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Want to know the worst thing about this? The Casual Game of the Year award. It's full of match-three puzzles and very little else. I'm pretty sure that there were more exciting casual games than that out there last year, starting with Jewel Thief, for example.

Then keep an eye on my homepage:

Millionsofgame - suttree

I'll be posting plenty of games there and tagging them accordingly. Jewel Thief, for starters, is a great little game.

Two things - I doubt they have an office, my guess is they all work remotely (read, bedroom) so there's no face-to-face communication about dupes and posts, which is killer.

Second, the is the second time recently that I've seen a dupe get *way* more comments than the original, even if 90% of them are 'dupe!' posts.

Go figure.
Playaholics - Wolf N Swine

My 'frist post' to Slashdot. I've submitted a few things before but this is the only one that got posted.

Shame it's a dupe though :(
Ah well, best go play some pool then.

Pick any of these:

Boat Rider

Lightning Pool

Wolf n Swine

Just so long as the developers understand that Flash games are at their best when the game mechanics are kept simple. That doesn't mean that the game itself has to be simple, there's still room for complexity and depth. Please, flash developers, no more multiplayer games - they just don't work

Enjoy :)

Pick any of these:

Boat Rider

Lightning Pool

Wolf n Swine

Just so long as the developers understand that Flash games are at their best when the game mechanics are kept simple. That doesn't mean that the game itself has to be simple, there's still room for complexity and depth. Please, flash developers, no more multiplayer games - they just don't work

Enjoy :)

Pick any of these:

Boat Rider

Lightning Pool

Wolf n Swine

Just so long as the developers understand that Flash games are at their best when the game mechanics are kept simple. That doesn't mean that the game itself has to be simple, there's still room for complexity and depth. Please, flash developers, no more multiplayer games - they just don't work

Enjoy :)

So true, and the same goes for the poeple who take them too seriously. At my last job I was threatened with 'action' if I continued to use, develop and test with Firefox.

When I wasn't laughing up my sleeve I was actually quite shocked about the ignorance of the wider web and blind faith some people have.

Needless to say, I moved on since them :)

Playaholics : Play Wolf N Swine!

Clever in that you run one instance of every toolbar per tab?

Now that's innovation!

When Apple said 'Redmond, start your photocopiers' I thought they were joking....

Playaholics: Play Wolf N Swine

You'll be wanting Googlesh then:

http://www.suttree.com/code/googlesh/

-- http://www.playaholics.com/play/wolfnswine/

Little Fluffy is the best, especially now that they're back.

If it's 15 minute web games you want though - you can't beat Playaholics though. Free to play and/or join, scoreboards, stats, decent forums. Oh yeh, shameless plug but who cares about a little thing like that eh?

capatcha baby!

That the Guardian Gamesblog really has a vested interest in making such outlandish claims. Ending up on games.slashdot.org really is its' own reward. There's been a large explosion in these games blogs lately, hence the surprising 'explosion' in 'hardcode gamers' when, in reality, it speaks much more of a dejected and bored workforce too embarrased to go into GAME to pick up a copy of The Sims.

If there really was such a huge explosion in casual gaming then why isn't the *print* version of The Guardian full to the brim of game reviews, website reviews and developer interviews?

Lighting Break - Online pool

capatcha baby!

Just like forgetting to add Wales to a map of Europe:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3715512.stm

How about we try that with the USA and drop the South from the maps. Then have a quick re-run of those elections and see if we can get a better result this time around :)
Playaholics: Dark Age - a great DHTML Gauntlet clone

Funny, a thread that is full of comments pointing out that the web makes the west a global market and that regionalisation just won't cut it anymore (like delaying the UK series) and you get to whine about the DVDs whilst assuming that everyone will know you're in the USA.
Playaholics: Arcade pool

*sigh*

Season 1 DVD, or would you prefer the Mini Series first?


Playaholics: Play LightingPool

Oh, and this crappy capatcha system is b0rked, ffs

Check out PyAIML as I think the sourceforge project has a few AIML sets you can download.

Of course, you can always try out GrokItBot - it massively cuts down on the amount of AIML you need to write by introducing a Bayesian parser before the data gets sent to ALICE, so you get a bit of machine-based learning happening before ALICE gets her hands on things. It works quite well and adds a few more smarts to your bot. Or at least, the impression of more smarts ;-)

GrokItbot - A PyAIML and Bayesian chat bot

Playaholics: Lightning Pool

Reminds me of the Apple motto, 'real pirates ship'.

Playaholics: Lightning Pool

Next up, Google Maps Australia:
"I can see the pub from here!"

Playaholics: Lightning Pool

From that directory, at least we can guarentee that the ending won't be a Turkey, just a Chicken

Playaholics : Lightning Pool

What's the difference between that and list comprehension?

And why is it so good if it reduces the readability of your code?

I was with you up 'till:

pets.each { |pet| puts pet.upcase }

Lightning Pool

Yeh, I bet he really regrets making a mistake like that now.

I mean, in my whole life so far, I've never made a mistake. Really.

Oh yeah, I'd love to see you turn down guarenteed fame and oodles of money on the basis of your principles.



Lightning Pool - Arcade pool

The bots in Condition Zero were quite good at that, they use the radio heavily and act on it too.

Playaholics : Lightning Pool : Free online pool game

duties that XML extensible stuff would come in handy - AIML processing for example, but on the other hand I'm nervous of the way XML is coming to dominate a lot of people's thinking especially when it seems to involve doing the same things differently.

Lightning Pool : Free online game

Lightning Pool

Yes, yes and thrice yes.

Flash and Shockwave are the platform of choice for free webgames and a whole host of them are just a rehash of a classic game. Not that there is anything wrong in that either - if the commercial developers aren't going to continue innovation on some of those old arcade games, then why should no-one else.

Check out FreeJack or even Driving Mad for the kind of games that are still great fun and as you've said, no doubt were much easier to write than their originals.

--
Playaholics : Play games and win stuff!

Yes, yes and thrice yes.

Flash and Shockwave are the platform of choice for free webgames and a whole host of them are just a rehash of a classic game. Not that there is anything wrong in that either - if the commercial developers aren't going to continue innovation on some of those old arcade games, then why should no-one else.

Check out FreeJack or even Driving Mad for the kind of games that are still great fun and as you've said, no doubt were much easier to write than their originals.

--
Playaholics : Play games and win stuff!

Yes, yes and thrice yes.

Flash and Shockwave are the platform of choice for free webgames and a whole host of them are just a rehash of a classic game. Not that there is anything wrong in that either - if the commercial developers aren't going to continue innovation on some of those old arcade games, then why should no-one else.

Check out FreeJack or even Driving Mad for the kind of games that are still great fun and as you've said, no doubt were much easier to write than their originals.

--
Playaholics : Play games and win stuff!

Now is the time - now that you have been warned. It'll be a miracle if this doesn't rubbish the book in some respect so just do yourself a favour and read A Scanner Darkly before it gets Keanu'd and you can never think of it without, uh, like, you know, dude.

Playaholics : Online games and scoreboards

Exactly right - in the same way that every one think that the ned headless iMac is going to be cheap, lining up as a '2nd PC' alternative.

Playaholics: Free online games and scoreboards

Rubbish - so long as you make sure that the community and group building aspects are compelling enough.

Let's face it, the Hello Kitty MMO has the potential to be much bigger than any MMO so far. After all, grinding up trolls and beheading orcs with a magic axe are niche activities too

Playaholics : Free Flash Games

It's in danger of becoming a bit like the Emperor's new clothers. Tagging has been around for a long time, it's just that we all got bored of doing it - meta tags that is.

For evey page on your website you'd create a bunch of meta tags and then cross yourself three times in the hope that a decent search engine would make sense of it all.

Of course, then Google came along and made the content of the page much more important than the author's chosen keywords, which is right, in my opinion.

No, I understand the difference between an author's chosen tags and these folksonomies and I'm for the folksonomy but it's hard work - I don't see a future in user-defined tags. I do, however, see a future in scripting all this - be it by a personal proxy server or a branch of Google.

A personal proxy server written in Python

The problem with tagging

Playaholics : Great online games

I think you just outed Pete Townshed..

Playaholics : Free online games and scoreboards

I love Bayes stuff - and there's a very nice Python module written by divmod.

I was playing around with AIML to cobble together a basic chat bot when I realised that I could use a Bayesian parser to radically cut down the amount of AIML that I needed to write. AIML is an XML style of chat bot repsonses, it's clever in that it's highly recursive but the downside is that you need to create a rule for every eventuality.

By adding in a bit of Bayesian guessing before the AIML parser got it hands on the conversation, I'm able to keep the AIML files very focused and give the chat bot a bit more sparkle - you don't have to train him about everything. After a while he realised that 'yo', 'hi' and 'hello' are all the same thing, so he just guesses that you're saying hello and pulls out the correct response from the AIML file (rather than creating an AIML rule to deal with all the variations on 'hello').

If you're interested I'd strongly recommend installing GrokitBot. You can get the source and a bit more explanation at my site, Suttree.com

Playaholics : Free Online Games

It's my favourite meme of the moment, the Uncanny Valley:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley

..if you're a Flash developer these sorts of games are far from over. Same goes if you're a mobile game developer. You just have to look at the Shareware game market to see that innovation in classic games is still strong. Sure, it's the same basic idea but these you do get the 'superbombs' included.

These kids aren't trashing my gaming history - they've given me a stack of new ideas for the kind of games that I can write the bare bones of in a week :)

Ahahha - good luck!

Playaholics: Free online games: Lightning Pool

The new Shuttle's can handle _real_ graphics cards and they put the power supply on the outside - which makes the whole thing much quieter too

Playaholics: Free online flash games: Lightning Break

It's been known about and fixed since sometime in November - part of the howdark exploit I think.

As has been mentioned before though, you'd have to *go to* phpBB to know that - it would be nice if they have a mailing list :(

Playaholics: Free online flash games: Driving Mad

See, this is where they ought to concentrate - PHP4 is bound to Apache 1.x but with PHP5 on the horizon and PHP being so tied to shared host, they ought to get PHP5 and Apache2 working together.

If the shared hosts offer Apache2 + PHP5 as the default, it'll get used, Remember, PHP programmers generally don't handle the sys-admin duties, so make the decision for them and your problem is solved. Since RedHat already ship Apache2, get them to add PHP5 as the default and you're there. Easy :)

Playaholics: Way of the exploding stick

Agreed - I've written simple arcade games quickly and I've fleshed out puzzle games in no time.

PyGame is where the Python and SDL integration really got me interested though - I was concerned about performance but I never ran into a problem with that, PyGame is a fast as you'll need.

Playaholics - Free online games, scoretables and a whole host player stats

and please, stop making words up, it's worse than boswollox

Lightning Pool

Please, stop making words up, it's worse than boswollox

Lightning Pool

It looks like a Google version of these new XMLHTTPRequest objects that most modern browser have now.

We've used this on Playaholics for our help pages:
Playaholics: Help - using XMLHTTPRequest

The best thing with these new controls is not only are they going to have a big say in the future of the web, if you disable Javascript the whole thing still works - it degrades very nicely.

Flash based websites suck, no doubt about it.

But flash as a game development environment does not deserve the same treatment. Especially when it ends up on mobile devices. I can see a lot of interesting multi-player games evolving out of this. SMS based games like fudfite are going to be twice the fun.

As for being a waste of bandwidth. Yes, flash websites are, but flash games are certainly not. A game like Lightning Break is only just over 300k. Write something similar in SDL/PyGame and it's going to be a couple of meg's, minimum.

Yes, flash websites suck, but flash games do not. A lot of clever programmers are handling the limitations of Flash to come up with some good, optimised code that always loads fast.

Now, if they could just make Flash a bit more secure and a bit more web-aware, I'd be much happier.

Disclaimer: I work with Flash games daily on Chickstop and Playaholics so I'm quite biased I guess.

Flash based websites suck, no doubt about it.

But flash as a game development environment does not deserve the same treatment. Especially when it ends up on mobile devices. I can see a lot of interesting multi-player games evolving out of this. SMS based games like fudfite are going to be twice the fun.

As for being a waste of bandwidth. Yes, flash websites are, but flash games are certainly not. A game like Lightning Break is only just over 300k. Write something similar in SDL/PyGame and it's going to be a couple of meg's, minimum.

Yes, flash websites suck, but flash games do not. A lot of clever programmers are handling the limitations of Flash to come up with some good, optimised code that always loads fast.

Now, if they could just make Flash a bit more secure and a bit more web-aware, I'd be much happier.

Disclaimer: I work with Flash games daily on Chickstop and Playaholics so I'm quite biased I guess.

Puzzle games are just the best, so it doesn't suprise me seeing this much effort put into developing the basic ideas of puzzle games. At Chickstop and Playaholics we find that almost all of these puzzle games are guarenteed a decent play.