DynDNS has been a staple of DNS routing for years now. Routers have had support included in their firmware for so long you'd be hard pressed to find one without it. Gamers and small business owners have been using it for years to host servers for things like Teamspeak, Ventrillo, FTP or VNC access across the web. The free service was fine for 99.9% of the internet because you didn't need any of the services that the paid model offered. Dyn finally smartened up, first building in annoyances such as having to log in to your account once a month through the website to finally just killing off free service altogether. The alternatives such as NO-IP are following suit, adding annoyances and just making transparent service impossible. Whats Joe Average to do?

DuckDNS is a goofy named DNS server that is hosted on Amazon VPC and offers exactly what users want; simple integration. While setting it up via routers can be a bit problematic, gamers such as myself just want a simple solution. Their website, which can be logged in to with Twitter, Facebook or Google+, has some software solutions to update your IP. For Windows there is the standard background utility that constantly updates or a Powershell script and a VBS script that you can set up as a recurring task. None of these solutions are to my liking, unless you are on DSL or dialup (egads!) your IP will almost never change without you forcing it to do so. Also, allowing Powershell or VBS scripting through your firewall is a serious security risk.

I decided to create my own using AutoIt3, a simple shell scripting language that I use for many things. The program does exactly what I need it to do; tries to update your IP until it is successful or you click cancel, then terminates. Simple, easy and transparent like it should be.

The program is available here and the source code is included so you can modify it to your liking. It works by either hard coding your domain and token into the program or by adding them to the commandline. You could also add it as a recurring Windows task if you wish but a simple run at startup works for me. The program itself does not require internet access, it uses Internet Explorer to update so IE will require net access for this to work.
This. Is. Awesome.

Seriously, I almost wet myself when I watched the video. How I have missed the creation of this fantastic piece of amazing is a mystery to me. Imagine, if you will, a fighting game with some of the most iconic horror baddies in history? Now imagine that it's free, final and can be downloaded today. Can I get a F**K Ya?

Now you may want to not watch this video as it shows almost all of the characters, half the fun is seeing them materialize in the game. You have been warned.


Story? Who needs a story when I can pit the Tall Man against Pinhead? Not me, that's for damn sure!
A classic from the past, built by the Warcraft smithy's known as Blizzard, Blackthorne creeps back up from the abyss to your awaiting hard drive. Back in the DOS days, platformers were pretty abundant with titles like Commander Keen and Jazz Jackrabbit heading the pack with their cartoony and mostly violence-free gaming that were a staple of the consoles. PC owners on the other hand were still slavering after a small shareware title called Doom that was most likely still on their Multi-Megabyte MFM hard drives after a year of being released.

A large distinction that separated the PC from the consoles was a bigbrother-free market. This allowed what would be called an AO rated game such as the Shareware version of Doom to be freely downloaded from any BBS and enjoyed without anyone's approval. Doom employed blood, gore, violence and satanic symbols with wild abandon and the PC market was in love with the sheer brutality of it all. Cute characters on the consoles only inflamed the scorn PC users felt towards being treated like a child watching Saturday morning cartoons and helped sowed the seeds of the PC vs Console debate that has raged ever since.

Blizzard surely noticed the attention that Doom had attained and while smart platformers such as Prince of Persia existed on PC, it lacked a certain bloodlust that had grabbed the PC market. Enter a marriage of the two: Blackthorne.


Now Blackthorne is not the wanton carnagefest that Doom happily propagates, but having a shotgun that visually inflicted bloody damage was new to platformers. Killing things such as your own people, who are chained to a wall, backhanded blind fire ala Evil-Dead style was taboo and a guilty pleasure for the time.
Very old schooly, Game of Thrones 8-Bit is a throwback to the NES world. The game doesn't go through the entire story so far but instead plays through key moments of four of the characters from the books.

You can expect some hard gameplay here, as in you'll die trying to make the first jump, but if you are a fan of these types of games you will come expecting.

The website is in spanish, so those non-Latino can use this link instead.

Unnng! Yes that's what I thought as well. At the time, Donkey Kong on the 2600 was sure as hell better than spending quarter after quarter in the arcade but let's be honest - it sucked! Not casually, but on an almost Pac-Man level of suckage here. Two Levels of awful leaving you to hope maybe, just maybe, there'll be another level if I grind enough - Nope!

Now after 30 years is the game that could have been. Well not really as the cartridge would have been 32k and likely cost more than the console, but this is an impressive feat to say the least.


The Original 2600 Game


The Updated Version

Pretty impressive wizardry going on there, I think I would have wet myself if that's the game that came home with me back in the 80's. You can download the rom and play it to your hearts content using the fantastic Stella emulator.
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