Author: itvbadmin

  • Zamboozal Silverlight (2009)

    A version of poker dice with more options…

  • Game Magazine Subscriptions Cancelled? Credit/Refund might Be Waiting For You.

    Have you lost out on a game magazine subscription (or any other subscription) in the past couple years because the publication has ceased operations? Well, if you bought the subscription through any kind of “magazine drive” (Girl Scouts, School promotion, door-to-door, etc.) you probably actually bought (unknown to you) it…

  • PC Gamer Subscription Chronicles 2: Into The Black Hole

    PC Gamer Subscription Chronicles 2: Into The Black Hole In the first entry of this series, I relayed a mildly amusing story of how PC Gamer has inexplicably lost my new subscription, The event is seemingly suspect as it came directly after I published an article that was mildly critical…

  • Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: April 14, 2009

    Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: April 14, 2009 The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. Our Mash-up of all things Flash Indie Game Development is back, but to mix things up, a more DADA, stream of consciousness, not-so-focused, more verbose, and not quite…

  • …palindromes… now on FlashGameLicense.com : Update

    My newest game, …palindromes… is now up on FlashGameLicense.com.  …palindromes… is a departure for me as a game designer.  It is a pure word game aimed at an audience who loves words and word game challenges. In …palindromes… your job is to unscramble a series of words before the time…

  • PC Gamer Subscription Chronicles #1: Where Are My #$@! Magazines?

    Some of you who have been paying close attention may have seen this story from back in December.  Back then I thought it would be fun to do a review of PC Gamer Magazine.  I had just started a new subscription through my daughter’s Girl Scout magazine drive. Since it…

  • Blaster-Mines Chronicles #2

    Blaster-Mines Chronicles #2 I have spent the last couple nights’ worth of late-night game programming to make a little more progress with Blaster-Mines. I used up an inordinate amount of time coming up with a class structure for the Enemy types. The first enemy I created was the ‘Wanderer’ as…

  • Blaster-Mines Chronicles #1

    Blaster-Mines Chronicles #1 Blaster-Mines is the name of my current indie project. It started out as Mine-X 4K, and is slowly evolving into a game in it’s own right. While Mine-X was simply a scrolling Asteroids variant, Blaster-Mines will be a combination of Bosconian, Star Castle, Asteroids, mixed with my…

  • The perfect Apple BlueTooth Mouse Replacement?

    I don’t know about perfect, but the Targus Blue Tooth laptop mouse was only $34.99 at Best Buy and the scroll wheel actually works. Outside the Apple community there is little knowledge of a dirty little secret that they would like to keep quiet- the $80 Blue Tooth Apple mouse…

  • Slowdown Revisited

    So our close colleague mentioned earlier this week that we were “slowing down”.  However, that is not entirely the case. We here at 8bitrocket.com are simply “focusing” our content on what is important: our games.   We are going to write about our games, post our games, podcast about our own…

  • Atari Nerd Interweb Mash-Up: Mini Edition

    OK, here are some neat links to some cool Atari related content: IGN Retro has an article about Activision vets David Crane’s and Steve Cartwright’s session at the GDC.  Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton’s new book: Vintage Games has just been released and is now for sale Bill Kunkel has…

  • Slowdown?

    You might notice in the next few weeks that the other guys here at 8bitrocket.com have started to slow-down on their numerous updates.  It seems that after launching all sorts of new features this year (games, videos, blogs, cartoons, awards, Atari Nerd, iphone stuff ,etc.) they are trying to assess…

  • Minus World’s NES Modern Classics

    I know I talk a lot about Atari on this blog, but I spent almost as much time playing NES games at my friend Ian’s house in the late 80’s as I played 2600 games in the early 80’s.  Because of that, I am very proud to announce that The-MinisWorld.com…

  • Eclipse Tools For Silverlight – Mac : Hands On

    I decided to try out the newly announced Elclipse Tools for Silverlight this morning to see if it was true that a real development environment for Silverlight Web apps now existed for Mac OSX. My journey started by visiting the Eclipse 4SL page (http://www.eclipse4sl.org/) to download everything required.   There are…

  • 8bitrocket Pumpkinman Reaches 1,000,000 plays (finally)

    Finally, within the last couple days, one of our games reached 1,000,000 plays (as recorded by Mochiads).  Pumpkinman was one of the first games we put on Mochiads, right after the service launched. While this is nice mile-stone, it’s also kind of wake-up-call and time for reflection. Creating games that…

  • Skript Kitty Episode #1: Skript Kitty vs. Intellectual Property

    OK, so here is our first attempt at a “cartoon”.  This idea came about when my 13 year-old cat entered the frame of our first video podcast.  Jeff and I got the idea that maybe she was listening in to our conversation and trying to steal our ideas. Postmortem: As…

  • Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: March 25, 2009

    Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: March 25, 2009 The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. This time we cover a lot of articles on monetization (because that’s what I found). Maybe this is because of the bad economic climate and many people are…

  • Silverlight Game Development Interweb Mash-Up March 24, 2009

    Sorry it has been a while since I’ve posted any news about Silverlight. We’ve been busy finishing off our Flash games from the 4K Contest, and working on our new Video Podcast. First, the really big news is that Microsoft has released the Silverlight 3 Beta to the public. There…

  • Tweening in Flex AS3 – sans MXML

    Tweening in Flex AS3 – sans MXML On Sunday night I decided to start working a new game called Blaster Mines that is a direct descendant of my 4K Game Contest Entry, Mine-X 4K. I originally thought that I would limit this one to under 100K, or some other artificial…

  • 8bitrocket GameStorm Video Podcast #2: Goofus and Goofus

    8bitrocket.com GameStorm Video Podcast #2 This week we tackle “disturbing clauses in terms and conditions” of viral game sites, especially the term “derivative works”. We also have some news, a GameStorming session, a special preview of our all-new “cartoon” “Skript Kitty” http://www.8bitrocket.com

  • Game Poetry 4K Game Competition Post-mortems

    Game Poetry 4K Game Competition Post-mortems Urbansquall has posted 4 Post-mortems on games in the 4K Game Competition. Aside from my all too long entry on Mine-X 4K, you can read about Face Dodge, Falling With Style, and Grompers. I again want to thank Urbansquall and Gamingyourway.com again for running…

  • Will Nonoba GameRise Change the Landscape for Flash Gaming?

    Will Nonoba GameRise Change the Landscape for Flash Gaming? I have been reading a lot about Nonoba Gamerise and I am very interested, but also a little cautious. For some reason, the Danish Company Nonoba doesn’t have quite the cache as Mochi or Flash Game license do with me. I…

  • HeyZap, the YouTube of Flash Games?

    So, I was doing a search this morning to find interesting content for you guys on the world of Indie Flash gaming and I came across this relatively new site called  HeyZap. They seem to be a new distribution channel for Mochi (and other) games in an interface that resembles…

  • Topless Robot’s Top 10 Movie Games for the Atari 2600

    Topless Robot’s Top 10 Movie Games for the Atari 2600 One of the absolute best named blogs in  the history of the web-log-o-sphere, Topless Robot, has put together a pretty informative, well thought out piece on the top 10 Movie Games for the 2600.   Just the term Topless Robot has…

  • Zamboozal Flash (2009)

    A version of poker dice with more options…

  • Agent Pixel 6502 #1

    Agent Pixel 6502 #1 I have quite a few games ideas floating around that have not been implemented and I have decided to pick one up and go with it for my next real ad sponsored game. I have not created an ad sponsored game since he utter disaster that…

  • 8bitrocket GameStorm Video Podcast #1: See Us In In-Action

    Our First video podcast. We talk about the 4K Game Contest, Microsoft Silverlight, Mochi, Google App engine…and more…

  • Mines and Bricks in 64K?

    Mines and Bricks in 64K? The judging for the first and second jury prizes in the 4K game competition is over. Two simply incredible entries won (A-Steroids4K and Dungeon Romp).   Unfortunately neither my Mine-X 4K (Mochi version, 4K Comp version) or Steve’s Neon Bricks 4K (Mochi version, 4K Comp version)…

  • 4K Game: 96% Useless Fluff

    So I just finished added our pre-loader, title screen, mochi ads and mochi leaderboard, and some support code for those those things to my 4K games and it is now 100K! In reality, 100K is not that much, but think about 100K in terms of a percentage of actual gaming…

  • Silverlight Game Development Inter-web Mash-Up, March 10th 2009

    OK, so I missed last week, sorry. I was finishing my 4K Flash game for the Game Poetry 4K Game Competition. I’m now working on converting that game into Silverlight. Anyway, that’s a good, quick segue into our first topic: Silverlight Game Competitions. We have already discussed a couple competitions…

  • Wired On “Design Under Constraint” = 4K Game competition

    Wired has a nice article  about “designing under contraint”, and how it can boost both productivity and creativity. Here is a quote: “The idea of operating within constraints’of making more with less’is especially relevant these days. From Wall Street to Detroit to Washington, the lack of limits has proven to…

  • 4K Game Competition Game #2 (game spoiler)

    4K Game Competition Game #2 (game spoiler) I have decided to post my contest entry also. This is NOT the exact same game as I added one line of instruction text and the Mochi Services (which bloated it to 16K). Also, I am having some problems with the Mochi High…

  • 4K Game Competition Game #1 (4K Spolier)

    OK, here is my entry into the 4K game competition.  It’s actually 8K now with the Mochi services added. http://games.mochiads.com/c/g/neon-bricks-4k/4kbreakout_mochi.swf Neon Bricks 4K is take on the classic game of Breakout.  The basic rules are no different than Breakout: destroy all the bricks to advance to the next level.  The…

  • Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: March 8, 2009

    Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: March 8, 2009 The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. This time we cover: A selection of blogs entries on subject ranging from Eclipse v. Flashdevelop to art imitating life imitating art in the Flash world; Tutorials ranging…

  • K. Thor Jensen’s Tidal added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade

    K. Thor Jensen’s Tidal added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade. This is final arcade game addition for the week (unless I find a great one for the weekend, or someone sends me a gem) as I am going to concentrate on adding to a couple other blog series I have…

  • Steve’s List Of The Top-10 Most Insanely Addictive Mid-Core Game Ever Created

    OK, this is kind of “time-out” from other content.  While I’m working on some Silverlight entries, new Flash games, etc, I thought I would go back a bit and name my Top-10 “Insanely Addictive” games of all time.  These are not necessarily the “best” games of all time, just the…

  • Zir0’s LaserStryker added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade

    Zir0’s LaserStryker added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade This is the third day in a row that I am adding another fantastic retro gem to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade. I have to say that all of the last games (plus the one I add tomorrow) have been sent directly to…

  • Oliver Snyders’ Dot Devour added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade

    Oliver Snyders’ Dot Devour added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade The Retro Arcade hasn’t had a lot of love lately as other priorities have hit 8bitrocket towers. So, this week I am going to add a game a day to make up for it. For the second day in a…

  • Oliver Snyders’ Atomsphere added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade

    Oliver Snyders’ Atomsphere added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade Boy do I love Missile Command! It is was one of the absolute best Atari 2600 coin-op conversions (Rob Fulop classic). Oliver’s game is very similar, but with some modern twists. “Shoot down incoming missiles and passing UFOs to protect your…

  • Mine-X 4K

    Mine-X 4K is an Asteroids like game played in a 360 degree scrolling world. It was my entry into the Game Poetry / Gaming Your Way 4K game contest. This version is 16K with the addition of Mochi Ads and Leader Boards only.