Rubik's Touchcube

There's something about the feel of a Rubik's cube that just can't be replaced with a touch version. Don't see this going anywhere except filed under 'that's cool but useless'.

Microsoft axes Flight Sim

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/...

Java game in under 4K - Left 4K Dead

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/

Cheat in any game with Poke

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

MS launches new Xbox website

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

Grow cube is a fun Flash Game that is quite different

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/

Hotcorn is a pretty fun flash game like no other

Basically you just have to pop popcorn.

Link:
http://www.ninjakiwi.com/...

The Sims Carnival

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

Tower of Defense roundup

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 in JavaScript

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

Free 3D Engine with Panda3D

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

Link:
http://panda3d.net/

Excel as a 3D Game Engine?

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/...

Another reason to get a Playstation 3

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

A look back at the technology of Wolfenstein 3D

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

Best freeware games of 2007

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

Javascript games programming library

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

Video games that defined my childhood

These are the games I played to death with I was younger. In no particular order.


1) Conan: Hall of Volta (apple IIc)

2) Bards Tale (apple IIc)

3) Super Mario Brothers (nintendo)

4) Zork (apple IIc)

5) Breakout (atari)

6) Minestorm (vectrex)

7) Castle Wolfenstein 3D (PC)

8) Mortal Combat (sega genesis)

9) Mission Impossible (vic20)

10) Zookeeper (arcade)


There are more, but these are the ones I remembered playing the most. Share yours by leaving a comment.

Secret Maryo Chronicles

Secret Maryo Chronicles is an Open Source two-dimensional platform game with a style designed similar to classic sidescroller games.

If you like Super Mario Brothers then you will love this game. This game is amazingly well done and the game play is fun.

Link:
http://www.secretmaryo.org

(found on DonationCoder.com)

Anyone else remember Rocky's Boots

Am I the only one that played this game? A quick discussion over at DC brought back memories of Rocky's Boots. Funny thing is the graphics were actually decent for back in the early 80's.

Rocky’s Boots was a visual simulation that made it possible for upper-grade-school students to design simple digital logic circuits, using a joystick to move around circuit symbols on the screen and plug them together. The circuit components were AND gates, OR gates, NOT gates, and flip-flops. The colors orange and white were used to show the logic states ‘1’ and ‘0’ of the components, so that as the circuit operated, the signals could be seen propagating through the circuits, as if the electricity was liquid orange fire flowing through transparent pipes.

Link:
http://www.warrenrobinett.com/rockysboots/

Zork

Remember Zork?

Never did finish that game even though I played it for many hours. Amazing that a game that was nothing more than text with very limited interaction could be fun. So much for those days.

Get your game on with some hot games from 1980

1980 Games seems to be a Java implementation of MAME32, an arcade emulator. So, they offer emulated arcade video games from the 1980's that you can play in your browser.

Link:
http://www.1980-games.com/us/

Amsterdam for $50,000

You have got to be kidding me that some actually paid $50,000 real money for the virtual city of Amsterdam in the game Second Life. Why?

Link:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=125

PlayStation 3 may get a price cut

You think. A $700 gaming console didn't sell as well as expected. Nope, never saw that coming...

Link:
http://.../personaltech/playstation/

Enigma - Now that's how I like it

Enigma is a game in the style I like. No complex graphics, solid game play and takes half a brain to move forward in the game.

From the developer:

The object of the game is to find uncover pairs of identically colored Oxyd stones. Simple? Yes. Easy? Certainly not! Hidden traps, vast mazes, laser beams, and, most of all, countless hairy puzzles usually block your direct way to the Oxyd stones

Link:
http://www.nongnu.org/enigma/

Also, if you know of any games like this and they are free please feel free to share.

10.855 seconds

The Worlds Most Addicting Game

Revised: New high score for me 20.99

What is your average reaction time?

Test your reaction time:
http://kylan.newgrabs.com/reaction.swf

My best average was: 0.219

My favorite game when I was in school

Aside from the Atari 2600 Conan: Hall of Volta was probably my favorite game when I was in school. It was a puzzle type game and very addicting. Wish I could find an emulated version of this game but no luck...

Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan:_Hall_of_Volta

Atari 2600:
http://.../atari-2600-most-peoples-first-home.html

Another time wasting (addictive) Flash game

Card Tossing Game

Try and beat 111,594