Friday Fun: Doom in Flash

December 12, 2008Leave a comment

: Image via Wikipedia

Been a while since I last posted a Friday Fun link, so here’s a doozy – play the original Doom from Id Software right in your browser with the flash plugin. This works surprisingly well and really brought back memories. Funny too, in that back in the day this was the most intense thing ever, and now of course it looks desperately crude. Still, it’s pretty fun to play and authentically recreates the experience, right down to the sluggishness you probably experienced back when this first came out, trying to get your 386 or 486 to push Doom along at a reasonable framerate. Check it out!

Problems with Nyko Frontman guitar and Rockband 2?

December 6, 2008Leave a comment

If you have a Nyko Frontman guitar and suddenly started having problems with it when you’re playing Rock Band 2 on your PS3, it’s not the guitar – a recent PS3 firmware update broke things, but there’s a workaround. Set the ‘footpedal’ usb controller dongle to Guitar Hero compatibility mode and your Frontman will work with Rock Band 2 again. Thanks to the folks over here for the pointer on how to fix this. Hopefully Sony patches this problem out of their firmware in a subsequent update.

What if WWII was a game on xbox live?

November 14, 2008Leave a comment

You have to be a gamer and have spent some time on xbox live or played some other online competitive game to appreciate this animated gif that tells the tale of WWII as if it had been fought as an online game, but if you have this is funny as hell. Warning though – harsh language, not politically correct by any stretch of the imagination, and it runs for a couple of minutes. Kudos to whoever came up with this though, it cracked me up.

Friday fun – Warzone

November 7, 2008Leave a comment

Image of Desktop Tower Defense via Wikipedia

I mentioned a week or two ago how I had finally gotten the last and hardest badge for Desktop Tower Defense over on Kongregate.com and how I needed to find a new pastime for my lunch hour. I’ve found it. It’s called Warzone, and it’s cast from the same mold that DTD is. You purchase various kinds of towers and place them on the board, building a maze to channel the enemy forces through, slowing their march towards your home and exposing them as effectively as you can to the firepower of your towers. Warzone doesn’t add much in the way of innovation to this formula, but it’s well executed, comes with a number of maps and game modes, and so far, 5-10 games under my belt, it seems pretty well balanced. I wish it had some kind of slowing/freezing tower, and I wish it was over on Kongregate with badges etc would be the only things I would say in terms of enhancements. This is flash based so it should play on any machine. Check it out for a little friday fun, and good luck trying to beat my current high score, ~85k on the original map using cash mode.

Audiosurf on sale for only $2.50 this week

November 5, 2008Leave a comment

Image via Wikipedia

If you have a PC and you don’t buy this game, you don’t love fun. Audiosurf is this fantastic little music game that uses your own music collection to build levels you fly through, collecting tokens for points as you go. At $2.50 over on steampowered.com this week, you have nothing to lose by trying it – your morning coffee probably costs more than Audiosurf does and it won’t last nearly as long. Get thee over and buy it, then friend me on Steam so we can compare scores!

Friday Fun Link part deux: more zombies, this time in flash

October 31, 2008Leave a comment

So, the last post might have bummed you out because it was PC only? Here’s some halloween themed Zombie action anyone with the flash plugin can play: The Last Stand 2, over on kongregate.com. You’re one of the few survivors after the zombie apocalypse, and you have to make your way from town to town, searching for survivors and supplies whilst fighting off hordes of zombies from behind a barricade. If the zombies break through it’s game over. Simple gameplay, decent graphics, and tons of zombie blasting action. What’s not to like on Halloween? Not for the squeamish though. Enjoy!

Friday fun for halloween – Zombie outbreak

October 31, 2008Leave a comment

Armed Assault is a first person shooter that aims to be more of a simulator than a run and gun action game. It got decent reviews when it came out, and was notable for the strength of its mod community and the tools available for it, along with the size of the areas you can play in. There are tons of available mods, most aiming to simulate various military activities – using a squad to liberate a city, fight off an incursion from an attacking force, implement an ambush on a military convoy, that kind of thing. In honor of Halloween, I offer up the Zombie Outbreak mod for it, which allows you to set up a sort of ‘Day of the Dead‘ scenario where a number of zombies get introduced into an area and can infect the civilians and military personel in the region. You and a team of friends can then try and combat the outbreak, using the kit you start with and anything you can scrounge. It’s really pretty cool, and I’m posting this partly in the hope that a friend or two will pick up Armed Assault so we can team up, but even as a solo experience it’s pretty fun. You can score Armed Assault cheap off of ebay, or in the $30 range on Steam or Amazon.com. Definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in some Halloween themed zombie battling action. PC only, you need a decent gaming rig to run this.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

Image via Wikipedia

Here’s a ~5 minute youtube video showing off what the gameplay looks like:

No better way to enjoy a lunchbreak

October 21, 2008Leave a comment

So a slightly embarrasing admission: for the last 8-9 months, I’ve often spent my lunch hour playing desktop tower defense, this excellent flash game where you build mazes out of little defensive towers with various capabilities, attempting to stop endless waves of creeps from making their way to the opposite sides of your maze. I play it over on Kongregate.com, where they have various challenges integrated into their flash portal, and the top challenge for Desktop Tower Defense is to score >12,000 points on one particular level. It’s hard. REALLY hard. I’ve spent an unbelievable amount of time trying various strategies on that level, reading up on the game’s forums, and watching Youtube videos of others who’ve managed to beat it. Today I finally managed it, barely squeaking by with 12,054 points. I can’t tell you how psyched I am to have beat this, as silly as it seems. I haven’t been this engrossed with a game in I don’t know how long. Now I can throw down the gauntlet: anyone else think they can do this? I scoff at the notion 🙂

Below is my winning maze, for those that are interested. Note that the big central area was filled with anti-air towers for most of the game – I sold them off right near the end and bought several additional bash towers, also spending a good deal on upgrading a number of pellet towers. For most of the game, the only non-anti-air towers I had were 1 bash tower and two ink guns.

Now that I have a winning formula I suspect I could bump up my score a bit, but… I’m done. I’ve been obsessing on this for months, now that I’ve beat it, I’m moving on.

(I’ll just go off to find another tower defense game to obsess over 😉

Spelunker returns

October 12, 2008Leave a comment

Back in the day, I had a Commodore 64 and loved it. There was a brutally difficult little platformer on the C64 called Spelunker, featuring you as a miner making his way to the deepest depths of a mineshaft infested with critters out for your blood and a constantly depleting air supply. It was fantastic, and I still pride myself on the fact that I actually beat the game way back when. The Tokyo Game show just finished up on Friday and a remake was announced featuring updated graphics and some kind of multiplayer mode for the Sony Playstation 3. This is a definite purchase for me and I’ll be looking for companions in the multiplayer mode, assuming it’s worth playing.There are some screenshots of the new version and some impressions of the gameplay over here on Joystiq.

Good old Games – one free invite

September 25, 2008Leave a comment

Good Old Games is this fantastic new software store developed by the folks who produced The Witcher. They’re selling old, classic games for $10 and under, with the DRM removed and the games patched and tweaked to run on modern systems. Many excellent games are to be had for ~$6, and it’s all wrapped up in a well designed website. In short, I love it. I’ve already picked up Sacrifice and Hostile Waters (which I’ve mentioned in the past is one of the finest games, ever), and I’ve got my eyes on several other games. I mention all this because the site is still in beta and they’ve started offering gift keys to the beta users. So – if you’re seriously interested in the site, drop me a comment and I’ll give you a key. So far I only have one, and this is first come, first serve. It’s all free of course, aside from the cost of the games, but since they’re really trying to stress test the system, please don’t ask for the key if you don’t intend to buy anything – the point after all is to actually use it. You can check out the current catalog using the link above to get a sense if there’s anything there that you’d like, and I’ll note that so far they’ve been adding 1-3 games a week.

Dave's Place/Metamusing

News and pictures of the Hamilton Kimballs

Category: Gaming