Merry Christmas: A Stocking full of guilt free and legal retro game roms While I am fully aware of all the places you can obtain nefarious copies of all the best retro games in digitized disk or rom format, but I also know of a great big stocking full of free…

Flashkit Game Challenge #8: Game Reviews Well, this weekend’s game challenge is complete and the brave and talented game developers have submitted entries. The challenge was to make a shoot-em-up style game (in the theme of apocalypse) and all five accomplish this with varying degrees of success. There are a…

New Star Soccer 4 Chronicles #3 Note: New Star Soccer 4 is a great combination of sports simulation and role-playing game. I have some time off from my day job, so instead of actually working on any of my own games, I am feeding my addiction to Simon Read’s indie…

Flashkit Game Challenge #8 Has Started! The theme this time is SHOOT ‘EM UP!!!! Now, that is right up my alley, but unfortunately, I never have more than a few hours a day (at the most) to code or work on the site, so would never be able to compete…

The particularly well  crafted retro pinball game, Law of the West, has been added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade. This game was created by the artisan professionals at Gamingyourway.com in the tradition of 70’s and 80’s arcade to pinball cross conversions. Atari and Bally Midway did a number of Pinball…

OK, I just “finished” uploading the new version of the web site.  I’m sure there are some critical/horrible bugs some place, but I have not located any yet.  If  you get any server error messages from the site, please email them to us here: info@8bitrocket.com Thanks, Steve Fulton

Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: Dec 17, 2008 The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. This time we have: How to create heat seeking missiles in AS2; more on the Whiflash game beta; How to make a game in Flex; New games in…

Here is the first in a series of “Managment Sucks” “algorithms for modern managers” (written in ActionScript!) private function getManagerChristmasBonus(mgr:Manager, employees:Array) : Number { var managerBonus:Number = 5000; for (var i=0; i< employees.length; i++) { switch (employee[i].status) { case FIRED: managerBonus += 3000; break; case OUTSOURCED: managerbonus += 2500; break;…

Top 10 Most Played Mochi Flash Games of 2008gigaom.com is reporting today a list of the 10 most popular games on the Mochi ad network. All 10 are very well done, addictive games. The list includes 3 of my favorite games of all time:Bloons Cube Crush And Fancy Pants Adventure…

The Flash game Forever Hunted, by Canadian university student, Evan Miller, has been named one of the Top Video Games of 2008 by Time Magazine. Most of the other games on the list were developed by teams of people and appeared on major console or PC platforms. Nestled in between…

A Midcore Gamer Reviews PC Gamer Magazine: January 2009 Issue I recently re-started my subscription to PC Gamer after a 5 year break. Ironically, I now do not own a desktop PC any longer (although I have a couple laptops). I play my PC games on a dual-boot iMac (the…

Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: Dec 10, 2008 The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. This time we cover: The Nov/Dec 25 lines of code contest; Using the factory Design Pattern; Creating the prefect maze with tiles; a $100,000 Flash indie game attempt;…

I find myself at a complete loss today because I have nothing useful to post .I have is tons of stuff 2/3, 1/2, 1/4 finished, but nothing that is ready to go.   Here is a list of what I’m currently working on for the 8bitrocket.com: 1. Brand New Design.  We have…

Blast-a-thon retro evolved Hey Hey Shooter Classic added to the 8bitrocket Retro Showcase Hey Hey Shooter Classic is a  fast and furious top-down shooter game reminiscent of Geometry Wars Retro. Be sure to check out the achievements and get to the top of the leader boards!  – Developer: Nate Pacyga.…

$100,000 Flash Game Revenue Experiment (updated! now with 25% more free content!)I stumbled upon the APMID web site this morning. APMID stands for Accumulate Profit Margin Investment Destroy  (I have no idea either). The author (unnamed on the post) is attempting to make $100,000 from casual viral Flash games. The…

Exceptional Quality Atari ST Remake, Abominaball Added to the 8bitrocket Retro Showcase Here is the description straight from author, Richard Davey: Defuse the bombs in the right order in this 50 level arcade puzzle game. Don’t touch the wrong bomb or take too long, and be careful how you plan…

Finally: Two New Books About Video Game History Set For Release If you have followed my ranting on this subject, you will already know that I love books about video games and video game history (i.e not strategy guides) and that I don’t think there are enough of them being…

Tutorial: Using MP3 Files InFlex 3 with Flash Player 9.x This tutorial will explore several different methods to use MP3 files in Flex 3. We will cover simple loading and embedding, as well as strategies for seamlessly looping MP3 files. Some of these concepts can be used for Flash CS2/CS3…

I wrote about and tested www.whirled.com a few weeks back. It is a slick system by which game developers can create single and multiplayer games, and also earn money with them through micro transactions. They have a new contest that just started and will run for three months, and possibly…

The Classic Atari USB Joystick Review My first real video game experience was on an Atari 2600 at a neighbors house in 1978.  Although I had played some Apple II games, had a cheap Pong knock-off, and was familiar with the arcade games of the time, the 2600 was the…

This week we unveil another new feature for 8bitrocket.com: The Atari Nerd Podcast!  We have decided that Atari fanboys need a podcast all their own and Jeff and I are only too happy to oblige.  This one has been in mothballs for a couple weeks. It’s very rough, and we…

Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: Dec 1, 2008 The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. I took last week off, so there is a lot to cover: Efficient Multiple Object Collision Detection with groups; Using Game Entities for in game objects; Doom in…

New Star Soccer 4 Chronicles #2: 8bitjeff season 2 start Note: New Star Soccer 4 (NSS4) is a brilliant independent game by Simon Read. It was released on Windows and Mac platforms in early November and I am spending some of my free time with it, grinding out a career as…

Outstanding shoot ’em up Polarity added to the 8bitrocket Retro Showcase WOW! And that’s a pretty powerful WOW! Thomsampson, Jeb (www.stimunationgames.com),  Vengeance (www.gamesgamesgames.co.uk) and Squize (now at GamingYourWay www.gamingyourway.com)  teamed up to put this game out a while ago, and it has just hit Mochi.  We couldn’t be more happy…

If you are not from the USA, then you might not be aware that today we celebrate a holiday we know as Thanksgiving. You can read wikipedia to find out the details on what is basically a harvest celebration.  It is all of those things, but to most of us…

Fresh Kill : Spike Arcade Edition  Spike.com, the web arm of Spike TV has launched an arcade filled with games that they claim are just for men (women will get a kick out of some of t these too I am sure).   The arcade currently contains 5 titles that…

3d Space Shooter Star Force added to 8bitrocket Retro Showcase Star Force,  a very well made 3d first person perspective space shooter has been added to the 8bitrocket Retro Showcase. In the game, you pilot a space fighter against hordes of enemy pilots, asteroids and other baddies. It has the…

Squize, over at Gamingyourway.com has posted a heart tugging piece on Cessation Time Distortion – the brain’s way of dealing with addiction after you have stopping feeding it what it wants. Squize is currently fighting his addicting to nicotine, having quit smoking a week ago. We all have something that…

function DHTMLSound(surl) { document.getElementById(“dummysoundplayerspan”).innerHTML=”http://+surl+“; } function DHTMLSoundLoop(surl) { document.getElementById(“dummysoundplayerspan”).innerHTML=”http://+surl+“; } function stopSound() { document.getElementById(“dummysoundplayerspan”).innerHTML=””; } function downloadSoundLoop(surl) { var locationString=”sounddownload.aspx?”+surl; //alert(locationString); location.href=locationString; } 6 new music clips added to the 8bitrocket royalty free music library I spent the only fee time I had this Saturday creating 6 new music clips…

I’ve been getting into 60’s punk lately and I “found” this gem from the L.A. 60’s punk/garage band Love fronted by Authur Lee.  If you thought the MC5 and Iggy Pop were the only precursors to 70’s punk, think again (“Seven And Seven is” from “De Capo“, Electra 1967):

Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: Nov 20, 2008 The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. This time we cover The Casual Collective; Playing Flash games at Maximum Size; A fantastic Atari ST Remake; Smart Game Interface Choices; Kongregate’s Kred system; Box2d Tutorials; The…

OK, so I back-slid to Phantasy Star I last weekend after trying in vain to enjoy Phantasy Star II and Phantasy Star III.  The later games have not aged-well, but, even though I can’t stand some of the “puzzles” (too much repetition involved) of the first Phantasy Star title, the game…