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A couple more new web based games got on my radar recently.

• Nodewar - Sleak, web-based, Javascript. Feels lean and mean. I like that the gameplay is not your typical "arena" style battle. Replays are very nice looking and HTML5 (a few at nodewar.com/ladders). This one doesn't seem very active atm, but I really dig it.
• Code & Conquer - This one looks really polished and education-oriented. Haven't seen the gameplay yet. Getting a fair amount of attention right now.

This new breed of fully web-based programming games really seems to be taking shape. I dig it! I hope we get some good ones and it brings tons of people into programming and programming games... It's got to be 100x easier to get people to try a game when all they need is a web browser.

But I also wonder about the future of desktop app games like Robocode. One thing I love about the Robocode community is that we contribute a lot of code outside of our bots, like RoboResearch, RoboRumble, running web sites and services, etc. It's sort of like console gaming vs computer gaming - computer gaming gives you level editors, mods, the precision of a mouse. We exercise a lot of freedom on the RoboWiki to do whatever we feel like with Robocode.

Of course you could have games that straddle this line. A fully web-based game that also lets you run your own servers for the hardcore players, or a desktop game with some web features (which is kind of where I'm going with BerryBots).