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05 March 2006
NTSC-uk Features > OMEGA Interview
Following on from our article on Homebrew Shmup's, NTSC-uk decided to catch up with OMEGA, the Japan based homebrew Shmup developer (and creators of titles such as EveryExtend and Dan! Da! Dan!) to find out a little bit more about what goes on behind the scenes.
04 March 2006
Reading RSS the easy way - Flashmagazine
(via)I used to hate XML and all the looping across nodes to get data. Then I found a class called XMLSA, created by Max Ziebell. Using XMLSA, making a RSS news ticker/reader is easy.
The Escapist - Attack of the Parasites
You get the same vibe off the most popular gaming sites in the English- speaking world, the casual game portals: EA's Pogo, Miniclip, Yahoo! Games, Microsoft's MSN Games, RealNetworks' GameHouse, Big Fish Games and many more. These lookalike sites are "portals" because they aggregate dozens or hundreds of casual games from many indie designers. Some big portals are mere front ends for faceless distributors like Oberon Media or Boonty.
CNN.com - Casual games -- good, clean, cheap fun online - Feb 28, 2006
(via)Casual games, those five-minute diversions you play for a quick break but somehow end up clicking away on for two hours, have become one of the fastest-growing categories of computer gaming.
Creating a MySQL connection with PHP/AJAX at John Wiseman
by 6 others (via)In this tutorial I will explain how to open a mysql database connection using PHP and the all popular AJAX. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the XMLHttpRequest object works within php and the advantages of using it. This tutorial will be the first in a series of articles leading to the development of a fully functional dynamic web events application.
Terra Games | Veja 10 RPGs online completamente gratuitos
(via)Nem todos jogos de RPG massivos online são pagos. Existem diversos games MMORPG, como são chamados, completamente gratuitos, necessitando somente que o jogador realize um cadastro no site para ter acesso ao mundo virtual. Fizemos uma seleção dos 10 melhores RPGs online gratuitos para você baixar e jogar.
IGN: The Impact of Violent Videogames
Violent media has existed as long as human history and the debate over how or when to control it is as hotly contested as ever. With the trend towards greater realism and graphic content that began in the 90's, videogames have found themselves the focal point du jour. But how much of an impact have these violent videogames had? We'll take a look at the psychological, political, and economic issues surrounding violent videogames and try to make sense of it all. No matter which side of the fence you sit on this argument, it is important to know the facts.
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26 February 2006
Making An RSS Feed
by 4 others (via)RSS is a method of distributing links to content in your web site that you'd like others to use. In other words, it's a mechanism to "syndicate" your content.
To understand syndication, consider the "real world" situation where artist Scott Adams draws a daily Dilbert cartoon. The cartoon is made available to any newspaper that cares to run it, in exchange for a fee -- and 2,000 papers in 65 countries do so.
Unlike Scott Adams, syndication of web content via RSS is unlikely to make you rich. However, it can be an easy way to draw attention to your material, bringing you some traffic and perhaps a little net fame, depending on how good your information is.
Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?
by 9 others (via)1. Introduction
A folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system. It is usually created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks and text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined. A general review of social bookmarking tools, one popular use area of folksonomies, was given in the April edition of D-Lib [1]. In the article the authors elaborate on the approach taken by social classification systems and the motivators behind tagging. They write, "...tags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc.... Rather, they are a supplemental means to organise information and order search results."
25 February 2006
Why avoiding tables (for layout) is important
(via)On Scripting News on February 13, 2002, Dave Winer asks why avoiding tables is so important in web-design and points here. This is an attempt to answer that question. Thanks for the link and conversation, Dave!
I want to make clear that I’m not saying you should never use tables. Tables are in HTML, and when you want to display tabular data, you should use them. But for layout, there are other options.
GameReporter.org | Os jogos antigos não eram mais divertidos: analisando a evolução dos games
Gostaria de apresentar neste artigo uma reflexão a respeito da qualidade e nível de diversão dos jogos atuais em relação aos jogos antigos. Esta reflexão partiu da observação de uma possível tendência, entre os gamers com quase 30 anos (como eu), de avaliar os jogos mais antigos de maneira desproporcionalmente favorável.
IGN: Top 10 Tuesday: Worst Game Controllers
(via)Some brilliant ideas came out of gaming engineers...
Gamasutra - Soapbox - "World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things" - printer friendly
Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft has over 5 million subscribers worldwide, as of this writing. It's the most successful massively multiplayer game on Earth right now. This well-crafted game has put other games in its genre to shame. Blizzard is a great company, and I might even end up there some day, though this article probably rules out that possibility.
Gamasutra - A Circular Model of Gameplay
Three things must happen in order for there to be gameplay:
* The player must get information about the state of the game.
* The player must be able to affect the game, creating new game states.
* New game states must be communicated to the player prompting further actions
In addition in almost all types of game:
* The game creates new states without the player's input.
19 February 2006
Plasma ou LCD
(via)Com novo design, grande qualidade de
imagem e preços em queda, os televisores
voltaram a ser objetos de desejo. E ainda
vem aí a revolução digital
18 February 2006
Freeloader Vol. 3: ABA Shooter Madness from 1UP.com
ABA Games is a little Japanese company that has dedicated itself to that strange, videogame induced Nirvana, and they've produced a half dozen games that'll help you get there. Stranger still, they don't want a penny for it. How enlightened.
Schtick 'Em Up: The Shooter Gets Weird from 1UP.com
Shooters are the foundation of the video game industry, dating back all the way to the 1960's with Steve Russell's classic Spacewar. Since that time, the genre has been responsible for bringing much depth to the world of interactive entertainment, popularizing vital concepts like the power-up and the end-of-level boss which are still used in many of today's greatest games.
Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Keith Stuart: Gamesblog
by 1 other (via)five-point guide to dealing with any troublesome boss
IGN: TGS 2005: Mizuguchi's New Game
The idea behind the game is to collect enemy objects and make them explode. You have to avoid enemy objects and gather them in the center of the screen. Bring together a certain number of enemies, and they will explode. You'll apparently be able to gather enemies together in excess of one hundred.
BBC NEWS | Technology | How to be a rock star, virtually
There are usually only two things that stop most adolescent males from being guitar "rock gods" - lack of a guitar and a total lack of talent.
Febre do <i>Pump it Up</i> enche os shoppings de jovens
O jogo consiste em seguir a sequência de passos que a máquina dita. Pode-se jogar em dupla, na modalidade stepper, ou sozinho, o que se chama de free style. "O stepper exige mais fôlego e resistência, já no free style é preciso saber dançar e coordenar os movimentos", explica Rafael. No começo pode ser esquisito ver um monte de marmanjo sapateando, mas aos poucos a gente se acostuma e começa a admirar o gingado dos rapazes.
Gamasutra - Feature - "Anticipatory AI and Compelling Characters"
Much of the work in game AI has focused on the ‘big' problems: path planning, squad planning, goal-directed behavior, etc. The result is characters that are capable of increasingly intelligent behavior. However, acting intelligently and acting aware and sentient is not the same thing. But if we are to create the kind of compelling and emotional characters upon which the next generation of computer games will be based, we must solve the latter problem, namely how to build characters that seem aware and sentient.
12 February 2006
A PyGame Working Example: Starting a Game
In PyGame for Game Development, I showed you the very basics of PyGame's graphical side. However, creating a game with PyGame requires a bit more. All the concepts described before need to be glued together somehow, and new concepts will need to be introduced in order to create a functional game. In this article, we'll do just that by tackling a working example of PyGame's capabilities—a Python-powered game.
