments on it.

(2005-08-11) Update: Edge Online (The online presence of the Edge magazine) has an article on How to get into the games industry.

Thanks to this Joystiq article, I found Liberated Games. They have a list of previously-retail games that have, in some way or another, become free. Be it in GPL’d source or freely downloadable binary format, there’s a bunch of games there…

Some of my favs that are there:

• Defender of the Crown
• Descent I & II
• Doom 1 & 2 (of course)
• GTA 1 & 2
• Quake 1 & 2
• Rise of the Triad (!!!)
• Wolfenstein 3D

I spent many an hour playing these games. We even had a guy that knew a guy that knew a guy make up a serial cable for us, so that we could play Doom 1 cooperative on our old 486′s… Those were the days.
(Does anybody remember that special version of Doom 1 where you could start it up on a network with a -left and -right command-line switch, and have 3 PCs that render the game’s left, front and right views? Doom V1.1 or something I think it was. Never got that to work…)

(2005-08-11) Update: Joystiq has an entry that talks about lots and lots and lots of free dos games for your perusal (and download). Head on over to www.dosgames.com and have a peek at their list of over 400 games. The nice thing, of course, is that there are pretty good DOS emulators out for practically every operating system out there, so all these games are playable on your desktop right now.

I recently heard about, and then watched the sneak preview trailer for Doom: The Movie.

I can honestly say that this is the least excited I’ve ever been to see a movie that I thought I really wanted to see. It stars The Rock, and has a seriously Alien feel to it… It looks bad.

But don’t take my word for it, go check it out for yourself.