Gamma Bros.

Oops, it's been almost a week...sorry, I've been busy lately. But I'm back, and I'll be better from now on, I promise! Anyways, I guess I've been feeling in a retro mood lately as far as gaming goes; last time I suggested you play Zork, which was actually an old game, and this entry I suggest you play Gamma Bros, which only seems like an old game. The folks over at Pixeljam Games have decided to take the graphically challenged space shooter thing and run with it, and they've miraculously put together quite a great game!

You know that I really like simple games that are just about the gameplay, and Gamma Bros delivers - the controls are merely the arrow pad and WASD. It's a vanilla space shooter, with the usual assortment of bad guys, powerups, and weapons, but it's strangely compelling, I don't know why. Give it a shot, you'll probably spend far more time on it than you intended to! Just a warning - it does start off a little slow, but trust me, if you hold on for a few minutes you'll really start to like it.

Zork!

Ah, Zork...if one game reminds me of my youth, this is it. Back when DOS was as high tech as it got (and it seemed that IBM was the one calling all the shots, not Microsoft!), Zork was it as far as gaming. Yes, there were other games to play, and some of them brought me lots of enjoyment, but frankly, none of them could make me waste as much time staring at the screen as Zork could. Back then there was no web, so you couldn't very easily look up the answer if you got stuck - you actually had to puzzle your way out of each one of the roadblocks the game threw in front of you. Unfortunately the series went downhill quickly once graphics became a necessity (not that I didn't waste several hours on that 3D one, too - would have been a lot more impressive if The 7th Guest and Myst hadn't come out at around the same time and stomped it), but hey, it was a good run anyways.

Anyways, I know it seems quaint to suggest a text adventure now, what with physics processing units beefing up our consoles to ridiculous levels of realism and real time raytracing but a few years off the mainstream, but hey, it never hurts to look back at the games that enthralled us 20 years ago - you might be surprised how many of them are still great by today's standards!

Check out Play.vg's adventure section for Zork II and Zork III if you're itching for more after fighting through the first one - warning, you're in for quite a commitment of time if you start digging into this stuff!

Britney's Pain + POSGOTD

[Britney's shame - Egotastic]
Sorry, this is completely and utterly off-topic, and has nothing whatsoever to do with games, but come on, this is too classic to pass up - why would anyone, ever, under any circumstances, shave their head and then go out in public with that ridiculous looking clown wig on? Especially when their career is already in the dumpster because they've finally completed the transition from attractive dirty untalented strumpet to ugly dirty untalented strumpet!

Everyone with me now, revel in Britney's pain for a moment...there, done it? Good. Now, for our POS game of the day, head over and check out Knife Throw 2, an uber-lame game where you can throw knives at all your least-favorite celebrities. I don't know who makes this crap, but whatever...if you go into practice mode, the game doesn't end when you kill them. Yay!



We're all done here. Go do something productive, now.

Ellipsis

Ellipsis: great fun for a few minutes. Not anything too surprising, but this is a nice point-click-destroy game that will entertain you for your lunchbreak. Here's a tip - whenever you clear the field, click a few extra times, because the new enemies tend to spawn right under your mouse, and if you can get rid of them before they scatter it makes things much easier.

As far as these types of games go, this one is pretty well done. I really like the shrapnel effects, although they're a little processor heavy. I'm not sure I'm such a fan of the overall genre - I mean, basically, the difficulty here is that the little squares are kind of small and mouses suck as fine motion instruments - but it amused me enough to load up my screenshot taker and write up a blog entry, so it's worth a play at least.

Fancy Pants Adventure

Fancy Pants Adventure is not a new game, but I haven't mentioned it yet, and it's definitely worth playing. It reminds me a bit of the Sonic the Hedgehog flash game, in that it has very nice graphics, similar gameplay, and (unfortunately for both) is a bit slower than it should be - in these types of platformer games, you don't want to have to wait too long for each jump to happen after you hit the button, or it really bogs down gameplay. Nevertheless, Fancy Pants is really one of the highest quality Flash games out there; I only wish the author would write another level or two!

Slime Games

The Slime games are a set of fun, basic (= graphically challenged) Java games, the original version of which was written by Quin Pendragon several years ago. Since then, they have been modded, rewritten, and altered in many different ways. Slime volleyball is the classic (here I've linked to the one player mod, by Wedgey - the original was two player only, and thus not that much fun if you're alone...), and you should also check out Slime soccer, Slime basketball, and Slime hackeysack (full disclosure - Slime hackeysack is a Flash game that I wrote to test out a more realistic physics engine for these games).

I'm considering creating some more of these games if I ever get a chance or someone shows any interest. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any ideas that you'd like to see come to life!

Neon

Neon is a simple, retro space shooter, using just the mouse to control. I've often had serious problems with these kinds of controls, just because it's a bit difficult when you're forced to always move the ship if you want it to aim in a certain direction, but hey, that's the game. And it's quite fun - Gprime bills it as "a flash version of Geometry Wars" - to be honest, I've never played Geometry Wars, so I have no idea if this is hyperbole or not. Probably, if I had to guess. But it's still worth a few minutes of your lunchbreak, so head on over and check it out.

Tanks

Okay, I felt bad not giving any sort of game content along with my Jack Thompson dig, so here's the game Tanks, a fun turn-based shooter game that is a dead ringer for the old classic Howitzer (which is at that link for download, though it's an old DOS game - if I had to guess, I'd say it might run a bit fast on your machine). IMO, Tanks is actually a little lower in quality than Howitzer, but to each his own - Howitzer ain't on the web, so Tanks wins by default! Not quite by default - there are certainly other versions of this type of game, such as the penguin shooter one, which is quite inferior in my estimation, though if the penguin thing is a Tux shout-out I approve.

The setup is familiar if you've ever played Worms: move, aim, and shoot. Hopefully you pwn before you are pwned. You know how it goes - you can see a screenshot of me cleaning up the playing field above. Hopefully you'll do as masterful a job as I have. Good luck!

If you like this, you might also like TurboTanks, which is totally different but...um, also involves tanks. Yeah.

Jack Thompson, Douchebag of the Day

No game today, just wanted to point out that in case you don't already know, Jack Thompson is a douchebag. A really big douchebag.

In my humble opinion, of course - for legal purposes I'm not allowed to make any claim that he actually possesses all the qualities of a douchebag (I can't risk getting sued by an actual douchebag for the unflattering comparison). Yes, I am totally aware that parts of a douchebag often make contact with a woman's intimate areas, whereas Jack Thompson does not. But apart from that, and with my apologies to the douchebag in question, the resemblance is striking.

Sorry, we'll be back to games next post, I just couldn't resist. This guy has been trying to kill the video game industry for so long that it's just impossible not to despise him.

Link Dump

All I've got time for before bed is a quick link dump, so here goes:

• Link Remover - text in Japanese, but you'll get the point...also from Dofi Blog we get War of the Hell. Good stuff.
  
• Drunk Walk - keeping with the foreign language thing, this one's German, but again, you'll get it pretty quick.
  
• GiriJump, KuruShot, YuraSquash and TameShot - a sampling of Sunflat's works (Japanese pages, sorry - again, though, you won't have much trouble figuring out what to do!), all of which are simple and graphically starved but strangely compelling. One could make a fantastic set of games just by remaking all of Sunflat's stuff with updated artwork! One example of this is the snake game (featured in the first post), a remake of Papijump 2, or the famous SFCave (play it at SFCave.com where it's a little larger than the original), which you may have seen reincarnated many times on game sites all over the web as the (much crappier, in my opinion) helicopter game.
  
• Planet Gobbler - eat planets. Yum!
  
• Celebrity Ugly Stick - another real stinker of a game from the clowns making crapvertisements...um, I mean advergames, over at Comedy Central. Funny just to see how stupid it is.
  

That's it for now, it's time for me to sleep. Have fun!

Soda Constructor

Soda Constructor is a sweet physics-based webtoy that I just saw for the first time today. It takes a bit of getting used to, but you can use it to make little artificial creatures that move around and stuff. I'd check out some of the default preloaded creatures to get some inspiration, then have some fun.

These guys are doing some real interesting stuff. I've played around quite a bit with physical modelling in Java (which is what they use), and it can be lots of fun, but a little tricky. This implementation is spring-based, which means you can't get things like rigid bodies, but a stiff enough spring comes pretty darn close. Of course, set the springs too stiff, and everything just explodes...but carefully chose ranges of parameters (or simulation method) can reduce the likelihood of this happening. I've managed to get this physics stuff working in my own stuff, but I've never set up a nice user interface for the whole thing, which is where Soda Constructor shines - it's extremely intuitive to use, you just click and drag to make points. The only tricky bit is to realize that you need to right click to deselect points, then click on the springs that are created to connect them to the control structure.

But wait! There's more: the most interesting part, to me, is Sodarace, where they are using genetic algorithms (one of a handful of soft-AI techniques) to evolve these creatures from scratch. You can see some of my thoughts on machine intelligence on my artificial intelligence blog (only a couple of posts so far); as you'll see, this is a subject I am very interested in, and Sodarace is more or less the applet (okay, actually it's a JNLP program) that I've been meaning to write for a long time now. Guess they beat me to it! The especially interesting part is that the machine evolved things tend to do very well versus the human designed ones, even if they don't look so pretty.

Winterbells

Orisinal is always the place to go for very simple, well put together games. Almost every one is just played by moving your mouse and clicking, but they manage to grab you so much stronger than many games with a lot more going on in them. The fantastic quality of art probably doesn't hurt, nor does the calm, soothing music that's always playing.

And they've provided us with another hit with Winterbells. You control a cute little bunny rabbit by moving your mouse left and right - that's it. Okay, you have to click to make the first jump. You'll figure it out - one of the best parts about these games is that the instructions are usually completely unnecessary because it's so obvious what to do. Anyways, you just need to keep bouncing on the bells and make sure that you don't fall. Good luck! I spent way more time than I'm comfortable admitting on this one!

On the topic of Orisinal, I have no idea how this site manages to win me over every time. All the games are cute, and often have fuzzy little animals. But I hate cute games. AND I ESPECIALLY HATE GAMES THAT FEATURE FUZZY LITTLE FREAKING ANIMALS! AAAARGH! Yet when I visit this site, my cold heart thaws just a little bit every time (though this is easily fixed with a quick round of Kitten Cannon, or better - Pingu Baseball). It's utterly confusing, but oh well...

Lastly, I wanted to mention that Winterbells definitely reminds me of SnakeJump, the subject of this blog's first post. Two completely different implementations (three if you count PapiJump, which is actually closer to Winterbells) of the exact same gameplay idea. Each one still has its own charm, though - this is what I love about casual games, even the same idea ends up expressed in seriously different ways depending who's doing the expressing. I'm not going to go as far as calling game-making as a whole an art (Madden Football #47, anyone?), but in some cases, it certainly seems to edge closer than one would expect.

Puki 3d

As if to punctuate my rant yesterday about 3D Shockwave games being generally sub-par, I happened to stumble upon (literally, in this case)Puki 3D, a 3D Flash game that I had played a while ago but couldn't remember the name of. You get to shoot angry babies or something like that, which is quite satisfying until they bite you - they're pretty scary when they leap. Now, doing 3D in Flash is quite difficult, as there is no native support. Yet to me, this game is of higher quality than most of the Shockwave 3D games I've played, despite its simplicity and pseudo-3D rendering.

Perhaps I'm just enjoying the similarity to The Missile Game, though, and I happen to like that aesthetic:



Whatever. I've got a beef with Shockwave, maybe it's just because I don't know how to use it, I'll leave it at that...either way, both of these games are fun tunnel games, so enjoy. I'm told that the missile game is incredibly enjoyable on the Wii, so you may want to give it a go if you've installed the Opera browser on yours (and if you have one yet, which I sadly don't...I borrowed a friend's, though, and it's lots of fun - I had a great time with Elebits and wasted almost a whole week devouring Zelda).

On the topic of 3D in Flash, by the way, check this out - the link requires Flash 9, so if you don't have it, head over to Macromedia's site and upgrade your player (might as well do it anyways, because it's reaching the penetration point and games are going to start relying on it exclusively because it's so much faster than the previous version - I just upgraded today). It appears that some serious 3D rendering is going to be possible with this new version of the player, since the language that underlies Flash has undergone some serious performance boosts since Flash 8 (Actionscript has finally leveled up to 3.0, adding a whole slew of useful features).

Tank Ball

Okay, so today we've got Tank Ball, a shooter that's also (surprise!) multiplayer and 3D. Of course, it uses the Shockwave player, which to webgame developers is generally considered a Cheap Way Out, since it provides you with automatic 3D and physics capabilities, yet is only installed on some people's browsers; nevertheless, if you happen to have the player installed, this game is actually kind of fun. If you have a fast connection, you might as well install it anyways, because it might even be around to stay unless Macromedia beefs up the Flash player quite considerably. [that's a rant for later!]

Like most webgames, very little detail exists in the modeling, so you're just shooting balls at each other across a simple landscape, but hey, the multiplayer game actually works, which puts this above most browser games. I say good job!

There are some other interesting games at Maid Marian to check out, too, such as Sherwood Dungeon, a free MMORPG (in a browser? I know, I don't like the idea either...) that is quite a bit more complex than the tank game, even if the gameplay gets old a bit quickly.

[Begin Shockwave rant]
I've got to say, regarding all these 3D Shockwave games out there, I can't say I like them, generally. You'd think, hey, great, we can make 3d stuff in the browser, and Shockwave will even do the physics for us! But to me, the resulting games tend to come off a little cheesy. I never get that feeling that the physics is good enough to make the games feel right, although I can't really see what's wrong with it...I suspect a large part of this is that Macromedia has made it too easy to throw any old crap together, add the 3D, add the physics and call it a game, so a lot of people do just that without considering the best way to handle everything else. Controls and camera work tend to be severely lacking as a rule - I don't know if that's because it's very difficult to do, or because nobody's done it right yet. But either way, in my opinion better games have come out on Flash and Java than Shockwave, despite it being the most featureful of the three...

Don't take my word for it, though, decide for yourself. Here are a few Shockwave games (in addition to Tank Ball) that have made the rounds on the web, some decent, some not:

• Pipedown
  
• Vertigolf
  
• Vertigolf 2
  
• Roll On
  
• Alien Abduction
  
• Formula Fog
  
• Super Bike
  
• Snowboarder XS
  
• Fowl Words (this one's probably my favorite, though it's neither 3d or a simulation)
  

[End rant]

The Falling Sand Game

The Falling Sand Game is a real gem. It's more of a webtoy than a game (I know, I hate that phrase, too, but that's what it is!). As you may have noticed, I've been pretty into the types of games where you set something up and then watch it run, the physical simulation type things. I guess it makes sense - I was a physics major, after all!

Anyways, this is a lot of fun to play; unfortunately, I have no idea who to credit for it. Sometimes it's known as World of Sand, too; the Falling Sand Game website has the following to say about it:

"Falling Sand Game", also "World of Sand", (2005) is a Java applet first found on the Dofi Blog via Fark thread, later enlarged and rehosted by Chirag Mehta. The game has been popular on community link sites like Digg and Delicious and involves four main falling particles: sand, water, salt, and oil. Each of these particles have special properties that can be manipulated; among these include burning, desiccating, growing, eroding, and more. Along with these four, main particles are auxiliary environmental manipulators: Wall, Fire, Plant, Spout, Cera (or wax), ???, and Eraser. By putting these together, one can thoroughly enjoy the modeling and construction of very complex structures and systems. There is an additional special feature that can be turned on, off, or told to remain in place. This is called the namekuji. In japanese, "namekuji" means slug, naturally for the properties of a slug when salt is poured onto it. Several different versions exist, varying from applets with zombies, or human bodies, that have their own unique properties to applets where auxiliary environmental manipulators have additional properties.

So anyways, give it a go. When you've played the original, you might also want to check out Pyro Sand, Pyro Sand 2, and Hell of Sand, my favorites of the mods.

By the way, all of these games were built with Processing, which I've been pushing quite a bit lately - it's just such a nice environment to quickly bang out cool Java applets with. FYI, the source for Pyro Sand has been released, and "You're welcome to use it in whatever way you please. " according to this forum post. At some point I may try to find the time to refactor this code a little bit and release a more OO version with some explanation of what's going on.

Blob Game - Liquid2

Liquid2 is something that I hacked together in Processing as I was testing a spatial partitioning algorithm for another game I'm working on. I got the algorithm working (without it, you couldn't have nearly as many particles on screen), and the thing looked pretty cool so I fashioned a simple little (demo of a) game out of it. Check it out, it might amuse you. Source code is available on that page, too - follow the links under the game.

You have to accept a security dialogue before you can play - this just lets your browser use OpenGL for faster graphics display. It's safe, signed by Sun Microsystems (the dudes that made Java), so I hope that doesn't discourage you from giving it a play.

Controls are simple - just hold the mouse button to repel particles. Particles "eat" each other in a way, and the goal is to not let all your particles get eaten by another color. Pay attention at the beginning of each round, it will tell you which color you are supposed to protect. As time goes on, things get crazier, so be careful. Be aware, the "goopiness" of the blobs changes randomly round to round, so some will be easier than others.

There are certainly some problems with this game, but hey, let's pull a Google and call it beta. Worst comes to worst, think of it as a lava lamp on your screen! Suggestions are welcome, although I can't promise I'll have time to implement them for a little while!

POS Game of the Day

Now, you'd think that since South Park lends itself so easily to Flash, any Flash game put out under that name would be great. Sadly, it's not true. I'm not going to say anything about Cripple Fight other than the fact that they've taken a great idea for a real twisted game and turned it into feces. This always seems to happen, and I don't know why these big media outlets don't yet understand that crappy advergames based on popular shows only make the shows look worse. Especially when you underpay some code monkey to throw the piece of crap together in a couple of days!

Anyways, back to feces: check out Shit War if you're in the mood for more of that sort of thing.

A special "thanks" to Wikipedia user Cacetudo (hey dude, you asked for a credit, so you got it!) for producing and photographing the fine specimen you see at the top of this post. Yum yum! Bonus game: head on over to the hi-res pic and see if you can guess what Cacetudo had for dinner that night!

Draw Stuff Then Play

First, a plea: if you're using Internet Explorer, please strongly consider upgrading to Firefox. Firefox is just a much better browser than IE: it's more secure, it's free, it's supported by the community, and it's got sweet extensions that you can add to it. Best part: the more people switch to Firefox, the more Microsoft panics. And it's oh so sweet to see them panic.

Seriously, though, you actually should switch to Firefox. We've also got a few games to cover today, all variations on a theme. First up:



Draw Play, and its brother Draw Play 2, are both pretty interesting games. You've got to draw a path for your character to take to the finish. Both games are a bit weird with some of the hit detection sometimes, but they're pretty fun.

Along the same lines (sorry, bad pun), check out LineArena:



I would be surprised if you hadn't seen LineRider before, but in any case, it's worth checking out if you haven't. There's a little drama in the LineRider world, over some copyright stuff or something - it appears the original designers of the game got a "real" deal offered to them, and thus had to swing the heavy hammer of justice at anyone who would dare improve or alter their game. One group that did this was ZadaRider, which mainly added things like an eraser (duh!) to the first version of the game, and stuff got crazy from there. Now it looks like Zada is developing their own game, but the fans are pissy because it took so long to come out (they put a countdown timer on their site and everything, and it's now been weeks since it ran down to zero). It's unclear if they couldn't get around using copyrighted code, or got in trouble for graphic-snatching, or what, but something's up.

Not ZadaRider (but also not playable yet):



More to come.

By the way, Carlos Mencia sucks, in case you didn't already know.