If you like your game play pixelated and your background music repetitively bleeping, or if you just want to take a look at how far along video game design has come over the last thirty-or-so years, you’re in luck! The Internet Archive has just released a collection of over 2,000 MS-DOS games that you can play through your Internet browser right now.

The collection, which you can find here, holds some popular titles you’ll probably recognize if you’re of a certain digital vintage including Q-bert, Ms. Pac Man, The Oregon Trail, Double Dragon and a couple of titles from the Street Fighter series, to name just a few. You’ll also find lesser known (at least to me) games, some of which are bound to generate a laugh or two such as Sex Vixens from Space, Tongue of the Fat Man and the inexplicable Captain Bible in the Dome of Darkness.

By the way, the page for these selections warns that the “EM-DOSBOX in-browser emulator” used to play these games can be a little buggy. So watch out for that I guess.

Below you’ll find a clip just over 13 minutes long of somebody playing the aforementioned Tongue of the Fat Man created in 1989 that might give you an idea of the kind of wacko video game action that we’re talking about here in some cases.
 

 
You would think that disgraced TV evangelist Benny Hinn couldn’t get any more reedonkulous than he already is, but seeing Hinn in this context puts him in a new perspective entirely! Genius.

 
Via reddit

The Secret World is an upcoming MMORPG in which players join one of three secret societies and battle evil forces threatening to overwhelm the world by 2012. Something like this’s been coming for a while… let’s see if it lives up to expectations.

From IGN:

Last week, Funcom released the second teaser trailer for its highly anticipated MMO The Secret World. At the same time, an “initiation test” went up on the game’s website, classifying test-takers into three secret societies - the Illuminati, the Dragons and the Templars, providing a brief description of each with a promise of more information to be revealed at Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. If PAX attendees had hoped to catch a glimpse of some gameplay or anything other than the video, they would have been disappointed because the revelations were done behind closed doors. The good news is that we were there to see it.

Funcom’s Creative Director Ragnar T?ɬ?rnquist started off the presentation with a video that was shown at GDC in April, which was mostly about the game’s setting and its universe. The Secret World takes place in modern day cities all around the globe, but it’s a world where paranormal occurrences do happen. The designers have drawn upon various myths, legends and conspiracy theories to create a world where supernatural beings exist right under our noses, for the most part undetected or ignored by us. The player takes on the role of a hero with great magical powers who has to battle zombies, vampires, demons and other fell creatures in order to keep the rest of the world safe.

(The Secret World: Dark Days Are Coming)

8-bit versions of Miles Davis standards. Neat!

(Link here.)

If you hate druggies, you’ll love NARC. It’s about the best 8-bit Nintendo game ever, and when it came out in 1988, I bet Nancy Reagan was so happy she had a twinkling tear in her left eye and ate a cream puff as a little self-reward for the day. In this awesome game, you can team up with a friend to portray two narcotics officers who “take it to the streets” and kill the shit out of every drug user and drug dealer they can get their hands on. It’s gritty, real-life, practically the 8-bit “The Wire.” Its villains are ultra-realistic portrayals of the heartbreak of urban living, as if they could be taken straight from the blood-splashed newspaper headlines of today. Among the “people” you eliminate for their wretched, spineless crimes against society are fiends such as:

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If you are a nerd, and under the age of 30, you know what Starcraft is. You have wasted countless hours of your life playing it, because it is one of the best video games ever created, and, along with Blizzard’s other titles Diablo and World of Warcraft, has probably disposed of more youthful potential than anything this side of the public school system. It’s a strategy game in which players portray one of three races?

 
While my video game muscles have long since atrophied (I was always more a pinball man), and I reach for my Revolver only rarely these days, I read every word of the NYT’s While My Guitar Gently Beeps, which describes the enormous effort that went into pulling off The Beatles: Rock Band.  Beyond its account, though, of welcome, surviving Beatles-Yoko Ono-Giles Martin d?ɬ