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.

Eater of Worlds

Been a while since my last post. Oops! The realities of life, really busy, yadda yadda...anyways, here's a pretty cool game that I found at Jay is Games, which is definitely a blog to keep an eye on if you like webgames. The team there has a bit of a thing for puzzle games, which isn't exactly my cup of tea, but they have pointed me towards more than their fair share of good games to play.



This one is called Eater of Worlds. The story: you're a blob. Eat stuff. Real simple. Not exactly the next Zelda, but it will entertain you for a lunch break or two. Well integrated music, too!