What of Runic Games, then, and their game which looks set to steal the ARPG crown in the meantime? Sticking true to the roots from which the team grew, they too haven’t let slip any official release date for Torchlight 2, other than the hallowed quote of “sometime in 2011″ – blargh, the suspense!

To ease the interminable wait, you might want to spare a glance toward one of these two alternatives.

First, you can dive straight in to Drakensang Online‘s open beta. It’s a browser-based game, and thanks to Java it’s far more playable and graphically attractive than you may initially think (no huge downloads, either!). The cash shop sells the usual selection of stuff like XP boosts and special item sets, but in my experience it’s entirely optional and – if you do have money to spare – it’s more balanced and better value for money than a lot of other similar games. While it only has two character classes and suffers noticeably from production-line armour making everyone look the same, the game is otherwise quite polished and the developers seem to be working hard to capitalise on its potential for the future.

Something else to check out is Path of Exile, a much darker and grittier affair that fans of early ARPGs should definitely appreciate – it has a good selection of loot and a system of gaining skills through socket gems, alongside a novel way of recharging your healing and mana flasks by killing enemies. Unfortunately it’s in closed beta as I write this, so you’ll need to register an account there and hope you get lucky with their random hourly giveaways (or have some kind soul pass you a spare key). My words of wisdom would be that you should definitely try and play it through whatever means possible – it has “rising star” written all over it and has picked up some good press from the various gaming expos of the past couple of months.

There are other forms of free click-kill-loot entertainment out there but they mostly fall into the smelly category of “Korean grindfest”, so I’ve deliberately avoided mentioning them. What games (ARPG or otherwise) are you playing to while away the days between now and loot-filled heaven?

• Space Smuggler
• SpriteGears
• Super Treasure Ball Gasm
• The Birth of Selthar
• The Girl and the Shadow
• The Journey

For such a massive batch as this I’ll see you after the jump! Oh, and another new icon at this late stage in proceedings (which I should’ve possibly added earlier) – this one indicates a Java file which you may or may not be able to play on all of Windows, Linux and Mac. Have fun!

Space Smuggler by AttributeClash
You’ve been rumbled! After barely surviving a meteor shower that weakened the hull of your strangely cubic spaceship, the law (and a supporting cast of space aliens) are out to get you. Survive five waves of attackers to win, but aim carefully: your blaster can destroy the structure of your ship and if that happens… well, depressurisation sucks. A tricky game to win but good attention to detail. 70%

SpriteGears by Santiago ‘Slashie’ Zapata
An interesting attempt to mix PixelShips with a turn-based strategy game. Pick a squadron of SpriteGears to explore the galaxy and expand your collection by fighting and capturing other Sprites. Each has its own attack pattern, strength and shield power. Alas that the game is noticeably unfinished and unpolished. However, make no mistake. Should development continue, this is a possible star in the making… 64%

Super Treasure Ball Gasm by jamatthews
Roll your super treasure ball around the screen collecting coins and avoiding devious traps. Reminds me a bit of Oxyd. Nothing spectacularly original but it’s still a pleasant and relaxing bit of entertainment – it has plenty of levels, a competitive 2-player mode and some unlockable content to keep you busy with. Even has a nice credits sequence! Good game, this. 82%

The Birth of Selthar by ZepGrem, JonRambo & Kyliroth
Yippity yay hiii-oh, it’s console RPG time! Pretty standard fare as you adventure through some ancient caverns seeking fame, treasure and a place that sells a decent cup of tea. Has a nifty trick up its sleeve, though. You can learn new attacks and power up your character in specific ways based on the monsters you fight. Feels rather unbalanced and lacks finesse, but still enjoyable and a jolly good effort. 76%

The Girl and the Shadow by Aik
What’s that you say? You want something to ponder the meaning of life with? Something a bit surreal? Aha, well, here’s just the thing for you! Help a girl and her donkey (!) to get rid of a shadow that’s taken to lurking inside her cave. Gain the help of three costume spirits and you should be able to drive it away. The bugs in the game almost add to the dreamlike feel. A five minute distraction; nothing more. 59%

The Journey by Georg ‘Endurion’ Rottensteiner
Too long have we been waiting in this competition for an entrant that makes good use of ninjas, but now The Journey is here to quench our hunger for throwing-star-wielding protagonists! Unforgiving collisions and some challenging boss fights make for a platformer that’ll need ninja-like reflexes to beat. And then there’s the whole rotating the world thing. Excellently put together and lots of gameplay. 84%

Space Penguin by harima555
Your cute ‘n’ cuddly space penguin has run out of food on his home planet, so he jets off in search of supplies on another world. The only slight complication is that he only has 5 minutes to do his job. Watch out for the penguin-hating locals! Use your dual-purpose laser pistol to both defend yourself and vacuum up those juicy bits of fruit. Pleasant enough; above average quality but a bit short. 73%

Space Short Bus by Bob le Moche
What we have here is a mix of Space Taxi and Gravitar including some nifty tactical ship upgrades. Navigate a series of landscapes to take the students of the future safely to school by braving inclement weather and avoiding the hostile turrets that try to stop you. Why are the turrets attacking you on an everyday school run? We’ll never know, but it’s all good. An enjoyable game let down a little by rockabilly ship rotation. 77%

Play Zolyx online!

Brought to you by the power of the Java Commodore 64 emulator created by Joakim Eriksson. Hope it brings back some memories

As you possibly noticed by the lack of the announcement, submissions for the Poing! PC community level pack are now closed. I’m moving the estimated release date back a week to somewhere around the first weekend in June. When it does arrive, though, you can look forward to at least two new levelsets with new graphics and a new “pastel” brickset to use in your own levels if you wish. I’m resisting the temptation to do a full visual makeover of the game because, honestly, with no access to the code in order to fix its long-standing bugs, that would be wasteful. It’s an old game and I think from this point it needs to grow old gracefully

Yeah. Any more work I do on a Poing-style game would be better spent on making a sequel… and sorry Poing fans, but no – that’s not a hint at a future project. Not for this year, at any rate!

The Minecraft Museum is a new page dedicated to screenshots of Minecraft [link], preserved on the interwebs for eternity. When the game gets uber shiny it’ll be fun to look back and say “Whoa, is that all there was?”. I’ll be trawling through various forum threads (and IRC) to refine and bulk it up later, if I get time.

A few hours passed after I first loaded the game up, and this was the result of its instant throat-grabbing effect. (Oh, and thanks to Markus for using it on the Minecraft homepage, even if only for a lil’ while!)

So, yes. Minecraft is just so amazingly uber that I invite you – for the first time in the history of this blog – to check out more information after the split. There’s more screenshots and everything!

Lots of other spiffy stuff has already been made by other folks (there’s a buzzing thread about it over on the TIGForums):

Despite the game currently being marked as “alpha”, Dwarf Fortress has taught us that’s no barrier to some decent enjoyment. It seems to run well on even quite low-end computers, due in part to the author aspiring to run it on a humble Asus Eee PC. All you need is a good web browser (Opera is a no-no for the time being) with Java installed, and you’re away.

Unfortunately there isn’t any way to save your creations yet, but this is apparently coming within the next few days (along with the vital addition of water to the landscape). After that, well – multiplayer seems to be the thrust, with a whole slew of Garry’s Mod-style game modes planned for the more distant future. In a game this freeform, you can quite easily make up your own rules as you go along!

Just remember, folks: don’t be like me. Be kind to your mobs. Nurture them, even if they do tend to march around like gaudily-dressed sergeant majors who’ve eaten one too many dried frog pills. Don’t lure them cruelly into bottomless pits. One day – one day sooner than you think – they might be the only allies you have in a hostile (and very cubic) world…

EDIT 20/05/09: A new version is now active, adding water and lava along with tweaked landscape generation. Level saving is coming very soon…

1. Watch stuff on YouTube. My personal favourites being anything in the Let’s Play… category. If you like retro games, and in particularly like watching other people suffer while playing retro games, my recommendation is DeceasedCrab‘s complete playthrough of La-Mulana. Yes, he does include Hell Temple. And yes, it’s quite frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious
2. Play random browser games. “You wake up in a room, but you have no idea how you got here. And wait – the only exit seems to be locked…” There’s more to online games than escape-the-room stuff! For example, the Java-powered Powder Game and Stick Ranger by DAN-BALL are famous around the net for good reason, and there’s also stuff like Desktop Tower Defense and Tumbledrop to suck up those idle minutes.
3. Find juicy loot in an MMORPG. My personal bad habit is World of Warcraft, but there are plenty of others (some – like Runes of Magic – are completely free). You could even mix an MMO with browser games and end up with Runescape. Hey, these days you can play it fullscreen with all manner of bells and whistles, so don’t turn your nose up just ‘cos it’s been around for ages!
4. See what other indies are doing. There are plenty of blogs and forums with interesting stuff that I check frequently, as well as the site of other indie developers. I won’t mention any specific ones because they’re pretty much all over to the left, just there, under “Fellow Developers” and “Links”
5. Create stuff. Okay, maybe this isn’t actually wasting time, but it can still use up lots of it There are more and more online tools around lately with which you can create and share content with others. A couple of my favourites that I stumbled across recently: FontStruct, a TTF font creator, and SumoPaint, a light-looking but fully-featured graphics app. There are also downloadable gems like MoonEdit, something Mauft told me about. It looks like a text editor, but it’s “multiplayer” – up to 14 people can edit a document simultaneously over the internet. Funky!

Gosh. I didn’t think this post would be so big. Never mind, eh…