Tag: FLASH

Years of computer use have taught us that the mouse cursor is "above" the windows. It doesn't push anything around; at least not without you clicking anything. Balance takes that ingrained bit of knowledge and cancels it out. Suddenly your cursor (a blue dot) is solid – and if it touches the blue block, it pushes it around. Your job is to use your cursor to nudge the blue block over ...

In BattlePaint, you play a cube. In fact, you're not even a cube -- just a square. But boy, are you fast! And you can shoot in all directions. That's important, because there are baddies coming in from all over the place. The "baddies" are swarms of other squares, in all sorts of pretty colors. They track you all over the screen, and you run around very quickly and just shoot, shoot, and ...

So this professor comes up with a new toilet cleaner that works by "eating" the dirt; or so he thinks. That's how the plot starts for Tasty Planet. You play the role of the toilet cleaner, but you're not really a toilet cleaner after all -- you're a blob of gray goo that can eat anything that's smaller than yourself. As you chomp away, you grow -- and as you grow, you can eat bigger and ...

Last month's beta version of Chrome has become the new stable build, bringing a large JavaScript performance improvement to hundreds of millions of Chrome users. While it's a bit meaningless at this stage, this means the stable channel is now version 10, which first appeared at the end of 2010. The main addition to this version is Crankshaft, a new version of the V8 JavaScript engine that ...

Adobe, in yet another move to shift its eggs into other baskets, has released an experimental Flash-to-HTML5 converter called Wallaby. The tool doesn't do much at the moment -- it just exports the assets used in the Flash project, and uses HTML and CSS to lay them out. It also creates a custom JavaScript library which seems to handle animation (but we couldn't get animation to work), and ...

Adobe's just let loose Flash Player 10.3 beta for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, featuring a few new talents ready for developers to take advantage. First up we've got 'Acoustic Echo Cancellation,' which aims to aid voice conferencing by implementing noise suppression, voice activity detection, automatic gain control for volume level compensation, and of course, acoustic echo cancellation. ...

Skyfire for iPhone, the browser that shot to fame at the end of 2010 thanks to its ability to play Flash video, has now reached version 3. The most notable change, if you're using Skyfire to play Flash video on your iPhone, is that Skyfire now works with more sites, and transcoded video has been further optimized to save your bandwidth, and thus money. The new version features even more ...

Space-shooters are usually a fairly fiery affair, with many types of guns, weapon upgrades, power-ups and more. Dodge does away with all of that, while keeping the very essence of a space shooter: Dark background, fast action, and stuff blowing up all over the place. Your vector-looking spacecraft is the fastest thing on the screen, most of the time. And as the header implies, you have ...

Unity -- the popular 3D game development tool -- has announced that its Unity Android and Unity Android Pro tools are now available for download. So what's the big deal? The tool allows developers who have used Unity to create games for other platforms -- including iOS -- to port them to Android with "one click." Loads of popular games have been created using Unity, and some have already ...

Adobe recently announced that Flash Player 11 would feature some impressive upgrades -- including new hardware accelerated 3D graphics APIs. Currently, Flash 10.1 can render a few thousand polygons at 30 FPS. The updated 3D kung fu allows Flash 11 to easily render hundreds of thousands of polygons at 60 FPS, which is obviously a massive improvement. End users won't notice much difference ...

In most games, dying is a bad thing. You have to start all over again, or at least revert to the last save point and lose some progress. Not so in Survival Lab: in this pixelated gem you play as a lone individual pitted against ruthless weapons in a sealed chamber. You have to run, jump and duck, collecting little yellow things (I have no idea what they're called). For each donut-like ...

You know those fridge magnet kits composed of a whole bunch of words? The ones you put all over your fridge door and then try to arrange into all sorts of juvenile and/or amusing sentences. Well, Farragomate is the social, webby version of that very same pastime. You get to play with a bunch of random strangers in real-time, and make up sentences out of a pre-set collection of words, ...

Shot Shot Pirate is very satisfying, because each level is short and to the point. You know what you have to do and you just do it. As you may have gathered from the name, you're cast in the role of a pirate. Your goal is to shoot at a diamond and make it fall off a tower of bricks. The height of the tower changes as you progress through the levels. It's not enough to just make the diamond ...

I have a thing for physics games, and I've been known to post the occasional platformer or action game here and there. But Let it Slide is one of the brainiest games I've posted to date. The idea is very simple, and far from original: You get a board with pieces arranged in a particular pattern; you have to slide those around until you get the special piece into its target location. It's ...

Yes, that's right, I said adorable. Because Cueboy Quest really is! You play an 8-bit cowboy whose goal on each level is to get to the door (and thus to the next level), but the door is often locked. To get it to open, you must shoot at one or more targets, and those targets aren't always in your line of sight. For example, on one level the the target is a balloon which is stuck all the way at ...