Effective 3d inside flash? Impossible you say? I thought so too, until I played around with this. Pretty damned impressive! Still a long way to go until we have the equivalent of Quake IV in our browsers, but still, this makes other examples of 3d in flash that I’ve seen look silly. There’s another example as well, and more detail over on Rock Paper Shotgun.
Category: Gaming
Friday fun link: Robokill
Ok ok, so you lack imagination and don’t appreciate my other friday fun link. Fine. I missed a week last week anyway, so here for your frenetic mouse clicking pleasure is Robokill, a flash-based action game built along Robotron 2084 lines. This is one of the best action games I’ve seen in flash, with great graphics and sound and tight controls. The link takes you to the demo, but it’s long enough that you’ll almost definitely get your fill, and the game is good enough that it’s worth considering a purchase.
Originally [via]
Game finished: Shadowgrounds Survivor
I finished up Shadowgrounds Survivor this morning. It was on sale a couple of weekends ago on Valve’s Steam software distribution service for only $5. I had played the demo some time ago and liked it but hadn’t gotten around to spending the ~$20 to buy it, so when it came up for only $5 I jumped on it. By and large the game is worth $20 though there are some annoying glitches to be found playing through it.
It’s an old school action arcade game with some light RPG elements layered onto it. The plot is a riff on the old ‘aliens that look like the aliens from the movie aliens attack a space colony’ which has been riffed on any number of times, but it’s done competently enough and you can pretty much skip through it directly to the alien blasting action if you want. Controls are straightforward – mouse to rotate/aim and shoot and WASD/arrow keys to move your character around. Over the course of the game you get to use and level up three characters – a marine with a lot of firepower, a drunken russian with a flamethrower, and a lithe little assassin with some stealthy and long distance firepower. There isn’t much variety in terms of enemy types, but the game is about the blasting of the hordes and this never bothered me. The graphics themselves are pretty good:
Image via Wikipedia
There were two major technical issues with the game. The first had to do with the camera. Often as you entered a level the camera would swoop around in an in-game cinematic, and this would sometimes then get stuck in a weird location leaving you unable to see the action, or even worse, sometimes after the cinematic I’d find my character trapped in the level geometry and unable to move or stuck in a confined area. Reloading from my last save always seemed to clear this up. The second problem was worse – there is a known save game corruption bug with the game which would always happen as you transitioned into a new level and would crash the game. This one is really annoying. There’s a workaround to this problem on the forums over on steampowered.com that involves downloading known non-corrupt save game files. I suspect this one would have pissed me off more had I paid more than $5 for the game, but for what I paid…ehh, I more than got my money’s worth.
Anyway, the game’s worth a look if you like action shooter games. PC only, price between $0 and $20 (it’s on Gametap if you’re a subscriber) depending on where you pick it up.
Suckegg rides again
Windows sucks, sucks so profoundly that words cannot express my loathing for it, yet it’s the standard OS for gaming and I love my gaming action, so I’m stuck with it. I took Friday off last week because windows registry cruft had finally gotten to the point where the machine was taking ~5 minutes to finish booting and no amount of registry scouring could cleanse it of the problem, plus the boot volume was writing a disturbing amount of error messages to the logs, making me fear for its life. It was time for the ‘once every couple of years’ clean install of windows.
Since I was having to go through this, I took the opportunity to buy a new motherboard and videocard. The motherboard only supported 1066 bus speed, leaving me unable to upgrade to newer faster cpu’s including the new wolfsdale 45nm cpus. The videocard has had overheating problems since the day I bought it – it’s an ATI 1900xt and I basically dislike the thing. Performance wise it was ok, but it’s been loud and flaky due to the heating problems the whole time I’ve owned it.
I went cheap but effective on the motherboard side of things, with a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L. It’s lean on the features but the right price and with a solid review and reliability record. The one thing it lacks is firewire, which my last board also lacked and I survived without (though not without the occasional annoyance). It doesn’t support DDR3 RAM either, but I figure I am at least one machine away from moving to DDR3 anyway.
On the videocard end of things, I switched to Nvidia after at least 4-5 ATI cards in a row. ATI still produces decent cards but the 8800GT I bought is basically the value performance leader these days and ATI cards continue to run hot and loud. I didn’t want a repeat of my last ATI card is what it boiled down to. It also helped that I found a deal on an ASUS for around $150 after a rebate.
The build went pretty uneventfully. The only problems I had were initially getting it to boot, which turned out to be because the cooler on my CPU has a broken peg which was causing it to not stay seated against the cpu. Boot, overheat, shutdown immediately. I figured it out pretty quickly and brute-forced a solution. Next time I upgrade the CPU I’ll toss the cooler. The other problem was me being a dummy coupled with bad labeling on my RAM. For some reason I had it in my head that I had 4GB of Patriot RAM, the the labels on the RAM are misleading, so I spent a ton of time fiddling with ram slots and BIOS memory timing settings before I had a V8 moment and realized all was already working well – I had 2GB and the machine was seeing it correctly.
On the OS side of things, I did a couple of things differently. For the first time I used a slipstreamed installer disc, in this case one with service pak 3. I had an initial blue screen with it but the second install went smoothly, and it was a beautiful thing to go to windows update and see only a small handful of patches instead of the usual hours worth of patches to apply. I also installed Ubuntu 8.04. I’m going to try and force myself to only use windows when I’m gaming and linux the rest of the time. We’ll see how that goes.
Anyway I just figured I’d write up how the build went, as I’ve done a number of times in the past. The whole thing took me a full day and then some, though portions of it were spent watching progress bars creep by, fiddling with my DS or PS3 while I waited. The current build’s name is ‘suckeggridesaga,’ which is short for ‘Suck Egg Rides Again.’ Every one of my machines has been named some version of suck egg, cause, well, you know – Windows really does suck eggs.
Oh – one other thing to mention. Steam, as in the software service from Valve, is just awesome. I have at least a dozen games installed in Steam, and to get everything up and running again all I had to do was install a new copy of the steam client, log in once, then log out, copy 70 some gigs of data into the steampowered folder, and re-login to the client, and all my games just worked. Compare that to installing a dozen games using the physical media, then installing all the patches and adding in all the mods and addon content. There’s no contest – digital distribution is totally the way to go. The same was basically true of my gametap stuff as well – I copied over the client and binaries and all my games were good to go. Physical media for PC games can bite me. Given the choice, I will go digital distribution every time.
This week’s friday fun link: Everyday Shooter
This week’s friday fun link costs money, $8.99 to be precise. One of the best reasons to own a Playstation 3, Everyday Shooter, is now available for the PC, and it’s on sale this weekend on Steam for a measly $9. This is 80’s arcade gaming-inspired perfection, with superb retro graphics and a guitar riff soundtrack to die for. Gameplay might be described as what you would get if an art student dropped acid and riffed on robotron. If you don’t buy this, you don’t like fun!
Friday Fun: Play Team Fortress 2 for free this weekend
Valve’s just released a new map, gametype, and a host of new weapons and achievements for the Medic class in Team Fortress 2, the first of a coming wave of achievements and additional weapons. To celebrate, they’ve announced that everyone can play Team Fortress 2 for free this weekend. All the details are here. TF2 is my current fave FPS. If you haven’t tried it, I encourage you to give it a shot this weekend since it will cost you nothing, and the full game is like $19.99 and more than worth 3x the price.
End of an era – Computer Gaming World closes
I first started reading Computer Gaming World when I was in college back in the mid-80’s, and for most of the time it’s been in print I’ve been a regular reader, sometimes subscribing and sometimes picking it up off magazine racks. It’s only been over the past 3-4 years that I stopped reading it altogether, and I guess I’m part of the problem, as the editor recently announced the end of the print magazine. The sad truth is the web has completely displaced magazine for most sources of information for me, and I guess for enough others that it was no longer economically viable. The good news is the editor, Jeff Green, and several of the other regular writers still have a job with the publisher, writing web content for the 1up.com web portal that’s the umbrella site for a lot of the print publications, and they’ll still be producing their excellent podcast, GFW Radio. I hope this works out from an economic standpoint, though I have to admit that I’m worried based on what I know of the situation with newspaper publishing, the decline of print revenue, and their inability to scale up their web presences and the ad dollars they make from them to replace the income lost from the print side. Here’s hoping those equations work differently in the magazine business and for 1up, because Jeff and crew are talented and funny folks and it would be a shame to see them broken up. Meanwhile, a tip of the virtual cap to an old friend – so long Computer Gaming World, loved ya while you lasted, mostly.
Oh, and here’s also hoping they abandon ‘Games For Windows’ and revert to Computer Gaming World…I never liked that switch, for obvious reasons.
Friday fun link: Doeo
Mix a japanese pop soundtrack with the art style and humor of Katamari Damacy and drop dead simple controls and you get Doeo, a lovely little flash game on my favorite gaming portal, Kongregate.com. Doeo’s appear, and you roll your mouse over them to make them disappear, scoring points for doing so and for chaining together sequences of them. It couldn’t be similar and it’s charming and fun, a perfect friday fun link.
Friday fun link: Dirk Valentine, steampunkish platformer
This week’s diversion features Dirk Valentine romping through some simple flash-based platforming action. Run, jump, shoot – it’s not too complicated. Beyond the unusual steampunk setting the main novelty to be found is in Dirk’s chain gun, which doubles as a platform builder. The graphics are also above average. Anyway, check it out!
Friday fun: get yer boomstick on
Here’s a fun little friday diversion. You, a shotgun, abstract shapes flying by in a virtual skeetshoot. Hitting multiple targets increases the score. Not much to it but that’s the beauty of it – simple, arcade blasting fun. Get to it! Flash based, btw, and found over on the superb kongregate.com, which is the flash-based casual gaming portal I’ve mentioned a few time.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 