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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 first five games...AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome,.."
How the hell did you come up with...wait, don't tell me. The bong fell over on the keyboard, right?
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.)
Yes.
I don't since the prices are so reasonable (and for the small risk I guess.)
I'd argue the other way around. This is 2014. The market has caught up and offer decent services. It's ok to pay now.
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.
Now I know why politics is in the shape it is in. People think Democracy is a game.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
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"
Does that mean I should steal food, shelter, clothing, water, power, and internet access? After all, who are those people who think they should get paid for providing this shit?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Or well, if one got one wish more it would be to actually OWN the games and not the LICENSE and to know you'd have access "FOREVER" and even better "FOR ALL PLATFORMS." .. ok, more than one wish. But yeah. Actually have the game, always, everywhere, no matter what!
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"
Years of marketing seems to have equated the idea of a personal computer as some sort of quasi Microsoft exclusive brand but really Linux desktops are usually P-ersonal C-omputers as well (as opposed to non-personal computers like time sharing mainframes), likewise can be said for Macintosh.
On the FireFox start page the game can't be controlled if you have "Search for text when I start typing" enabled in options.
...this gives me ideas for monetising them... anyone fancy helping with runtesting them in a DOS sandbox?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
yeah that's always bugged me as well, at least since the market steered away from the reference to "XT compatible" or whatever it was and genericised it to "PC" or "Mac". My last Mac ran Linux, what category does that fall under?? Hell, for that matter, this laptop runs Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD, DOS and xp sandboxed on a Win7 host. Hey, Computer Darwin - this one's got fur and a beak!
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I don't need new games. I still haven't found the last rooms in the mud I play.
Sadly on a particular computer all WebGL looks like this, even though OpenGL works in other apps.
http://i.imgur.com/Aoj38Ra.png
Maybe running the proprietary graphics driver would make it work, but it has or had just one particular little bug meaning graphics card or monitor would have to be changed. Well, no. The graphics card is only 8 year old but with lots of gigaflops and few watts, and monitor only 10 year old.
There aren't that many options for browsers, in particular major non crashy ones. Without Mozilla I would probably have to run Windows NT 6.x and Internet Explorer.
Pale Moon sits on top of ESR, and they had to switch to a different identifier for the browser because they aren't going with australis insanity.
So far, they appear to be fine. You may want to check them out if you want to keep most of your plugins working, and your interface PC-centric rather than tablet-centric that mozilla is gunning for.
It's going to go down even further now that one of the most popular Firefox forks for those that dropped Firefox for UI reasons, Pale Moon will now start to carry its own identifier by default.
There are plenty, including Chrome, IE, Safari, Opera.
And if you are into Firefox functionality such as add-ons, there are fully functional forks that keep most of the functionality such as Pale Moon.
Pirate Bay doesn't own the games, nor does it host them. Therefore you can't steal them from Pirate Bay no matter how much you would like to try.
To be fair, it would not be too hard to implement a game like FTL in flash. It's a text based adventure + static small scale RTS combat. All of these are done on much more complex level in flash today.
Probably easier than implementing it in bastardized version of javascript as was done here.
Excellent trick!
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Emperor is still not wearing any clothes, and no matter how much you herald ACs are trumpeting about it, he's still out there, still naked, still ugly as fuck.
And hence, people are still leaving FF for any options available when they're not using FF on tablets. Because as of typing this, FF is no longer a desktop browser and hasn't been one for a while. Yes it can be installed on a desktop, but it's in no way, shape or form designed or optimized for desktop usage scenario any more.