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]

Zombie 4

This game is sweet - make sure you've got a Java Runtime Environment installed. This is one of the few 3-D shooters available as a web game, and it doesn't disappoint. Okay, it's not Half Life 2, but it's got a simple charm and great gameplay. This was developed by a guy named John G in Processing (you can find him in the forums if you have suggestions for the next game), which is a fantastic environment to write Java games in because it makes Java graphics effortless; for anyone that has ever struggled with Swing/AWT, this is an awesome achievement, and it even does 3D! If you're interested in making web games, you should definitely check it out. It's more flexible than Flash, and as free open source software, the price is right!