Unhandled Perception

Redmond, Washington-based ACES Studio, the Microsoft-owned internal group behind the venerable Microsoft Flight Simulator series, has been heavily affected by Microsoft’s ongoing job cuts.

Development sources have told Gamasutra that a large portion of the dev house’s staff has been let go – with multiple reports indicating that the entire Flight Simulator team has been axed.

Link:
http://www.steve-lacey.com/…

Left 4k Dead was made by Markus Persson, for the 2009 Java 4k Competition. The entire game is less than 4kb. The game is inspired by Left 4 Dead by Valve Software.

The game was written for a contest where developers submit applications written in under 4K using Java. Pretty amazing what people can come with to fit in 4K.

Link:
http://www.mojang.com/notch/j4k/l4kd/

Poke is the ultimate gaming utility. It’s a small program that allows you to cheat in every game out there – published or to be published in the future!

In a computer game, all numerical values are stored ‘as is’ in memory. We’ll use a great game, The Sims, to show you how easy it is to take advantage of this fact using Poke.

Link:
http://codefromthe70s.org/poke.asp

Xbox Flavors:
Link:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/default.htm

Basically you have to choose the objects around the cube one at a time, in the proper order, to get the cube to fully grow (see image below).

Can you solve it?

Link:
http://www.eyezmaze.com/grow/cube/

Basically you just have to pop popcorn.

Link:
http://www.ninjakiwi.com/…

The Sims Carnival is a new online community and gaming experience from The Sims that makes game creation and sharing more accessible and fun than ever before. The introduction of this new creative endeavor from The Sims is designed to convert millions of players into game designers – no programming skills required!

Link:
http://www.simscarnival.com

Two great roundups of the popular Tower of Defense online Flash games.

Defend The Towers: A nice summary of 28 tower of defense games each with a screenshot and short statement about the game.

Tower Defense games collection: An actively updated collection of every tower of defense game that the author feels is worth checking out. Larger screenshots makes this forum post a handy little guide to the tower of defense game genre.

Mario Brothers, sorta, in a 14K JavaScript file:
http://blog.nihilogic.dk/…/super-mario-in-14kb-javascript.html

Panda3D is a 3D engine: a library of subroutines for 3D rendering and game development.

Link:
http://panda3d.net/

Cutting-edge computer games use different graphics subsystems — so-called 3D graphics engines. Source (used in Half Life 2), Unreal Engine (Unreal Tournament), idTech 4 (Doom 3), CryENGINE2 (Crysis) or Clever’s Paradox engine are well-known among the players and the game industry experts.

It’s time to learn a new 3D game engine name: Microsoft Excel.

Link:
http://www.gamasutra.com/…

With the upcoming 2.0 player profile requiring Blu-ray players to be networked, Sony finally gets to play its trump card: the PlayStation 3, which has clearly emerged as one of the best Blu-ray players on the market—and is likely to remain so for some time. Why? Because the first player now becomes the most versatile, sporting a future-proof Blu-ray setup.

Link:
http://…ps3-the-most-future-proof-player

Raycasting is a rendering technique to create a 3D perspective in a 2D map. Back when computers were slower it wasn’t possible to run real 3D engines in realtime, and raycasting was the first solution. Raycasting can go very fast, because only a calculation has to be done for every vertical line of the screen. The most well known game that used this technique, is of course Wolfenstein 3D.

If you’re into gaming and want to see the game that started the first-person revolution then this is a pretty interesting read.

Link:
http://student.kuleuven.be/~m0216922/CG/raycasting.html

Great list of some of the best freeware games of 2007. The screenshots is a nice touch. I would like to add Super Maryo Chronicles as this game is well designed and worth at least a mention.

Link:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=887.0

Scott Porter made a popular library for creating Javascript Games, called the Javascript Gamelib. It provided relatively simple routines for animation, sprites, collision detection and control. It meant games programmers could concentrate on designing games for websites instead of spending time rewriting the basic building blocks.

Link:
http://…/javascript_gamelib/javascript_gamelib.shtm