8bitrocket.com Blog

11/21/2008 Game Development Inter-web mash up: Nov 20, 2008

New Required Reading Blog Entry : FlashGame DevelopmentInter-web mash up: Nov 20, 2008The latest in Blog entries andarticles that might interest Flash game developers. This time we cover The CasualCollective; Playing Flash games at Maximum Size; A fantastic Atari STRemake; Smart Game Interface Choices; Kongregate's Kred system; Box2dTutorials; The 25 Line Actionscript Contest; Getting Started with FlexGame Development; A Papervision tutorial; Making Money With Web Games;A Silverlight Shootorial and more...

11/21/2008 A Musical Interlude: One Of The Best Song's I've Ever Heard

New diatribe Blog Entry : I've been getting into 60's punk lately and I 'found' this gem from the L.A. 60's punk/garage band Love fronted by Authur Lee. If you thought the MC5 and Iggy Pop were the only precursors to 70's punk, think again ('Seven And Seven is' from 'De Capo', Electra 1967):

11/20/2008 Alpha And Omega: Phantasy Star and Fallout 3

New Atari Nerd Blog Entry : OK, so Iback-slid to Phantasy Star I last weekend after trying in vain to enjoy Phantasy Star II and Phantasy Star III. The later games have not aged-well, but, even though I can't stand some of the 'puzzles' (too much repetition involved) of the first Phantasy Star title, the game itself is not so bad.There is something very charming about the way the story in Phantasy Star unfolds, andI can see why so many people think it is a great game. I do not think it is 'great', but it is 'good', and itsomething worth playing, even in this modern age of games like Fallout 3.

11/19/2008 GameStorm! Podcast Num. 12: Flex, Holiday Game Wrap-Up, Game Endings, etc.

New Podcasts Blog Entry : In this week's GameStorm! podcast we talk about a bunch of stuff I can't totally recall because we recorded it two weeks ago. Have fun.You can download the podcast here: http://www.8bitrocket.com/podcasts/gamestorm12.mp3

11/19/2008 Unique shooter, Split 'em Up, added to the 8bitrocket retro showcase

New World Famous Flash Retro Showcase Blog Entry : Unique shooter, Split 'em Up, added to the 8bitrocket retro showcaseCreated by Mochi user, mattS,Split'em Up is a top notch retroshooter. From the eye pleasing gradient arcade font to the retro musicselection, this one is pure retro class. It's a very fun,unique shooter with some great game-play innovations. mattS's description: Retro shooter with a modern twist. Split your gunsto create maximum firepower! ...

11/19/2008 Flash Maximizer - New Firefox Plug-in for full screen gaming

New Game Development Blog Entry : The Flash Maximizer 1.06 has been released on the Firefox Ad-On page.Here is the description from the site:-This small extension for Firefox allow you to 'maximize' Flash games(and other Flash content) by clicking a button in the toolbar. TheFlash content will be reloaded in the full browser window, causing itto resize along with the window. In this way you can play Flash games,or view other Flash content, in any size you like. This even includesthe Firefox 'full-screen mode', making your favourite Flash games feelmuch like 'real' games. For the latter, I recommend the 'Autohide'extension (search Google, don't think it is available here), which canremove the remaining GUI elements (scrollbar, toolbar etc.) from thefull-screen mode.It is currently an experimental ad-on that you will need to log in to download and test.

11/19/2008 Atari Nerd Inter-Web Mashup- Nov 19, 2008

New Atari Nerd Blog Entry : Atari Nerd Inter-Web Mashup- Nov 19, 2008What's new (and old) in the world of Atari - Press releases, blogs, messages boards sites and more... This week we have new game announcements from the current Atari; a revenue announcement from them too; The Legacy Engineering Atari 2600 USB Stick; some great retrospectives and review of 2600, ST, 800, and 5200 games; A video game documentary on Showtime; Some 1991 Atari ST coding practices; Atari ST 16 color art; 2600 Adventure on the iPhone; Portal on the 2600; Atari computer finds in the wild and much more...

11/19/2008 Google Analytics Adds Flash Tracking

New Game Development Blog Entry : Today on the Google Analytics blog they announced a full suite of new features that can help track viral Flash content. These features go far beyond their previous offering, which was simply a JavaScript pass-through. You can check out the new features for yourself over here:http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/11/want-to-track-adobe-flash-now-you-can.html

11/18/2008 No Flash On iPhone? Is Apple Becoming Microsoft?

New Game Development Blog Entry : Just when I thought I was going the right way by ditching windows for the Max OSX, a story like this appears on wired today:Why Apple Won't Allow Adobe Flash on iPhone

11/17/2008 The 56K Connection: Fisherboy review.

New 56k Connection Blog Entry : Fisher Boy, http://www.box10.com/fisher-boy.htmlCalifornia wildfires have caused more than 60,000 people to beevacuated from their homes and we,rsquo;ve had 3 days of constanttelevision coverage of the devastation. AlthoughI,rsquo;m not inany imminent danger, soot and ash is flying through the air coveringeverything with a layer whitish gray flakes, the sky is glowingyellowy-orange and the news reports are telling us to try not to,ldquo;breathe,rdquo; too much.So I,rsquo;m going deep-sea fishing.At the start of Fisher Boy the player is given a harpoon:whichis classified as ,ldquo;Basic Weapon: TurtleClass,rdquo;.As play progresses the player is able to go to the Weapon Shop and buyupgrades and better weapons. The playerpicks a nameand it is listed at the top of the screen with the blunt title of,ldquo;Fish Killer,rdquo; underneath. This was myfirstindication that persons to whom English is not their first language mayhave created this game. I love funky translations.As the player starts the adventure, a map of ocean and islands rollsout, by clicking on the red dot (,ldquo;select spot togo,rdquo;)you,rsquo;re ready. I also know this because the screentold me,,ldquo;YOO. BURN YOUR SPIRIT!,rdquo; ,ndash; Which Iinterpreted tomean, ,ldquo;It,rsquo;s time to start your adventure, go have ajolly,lsquo;ol time,rdquo;...

11/17/2008 Free Flash Game Development Tool Kit

New Game Development Blog Entry : Free Flash Game Development Tool KitMy latest quest has been to create both a Windows and Mac Free Flash Game development tool kit. I have heard some rumors and horror stories about some of the popular free tools available, so I decided to take a look for myself and see if I could move from Adobe tools to similar free versions. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I encourage anyone with competing or better alternatives to point them out.SWF Platform Game DevelopmentThere are many decent alternatives to using the Flash IDE for game development. I have found that that Flex SDK and Flash Develop work best for me. If you are interested in trying this out, check out my HelloWorld Flash Develop and Flex. If you are using a Mac, the choices are not as pretty, but I have heard a combination of Eclipse, Flex SDK, and an Eclipse AS3 plug-in will do the trick. I had a little trouble getting this to work on my Mac, so I am currently using the FlashDevelop/Flex system in Parallels (Win Xp)...

11/16/2008 New Star Soccer 4 Chronicles Num. 1: 8bitjeff mid season 1 report

New Required Playing Blog Entry : New Star Soccer 4 Chronicles Num. 1: 8bitjeff mid season 1 reportNote: New Star Soccer 4 has been released by Simon Read and his team atNewstargames.com. Being a supporter of both the world footiegame and independent computer games, especially Read's Masterpiece, New Star Soccer3, I have been spending an inordinate amount of my time playing the newversion. To prove to all readers the depth and brilliance of the game, I willperiodically give updates based on real game happenings. 8bitjeff started his professional soccer career as an 18 year old with theLA Galaxy on training contract. Finances were very tight with on just a fewhundred dollars a week, and the early season constant training put a hugestrain on both his personal and professional life. He had two disastrous dateswith local girls who were disgusted to see that his tiny apartment was filledwith only the cheapest gym equipment he could afford and nothing else. Havingno car and no time to spend with family and friends, all he could talk to histwo dates about was the training ground, and it was obvious that neither girlwas interested enough to last passed a couple minutes with poor 8bitjeff.

11/15/2008 iMac Gaming: Playing Fallout 3 With A Boot Camp Partition.

New Required Playing Blog Entry : Note: iMac gaming is a blog about playing games on a 24', 2GB dual core iMac running at just about 3 ghz with an NVidia 8800 GS graphics chip.When I made the big Mac switch back in August there was one game for windows that I knew I would want to play: Fallout III. I was huge fan of both the previous Fallout games, and with the Oblivion masters at Bethesda at the helm, I knew the game would be something very special. However, I was not sure that getting it work on the iMac would be an easy task. In truth, it was a bit more complicated than I first thought, but only because I did not RTFM (look it up youngsters). However, at the end of the process, the game worked beautifully and I played, enthralled for several hours last night. To complete this process you will need: The latest updated version of Mac OSX 32 GB of free space on your hard drive A copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 3The good news is that I have done the work for you. Here are the steps I took to make it work.

11/15/2008 Superb Retro Shooter Hallows Revenge Added to The 8bitrocket Retro Showcase

New World Famous Flash Retro Showcase Blog Entry : Superb Retro Shooter Hallows Revenge Added to The 8bitrocket Retro ShowcasePlay it now in our Retro Showcase:Created by Mochi developer, Earthwind, in their words: You must defend Earth against the invading fleet of Hallow, a remote planet where Halloween is the normal way of life! The citizens of Hallow have constructed a fleet of space worthy vessels that are on their way to invade Earth. You, an experimental space fighter test pilot, must destroy them before it's too late. There are five waves of enemies that you must destroy.8bitrocket take:Hallow's Revenge might be shrugged off by some as just another Halloween game, but this thing has EVER GREEN written all over it. From the retro music to the splendid visuals, every care has been made to deliver a top notch vertical shooter game experience. If you like Raiden, Trunxton, Foundations Waste, any number of Bitmap Brothers games, Zolar Mercenary, or any type of satisfying shooter, you'll play this gem over and over! ...

11/13/2008 Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: Nov 11, 2008

New Required Reading Blog Entry : Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: Nov 13, 2008The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. This time we cover a new online game creator; A new blog just about good games; An Interview With Game Jacket; Flash CS4 in the wild; Gimp Shop; Parallels 4.0 and FlashDevelop; Structuring your game with screens; The 7 worst verbs programmers use in function calls; How to get started in Flex with FlashDevelop and more...

11/12/2008 Atari Nerd Inter-Web Mashup- Nov 12, 2008

New Atari Nerd Blog Entry : Atari Nerd Inter-Web Mashup- Nov 12, 2008What's new (and old) in the world of Atari - Press releases, blogs, messages boards sites and more... This week we have some new announced 2009 games from Atari; A 2600/5200 Mario Bros commercial and comic; An Atari 800 arcade shooter being released for charity;The Atari 2600 in the Toy Hall Of Fame;A new Atari 800 emulator; A download of all of the Atari 2600 synth sounds in wav and mp3 formats; Kick Off 2 is still going strong; The Great Atari ST Games Survey; Game reviews; 8bitrocket Save Atari Week, and a lot more.Announcements from the Current Atari (I don't really consider them ATARI cannon, but they are all we have right now)...

11/11/2008 A new Whirled?

New Required Playing Blog Entry : A new Whirled? I get a lot of press releases, and while I read them all, I rarely spend the time to post an entire entry about a single one. Some times though, something special arrives and I feel the need to investigate it and tell you guys what I have found. Whirled (www.whirled.com) opened its doors today. I had not heard of it until the press release arrived. At first glance, Whirled seems like it might be just another attempt to monetize the MMO universe (and it is). It is more than that though. Whirled allows game developers to earn money by applying the Whirled API to their games and uploading them to the server. I know, that doesn't sound overly unique at face value, but hear me out. Whirled is attempting give game developers an almost XBox Live style system to compliment their Flash games. Not just achievements, chatting, and other features common to the Xbox Live experience (and other web gaming portals), but also the ability to sell premium content to users of your games.Whirled players earn coins that can be spent on in-game items for their rooms, but can also buy 'bars' via multiple mediums (gift cards, Pay Pal, etc) that translate into real world currency which can be used to buy games and other items from the shop. Content Providers earn BLING when a user purchases their content from the shop. Bling can be turned into cash money by the content providers. It sounds interesting, and they have a nice little line up of games and developers so far. Also, supposedly there is a LIFETIME rev share for referrals to the world. I looked for a way to embed a code or a game into this blog to test out the referral system and was able to find one for the brilliant VectorOids game that would fit our site perfectly...

11/11/2008 Late To The Game: Phantasy Star II : Oops Onto III

New Atari Nerd Blog Entry : I started Phantasy Star II last night on the GBA. I played for about 20 minutes and decided I had enough. Why?2 things:1. You cannot [Save] any where. Why was this taken away from the design of Phantasy Star I? The GBA version should have added this, but did not. This is a critical flaw.2. The battles are terrible. The pseudo-3D makes little sense. The menus are very hard to read. However, the worst part is that they are not satisfying at all. I hate them, For a game that takes so much grind, this makes it impossible to play.Onto Phantasy Star III.

11/11/2008 Flex Files: Tutorial - Flex 3 HelloWorld in FlashDevlop

New Tutorials Blog Entry : Flex Files: Flex Files: Tutorial - Flex 3 HelloWorld in FlashDevlopI have decided to start exploring the world of developing Flash games outside the Flash CS3/CS4 IDE. This makes sense for me because I rarely use the time line or the drawing tools inside Flash. Also, I am itching to use the Gaming Your Way encryption that Squize created, and it works primarily with Flex apps. I know this has been done before and better else where, but here are the EXACT steps I went through to compile my first Flex 3 Hello World app with FlashDevelop...

11/10/2008 Late To The Game: Sorry, Phantasy Star Is NOT One Of The Best Games Ever Made

New Atari Nerd Blog Entry : I hate to do this. I like to keep these blogs as positive as possible, but in this case I just can't do it. I am finished with Phantasy Star. I did not finish the game mind you, but I have finished my time with it. I ran into another 'puzzle' that required the player simply to revisit a location several times before an intended outcome would surface. I did not find this out on my own, but instead, 'discovered' it by reading the walk through. I'm a fairly good RPG player, so if I have to read a walk through more than a few than a few times, it means something is amiss. Either I simply suck at the game, or the game has not been designed logically. In this case, I blame Phantasy Star. Logically, I just don't consider 'talking to the same person multiple times until they tell you what you want to hear' either a puzzle or a solution. It's just lame.

11/9/2008 Retro Blaster - A look back (and forward), plus a new high score.

New Game Development Blog Entry : Retro Blaster - A look back, plus a new high score.The first independent Flash game I ever released on the harsh Flash gaming public was my Asteroids/Blasteroids loving tribute called Retro Blaster. It was finished after many false starts, and well before Mochi or GameJacket allowed us to derive revenue from our games directly. I knew nothing about sponsorships and licensing (FGL would be started 6 months later). So, I sent out a few feeler emails to aGame and AddictingGames, as well as a couple software houses, but no one wanted to touch it with a 10 foot pole. That was very very difficult for me as I thought the game was brilliant (we all feel that about our babies, don't we). It was the Asteroids on Steroids game that I had always wanted to make (and play), but never could before. I spend an entire year of spare time on the game. Much of it was spent developing my own BitmapData engine for animating all of the sprites and particle explosions in AS2, well before I even knew others were attempting the same thing. It used 100's of movieclips (empty) with a BitmapData object attached to each. The objects would loop though array of BitmapData to simulate animation. It provided me with the optimizations necessary to display 500+ objects on the screen and made for simply the best blaster I had ever made...

11/9/2008 The 56K Connection: Olive War – Attack 1: Veggies from above review.

New 56k Connection Blog Entry : The 56K Connection: Olive War – Attack 1: Veggies from above review.Editors Note: Marz Nolte is the newest 8bitrocket editorial team member. She brings a much needed female voice to the pages of this site. And yes, she does really only have a 56K modem.Olive War – Attack 1: Veggies from above. thecodezone.com or http://www.stoneagegames.com/games/412/I like all kinds of games; puzzles, adventure, shoot-‘ems or strategy, it all depends on my mood. But sometimes, a good description is all I need to try one on line.“You are an olive with a gun, the latest in a long and proud line of heavily armed condiments, and the planet Salad Bar is under attack from evil flying vegetables, …”Yes! ...

11/6/2008 Crispy Gamer's 'What If' = Atari Love!

New Atari Nerd Blog Entry : Kyle Orland over at my current favorite 'general' gaming site, CrispyGamer.com has a new article named 'What If' that proposes some alternate video game history...and much of it concerns Atari.Since we just finished an entire week of alternate Atari fantasy named : Project:Save Atari, it's cool to see that others have been thinking along the same lines.Nice job Kyle!

11/6/2008 Epic Shadow's Corruption Actually Followed The License And Linked Back To Us!!!

New 8bitrocket History Blog Entry : Epic Shadow's new game Corruption uses one or more of our free music loops, and the developers actually used our attribution license to link back to us!! Very cool Epic Shadow, we really appreciate it. Thanks!Corruption is a very cool sliding block puzzler that uses the music very well. Anyway, if you are dev and are interested in some free loops for your games, look here: http://www.8bitrocket.com/music.aspx. We will be updatng this section in the next few weeks with even more loops.

11/5/2008 The 56k Connection : Body Ladder Review

New 56k Connection Blog Entry : The 56k Connection : Body Ladder ReviewEditors Note: Marz Nolte joins the 8bitrocket editorial team with the first of her sure to be insightful look at the world of casual games. Marz has bee an avid gamer ever since she helped Steve and Jeff's parents buy them an Atari 2600 in the early 80's. She brings a much needed female voice to the pages of this site and we look forward to many more reviews and editorials from her in the future. And yes, she does really only have a 56K modem.This morning we toddle along at a rousing 42.6k, which is irritating when you're trying to view the last Opus strip. No amount of begging, pleading or bribes can persuade my service provider to actually provide DSL service to my area. Oh sure, if I want to cough up bricks of gold bullion every month they'd be happy to sell me a gigantic cable package with bells and whistles and all the internet speed, phone options, tv and (oh boy) billable porno I can stomach … but no. I figure there must be others like myself that by necessity or choice must flounder around with a dial up.So, – Welcome to The 56k Connection. The one stop shop for all your slow connection game playing reviews...