Flash, SilverLight, Android, JavaFX, QT and the iPhone. Seems that everyone wants to redefine our mobile phone, the ultimate device/gadget of all time. I’ve written a summary of the latest advancement in the area of rich mobile applications.
Playyoo is about bringing the game experience we became used to get inside our browser, into our mobile devices. Simply direct your mobile phone to m.playyoo.com, to get instant fun. No need for any installations, no need to go through boring textual catalogs of games. All you need is a Flash Lite supported device, no matter which version.
Lately the playyoo game catalog grew considerably, since they opened their beta with only 13 Flash-Light games. The grew came partially because of the game creation contest that was recently closed, and the winners were announced today.
The wining game is Match the Blocks, an extremely simple and fun to play game that is very well suited to be played inside a mobile phone. The game is written in the widely supported Flash Lite 1.1, so it’s likely to be pre-installed on your device.
Designed like a game website, this new Microsoft website shows a nice use of the Flash technology. It got it all, from Flash Video to scripted animation, sound and transitions.
check it out…
Valve, the maker of two of the best games of all time, Half-Life 2 and 1, was already hacked once in 2003. The source code of it’s highly anticipated and in-development game, Half-Life 2, was stolen and was then available for everyone on the web. Playable version started to emerge, and the company had to postpone the release for months, which cost them a lot of money and pain. You might have thought that they learned from the experience, but it seems that they might have been hacked again. This time no source code for you to peek in “only” sensitive data like users credit card numbers was stolen.
At the moment there is no official confirmation of this, and personally I hope it isn’t true, I’d like Valve to use their time for delivering the next best games instead of having to deal with this.
JPC is an x86 PC emulator written in Java. It’s an impressive piece of software developed by some uber geeks, but it’s most exciting Side Effect, as they call it, is that it enable you to “Relive your childhood by playing your favorite DOS games”. They have a demo running on their web site that let you play some nostalgic DOS games. These are the exact original games and not clones. Playing these games and starting them from the DOS prompt really feel like traveling back in time, the only thing that is missing to complete the experience is the sound of the loading diskette drive.
Commander Keen 1
Somehow this screen felt very nostalgic
Prince of Persia
Since it’s pure Java it can theoretically run on any Java enabled machine even on a mobile phone.
Forget about these cheesy Star-Wars Lego games. Imagine how a GTA Lego game would look like. This is how:
Download Grand Theft Auto - Lego City
The guys from brickflick.com are creating scenes from famous video games using real lego blocks and stop-motion animation.
Scribble is a simple, fun and original drawing flash game. It’s tons of fun playing the game with a wacom tablet.
Play Scribble
Mr Paul Neave is not the next trash-TV host, he is a “serial Flash fettler and interactive designer”, or at least thats what he calls himself. He is a Flash experimentalist who creates fun and usefull Flash experiences. Few years back it was some high quality open source flash games, an improved version can be found here, sadly the source is not availble anymore. Then came the flash planetarium a cool and accurate way to examine the stars from within the browser. Last year it was flashearth which need no introduction.
And now, his latest experiment is neave.tv a cool replacement for your television. Based on video services like youtube and google video, the improvment is that you can lean back and enjoy the show in full sceen and without the need for you to do anything. Which mean you can be a couch potato again, only this time the shows are in much higher quality 
check it out, neave.tv
Why make a small Flash game when you can make a small Xbox306 one ?
One of the coolest thing about Flash is the fact that it made everyone a potential game maker. Games, as you might (not) agree, are the main force that power computers. Beside from the fact that games are pushing the hardware industry to it’s limits on a daily basis, all of these fancy applications we’re using are just by-products of geeks playing. From the moment you first played the arcade or held a console controller, if you are a true geek or a passionate gamer, you knew that it’ll be awesome to make your own games. Sadly, in the past, to create even the simplest or stupidest game, one would have to grasp complex programming and math. Flash substantially lowered the entry point for creating games, and also completely revolutionized the way we interact with small and very-small games. The term “Flash Games” has become so familiar and recognized that people sometimes reffer to all small games as Flash-Games, even if it’s a small desktop casual game that has nothing to do with Flash. Many of today computer users won’t finish their day without playing some Flash game they got by email or stumbled upon while surfing the web.
This game making enthusiasm is what Microsoft want to capture and use in it’s Xbox360. With the release of XNA Game Studio Express, MS wants to lower the entry point for the Xbox360 game maker. It was possible to create your own Xbox games before, but it was much harder and was lake of the community aspect. The XNA is a free set of developer tools for creating Xbox360 games that will be published through the Xbox Live service. This free tool is a subset from the professional tools for Xbox360 game developers but will be suffice for the amateur to indie game developer. This indeed sounds like a very cool and welcome initiative from Microsoft.
Read more about it: here, here and here.
IMHO MS should include the Flash player in it’s Xbox360, that way it can take advantage of the tons of already deployed Flash homebrew games that are out there. This likely not gonna happen, Flash and MS has become somewhat of an enemies since MS has it’s own pov of what the next Flash or the next rich-media-platform should be, and that’s her WPF/Sparkle. And what about Sparkle, can we make games with it ?. Only time will tell if it’ll be as approachable as Flash for the ++amateur game maker. What I’m sure of is this, when such a term as WPF-Games or Sparkle-Games will be as familiar as the term Flash-Games then we’ll know that Microsoft has made it.
It’s all about the games !.
BTW it’s possible to run Flash games on the Xbox360 with some limitation.
If you ever played beat’em up games in the arcade or old consoles (even if you didn’t), you’re gonna blow your mind from this video. This Pixel-Art styled animation is the work of Paul Robertson who manage to deliver a non stop 12 minutes of amazing, smoth, video game like action.Â
Check out the screens:
Download: Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006Â
Well worth it’s 112mb
For me, beside it is a great animation it reminds me of the good old arcade days in a funny and inspiring way.
Someone gotta make this into a real game.
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Google can now search and parse what’s inside flash swf files. Which means that now you can search flash content directly. For Example, Search this pharse in google to get approximately 200,000 links to games:
“game” filetype:swf
or follow this link.
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