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The "official" website for the series.

Do you know how obscenely expensive hand animation is compared to acting?

Full animated features can be made for as little as $5 million, and the total cost less than $50 million. Disney's huge, bloated, animated blockbusters cost about $150 million total, but only a fraction of that is the actual cost of the animation. Compare that to the $20 million salary of a single "A" list actor alone, and the production costs of a typical live-action blockbuster of over $200 million.

with motion capture, one actor can play a dozen parts

do you really think they're going to pay Tom Hanks $32 million when they can pay some actor $5000 to do the motion capture sequences?

Think before you post

I think the best you're going to get are Rogue-like games. I'd recommend ADOM. You might also try shockwave.com, they actually have some pretty interesting puzzle games.

If all else fails, there's always the Playstation Portable...

I think it's a great way to launch, especially if monkey-boy MS can't dance for their rollout, if 2000 crashed(blue screen baby), and we can't have a "Dance on Bill's Grave" party.
I do not trust any entity that has waaaaayyyyy to much centralised power, and i've been wondering about God in that dept.(wonder what upgrades HE gives....)
I think a party is appropriate, not a pie in mozilla's face, or other wankin' PR sh*t, but it's a release.
For you folks groaning and saying that it's not V3 of your fav game, humor from a little back
check out the mozilla up front!
True, it's not release 3 of Game-Quest-Gate-Raider-Zombie, but this is a jab at an OS as much as it is a product. Don't whine. Somebody took up the old line, "If somebody was gonna come up with something better, doncha think they would?"...
Now...if you want to argue too much "Chrome features", ummm, can't argue that, oh gee, look at the time, gotta go....
check out

Since it doesn't seem to be posted yet, Atom Films recently picked the winners and runners up in their Star Wars short films contest. Some good works.

Since I am stupid, that symbol makes me think there's something entertaining buried there.

I am the Radiskull and I will kill you all!

- Next Sunday on CNN: Bin Laden explains why he did it!

Too obvious (I think everyone already knows why he did it)

not THAT obvious: Bin Laden Last Movie

They do make a Flash plugin for Linux (I'm using it on Mozilla right now)...

Flash for Linux v5.0r47

Now if its Macromedia's Shockwave that you are referring to, then yes, it is not currently available on Linux. I gasp at even thinking about people trying to do web sites ENTIRELY in Shockwave...

It really does nothing better than text.

There are probably a few things everyone can agree on, like Flash being worthless at best and extremely annoying most of the time.

Backwards writing

Of course there were other ones like Capital Critters (anyone remember that?) that didn't last long at all.

Anyhow Futurama has had a hard time holding its own from the beginning. Some people attribute this to it not being done by Film Roman, the ones responsable for the work behind The Simpsons and King of the Hill, but I doubt that is it.

I personally miss primetime animated series so I hope the petition goes through so everyone sign away :o)

My current addictions are:

• Grand Theft Auto III for PS2
  Combining racing, shooting, dark humor and wonton viloence in one game. Plus, you get to be the bad guy for once :).
• Tekken Tag Tournament for PS2
  Practice at home to play Tekken 4 in arcades and provide maximum pain to my adversaries.
• Final Fantasy X for PS2
  Ooooo... pretty...
• Yahoo! Eucher
  No one else in my family plays, so I play with complete strangers.
• Unreal Tournament on PC
  Team Deathmatch and Domination with 3+ teams is good. Mods like Jailbreak and FragBall are also highly time-consuming.
• Diamond Mine
  Great little Shockwave game. I play this constantly at work :)

Wow, looking at the list, it's amazing that I'm bored all the time...

There is a shockwave version of Tapper here. Unfortunately, it is the "sissied" version called "Root Beer Tapper" that was available in some arcades and other platforms...

Anyway, the gameplay is almost identical to the original arcade game, as far as I can tell..

This plugin might have had legs a year or so ago, when any new internet technology could garner support for no other reason than it was a new internet technology. Now that Macromedia's shockwave has a pretty impressive 3D engine, with hardware acceleration, the Blender plugin might not see that much attention. Flash has the 2D animation market pretty much sewn up, and I'm expecting SW to do the same for 3D...

This plugin might have had legs a year or so ago, when any new internet technology could garner support for no other reason than it was a new internet technology. Now that Macromedia's shockwave has a pretty impressive 3D engine, with hardware acceleration, the Blender plugin might not see that much attention. Flash has the 2D animation market pretty much sewn up, and I'm expecting SW to do the same for 3D...

They already have lots of other stuff here, at AtomFilms, but this is reallly cool! I love Aardman Animations, they are great! Some of my favorites are Creature Comforts (done by Nick Park) and Pib and Pog (two little kids playing around with sulfuric acid, lol, priceless).

I just got Spy Hunter and it's a blast.

20 years ago, Spy Hunter was a sprite-based top-down scrolling shooter. Your little car sprite would shoot the other little car sprites, or drop oil slicks in front of them. Sometimes you would drive a little boat sprite. You drove on an endless scrolling road (or sometimes river). (With Shockwave, you can play a version of the original Spy Hunter here.)

Now, on the PlayStation 2, Spy Hunter is a 3D game. The camera is just above and behind your car. There are 14 levels to play, with multiple objectives per level. It plays a lot like Hydro Thunder, but with weapons.

Drive into water, and the car morphs to a boat. Drive the boat up onto land it and morphs back to car. When the car takes too much damage, lots of parts explode off it and what's left morphs to an armored motorcycle! Even cooler, drive the motorcycle into the water and it morphs into an armored jet-ski! When you are driving the car/jetski, you don't have the full special abilities of the car, and you have reduced firepower, but you can play the level anyway; it's just tougher. Dock with the weapons van (or weapons boat) for a full repair of all damage and full ammo load.

If you like Hydro Thunder you should like this too. I haven't had it long, but I don't think I will get tired of it, just as I'm not tired of Hydro Thunder. The gameplay is somewhat repetitive: you drive around shooting bad guys, you try to find the ramps that let you make the jumps, etc. But the level design is fun, and I don't seem to get tired of locking guided missiles on enemies and blowing them away.

I have only two complaints about the game. 0) Most of the cinematic cutscenes are pretty boring (just a shot of your car making the getaway after finishing the level). 1) If you are a good player, it will probably take you 20 hours or less to finish all the levels. But as I said there is a lot of replay value even just playing the same levels over and over, plus it will take you many plays to find all the secrets and accomplish all the objectives. Once you have found all secrets and accomplished all objectives, that level unlocks for 2-player mode; in 2-player mode you both play, split-screen, at the same time. I haven't tried 2-player yet but it looks like a blast.

The music is great. The rocking "Spy Hunter" soundtrack the "Peter Gunn Theme" by Henry Mancini, but remixed and with variations. I like the soundtrack so much that if they sell a CD of just the music, I'll probably buy it.

GameSpot has a review. They like it but not quite as much as I like it.

Recommended.

steveha

What ARE you using then? They have a flash plugin for netscape AND mozilla (on linux as well).

Take a gander at what platforms shockwave/flash runs on. And with most browsers (except older netscapes, icky icky) downloading a plugin takes a few clicks.

While linux is improving nicely, it still lacks heavily in any music reporduction,

Actually, there's quite a bit of music production software for Linux.

media interfaces

You mean like Shockwave and MP3s?

business applications.

Such as Excel and Word?

I'd rather pay 199.00 bucks for something that works out of the box and comes with lots of software then several hours downloading, burning iso's and then chasing down the latest versions of all apps waisting a whole entire weekend or business days (thus costing more then the 199.00 XP package).

So would I. Fortunately, if I want to run Linux, I can get a complete set of CD-ROMs from CheapBytes for less than fifteen bucks (including postage) and usually install or upgrade the whole system in about two hours, most of it hands-free. Most of these systems have a reputation for running smoothly "right out of the box."

Off the top of my head, how about shockwave and more importantly Shockwave arcade? If you need a few minutes to kill while your brain regenerates, shockwave arcade has a ton of neat little video games.

I'm sure ther eare others, this is just one of the ones that annoys me. Yeah, yeah, I know it's Shockwave's fault for not supporting us, the point is that there ARE sites that just don't cut it on Linux.

This is good news. I'm not a K user, but this still affects the entire linux community, and I think it's a good thing. Inter-operability with other OSs and applications is what makes linux immediately superior to other OSs :)

The problem with supporting these "windows only" plugins is that web developers are STILL filtering their sites based on OS and browser string. Even though my browser (galeon) is perfectly able to display http://www.shockwave.com, I go there and get a "platform not supported" message for EVERY FSCKING PAGE on their site. Someone in the office managed to get in with either Konq or Opera by changing the os and browser string to windows/ie5, but this is not a valid option in my opinion.

Even if galeon or konq suddenly had the ability to view shockwave files, they would still not be allowed into the site, as on every page there is a browser/os check. Now I know this is not true for all sites, or perhaps even a majority of them, but it is something that affects non-windows and non-IE users every day, and I have no idea how to fix it.

Web designers have it in their ability without doing much. A friend of mine supports all OSs and browsers on his site even though it has heavy use of CSS and all the "new" tricks. He could write a huge amount of java script and multiple pages to display different things based on the browser, but he simply supports HTML4 (which is fine for ie, mozilla, galeon, ns6, etc) and strips all CSS for others. So while netscape 4.x doesn't look as pretty, the information is all there.

Even though I give him shit for not taking the time to support a still prominent browser (ns 4.x), I applaud him for not putting a big "you suck, get a new browser and use windows and ie" sign up for all non ie5 users.

I guess the trick is getting the web developers the information that non IE browsers DO support the latest standards and look just dandy.

Oh, and shockwave.com... you suck :)

Actually, it depends.....

On IE, it's an ActiveX control (and so is flash) on NN, it's using both C & Java....at least on the Linux Platform...not sure about others...anyone care to comment?

Relevant code and more details at http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documen ts/linux_player_readme.htm

Shockwave is a little different (of course), and from all that I can tell from the FAQ on shockwave.com (http://www.shockwave.com/bin/shockwave/entry.jsp? page=/help/faq_swplayer.html&skip=detection) there's no unix version....on my win2k box now, so can't test....any other experiences to share?

I am assuming that Macromedia followed a similar design philosophy with Shockwave as they did with Flash -- that is, they wrote the plug-in using the best tools for the job, and let's face it, ActiveX is the way to write plug-ins for IE. Of course, you have to re-write the code for other browsers / platforms, but that's a whole other debate, I suppose.

NO SIGS ALLOWED

Really? I see it every day, just the other way around:

Generally in the format of something like:

"Netscape 6/mozilla is not supported. Please go [here] to download the latest version of IE"

Or from shockwave (if you go to their site on a non-windows, non-ie browser... the only way to view anything on it is to fake the user agent string to a windows/ie code in konq).

"It appears that your operating system is not supported by shockwave.com. We support the following operating systems: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 (or later), and Mac OS 8.1 (or later)."

I have to give kudoes to http://k10k.net/ because they had a "we don't support netscape 6 DCOM just yet, sucks to be you" type message up a while back, but they have apparently re-designed their site.

Try getting any information from shockwave.com if you are on linux. They not only filter you out via browser (mozilla/netscape6 and derivatives are denied) but they also filter by OS (they support any OS that has a name starting with "Windows"). The only way I could get in was by forging the user agent in konqeror (or is it opera?) to reflect an IE5/windows box. Funny thing is, the site worked just fine except for a couple of blank boxes where the shockwave plugin was.

It really pissed me off.... wrote a nasty latter to a bunch of @shockwave.com addresses (as I couldn't get to the 'contact us' page).

Inklink does use commercials before the game while it is loading and also a commercial break halfway through about a 12 round game that advertises digital cameras from HP. It was a bit annoying at first, but Inklink is a great game and a bit addictive. It is basically online Pictionary.

I think it's likely that they will kill it.

I hope I'm wrong, though. If Sony brands it's own emulator to play it's outdated games then maybe we'll see a widespread acceptance of emulators by the other gaming behemoths. I for think there is an untapped industry for classic games. More companies should unleash there "dead" products.

A best example of how to use these old games is shockwave.com.

Tell them about it:

Feedback page -- this does work even on Mosaic on FreeBSD!

Bastards.

It's a shame, there's good material on this site. Lots of creative Flash animation, for which Linux works just fine, but I guess Macromedia just doesn't care. Perhaps some emails might convince them otherwise?

It is nothing new for a company and its lapdog companies to adopt exclusionary business practices like this. Shockwave does the same thing, and doesn't even let you click through to get information about Shockwave, unless you play ball or code a liar-proxy.

Big railroads used to do things like this all the time to destroy little railroads. Every few months or years they would patent a new hookup technology, change the hookups on their railcars to the new type, then charge spur-line railroads more than they paid for their railcars to buy the patented, "improved" hookups. Soon enough the little railroad was broke, to be snapped up by the big railroad at bargain prices.

I have to wonder if AOL/TW will make the decision that Netscape Navigator is unprofitable. As soon as they do, IE will be the only client. Once IE is the only client, MS can decide what the only servers are.

--

Stefan, who will not mourn the loss of shockwave capability, should it come that far.
It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-

Happy to use mozilla: www.shockwave.com for me

The Critic is back (kinda).

I can't think of one instance of where Flash has made a site better.

Flash sucks when people use it for extravagent menus, and anoying openings. However, when it's used for games and animations it kicks ass.

No, it's radiskull, and he will kill you one by one.



Fist Prost

"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."

Yhcrana

For those running Windoze, (More realistically for those running windoze as well) try the www.shockwave.com site to play fun classics like Rampage, Joust, and my favorite, Spy-Hunter.

Lots of fun time wasting activities available as long as you install the shockwave software.

If you're not too interested in the source for these things, there's some cool arcade classics on shockwave.com. Defender , Joust, Spy Hunter and more.

If you're not too interested in the source for these things, there's some cool arcade classics on shockwave.com. Defender , Joust, Spy Hunter and more.

If you're not too interested in the source for these things, there's some cool arcade classics on shockwave.com. Defender , Joust, Spy Hunter and more.

If you're not too interested in the source for these things, there's some cool arcade classics on shockwave.com. Defender , Joust, Spy Hunter and more.

I got it.

If you're having problems with the site, (you have, say, Flash 4 for Linux installed, but the JavaScript is giving you trouble) try going here.

Of course, once I tried to *play* a game, it said...

"Mac users! We
haven't forgotten
about ya. All these
great games will be
ready for you soon so
hurry back."

Grr. Someone doesn't get it. Time to play some games on XMAME...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'm sure any idiot could figure it out, but just to make sure here's the correct, working URL:

Shockwave.com