Tag: web

Aftermath Looks Back On One Year of Operation

Two whole days in a row of non-Youtube links? Who’d have thought it possible! Shame yesterday was on Nintendo-related things, the other over-frequent subject of our little blogmachine, but I guess you can’t have it all.

Aftermath is composed of just five webugees (original word plz steal) from various other bigcorp contentboxes, and is one of a whole wave of similar creator-owned outfits that also includes Second Wind, 404 Media and Defector. All seem to be doing pretty well… for now… but we’re hoping all the best for all of them, at least until they grow into Kotakus, Escapists or Washingtons Post of their own, and come to oppress an entirely new generation of writer. But that’s the future, and there’s still time to avoid it, at least according to my good friend, the Ghost of Collective Ownership Future.

Aftermath’s principals have an article up describing their experiences, and its variously enlightening and illuminating. Running a small business is a process rife with pitfalls, and when you’re just five people, most working part-time and not able to afford to just pay others to take care of the hard parts, it can be difficult, especially when at your last jobs you could just focus on doing the thing you’re good at, the thing you like doing. Another problem that being only five people creates is fragility. Not intending to jinx them at all, but if one of them were to suddenly pass away, could the remaining four keep the banner held aloft?

But they are doing it. It’s working! And they have plans to expand next year. If you want to follow them and help keep them afloat, they have a trial subscription going where you can read them for one month for just $1. And their monthly rate is just $7 anyway, $10 for commenting privileges and Discord access.

Reading the article, especially the bit about how sites like this tend to slowly bleed subscribers over time just as a fact of their existence, as life happens to their readers in the aggregate, but gain them in lumps as new features are introduced or bursts of publicity occur. It feels like we could all stand to recognize this, and remember these sites need subscribers to survive. Aftermath’s rates are quite reasonable I think, considering that the New York Times charges $25 a month for their output, and as a bonus Aftermath doesn’t even publish frequent transphobic op-eds from right-wing jerks. Huh!

Oldweb: DHTML Lemmings

The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

DHTML means “Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language.” The term is little-used now; it later got renamed AJAX, and now is pretty much just how websites are made if they have any interactive aspects. It was originally presented as an alternative to Flash applets, which were threatening to crowd out actual web pages at that time.

Lemmings, of course, is Psygnosis’ classic puzzle game where you grant members of a horde of suicidal rodent people specific skills to guide them to an exit while losing as few of them as possible to the hazards of their ridiculously dangerous world.

Back in 2004, DHTML Lemmings was a brilliant example of how much could be done with Javascript. Original Lemmings was released in 1991; we’re now further away from DHTML Lemming’s release than the original game was when it was published.

Its first home went away, although the server and even its page still exist. It says that the Lemmings page was taken down (and implies they did it to dodge legal liability), but promises something called The Pumpkins to replace it. It never did, but the promise survives. The game itself has been preserved, relocated as-was to a subpage of the site of Elizium, a dark rock band from the Netherlands.

Only the first ten levels of each difficulty, about one quarter of the original Amiga game, are presented. And this version has not survived the years unaltered: the distinctive sound effects and music appear to be missing. Still though, what’s here is playable, and fun. Enjoy, if you have the inclination and deliberation. And check out those requirements: IE 5.5 or better, or recent Firefox or Opera. And a 500 Mhz processor, wow!

DHTML Lemmings

Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection

This is Slant. I could tell you so much about Slant, but I think a lot of the fun of these puzzles is figuring out a good process for solving them yourself.
Loopy

I got a treat for you people today, a genuine treasure of the internet, a collection of forty computer-generated puzzles of wide-ranging types, from Sudoku (called “Solo” because of trademarks) to Minesweeper. And they’re not only all open source and free, they’re free for many platforms. Not all the puzzles are yet available for all platforms, but it’s continually being worked on, with new puzzles added from time to time. It has been for nineteen years; when it got started it only had five puzzle types. It’s one of the best things out there, and I’m amazed it’s not better known generally.

Galaxies

I can’t overstate what a wonder this collection is. All the puzzles are their own executable, if you don’t just play them on the web anyway. Each one of these puzzles offers many hours of happy puzzling. My own favorites are Loopy, Slant, Bridges, Dominosa, Galaxies, Net and Untangle. Most of the puzzles are of a type that should be familiar to fans of the Japanese puzzle magazine Nikoli, but they’re all randomly generated, and playable on multiple difficulty levels.

If the name Simon Tatham sounds familiar, he’s the guy who also created and maintains the popular networking tool PuTTY.

Here’s the links, all of these are free:

Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection main site, which has implementations for Java, Javascript and Windows

Here’s some other HTML implementations

Dominosa

For Android on the Play Store

For iOS on the Apple App Store

On the Windows Store

In the Debian and Ubuntu package repositories (and it should be available in your own distribution’s repository, too)

Flathub

And here it is for Windows again, but distributed through Chocolatey

Luke Plunkett: Stop closing forums for Discords

Image from Kotaku. It’s an old meme, granted.

The news section of the site is on hiatus for the time being, as I’m not sure if anyone reading this really cares about a weekly news roundup (if you’d like to see it return, let me know!), but a post on Kotaku from Luke Plunkett really struck a chord with me, about the awful trend of closing web forums in favor of Discords. I rarely agree with games writing so much.

The switching of game discussion, and even support, from publicly-visible, archivable, Googleable forums and bulletin boards to proprietary Discords is yet one more way that the internet is becoming objectively worse. Everything posted to a Discord will be locked off when the last active link to it dies. It’s a giant black hole to which future internet users won’t have access, and where the scroll rate rapidly makes past discussions into an impenetrable text wall that its search feature is not great at sifting through. It’s an information commode.

Not that there aren’t some advantages to the Discord format, but there are also advantages to Facebook and Twitter. As we’ve seen with both those sites, the disadvantages far outweigh them.

Truth be told, I’m a member of like 40 different Discords (I even started a couple of them), dedicated to a plethora of topics, by necessity, and it’s always a hassle to sort through them, seeing as the list isn’t even presented as a list of titles, just of at-times maddeningly obtuse icons. Discords have their place, ideally for small groups of members, maybe topping out at a couple dozen. If your group has hundreds of members, consider that there are probably better answers, ones that don’t require that a user install special software to their devices to communicate with you.

Stop. Closing. Forums. For. Discord. (Kotaku.)

XKCD Space Exploration Game Posts

Randall Munroe’s popular and (by now) venerable geek webcomic XKCD has been known to make “interactive posts” sometimes, little apps or even games that readers can play with. Lately there’s been two in particular of these, both focused towards space exploration: Gravity, made to promote Munroe’s recent book What If? 2, and Escape Speed, created in celebration of SpaceX’s recent launch, or at least celebrating the idea of it, since its actual fact turned out to not be so great.

Both games are much larger than they seem to be at first, offering a vast amount of void to whoosh around and entertaining planets to find within all that space. Gravity is mostly just for exploration, while Escape Speed is more like an actual game, starting your ship off with very modest capabilities that grow in power as you collect upgrades, which are gray circles with stars on them. You can find at least one upgrade on or near most objects out in space, and sometimes several.

This tableau is a reference to the time that Dinosaur Comics creator Ryan North got stuck in a skatepark pit with his dog, and it made the news.

There’s a lot to find, especially in Escape Speed, which also has a lot of minor collectables to locale, which it’ll track between runs. Escape Speed even has a couple of objectives to complate: locating the Hyperdrive, which requires finding out what happened to the map of Boston on Subway Planet, and eventually escaping from the huge crystal sphere that contains the game universe. Both games have enough going on that they have giant pages on the Explain XKCD fan wiki revealing their secrets. In case you can’t be bothered to discover them yourself, here’s the one for Gravity, and here’s the one for Escape Speed.

XKCD 2712 Gravity – FAQ

XKCD 2765 Escape Speed – FAQ

Karate Great

Another work of Babarageo, Karate Great riffs on Kung Fu, known as Spartan X in Japan in which you have to take down hordes of mooks, and the occasional boss, using karate moves. This revision of the idea gives you only one control, an attack that’s activated by clicking/tapping the game screen. This causes your leggy karate lady to swiftly knock basic opponents right off the screen, and inflict damage on bosses both mini and major. Further, if you can hit four opponents in quick succession, she’ll switch to some gun fu, pulling out a pink pistol and just blasting following opponents. Why doesn’t she use the gun all the time isn’t explained; it only shows up as the fifth through eighth hits of a combo. And if you can get in a ninth hit… well I don’t want to spoil it, but it makes short work of most bosses.

All of these moves make K-lady pretty overpowered for most of the game! It isn’t until the last couple of stages where you face opponents where just clicking away at the screen rapidly won’t suffice. The last boss, an evil CEO, has an attack that can’t be deflected by the normal means, and will probably stymie you until you come to realize that you have to learn how to trigger the combo-ending move to thwart it.

It’s short but fun, as good web games should be!

Karate Great (web, $0)

Remembering Orisinal

We’ve been remembering old game sites lately, not the big ones like Newgrounds, but the little ones. Specifically, Ferry Halim’s Orisinal.

What Comes Around

I hesitate to offer that link because everything on Orisinal is programmed in Flash, and not in way that works great with secure Flash emulator Ruffle, but the site survives today, even if it’s difficult to play anything on it. The games to the bottom of the list are more likely to work well with Ruffle.

Orisinal is a collection of very simple games with a laid-back vibe. Nothing too demanding or upsetting. Just a lot of clean and fun amusements for passing a few minutes in a pleasant way.

Bubble Bees

In internet terms, Orisinal is ancient, and the internet is not forever. Quite the opposite in fact. The oldest games on it date to around 2000. That it’s still up, even if it hasn’t seen much new content in over a decade, is a miracle. I keep harping on this I feel like, but things vanish from the internet every day, and the Wayback Machine can’t catch all of them (and itself isn’t guaranteed to not disappear someday). Enjoy it while you can.

Cats

Orisinal

Remember EYEZMAZE and GROW?

There was a time when these short Flash games were the toast of the internet. There is very little cultural memory online for anything that isn’t absolutely huge (and almost no quality control over the things that become huge) so no one talks about GROW anymore, or its Japanese creator On, which is a tremendous shame.

EYEZMAZE took a tremendous blow when Flash shut down. I really hate how people generally accepted its demise as good and necessary when it obliterated so many great things, like Homestar Runner’s original website, that are only now sort of becoming available again. There were serious problems with Flash, it’s true, but not all the reasons it was shoved out the airlock were good ones. Fortunately On has converted many of his games to work with HTML5.

The art is great for its own sake, but the games, available by clicking on the icons at the top of the site, are the highlights, and foremost of those are the GROW series. I was going to link them individually here, but most of them are GROW in some form of other. You should probably start with the first.

The object is to figure out the best order to click on the various items to add to the GROW planet. Every time you add something, things that were already on the planet may “level up” depending on the other things that are with it there. Some things being added too early may harm the development of other things. Usually there’s one specific order that will result in a perfect score (and an animation that goes with it). Figuring it out, using the visual clues from your failed attempts, will usually take many tries, but a run through only takes a couple of minutes at most. All off the GROW games take this general form, although most of them aren’t as complex as the first.

Bitrot has not been kind to GROW. There was an Android version of Grow RPG that appears to have succumbed to Google’s awful app culling policy, where if something isn’t updated, for whatever reason, in a certain time they just delete it. (Not nearly enough has been said about his hostile this is to software preservation. It’s horrendous.)

On has had health struggles over the years, which have interfered with his creation of new amusements. He still seems to be up and active though, and we hope he continues creating both his games and his art for a while to come.

EYEZMAZE (some games may require Ruffle)

On’s Twitter feed

On’s Bilibili page (Bilibili is a Chinese video site)