Title: Lethal XcessYear: 1991Publisher: EclipseDeveloper: X-TrollGame Design: Marc Rosocha, Heinz Rudolph, Claus FrienGraphics: Heinz RudolphProgramming: Claus Frien, Heinz RudolphMusic: Jochen Hippel Sifting through my huge collection of vintage games and roms, I have selected a few I have never played to test out. First up is an Atari ST /…

Every Christmas for at least the past decade, my brother Jeff and I have traded retro game collections for Christmas. It started in 1998 when I discovered MAME and Dave’s Video Game Classics. I collected a CD of ROMS and Emulators, printed a fancy CD label, and gifted it to…

My first (as a developer) web+toy (Toys that interact with the web) project went live today: Pixel Chix Flippin’ Kitchen.   The game is “inspired” by the “Cooking Mama” DS and Wii game.  You use your mouse to mix, cut, fry in mini games trying to make multiple dishes.  Here is the…

My latest writing project, “Part 1” of the History Of Atari (1971-1977) went up today at Gamasutra. The series is culmination of nearly 5 years of research and include content from my own personal interviews with Nolan Bushnell, Chris Crawford, Ralph Baer, David Crane, and others.  You can read it here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2000/the_history_of_atari_19711977.php

Ernest Adams has written a fantastic article for http://www.next-gen.biz about the “50 Greatest Game Design Innovations”.   There is tons of good content here to get you thinking, mull over, and argue about.  Take a look at it here: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7769&Itemid=2 Here are some of my comments about the entries: 3. Stealth…

The bitmapData class has been a revelation for advanced Flash game programmers. With it, one can replicate the sprite sheet magic that 8-bit game wizards produced on machines such as the Atari 800, C=64 and Nintendo NES. I have covered the use of sprite sheets and BitmapData in a previous…

Finally, my newest game for Hotwheels.com has gone live!  “Hot Wheels Spin City Drive-Thru Dilemma” is my casual game “sequel” to “Hot Wheels Accelracers Track Mod“, released in 2005.   It is not really a “sequel” though, as it’s game-play is based on the “Diner Dash” model, not on the “Pipe…

It looks like MochiAds has gone public today!  Check themout over at http://www.mochiads.com.   Also, they something new called “Customoized Ads” that looks very interesting…We’ll report more later when we know the details.

MochiAds are still in beta, but we here at 8bitrocket are firm supporters of this system. Mochi seems to be one of the few systems that is looking out for the independent developer. You can read more in Steve’s entry from a few weeks back. I am designing a new…

The last retro classic I redesigned was Asteroids when I created the game Retro Blaster. While I love early classic games, I also completely understand and appreciate how Nintendo, Sega, and other late 80’s innovators built upon classic themes to re-ignite the video game industry. Not only did they create…

I’ve been experimenting with the beta version of MochiMedia’s Mochiads system for the past few weeks. My first impression is that, when Mochiads finally rolls out to the public, it will help revolutionize the viral/free Flash game landscape. Mochimedia have already been providing a very useful product named Mochibot for…

Flash CS3: Actionscript 3 (AS3) Game Primer #3: Bitmap Collision detection One of the great features of Flash AS2 and AS3 is the ability to use the non-transparent colored pixels in a bitmapData object to accomplish pixel level hit detection. In this tutorial, we will build upon the last last…

Today we are launching our SECOND in a series of free, configurable game/activity engines for the web (following closely on the heels of “Free Jigsaw“).  This one a further evolution of our “fireworks show” engine that can now be configured for almost any purpose. You can watch fireworks launch, and/or…

“Retro Rogue” martyg, a frequent visitor to our fourms (“frequent” is a relative term on our forums) has written a very detailed and insightful article about the fate of the Atarinfogrames.    In the article, martyg writes: Atari management has had more changing faces and directions than a chameleon stuck in…

In Adobe’s attempt to “improve” every aspect of Actionscript, they deleted some features that arcade game programmers have relied on for years. One of the most fundamental aspects in most arcade games is accurately timed user input detection. Sadly, this has been made much more difficult (but not impossible) in…

The guys over at Electrotank have finally announced the released of ElectroServer 4.0, (ES4)their massive update to their already impressive Electroserver 3 multi-player socket-server.   ES4 is more than just a simple version upgrade.  New features for ES4 include: 200,000 concurrent users.  Site like Webkins now get about 30,000 concurrent users using…

Free Jigsaw is free-to-use, configurable, simple, Jigsaw Puzzle engine written in Flash. “Free Jigsaw” can support any number of images, and supports “animated” puzzles using .swf files. You can re-skin the the presentation of “Free Jigsaw” by editing the included .xml file and providing your own background and button images.…

One of the most useful advances in Flash 8 and CS3 for game developers has been the use of raw bitmap data to render on screen images. The CS3 / AS3 implementation has been changed from AS2, so this tutorial will go through the basics of creating, loading, and displaying…

(Larry Snyder: 1940-2007) I was very upset to learn today that Larry Snyder has passed away., The 67 year-old was head of sales for Midnight Coders, the developers of WebOrb, an ASP.NET 2.0 replacement for Flash Remoting.   I’d been in negotiations with Larry for the past 7 months to purchase…

OK, now that I’ve suffered through the Atari bashing in the well-written but overly biased Commodore love-fest On The Edge, and complete disregard for Atari history in books like Fire In The Valley and Accidental Empires, I’m ready to ask the question: Where is the great, all-encompassing history of Atari?…

Over at http://www.hotwheels.com they have just launched the Wii Arena (http://wii.hotwheels.com), a section of the site dedicated to users coming to the site with the Wii Opera Browser.  Among the games offered (including simplified version of very popular TrackMod Game) is the brand new Multi-Player on-line Collectible Card Racing Game: Finish…

Actionscript 3 is complete re-write of the Actionscript language that fuels Flash’s ability to create dynamic content and games. It could be said that AS3 is such a departure that many designers and some programmers will be left in the dark by this new version. I for one, think AS3…

I’ve only been working with Flash AS3 for a very short time, but I’m already very happy with it. Even though it is not as accessible as AS2, the power of the new language features are unmistakable. One very powerful feature of AS3 is the built-in event handling. Event handing…

I started with 8-bit degrees of separation last week where I investigated some rare/forgotten Atari 800 games. This week I’ll take my investigation up to the 16-bit level. Here is how the game is played. First I choose a random Atari ST game, then I search out related games, developers…

A player who goes by the name of Stephen Allen has sent in a picture of his score and a successful completion of the game: 101,773,150 points! This is the current recorded high score by someone other than me! Thanks, Stephen (if that’s your real name), for taking the time…

We at 8bitrocket.com have been trying promote our games at a grassroots level for the past few months.  In that time, we have met with some marginal success getting our games seen and played.   If making your game is hard enough, getting people to see it and play it is…

I have loads and loads of Atari 800 games to play via emulation. I have tried nearly 1100 in my quest to try every game available. Today I decided to play Atari 8-bit degrees of separation. I will start with one random 8-bit Atari 800 game, play it, review it,…

I don’t know how I missed this.  I’ve been reading Bob Cringely’s column at pbs.org for the past 10 years or so, and I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with it.  Bob was one of the first people to embrace “Geek” culture. His book “Accidental Empires” is a must-read for anyone…

A new game, called Space Eggs, has launched on 8bitrocket.com.We want more games on this site, so I have been going back and finishing up ideas of games I started a while back. The first was a game called Gradient Asteroids Optimized. It was the beginnings of the first game…

Here are 3 different interactive Flash activities for the the 4th of July: Raindown Fireworks Show This activitiy was designed to promote The Alarm’s single “Raindown” last year.  It is an interactive show.  The fireworks will got automatically, but it you press the [space bar] you can configure the color…

Great 8-bit home computer games didn’t start and end with the C=64 in the 80’s. Classic 8-bit computer games were enjoyed on many other computers, the Atari 800 being arguably the premier computer gaming platform in the USA for about 3 years (1980-1982). This dominance ended when the low cost…

OK, here is my last Sploder game with the current engine.  It’s called “Fantastic Journey”.  Travel through a human body to fight of disease and infaction in the legs, arms, heart, brain, etc. Play Below:   http://www.sploder.com/player.php?s=7ntjxvst Make Your Own Game