Boing Boing » Flash

Sugar Cube: a platformer with a refreshingly novel mechanic

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:01:48 +0000

Another great game review from Greg Costikyan and his Play This Thing! blog: this time, it's the 2010 IGF China Best Game winner Sugar Cube, a platformer with a novel and ingenious (and addictive!) mechanic:

At various points on the level are hidden items -- often platforms -- that are revealed, and switch "on," only when you pass through or near them. As you move about, the four squares immediately around you are tinted, and show the hidden items. Frequently, there are small "lights" on the screen that show the hidden items, in ghosted form, until turned on; but often, items are revealed only when you activate them. Finally, by holding "shift" while jumping, you can prevent items from "flipping" from active to inactive state.
The result is that each level holds surprises, and you have to learn how to time and use activations to get to the level end (represented by a door); sometimes you want an item to flip to inactive state to get through its location, while often you want to turn it on, to provide a location or item you can use.

Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory

Snowball: excellent and addictive Flash pinball

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 14:56:07 +0000

Snowball is Pixeljam's Flash take on a computer pinball game, and it's an incredibly fun table. I intended to play for a few minutes to try it out and got sucked in for an hour. Snowball is simultaneously very true to the spirit of physical pinball while managing to deliver a board and several mechanics that would be nearly impossible to create in a mechanical game. The vertical scrolling mechanism is also a nice way of transcending the constraint of the usual landscape aspect ratio in computer displays.

* SNOWBALL! * (via Waxy)

Ancient Greek punishments: the 8-bit Flashgame edition

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:00:13 +0000

"Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment" is a series of 8-bit Flash games based on the punishments visited by the gods on various naughty ancient Greeks: Sisyphus, Tantalus, Prometheus, Danaids and Zeno. There's something particularly awfully wonderful about rapidly pressing the G and H keys to writhe in agony and dislodge the eagle that is devouring your liver.

Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (via MeFi)

Web HTML5 version of Bastion hits Chrome web store

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:18:00 +0000

Bastion, the popular action RPG noted for its fantastic art and narration, is now available to play in-browser through the Chrome web store. It's built ~~as a HTML5 app~~ with the Native Client SDK, so Flash is not required—even if a browser that automatically installs it is.

One-second film festival

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 06:21:40 +0000

Montblanc held a one-second film competition. The videos are really very good, even if they're embedded in a genuinely obnoxious Flash blob that superimposes a watch-face over them. Better to watch the Vimeo version.

Montblanc - The beauty of a second challenge (via This is Colossal)

Flash in the pan

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:13:19 +0000

Adobe is finally giving up on Flash in mobile browsers, according to Jason Perlow at ZDNet.

Glitch: dreamlike whimsy and play in a MMO

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:57:39 +0000

Ars Technica has an in-depth review of Glitch, the whimsical, free-to-play game from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield (we've written about Glitch here before) and his new company, Tiny Speck. Glitch uses whimsical, cooperative tasks to produce fun and delight, rather than combat:

Tuning the quests and interactions to provide the right level of difficulty and reward was complicated. In beta testing, the development team found that while singing to butterflies was repetitive and boring, people would still sing to butterflies obsessively—because it provided small but guaranteed amounts of experience. The devs tried to balance this by making singing to animals cost energy, but then players simply farmed huge numbers of girly drinks (which made animals interactions cost no energy) and continued to grind the same thing again and again. The girly drinks were then nerfed, and people immediately complained.
"We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring," Butterfield told me, "people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us."
Player housing is implemented, with an apartment-style design that lets anyone have their own home without cluttering up the landscape. You can decorate your home and grow things in your own garden on the patio. Unlike many games, in Glitch it does not take long to save up enough cash for a place of your own, though making it look less than spartan will take considerable effort.
Funny little touches to the game litter the game. For example, getting the right papers to let you purchase an apartment requires multiple trips to the Department of Administrative Affairs (Ministry of Departments) where you spend much time in a waiting area while bureaucratic lizard men play Farmville on tiny computers.

Butterfly milking and pig nibbling: building the strange world of Glitch

Megamash: retro Flash game requires you to mash up vintage genres to win

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:21:30 +0000

Play This Thing reviews Megamash, a weird chimeric Flash game that combines several kinds of play and requires players to figure out how to use the mechanics of each genre to solve puzzles:

At first, it seems like a simple platformer in which you play a bunny collecting carrots and avoiding enemies. But half-way through the level, you pass through a barrier into a sidescrolling shmup, and become a spaceship shooting aliens with the space bar.
In otherwords, the game is actually a sort of mashup of seven different games, and you pass from one to the other over the course of a level. And indeed -- this is the clever part -- you often need to do something in one "game" in order to advance in the level. Thus, in the rabbit platformer, a crate you need is surrounded by impenetrable blocks; but when you fire across the shmup/platformer boundary, the bullets turn into falling fireballs, which obliterate impenetrable blocks, freeing the crate you need.

Megamash review [playthisthing.com]

Glitch: free-to-play, whimsical, delightful MMO from Flickr co-founder

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 20:04:40 +0000

Glitch, the whimsical free-to-play MMO game from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, is now open to the public. Glitch's developer team includes Katamari Damacy creator creator Keita Takahashi, and is as filled with delicious awesomeness as you could possibly hope for. They're overwhelmed with signups, so it might be a few hours before you're confirmed, but they're taking new players and putting them in a queue.

Glitch is a web-based massively-multiplayer game which takes place inside the minds of eleven peculiarly imaginative Giants. You choose how to grow and shape the world: building and developing, learning new skills, collaborating or competing with everyone else in one enormous, ever-changing, persistent world.
What's different?
For starters, it's all one big world. Which means everyone is playing the same game and anyone's actions have the ability to affect every other player in the game. It also involves very little war, moats, spaceships, wizards, mafiosos, or people with implausibly large muscles. Also: we have egg plants. Egg plants make it very different.
What does it look like?
We comb the internet every single day looking for fresh and original visual styles. The look varies as you travel around the world, from psychedelia to surrealism, Japanese cutesie to hypersaturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media. We love awesome illustration and animation and part of our mission is to find the best of the best and bring it to a wider audience.

(via Waxy)

(Disclosure: my wife is an uncompensated advisor to the company that makes Glitch)

Glitch [glitch.com]

Eating factory-farmed turkey for Thanksgiving? You may be eating arsenic.

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 11:04:40 +0000

Los Angeles Times: "Most commercial-grade poultry feed today contains an arsenic-based pesticide. Like the Victorians, farmers use the poison because of its ability to improve appearances -- in this case because arsenic's potent effect on blood vessels makes the chicken and turkey we buy look pinker and therefore fresher."

Copying is not theft: now with studio-recorded audio!

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 07:36:00 +0000

QuestionCopyright.org's most excellent animated video (which explains a common-sense but often-muddied distinction) now has a super soundtrack. Via TechDirt [Thanks, John!] Previously: Copying Isn't Theft video needs YOUR music! and Nina Paley's Copyright Song

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Hank Williams

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:49:17 +0000

Meet the newest recipient of a special Pulitzer Prize citation. Damn right. I love this music. It reminds me of my Great-Granpa Frank and Granma Rosella, who'd be frankly tickled to hear Hank Williams won a Pulitzer.

Plus: Special bonus cameos by June and Anita Carter! (Also, Stealth!Roy Acuff. Thanks for pointing that out, Suburbancowboy.)

(Tip of the—wide-brimmed, natch—hat to Greg Mitchell for finding this footage. Fabbo!)

Operation Teen Book Drop: getting 10,000 books into the hands of native American teens

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 06:05:49 +0000

Young adult author Lorie-Ann Grover sez, "In 2008 and 2009, readergirlz, GuysLitWire, and YALSA orchestrated publishers' donations of 20,000 new young adult books to hospitalized teens across the country. For 2010, If I Can Read I Can Do Anything has joined forces with these three organizations to drop over 10,000 new YA books, donated by publishers, into the hands of teens on Native Tribal Lands. Nationwide, librarians, over 100 YA authors, YA lit lovers, and teens will drop YA books in their own communities on April 15th, 2010, to raise awareness for Operation TBD 2010 and Support Teen Literature Day. They will participate further by purchasing books from the TBD Powell's Wish Lists during National Library Week. Purchases will be shipped directly to enrich one of two Native American libraries. Everyone will join an online party that evening at the readergirlz blog."

Operation Teen Book Drop (Thanks, Lorie-Ann!)

Previously:

Insane Clown Posse "Miracles" video

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 04:22:26 +0000

To fully appreciate the Insane Clown Posse science textbook parody, you must first witness the actually pretty awesome video above, for "Miracles," off their 2009 album Bang Pow Boom. And I ain't even hatin', fool. "There's magic everywhere in this bitch."

BONUS: Duckface at 3:30. (via Videogum)

Previously:

Malcolm McLaren, in Memoriam: Buffalo Gals

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:25:12 +0000

All that scratchin' is makin' me itch.

Previously:

Malcolm McLaren, RIP

Soul Train dancing to Curtis Mayfield

David Pescovitz — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 05:41:19 +0000

TuneUp's Gabe Adiv has been deep into the vintage Soul Train offered on-demand by his cable provider. Inspired to share the boogie, he found this great moment on YouTube. Here are the Soul Train dancers in 1971 getting down to Curtis Mayfield's "Get Down."

HOWTO defeat a sliding chain lock with a rubber band

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 22:37:04 +0000

Sliding chain lock, meet rubber band.

Defeating a sliding chain lock using a rubber band

1984, iPad edition

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 09:01:56 +0000

(Thanks, Al!)

Previously:

Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either) - Boing ...

Star Wars Sound Effects Quiz!

David K. Israel — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 02:52:42 +0000

Photo: Stéfan Le Dû We've isolated some distinctive--and not-so-distinctive!--audio snippets from the Star Wars flicks. Think you can identify them all? After you take the quiz, come on back and let us know how well you did. And if you have an idea for a future quiz, tell us your suggestion!

Noteworthy Modern Occurences: the Digital Economy Bill

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 23:08:54 +0000

Britain is on the verge of adopting the Digital Economy Bill without debate or scrutiny by Parliament. Among other things, the DEB provides for disconnection of entire households from the 'net if any member is accused -- without proof -- of infringing copyright.

Jim Killock from the UK Open Rights Group sez, "On Thursday, our 'Police' visited the offices of the BPI, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties, and UK Music, and presented them with notice that the Digital Economy Bill is disconnected, from democracy, human rights, public opinion and sound business sense."

Disconnection notices served to UK Music, BPI and politicians

Digital Economy Bill: the last hours

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 03:20:30 +0000

With the dread Digital Economy Bill in its final days of the UK Parliament, this is our last chance to demand that the government hold it over until after the election and give it the full debate it deserves. Please share this Open Rights Group video with your friends and colleagues and get them to write to their MP and ask for support for full debate.

This Tuesday, the government will rush a law that could cut you off the Internet

Time lapse of Mark Ryden's Incarnation painting

Mark Frauenfelder — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 17:22:39 +0000

I'm interested in finding out the different ways people create art, and this four-minute time lapse of Mark Ryden painting Incarnation is fascinating.

One to watch: new details on Superbrothers' iPhone adventure Sword & Sworcery EP

Brandon Boyer — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 12:33:29 +0000

It gave me goosebumps. That's about the highest compliment I can pay the upcoming iPhone adventure game Sword & Sworcery EP, and just about all you need to know for now. They were significant, too, for not just being the goosebumps of that media moment where all elements suddenly align -- where pixel and music work in perfect concert -- but for the kind you get when a game anticipates your demands and provides you with an answer to a question you hadn't even asked yet. There's a sense in which the EP is being created just for me: not quite that literally, but it is the collective brainchild of designer Craig 'Superbrothers' Adams (who you'll remember from his just-featured Less Talk, More Rock speech), indie studio Capy (also featured here for their gorgeous Critter Crunch revamp and their Clash of Heroes handheld masterstroke), and musician Jim Guthrie, a long-time favorite both for his golden, harmonic pop solo work and his own collaborative output as Human Highway. I managed to get my hands on Sworcery as soon as humanly possible -- before the Game Developers Conference started proper, and away from the chaotic bustle of this year's crowded Indie Games Fest pavilion. It was a wise and fortuitous choice -- playing alone on a late night Mission district rooftop -- because Sworcery's magic demands quiet and careful attention to properly cast its spell. True to his own words in that Boing Boing feature, the game is about unspoken dialogue between itself and the player: responding to your own curiosity and whispering questions rather than shouting demands. Case in point: just watch that video at top, where a single non-reflected mark in its waters practically evokes more mystery and wonder than most scripted turns-of-events in the majority of the triple-A fantasies the games industry has given us in the past few years. And while the main adventure mode showcased at top is all serenity now, Superbrothers promises higher intensity drama to follow, showcased via a combat mode against the game's Grizzled Boor -- an antagonist that pays slight homage to Another World's dark beast in subtly leading you deeper into its world while never necessarily proving himself not exactly a threat. Should you decide to take on the Boor, you're presented with this minigame above where here, too, Superbrothers takes their "less talk" mantra to heart, telegraphing your opponent's intentions with visual cues, in loving and open tribute to NES classic Punch-Out!! (see especially that 'stunned' star that appears overhead). These two modes were as many secrets as Superbrothers was willing to publicly disclose in the GDC demo, but with months yet left in its development, there's hints of much deeper layers of involvement ahead -- onion peeled layers that Adams has been drip-feeding though ultra-vague hints through his "teletex bulletin" email updates over the past several months. But this is one I can give away here: if you scroll back through the artwork Adams has released to date, one design element should stand out against the rest -- that razor sharp crescent moon hanging behind his otherwise signature field of muted pixels. Add that to the release schedule of those teletex updates (February 14th and 28th, March 15th and 29th...) and it should start to snap into focus: your adventure through its world will modify itself based on the phases of moon in the real world. Exactly what shape this will take is another secret Superbrothers won't fully divulge, but there are hints that certain rare mushrooms which pepper the game's landscape will only come out under certain circumstances. All this adds up to an intricate ecology that rewards multiple playthroughs, rather than a linear and static adventure meant to be experienced once and set aside, and a landscape dotted with people worth meeting and vistas worth traversing. Prior to GDC it was perhaps my most anticipated game of the event (as I might've hinted at myself with my iPad-feature-topping-image): coming away, it might just be my most anticipated game of the year.

Previously:

Robot folds laundry

David Pescovitz — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 04:46:24 +0000

UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard, working with Prof. Pieter Abbeel, has developed software that enables a robot to fold towels. From the abstract to their scientific paper:

The robot begins by picking up a randomly dropped towel from a table, goes through a sequence of vision-based re-grasps and manipulations-- partially in the air, partially on the table--and ï¬nally stacks the folded towel in a target location. The reliability and robustness of our algorithm enables for the ï¬rst time a robot with general purpose manipulators to reliably and fully-autonomously fold previously unseen towels, demonstrating success on all 50 out of 50 single-towel trials as well as on a pile of 5 towels.

"Cloth Grasp Point Detection based on Multiple-View Geometric Cues with Application to Robotic Towel Folding" (Thanks, Ken Goldberg!)

Congressman concerned about Guam capsizing

David Pescovitz — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 03:29:27 +0000

If Guam had too many people on it, could it tip over? Congressman Hank Johnson (D-GA) is concerned about that. Seriously. (Thanks, COOP!)

Gallery: First images, details of Ubisoft's Scott Pilgrim game

Brandon Boyer — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 03:29:55 +0000

As if this week's teaser trailer premiere of Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World -- the film adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's cult hit comic series (which I have already watched about a thousand times) -- wasn't enough, the first images and details of Ubisoft's game adaptation have come via games culture shop AttractMode. Via AttractMode we learn that the game's art direction and sprite work is being handled by none other than pixel master Paul Robertson -- the same as behind ultra-cute/violent viral videos Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight and Kings of Power 4Billion% -- with music being led by local favorite chip/rock artists Anamanaguchi. While the images show off what appears to be at heart a side-scrolling arcade beat'em'up -- of the same type that would originally influence the comics themselves -- the visual chaos present in these first pics comes from their use backing Anamanaguchi's Penny Arcade Expo performance where they debuted their theme song for the game, graphically glitched and remixed by frequent chipscene visual collaborators Paris and Outpt. Below, then, are a selection of those first images, reprinted with permission, with several handfuls more available via Attract Mode, and video of Anamanaguchi's theme song performed live. Anamanaguchi's theme song performance, via Edgar Wright:

Previously:

Pirate Radio documentary

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:25:03 +0000

Matt "Pirate's Dilemma" Mason teamed up with VICE/Palladium to shoot a short documentary on the current state of pirate radio in London (with an excursion to an old sea fort). Lots of climbing on roofs, setting up bootleg electronics in parking garages, loud music, and running away from radio cops. Nice work.

Exploration #6 - London Pirate Radio (Thanks, Matt!)

Previously:

Homebrew Turing Machine

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:16:56 +0000

Mike Davey, a maker from Wisconsin, built a classic Turing Machine with a 1000 foot instruction tape that holds up to 10k. Though Turing's machine was just a thought experiment, the paper in which it is described has enough detail to create it in real life. The machining is absolutely lovely, and when it's in motion, it's a thing of beauty.

A Turing Machine (Mike Davey)

DIY Turing Machine (IEEE Spectrum))

(Thanks, Erico!)

Previously:

Documentary of Austin musician Kimberly Freeman on YouTube

Mark Frauenfelder — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 08:00:21 +0000

davidjr says: "I just filmed and released for free on YouTube my entire feature length documentary [One-Eyed Doll]. Didn't think the festival circuit would garner that many views, didn't want it to be in limbo, didn't think people would buy a DVD about a band they never heard of. I wanted to show my talents & the bands."

Punk rock meets poetics in an intimate view of Austin, Texas underground rock star, Kimberly Freeman, a beauty with an irresistible voice, magnetism and moves, who delivers a range of soulful original songs that reflect on her personal story and have a transforming influence on her fans.
Filmmaker davidjr.com, aka David Bruce Bates, Jr., creates a portrait of Kimberly Freeman and her One-Eyed Doll band with one camera in this on-the-scene 'gonzo' style tour through back roads, basement rock houses and clubs from Austin to Harlem. One-Eyed Doll is the 2010 & 2009 Austin Music Awards winner for Best Punk Band.

The trailer is above. Here's the full (1.5 hour) documentary

Hot Tub Time Machine

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:03:07 +0000

John Cusack, who will soon be joining us here at Boing Boing as a guestblogger, has a new movie out tomorrow, Friday March 26: Hot Tub Time Machine.

Ebert likes it, and that's about all I need to know. Those of you, both men and women, who are old enough to have enjoyed "electroclash" back when it was called "new wave" and came out on vinyl will likely find much to enjoy. It's sort Hangover meets H.G. Wells meets 80s nostalgia, meets a dude in a bear suit and sex jokes.

Cusack, as Ebert writes in his review, pretty much rules in everything—even goofy escapist fare such as this. As the Village Voice headline aptly explains, "The Delorean's a jacuzzi and the 80s are back." Snip from a Chicago Sun-Times interview:

Q. With a name like "Hot Tub Time Machine," you have a lot to live up to.
Cusack: I sort of thought it was the other way around. If you have a title like "Hot Tub Time Machine," that's a stupid title. Maybe people are going to think the people who made it have lost their mind completely. When they go in and see it, they're going to be so pleasantly surprised ... [Laughs] It's pretty hard for people to say "Hot Tub Time Machine" does not live up to the artistic expectations we had.
Q: Why did you decide to produce this movie?
Cusack: Grace [Loh, his production partner] and I thought this would be ... very smart, post-modern and very dumb. Post-modern in the way that you have a movie within a movie. You have actors who were in these '80s movies going back to movies that, it's almost like Crispin [Glover] and I and Chevy [Chase] kind of being trapped into a version of film youth. We thought that mixture could be a pretty fun ride for a comedy if you get it right.

Boing Boing readers and internet continuity extremists will note that the comedy contains a few elements of historical fudging with regard to when the internet and email were invented, and by whom. And that is why FSM invented comment threads, my children.

Hot Tub Time Machine.