Amazingly it has already been 25 years since Warhammer started destroying lives, wallets, relationships etc and yet we still love it. Apparently the excellent people of the Miniatures Wargaming Union love it quite a bit more and to the extent of actually producing the above -frankly amazing- videos. Watch and learn kids, watch and learn. Then click here.

Beautiful isn't it? And grand. Quite a bit disturbing too and also the central piece of artwork for my vaguely planned redesign of Gnome's Lair. Oh, and, yes, it's another impressive creation of long time mate and lair denizen Deitrix, who tends to love coming up with stuff to visually impress the web masses. Find out more about the man and his work over at the excellent Deitrix Artworks blog.

Nope, we won't be discussing Stalin today children, so please do behave and try to stop acting shocked, as all we will be talking about will be games about Stalin, or, to be precise, the two games about Stalin I'm aware of. Right? Right! Excellent, then.

The first game is the appropriately freeware Stalin's Dilemma by famed strategy game designer and SUNY College history teacher Ed Bever. You can download it via the Home of the Underdogs, marvel at its impressive historical accuracy, revel in its intricate socio-economic model and start implementing 5-year plans while preparing for the Nazi invasion, as this is a turn-based game about Soviet economic development between 1928-42. Apparently doing a better -and less brutal- job than Stalin did is nigh on impossible...

Stalin Vs. Martians, on the other hand, a forthcoming piece on applied wargaming surrealism by three whole Russian development studios, seems to be aiming for a slightly less realistic take on Stalin. And it starts exactly where Dilemma ends too (i.e. in 1942), when the infamous invasion of colorful aliens began, though nobody noticed or seems to remember. The game, a humorous 3D RTS of sorts, will probably be available very soon and you can find out all there is to it by following this humblest of revolutionary links. Oh, and here's a rather interesting bit from the game's official FAQ:

Vopros: Can we play as Stalin himself?
Otvet: Yes, but not from the start. Stalin is our commander and he gives us orders. Closer to the grand finale he will appear on the battlefield as a playable unit - a huge colossus, five times higher than any other creature. Just like it was in real life.

Yes, well, as you might have noticed I'm not updating Gnome's Lair as regularly as I used to -neither of course as regularly as I would like to, but this definitely doesn't mean I have no more gaming nonsense to share with mankind. Au contraire... All I lack is the necessary free time, not the ideas. Hopefully though my just published Top 10 D&D CRPGs feature post over at the excellent Dungeon Mastering RPG blog will both keep you entertained and prove I've not lost interest in gaming. Cheers!

Those lovable retro gaming maniacs running Retromags.com, the premier resource for downloadable retro magazines, have gone and done something particularly impressive. Yes, again, and as you might have already read over at dear racketboy's they have scanned the historically important and immensely enjoyable premiere issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) for our reading pleasure. What you might not know, though, is that -in pure Retromags tradition- we're talking about something more than a mere scan. We're talking about a version of EGM that has been touched up and enhanced to remove any sign of old age and only then masterfully packed into a 68-pages long PDF/CBZ file.

To download EGM #1 you can either use the torrent created by racketboy, go for the direct PDF download or grab the CBZ file. Better yet, visit Retromags and grab a few more retro mags while you're at it or even stay and lend a helping hand. The retro gaming community after all probably needs you too. Yes, even you.

I go by the name Phillyman, but the real name is Rob. I am 28 years old and got into video games early on in life; my first systems were an Atari 2600 and a NES. I grew up mostly playing Nintendo based systems, but I did have the Sega Channel...who here remembers that service? Anyways now I collect older games and systems. I am also a fanatic of Halo 2 and 3!

I used to be a member on website named grh.se. Through that website I found a group of people scanning video game manuals. I had always wanted to help out with the emulation community, and knowing that my programming skills are not good enough to create emulators, I had the idea to scan my old Nintendo Power magazines. We were going to originally be called Powerscans.com, but a week later that domain name was taken. I then thought of the name Retromags because its more generic and doesn't tie us into just scanning Nintendo Power magazines.

We are working towards a few goals right now, one of them being scanning the first 10 years of Electronic Gaming Monthly. Other goals we are looking to accomplish by the end of this year are putting together a final set of Nintendo Power issues 1-165. Oh and I would also love to get PSM issues 1-53 and Sega Visions 1-25 all scanned and released to the public. Goals for next year include providing the first 10 years of GamePro and the first 5 years of Next Generation magazine. Beyond that I am not sure..Gamefan and GameInformer maybe?

The first issue of EGM has been on my hit list for the past 18 months or so, and through relentless searching on Ebay I finally found a copy for sale. I had to have it and placed a max bid of $100 on it...luckily I got it for around $37. I then took the $63 dollars saved and managed to snag EGM Issue 4, 8, 9 and 11 also! I think the best part of these magazines is really the advertisements, you can really get a feeling for the time the magazine was released in.

Icehole games, the Greek developers better known for World Basketball Manager and soon to achieve international stardom via the forthcoming political simulation Us & Them, have been all nice and released a couple of their older games as freeware. This means you can be playing both Sim Junta: Come be the Bastard and 1821 in a few minutes, provided of course you got a decent connection and are smart enough to figure out where to click.

Now, as 1821 is only available in Greek and -let's face it- the Greek audience of this blog isn't exactly gargantuan, let me focus on Sim Junta instead. It is, after all, a pretty deep statistical management/strategy game, that interestingly puts the player in the (stinky, imperialist) shoes of a dictator of a fictional country. Desperately trying to please ones American masters, avoiding being overthrown by revolutionary guerrillas and simultaneously making sure there's a constant flow of money from said country to a secret Swiss bank account is the object of the game. Knowing how to deal with a variety of social classes and interest groups the key. How very realistic, really. Great fun -in a thoughtful quasi-satirical manner- too!