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).