It was the project I used to teach myself Flash and Actionscript way back in Flash 5, and I’ve come back to it from time to time over the years between other projects to slowly add more rooms. This article convinced me that there’s money to be made from Flash games, which gave me the impetus to finish it recently, but apparently since that article was written all the sponsors who spend big money licensing flash games have ditched flash and moved on to iPad games. So, no big sponsorship, but at least I’ve finally finished it, and I’ve put it back in its quaint little home on my website where it’s lived for the past seven years.

Enjoy!

One brief caveat is that, since the game involves quickly clicking spots on the screen, you’re much better off using a mouse than a trackpad.

• All of the major consoles upgrade at pretty much the same time.
• Consoles, speaking in terms of raw horsepower, are roughly equivalent to a mid-to-high-end PC when they are released.
• Consoles, being specialized equipment, are generally cheaper than an equivalent PC.
• Consoles, being a fixed hardware configuration, generally provide a better ‘user experience’ (EG there is no fiddling with hardware or drivers to get things to work, no incompatibility with minor OS components, etc etc).
• Available PC hardware steadily gets better over time, while console hardware only gets better at the beginning of a “console upgrade” cycle

It seems fairly obvious that:

• At the beginning of a “console upgrade cycle”, consoles will seem as or more attractive for gaming as current PCs, particularly for users who are not willing or not interested to shell out for a top-of-the-line PC.
• As the console cycle continues, available low-to-mid range PCs will eventually meet and then exceed consoles in terms of pure hardware performance.
• By the end of the console upgrade cycle, PCs will grow to be more attractive gaming machines than consoles.

… so can we PLEASE get away from the “OMG PC GAMING IS DEAD 4EVER!!!!111″, “PC GAMING IS BACK!”, “OMG CONSOLE GAMING IS DEDD FOREVAR!!1112!!!11!!!shift+one11″ media cycle that repeats itself like every five goddamn years?

- HC

Here is a screenshot of an iPhone in an AT&T ad…

…from 1993.

Technically, of course, it’s not exactly an iPhone, and the actress is using a stylus with it, but otherwise it’s an HD touchscreen smartphone that’s about the same form factor as the iPhone. It even has a touchscreen that goes to the edges of the face, aside from a black area at the bottom. Spookily prescient!!

You can watch the whole ad here. This was part of AT&T’s “You Will” ad campaign, which was stylishly directed by David Fincher (obviously borrowing heavily from Blade Runner, but with a more optimistic air) and which made a large number of accurate predictions about future technology, although very few of those innovations actually came from AT&T.

I actually didn’t play the first Final Fantasy game until relatively recently (by which I mean, like, 5 or 6 years ago)- I’ve been meaning to play it again, but the thought of grinding away in that clunky interface for hours bores me to tears, even on fast-forward. Likewise, I try not to be too critical of a game’s appearance, but let’s face it- the original FF shows its’ age.

Luckily, I came across Final Fantasy ++.

Final Fantasy ++ is a rebalancing patch combined with a visual update. It includes updates of most enemy graphics (most of these are 8-bit-ized graphics taken from later FF games- FF4 and 5 in particular) and map tiles. Maps have all been redrawn to be prettier, although they’re fairly similar to their original incarnations. The game’s interface has been improved and the difficulty rebalanced; it no longer requires nearly as much obnoxious EXP-grinding as the original version. The classes, likewise, have been rebalanced such that Black Belts are no longer as overpowered as they once were, and Black Mages are now as useful as the fighting classes. A new magic-using class (Time Mage) has been introduced as well.

While most of the changes represent a big improvement, there are a couple rough spots- I wasn’t terribly impressed by the Ice Cave, and the whole ‘river section’ feels like it’s a lot harder than it should be. The familiar Four Fiends have been replaced- I like having the new enemies that don’t behave exactly as expected, but the choice for the new Fiend of Fire bothered me a bit. I expect that purists won’t like the idea of new Fiends, and I can see where they’re coming from- the Four Fiends are among the most recognizable characters from the original Final Fantasy, and I’m not sure that removing them was the best choice.

The class change now works somewhat differently than it did in the original- instead of each class turning into an upgraded version of itself, fighter-types generally turn into mage-types and vice-versa. It feels like the hacker was trying to make the class-change function more like the class changes in Dragon Warrior 3, but the game’s engine doesn’t quite support it. The new system works, but it takes a while to wrap your mind around.

That being said, Final Fantasy ++ adds a lot to the original- it’s still the same game at it’s core, but its’ rough edges have been smoothed down significantly. I strongly recommend giving it a try!

- HC

Action Fist was first brought to my attention by one of the folks over at Hardcore Gaming 101. It’s an awesome freeware action game; it looks like Cave Story, but the game itself reminds me strongly of Treasure’s Gunstar Heroes with a dash of Metal Slug for flavor.

Action Fist is a sidescrolling run-and-gun; it stars two main characters- the Tom Baker-esque Domingus and his monocled companion Ina- as they chase the creatively-named Madman and battle his army of robots. Each character carries two modular weapons, each of which is defined by a color, firing pattern, and bonus (such as increased bullet speed or damage). Enemies come in three colors (Yellow, Red, and Green), and take additional damage from a weapon of the same color. It’s a simple gimmick, but it adds some depth to your weapon selections- should I keep my yellow gun, or switch to green? Is a rapid-fire, penetrating weapon more useful than a three-way?

On the normal difficulty level, the game is pretty forgiving- you’re given infinite lives, and it can be completed in under two hours. There’s a reasonable variety of stages and enemies, and the game is fun throughout. A number of unlockables are available upon completing the game, including additional playable characters, costumes, and difficulty levels.

It’s a solid game, and absolutely worth playing. It can be downloaded for free from the Action Fist website; if you’re still not convinced, check out the trailer.

- HC

Almost a year ago, Dan Cook (who happens to have done all the art for Steam Birds) wrote a couple of articles about the possibility of making a living off Flash games. I called it a pipe dream, because I’d looked into the possibility of making a living off Flash games a few years earlier, and had come up empty-handed. So I pursued other things, like Xbox Live Indie Games, and sticking with my day job.

Last month, a friend of mine made a cool little Flash game, and sold it to a flash portal for almost twice as much as In the Pit has made in the year and a half it’s been on Xbox Live Indie Games. That totally amazed me, and convinced me that going back to making Flash games would be a more worthwhile pursuit than making Xbox Live Indie Games, but it certainly wasn’t a “quit your day job” amount of money.

$34,000, however, is more than I make in a year (before taxes). I realize that Moore is splitting those profits with his co-creators, but his take ($15,000) is certainly enough to get me off my ass and get me to finish up the pile of mostly-finished Flash games that I abandoned once I concluded that “there’s no money in Flash games”.

Thanks for being right, Dan!

The game I made is called At Land, and is based on the Maya Deren film of the same name. I’d originally looked up Maya Deren’s short films with the intention of derisively calling someone “the Maya Deren of video games”, but Maya Deren’s short films are actually pretty good. I tried to make this game a little more “gamey” than most art games; a friend recently commented, regarding a particular popular art game, “I wouldn’t mind calling it an art game if it didn’t fail so completely in being a game”, which I think applies to the vast majority of “art games” and is why they’re so commonly hated by people who play lots of games and people who design games. It would be like if I made the shape of a car out of paper maché, painted it garish colors, put a bicycle inside, and called it an “art car”; artists would stroke their chins at its artistic merits, other observers might be moved by its artistic “message”, but people who make cars and car enthusiasts would hop up and down and scream “a paper maché shell with a bicycle in it isn’t a ‘car’, you idiot!!” Which of these observers is “right”? Well, they all are, and I guess if the artist specifically wants to piss off car people that’s his prerogative, but in doing so he keeps car people from enjoying the other aspects of the work. The most successful “art car” would also be a functional car as well as a work of art, and the most successful “art games” are ones that are good solid games as well as works of art. At Land isn’t a very good example of this, because there’s not much game to it, but hopefully there’s enough game that its other merits aren’t undermined.

Anyway, please check out At Land, and remember that you’ll need to install Knytt Stories first in order to play it (there’s an option on Knytt Stories’ main menu to install new levels, which is what you’ll want to do to play this and any other additional levels). It helps if you’ve played at least the Tutorial level of Knytt Stories before, but it isn’t mandatory. Here are the rest of the submissions for “Knytt of the Month”, and here‘s the discussion of the event. I look forward to participating in the next one!

The Big Idea of Leave Home is that it’s a procedurally-generated shooter, taken from the Kenta Cho mold. It has a ‘ranking’ system built in- as you destroy enemies and collect the items they leave behind, your “anger” increases and the game gets more difficult. This is manifested multiple ways; obstacles grow denser, paths grow narrower, enemies spawn more frequently and are more aggressive, and your flight path through non-strictly-sidescrolling levels grows more erratic. The game is a fixed length- you have infinite lives, and play for a few minutes each runthrough.

The promise of a procedurally-generated game like this is infinite variety- new, fresh content each time you play through the game. While there are parts of Leave Home that work well, my main complaint is that they’re not nearly common enough- most of the time you’re seeing not ‘fresh’ stages but small variants within a fairly tight ‘theme’.

Although the exact content of Leave Home’s stages varies from run to run, you’ll always be traveling through four major areas, followed by a boss fight against a pair of major enemies. The first and third stages are Gradius-inspired sidescrolling affairs, while the second pits you against a rotating ‘pegboad’ of obstacles and the fourth sees you navigating through a number of rotating rings. The third of these stages is probably the best in the game- it features a variety of obstacles and features which change drastically from run to run. The rest, however, seem like they’re simply variants on the same small idea- the motions in the second stage grow more erratic and the obstacles denser, but on a fundamental level it’s always the same type of stage. The first stage is built more-or-less randomly out of a number of obstacles, but there are few enough different types that the stage looks more or less the same every time you see it.

I may just be reading way too much into things, but unlike most of Kenta Cho’s products, Leave Home forms something of a narrative- albeit an abstract one- telling the story of the drama surrounding a son’s decision to leave home. It’s easy enough to ignore if you’re not interested, but putting two and two together is kind of a nice “Oh, that’s what’s happening here!” moment.

At its’ core, Leave Home is a solid game, and I’d say that it was worth the five bucks I spent on it. I’m hoping that the producers expand on the ideas in Leave Home in the future- a sequel with more variety in stages could be really fantastic.

- HC

To avoid spoilers, I won’t say anything more about it, other than to call it a “Knyttrovania”; a 2D side-view exploration game, with discrete screens rather than scrolling.

Go play it now!

Anna also talks a little bit about the game’s development here.

The one additional thing I have to say about it is that the game starts out by railroading you through a bunch of combat sections all in a row (the combat isn’t bad, it’s just really tense, and the monsters in this game scare me more than the monsters in any other game I’ve played), but once you get past the saw mill the game opens up and lets you explore all the fun, GTA-ish stuff it has to offer.