Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Teams Up With Humble Bundle To Offer Eight Plugin-Free Games
An anonymous reader writes Mozilla and Humble Bundle announced a new package that features award-winning indie best-sellers for which gamers can choose how much they want to pay. Naturally called the Humble Mozilla Bundle, the package consists of eight games that have been ported to the Web. The first five games (Super Hexagon, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome, Osmos, Zen Bound 2, and Dustforce DX) can cost you whatever you want. The next two (Voxatron and FTL: Faster Than Light) can be had if you beat the average price for the bundle. You can pay $8 or more to receive all of the above, plus the last game, Democracy 3. Previously, all of these indie games were available only on PC or mobile. Now they all work in browsers on Windows, Mac, and Linux without having to install any plugins.
The Humble Bundle says "Another Game Coming Soon". The way Humble Bundle does things, they'll throw this game in for free to people who paid for the revevant threshold (which is the "beat the average" price, which is $5.30 at the time of this writing).
Also, the games have trial versions. (At least Super Hexagon and Voxatron, which I've tried.) Unfortunately, Voxatron had no online instructions included in the game, so it was a while before I learned that in addition to X for shooting forward (and Z for jump, and arrow keys), there was directional shooting (with I, J, K, L, or multiple keys for diagonals).
Awesome stuff. Gotta always love the Humble Bundle. However, why does *this* particular bundle show up on Slashdot?
Now they all work in browsers on Windows, Mac, and Linux without having to install any plugins.
The only reason I can guess, regarding why this particular release would be newsworthy, is that this Humble Bundle package was meant to highlight the capabilities of Asm.js (which just didn't seem to be focused on much in Slashdot's summary... there's a couple of mentions to not needing plugins, but the phrase Asm.js doesn't even show up in Slashdot's text.)
FTL is pretty fun. Imagine Rouge with graphics and spaceships. It's pretty well done. You'll probably beat it in a few days though.
asm.js is the underlying technology they used to port the games to the web. According to Wikipedia, "asm.js is an intermediate programming language consisting of a strict subset of the JavaScript language. It enables significant performance improvements for web applications that are written in statically-typed languages with manual memory management (such as C) and then translated to JavaScript by a source-to-source compiler."
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
These aren't flash games. Granted, some of the games on offer actually ARE mind-numbing, but FTL definitely isn't
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"