lash indie game interweb-mash-up : July 3, 2009

I was sick this past week (it's still lingering on), and today (actually July 4)  is a USA holiday - a couple hundred years ago some dudes in funky white wigs decided they didn't want to pay taxes to an island, I think it was Hawaii, but then again, I went to public school, and played Atari non-stop, so it could have been the Falklands. We celebrate this by blowing shit up! So,  this one will be shorter than usual, but I'll catch up next time.

Let's Start By Highlighting A New Releases that caught my eye...
- Push is an awesomely retro, but very unique in a modern puzzle game way 
- Waterwerks is a really really fun, well made game. I'll never understand Kong ratings...
- The Dig is a little like Dig Dug, your kids will enjoy it, I'm sure (don't tell them that you played a game like it in 1982 though).
- Daemons is a very well polished graphical adventure. It scared me though...
- Maze Roll is also an very nice, unique puzzle game...

ew Retrogaming Times Monthly (free online magazine) features my first Atari Playfield article on ST game developer Michtron . Richard Davey (www.atari.st and www.photonstorm.com) was invaluable help on this article.

I have been reading this splendid on-line magazine every month for a long time, but over the last year, Atari and especially  Atari computer coverage has been minimal. So, I have volunteered to do a monthly column on Atari ST and Atari 800 games. This month features the early ST game developer, Michtron.

There are also 18 other articles in this issue, ranging from a tribute to Michael Jackson, to  a movie review of the video game inspired film, The Wizard, and all kinds of other goodies in-between for various systems and consoles.

If you would like to contribute to the magazine and see your favorite computer or video game system covered, please contact Bryan Roppolo, the current, very hard working editor of this great, free, web-only magazine. (Squize, that means you and your Amiga).

The Atari Playfield names is a tribute to the long running Atari Playfield column in the great, now defunct, Computer Gaming World Magazine.

ackers and the Beautiful System

On the heels of Steve's wonderful post on the joys of being a creative programmer, we get an idiotic Infoworld post on why American programmers are so bad...because they are hackers?

I like to think that the Hacker Ethic (creative, open exploring of systems and solutions) helps to create beautiful systems, but Neil McAllister seems to think that hackers are actually "hacks" - kids with no coding skills or business knowledge that must be streaming out of our university system if he felt the need to write such a long piece on the subject. He got one thing right, most university students can't code worth shit because coding is assumed to be the "dirty" job in a Six Sigma - like development process system. There are virtually no classes on proper coding in a university IT departments...

believe that I was born to be a computer programmer. Somewhere, deep in my soul, there is a need to organize my thoughts in ways that are both new and interesting, but also foundational and reusable at the same time. I've always felt that there is something atypical about this kind of work, and about the people who have chosen to do it. Not that it is better or worse than any other profession mind you, but that it was very unique, and at the same time both interesting and powerful.

However over the years, I have learned that this is not exactly a commonly-held belief.

just read this news story that Time Warner Interactive is planning to buy Midway Games. This would stand as just another boring game industry story for me, if it was not for the "Atari" connection.

You see Atari was bought by Warner Communications in 1976.  When Warner "sold" Atari in 1984, they kept the arcade business and named it Atari Games. They sold it to Namco in 1985. When Nintendo struck gold with the NES, Atari Games created a home division named Tengen, and continued to make games... 

suppose you could call this "gallows humor".  I actually liked much of Michael Jackson's early 80's output, so I'm fairly sad to see that he could not turn himself around.  Anyway, this "Moonwalker" Game came out at just about the time Jackson took his final turn into "Neverland". 

Commercial For The Game

(More videos after the jump including a news report and an "Angry Video Game Nerd" review)

avorite Video / Computer Soccer (Football) game of all time

In support of the USA's remarkable 2-0 win over the vaunted powerful Spanish side in today's Confederation Cup semifinal, I wanted to up the quiz anti with a poll of sorts.   I have played a number of Soccer (Association Football) games over the years and I wanted to list my 10 favorites in order.  Are your favorites on this list?  If you are an American, Soccer hater, then can just say "Madden is the only Football game that matters", but I would rather you give an answer to the poll.  Mind you, this is a list of my favorites, not technically the "best", but the ones I find the most fun to play again and again.

1. Kick Off 2 (ST/Amiga)
2. Kick Off Player Manager (ST/Amiga)
3. New Star Soccer (3 and 4) (PC/MAC)
4. Sensible World of Soccer (ST/Amiga)
5. Fifa (series) (Genesis / PS2)
6. Winning 11 Series (PS2)
7. Microprose Soccer (ST / Amiga)
8. Pele's Soccer (2600)
9. NASL Soccer (Intellivision)
10. Super Mario Strikers (Nintendo Systems)

Which do you choose? I have surly not played all of the best footie games, so what am I missing?

uiz: Can You Name These Classic Computer Games From Their Old-School Reviews (#1)

In this quiz we will give you a few lines of a review from a classic computer and/or video game. Your job: Name The Game.  Leave a comment with your answers below.  The first person to get all 10 will win something worthless and virtual.

1."Computer speech synthesis has just been revolutionized by a product by Don't Ask Software. Unlike all the other systems, [this product] requires no special hardware. That's right, [it] provides the highest-quality computerized speech currently available for ATARI computers, and does it with software only. All you need is an ATARI 400 or 800 with at least 32K RAM and one disk drive."

2."The scenario of [the game] takes us back several years to the Middle Eastern desert where 64 Americans are being held captive in several sets of barracks. The [game] arrives on a starry night with a full moon beaming. As pilot, you push the stick forward to lift off in search of the first of four groups. You spot them, find a clearing and land. Be careful not to crush the hostages. ."

(8 more after the jump)

nterview with PhotonStorm's Richard Davey

Richard Davey has created some excellent games for the freelance Flash portal market in the past year including (but not limited to) Kyobi and Abominaball. Both has been featured in our Hall of Fame Arcade Showcase as Gold Medal winners. The combination of modern game-play, retro sensibility, and an excellent eye for finishing touches and polish has made the 8bitrocket team big fans of Rich and his games. His excellent blog, PhotonStorm (named after a great Jeff Minter title) and his dedication to the Atari ST (www.atari.st) makes an interview with Rich a perfect fit for 8bitrocket and our dedicated readers.

(Kyobi)

(Abominaball)

8bitrocket:
Richard, Kyobi is doing EXTREMELY well. How did you come up with the idea for such a unique physics based block puzzle? ...

yobi added to the 8bitrocket Arcade Showcase as Hall Of Fame Gold Medal Recipient

Richard Davey(Photonstorm)'s retro-remixed, physics based puzzler, Kyobi, has been added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade Showcase as a Gold Medal Winner. It joins just 6 other titles with the honor, including Richard's previous game, Abominaball.

Kyobi has everything that a great game should have to be successful in today's fickle market. Rich has done an excellent job honing his knowledge of great 16 bit titles into a modern game with a retro flavor that we can't get enough of.  Great work, Rich!






Here's what Richard had to say about Kyobi:...

o, just as I have given-up on ...palidromes..., mindjolt.com put it up a couple days ago, and the game plays have gone through the roof.  It has averaged 45,000 each of the past few days.  I knew the old girl had some life in her yet!  I know 45,000 plays on average won't save the world, but I can bask in the glow of relative success for minute right...right?  This comes right after I have finished .+.palindromes.+. plus too.  It makes me want to re-think my position on word games.  They night actually be a good place to put some effort.

short interview with Simon from GameJacket was recently posted by FlashGameMontezation Very interesting:

Badim: 1k$ Advance - it was good or bad thing? at least in short-term(few
months-1 year)

Simon: When GameJacket first went live in February '08, we had no developers and no games and only a small budget to spend on marketing our service. We evaluated the market and saw what the competition were doing and felt that the advance might help some devs sign with us. This was not a cash give-away. As those who successfully applied to this scheme already know, there were strict rules for acceptance and only games that had a very strong chance of success were accepted - It was a payment in advance for future ad revenues. We had only planned to run this incentive for the first few months, but it was successful and didn't costs us anything so we kept it alive.

Read the rest here: FlashGameMontezation

was searching the Indiecade Web site for some kind of interesting story, and I came across this awesome stop-motion film by Pez. Watch Centipede, Frogger, Asteroids, Space invaders and Pac-Man all re-made with household objects. Brilliant! I may be a bit late on this, but it's still awesome.

here is a sense these days that the concept of "Retro" games is disappearing. This does not mean that there are no retro inspired games being made, but it means that "retro" has been enveloped into the mainstream, and there really is no "retro" any longer. "Retro" is mainstream. At E3 this year, games that would have been shoved off into far corners and dismissed as "retro" in years past, were right up-front (i.e. Super Mario Wii, Nostalgia, Final Fantasy VII). This proved that "retro" is so all encompassing that the term means almost nothing if applied to these games.. These are just "games" (good games mind you) and are tagged "retro" only for the most superficial reasons. In sense, these are "classic" games with "classic" game play, that don't necessarily have to have a "retro" aesthetic.

At the same time, there still is a very healthy community for actual "retro gaming": Playing games on old systems old systems and emulators , or writing games specifically for old hardware. This is a truly is "retro" activity and should be treated as such.

However, a new game design movement is emerging that is very difficult to describe with the current set of accepted game genres (i.e. casual, core, retro, viral, mobile etc.). The new movement consists of new concepts, presented in retro fashion, but are not really retro games. These are not remakes, re-mixes, arrangements, remakes of old games with new graphics, or retro collections, nor are they pure play games for retro consoles. These games are something entirely different from genre I like to call: Post-Retro.

lash indie game interweb-mash-up : June 17, 2009

I was on vacation last week, so I missed doing one of these (well, I wouldn't say I missed it, but I didn't get a chance to do one). I was on vacation, so I must have had more time than usual to grind out a mash-up, right? Not! With a 1 year-old and a 4 year-old happy that daddy was home from the evil corporate world for a week, I had even less time than usual to troll your sites, mess with your games, drink your beer, leer at your women and laugh at your message board posts on making $1000 a day from Flash games...

Let's Start By Highlighting A New Releases that caught my eye...
- Play Fruiti Box from Richard Davey (finally available after a 6 month wait).
- Hovernauts is a new 8 v 8 player at a time multiplayer retro-styled action-based death match! Now, that's a mouthful, and I was only able to play by myself because it is in beta and I am probably in the wrong country (the Atari ST obsession aside). So, do me a favor and EVERYONE play William Gelpi's new game so I have someone to lose to.  You can create an account or just play as a guest, but it looks really fun, and was even a blast just buzzing around in single player mode...

ast week I noticed that Mochi is running a new contest in partnership with dictionary.com for "word games".  Since I just released "...palindromes..." two months ago, I thought hat maybe I could get it into the contest. 

I emailed Andrew Shen at Mochimedia, and he told me that to enter the contest I would have to remove ...palindromes... from their system, and then add it back again so that the date would show that I had released it within the contest period.

Now, even though ...palindromes... was not very popular, there are still portals that feature it using the Mochi game feed.   By removing the game, I would basically render the game unplayable to the few people who actually like it!

Instead of removing ...palindromes... I decided to make a new version. 

oth Microsoft and Sony announced camera-based game control solutions at E3 2009.  At the same time, Nintendo has said they rejected this kind of technology years ago in favor of the Wii-mote. Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President said recently:

"Until they say when they're releasing it, how much it costs and what software it comes with, we won't know whether that is the route we should have taken. However... I think they couldn't choose to release exactly the same thing." (link)

I have to say, that while the demos for Project Natal were neat, I tend to think that Nintendo is on to something.

Here is a question for you:  Have you ever played a game that uses a camera as the control mechanism?   I have owned both the Eye-Toy for the PS2 and the camera for the XBox 360.  While I like them both, but they both have some major problems. While these are not exactly what Microsoft and Sony have announced (but in part, they are the same too), there are some fundamental problems with camera control that go beyond any kind of new tech:

Take a look at this Microsoft demo before we begin.

ame Jacket Goes Under


I am sad to report that Game Jacket has gone under and all games will cease being hosted today. It seems they were not able to get a new round of funding and had to close their doors. Gone are the $1000 up fronts and .50 minimum CPMs.   We had a pretty good relationship with those guys and especially in the early days (last year) they had a pretty good reputation for paying on time and being honest and easy to work with.

Lately though, there were some grumblings among developers about late payments and even some non-payments.  This probably has a lot to do with their funding problems of late.

Let's hope everyone from GJ lands on their feet, and all developers have access to the original versions of their games (back ups at least). Also, if you had a game on the system, it would be best to re-upload it a new non-GJ version to any portals still hosting it. We have a couple that will need to be replaced. (Squize, that means a new version of the space invaders clone for us if you have one).

Mochi is the obvious choice to replace the GJ ads, so hop on over and sign up if you have not already.

his video has been making the rounds of people in the advertising industry since it was posted last week. It's focus is the Madison Avenue advertising industry, but many of the topics included should be very familar to viral Flash Game developers. So you think games are getting bad eCPM and you think it will get better soon? After watching this, I just don't think so.

I did not think that I would write a review of this book. I start reading dozens of books like "American Nerd" ,but in all honestly, it is the rare one that I actually finish. Even though I am a huge fan of non-fiction, I'm really not a fan of "diatribe". If it feels to me that an author has written a book merely to prove some point (i.e. a 250 page rebuttal to a bad grade a college professor awarded 10 years ago), I tend to to sense it right away and stop reading. These texts tend to have long paragraphs of argument with little evidence and an absence of expert quotes and paraphrase. Either there has to be a great story woven into the text (i.e "Hackers" by Steven Levy) or there has to be some kind of personal element added to the mix that begs me to finish the text (i.e. "Candy Freak" by Steve Almond). When I started reading "American Nerd" my diatribe sensor instantly went off...

984 Computer Chronicles TV Show Video on Computer Games


This rare video from USA public television chronicles the state of home computer games in 1984.

Games included
- Steve Kitchen's Atari 2600 game Space Shuttle (Activision) + Interview with Steve.

- Chris Crawford's Atari 800 game Excalibur (Atari Program Exchange) + and interview with Chris

- Bill Budge's Apple II game Pinball Construction Set (EA) + Interview with Bill and Trip Hawkins

- Trip also shows off the original One on One Basketball game (Bird Vs Dr. J) on the Apple II.

- They also mention the EA classic Hard Hat Mac

3 2009 Indie Game Report #3 - Indiecade 2009

One of the best things at this years' E3 was Indiecade 2009 preview.  Indiecade is a group that puts on events to showcase and promote independent games and indie game developers. It accomplishes this by staging a series on international events in which the craft and passion behind indie game creations can be experienced by the masses. The masses at E3 this year were treated to some very cool games in a relaxing lounge-like environment. It was usually pretty full of people, but we were able to kick it for a few minutes and try out some of the cool games on offer.

Note: As you can tell, thus is our own crappy video, so please don't blame the games if we made them look like doo doo. 

And Yet it Moves (by The Broken Rules Team)
This is a very sweet looking retro 3d platformer with some new twists.  It is set in the world of a ripped paper collage.


Credits: Christoph Binder,  Felix Bohatsch,  Jan Hackl,  Peter Vorlaufer...

Possibly, the coolest thing we saw at E3 this year was in a tiny booth manned by single person, tucked away in the corner of the South Hall at the Los Angeles Convention center.  In that booth, we saw the latest iteration of the (now defunct) Game Park hand-held console, the GP32...named updated and renamed GP32X Wiz by the company Game Park Holdings, who are directly related to the original company.

The GP32 and it successors have never been widely available in the USA.  In most of the rest of the world the systems are used primarily to play emulated games.   This new version has a beefy ARM 9 Processor running at 533 MHz, and it runs a on Linux Kernal.   The most interesting thing for Flash developers though, is the Flash support built-in GP32X Wiz.  At release it supports Flash 8, AS2, with plans for AS3 support.

Games can be played directly off an SD Card.

3 Retro / Indie Report #2

What can I say? So far, E3 2009 has been a little underwhelming. Most of the big companies are here except Atari (other than the Ghost Busters car and some people dressed up in Ghost Busters costumes), but the web / indie / and Flash gaming community is very under represented. Electrotank is here, as are a couple manufacturers of hand-held devices that can play Flash games, but we were expecting much much more.  One interesting turn of events is the almost complete absence of Windows and PC games. The Microsoft name is no where to be found and it looks like Vista has killed off most of the enthusiasm for PC titles. No wonder Games For Windows magazine died a slow and painful death.  

Contrary to anything you hear or see on G4, this E3 is not BIGGER and LOUDER than ever. It's actually smaller an quieter than ever. The usual size (4 large halls and 2 smaller venues) has have been compacted into 2 mostly filled large halls. There are a lot of people here, but not quite as many as in 2006 (the last time an E3 was held).  The big guys all have some nice booths, but NOTHING like they used to have. The gross spectacle of years past has given away to moderately sized booths and in some cases media only presentations.   Booth girls (babes) are present, but in most cases they are dressed much more respectably and can actually answer questions about the games themselves (not just about their "modeling" resumes). This is actually welcome, because in years past, strippers and "models" in some booths out numbered the games in many cases. Also, where there was once a stage set up in seemingly every corner for a live action wrestling match cum costumed battle royale - strip show, or the "next" big alternative band to play...

ou can keep-up on Steve Wiebe attempt to break the donkey Kong World Record with the video feed below.
Watch live video from G4TV - Steve Wiebe Donkey Kong Cam on Justin.tv