A few days ago, I spotted a report on IndieGames.com explaining how Symantec decided to flag IGF entrant Lose/Lose as a Trojan Horse.

As The Internet would put it: "Ha ha ha, oh wow!"

To Symantec's credit, they have a good reason: Lose/Lose showed up on the news circuits a little while back as an art game with a rather, er, destructive premise. And by destructive, I mean that every game enemy you shoot down is tied to an actual file on your system. Blast a baddie, and it equates to blasting some of your computer's precious data to smithereens. No refunds, no takebacks.

I safely ignored it as a dangerous novelty when it first came out, but I was surprised to discover it amongst the 300-odd IGF entries this year, and I guess that's what caught Symantec's attention too. The company argues that the game code can easily be altered to, you know, deceive people and generate a few nasty surprises — which is fair enough. But this is probably going to create a headache for IGF judges who need to view it as an art game and not a virus, and I'm sure the game's author has a few thoughts running through his head too.

Hope this interesting little snippet adds some colour to your end-of-week. "Light-hearted Friday news" today was a toss-up between reporting this gossip and gushing about how I'm being paid to review Heroes of Might and Magic 3. I'm going to play it all weekend, guilt-free. This game rocks.

-Nandrew

It appears that we are all doomed to drown under a tsunami of zany offers this season, so grab your life jacket and brace yourself for the news that Rock, Paper, Shotgun and about a million other Websites have been spurting out recently: there now exists an Unreal dev kit which can be used for free. Non-commercially, mind you, but that's still free enough for me and probably free enough for the gazillions of hobbyists who want to just get in there and play around. And there's some interesting conditions bundled with this if you care to read on below.

Aside from meaning oodles for the modding community, the dev kit proposes an interesting idea for people who want to try monetising small-scale projects: you're charged US$99 up front for a royalty license (dirt cheap for something like this), followed by a 25% royalty charge for any money earned after your first US$5000. This can work out to be a pretty steep cut in the long run, but it's generally more accessible than standard, up-front cough-uppery. It's a viable option for teams with low starting capital, and presents some interesting opportunities. We'll see if it works out.

My head's spinning from all of these cool free things recently. Are there any other offers that readers are currently aware of? I'd hazard a guess and say that we've dropped something somewhere recently. Tell us some good news and we'll post about it!

-Nandrew

I've heard a fair amount of news related to Gratuitous Space Battles, a game which pretty much sums itself up in the title. GSB is a strategic space combat simulator (and I use the term "simulator" loosely since, you know, it's really just all kinds of gratuitous) which has you decking out ships, managing fleets and — woo! — blowing the crap out of everything that gets in your way with great explosive gusto.

Now it has been released and is going for a smooth US$22.99. There's also a demo available for the good ol' try-before-you-buy types among us.

I really like the ethos of this game (gratuity, duh) and the visuals look pretty top-notch too. I'm going to assume that Mr DukeOFPrunes has already grabbed either the demo or the whole damn thing to screw around with, since he's considerably upped his usual amount of excited carpet-widdling ever since the announcement this morning. Expect a review soon.

-Nandrew

Hey look, another cool Gamasutra feature! This time, it's about rapid game prototyping, or more particularly, how a bunch of grad students managed to make more than 50 games in one semester.

This particular piece about the merits of creating stuff quickly is brought to you by the folks at the Experimental Gameplay Project, alma mater of Kyle Gabler's World of Goo and many awesome game prototypes.

I like the focus of this article because it deals mostly with the oldschool Experimental Gameplay and all of the stuff that happened before the crew became really really big and trendy and stuff. Not to say that they weren't high-profile before, you know. But I'd imagine that the most educational value could be gleaned from learning what they were up to as early as 2005.

While on the subject, anybody interested should check out this month's Experimental Gameplay competition theme, centred around the phrase "Art Game".

-Nandrew

Okay, let's play a little game of catch-up. I didn't post anything yesterday, and I apparently forgot that last Friday existed. So let's get the big news of the week outta the way: over 300 IGF entries have now been confirmed for the 2010 comp. Yowzers, that's a lot of games for the judges to work through!

As usual, it's a mixed bag of interesting stuff. Looking through the first page alone, I picked out stuff like Captain Forever, Aaaaa!, ASCIIpOrtal and even Experimental Gameplay entrant Broken Brothers.

Heck, they even have a game which I was quite startled to recognise: 78641, a project that's often hyped up by the Esperanto-speaking community because, well, it's in Esperanto. The IGF version is in English though, with some rather humorous mistranslations in the description that almost seem to be there on purpose.

Moral of the story: Esperanto's a neat language. And I can speak a bit of it too, so that makes me a pretty cool guy.

-Nandrew