Ninjas! Robots! Heck, it’s even got This Product™. Jon’s new indie game, Ninja Robot Winning Gameshow, manages to be simple, challenging and humorous all at the same time. A little while back I posted a video of the gameplay prototype. The game is (mostly) finished and everyone can download and play it now:
Can anyone else say, “About time!”? I’ve had this almost ready to release for quite some time. But I wanted to add some finishing touches to it. There are more finishing touches that I’d like to add, but at least now it’s to a point where I feel like I can let other people download it, play it, and rag on it.
I especially appreciate Jon taking a moment in his announcement to talk about his objectives in making the game, and what tools and libraries he used.
The Good
- The game is easy to learn, but hard to master.
- Dig the background music.
- The ninja robot has a great sense of humor.
- Commercial breaks give you something to laugh about when you keep dying.
- Nice retro look and feel.
The Bad
- Controls are a little tricky – sometimes it isn’t clear whether you are allowed to change gravity or not
- The collision detection with spikes is a little too sensitive. Occasionally it seems off by a pixel or two.
- Commercial breaks are a little too frequent. Also, it would be nice if there were different “ads” that were shown.
- Background music tracks are chosen at random, which is OK, except you often get the same song two times in a row.
- Not much in the way of sound effects other than the robot speech.
The Ugly
- Not being able to play this on the iPhone.
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Shiny Apples: Award-Winning Mac OS X and iPhone Apps
If you are an Apple fan, your software picks this month have to be the winners of the 2009 Apple Design Awards announced this week at WWDC.
Burn Music CDs the Easy Way on Windows
Let’s face it: sometime you still need to burn an old-school music CD. Digital music players aren’t for everyone, and making a custom CD as a gift is still nicer than handing someone a bunch of zipped MP3’s. If you are running Windows, the easiest way I know to burn a music CD is with Burrrn:
Burrrn is a little tool for creating audio CDs with CD-Text from various audio files.
Supported formats are: wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets. You can also burn EAC’s noncompliant image + cue sheets! Burrrn can read all types of tags from all these formats (including ape tags in mp3).
I especially like the way it converts song information from your tags to CD-Text so that CD players can display song and artist info for each track. Very nice. Although Burrrn is free, please consider sending a small thank-you to the programmer by way of a donation.
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I’ve recently been playing around with my old Athlon XP 1800 box and Windows 7. There is no way Vista would approach usability on that old hardware, but Windows 7, suprisingly, does just fine! Most hardware was recognized out of the box, even a WiFi card that Windows XP never was able to find on its own. Except for my poor, old Sound Blaster Live! card from days of yore. He got completely ignored by Windows 7. Abandoned, actually. Poor guy. I think I heard a sniffle come from somewhere inside the case.
Fortunately, I remembered something interesting that I learned while working at Microsoft on printer drivers. The fact is, Microsoft bends over backwards to avoid breaking old drivers with new operating systems, especially ones immediately succeeding each other. Now, put that together with the knowledge that the Windows 7 driver model is almost the same as in Vista, and you might start to see where I’m going.
Since Vista came directly after XP, there is a good chance that those dusty old Windows XP drivers would still work with the Sound Blaster Live! on Windows 7 (and presumably Windows Vista, but I haven’t tried it). So I went to the Creative Support site, dug around in their archives (note: you have to do a search at the bottom of the product page to see all the downloads), and tada! Found some Windows XP Drivers for my old Soundblaster Live! model.
After waiting about a month for the driver to download from Creative’s craptacular file server, I was excited to finally get my Sound Blaster Live! card working. But upon running the installer, it flashed a message about not being able to find any Sound Blaster cards on my computer! Dang. Back to square one.
But wait…what’s this? After closing the installer, Windows 7 goes Clippy on me and suggests that I re-run the installer with some “suggested settings.” Sure, why not? And you know what? This time it worked! It actually worked! Wahoooo!
P.S. – Do you like to hack hardware? Ever wanted to mod a game console? You need these books!
Posted in How To | Tagged drivers, hardware, Windows 7 | 1 Comment »
Recently I was looking for a show to go see, and came across some reviews about Pixar’s new film, Up. The reviews were all positive, with everyone basically saying that Pixar had managed to come up with yet another great film. Pixar is one of those amazing companies that has figured out how to not only do something great the first time, but again and again.
In fact, most people get lucky the first time and spend their entire lives trying to duplicate that first success, with no real understanding of the principles that made them successful in the first place. But Pixar has made a conscious effort, since the beginning, to identify and reinforce such principles. And that’s the real secret to being great.
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Paul Thurrott writes about Windows 7:
Was it possible, even remotely, I wondered, that the Windows 7 RC had improved matters enough to make this OS usable on this old hardware, a machine that was slow and out of date the day I got it over two years ago? I didn’t think so, but I needed some UMPC shots for the book, so it didn’t really matter. I fired up Windows 7 Setup on the device and got to work.
To my surprise, it runs just fine. Not just acceptably, it runs well. It runs as well on this little piece of junk as it does on a 2009-era netbook. This UMPC has an 800 MHz Celeron processor and just 1 GB of RAM. It will not accept any USB memory keys for ReadyBoost purposes, so there’s no way to even improve the memory situation. But it doesn’t matter: Windows 7 just runs and runs and runs. It runs well enough to play a full resolution H.264 DVD rip in Windows Media Player (windowed or full-screen) without a hitch. In fact, I brought the thing to the gym Friday and watched 30 minutes of that movie while doing some cardio. Perfect.
Now, I don’t care if you think Steve Jobs is your own personal God and Microsoft is merely a footnote in history. You have to admit this is freakin’ amazing. I actually installed Windows 7 on my old Athlon XP 1800 box. And it runs like champ. But here is the most surprising thing of all: in some ways Windows 7 is even faster than Windows XP on the same hardware.
Prediction: Apple will spend millions on new commercials making fun of Windows 7. They will probably run some spots that try to paint Windows 7 as just Vista with a new set of clothes, a haircut, or some fancy makeup. This will be sadly hypocritical, because you can make the same argument against Mac OS X vs. BSD. But, at the end of the day, anyone who takes a genuine look at Windows 7 will have to admit Microsoft has done something, well, insanely great.
Tip: Be sure to rate your computer (search for Windows Experience Index in the start menu or control panel). Windows 7 will actually use the results to tune your system for better performance.
Posted in Random Stuff | 1 Comment »
