Introduction to The Suicidal Jumpman Ruby game aka ROFLBALT

Hi folks, the last 3 days were MADLY fun for me @ Railscamp X (Adelaide). I was blown away with beers, whiskey, Werewolfs, foods, geeks, hackers and their SUPERCOOL hacks. Dennis Hotson (@dennishotson) and Paul Annesley (@pda) decided to join force to create a game that if was released before Mario, it would probably take on the world. (Unfortunately it was 25 years later). The game goal is to sustain alive by jumping on the top of the building as long as possible.

It is interesting to see the progress that Paul and Dennis made, from such few characters to draw the man (not knowing jumping yet) and build blocks to animated jumpman chasing the helicopter which blasted to pieces if bumped into buildings (/w blood trails on the building). Paul and Dennis called the game ROLFBALT, for me I would call it the Suicidal Jumpan for its bloody ending scene. I rank this game 2nd after the Wolf3D clone Rubystein. Give it a try now at https://github.com/pda/roflbalt

Starcraft 2 for MacOS X

Is it worth the wait? My take is YES, It’s about time!

The game performance is so so poor on 10.6.4, please stay at 10.6.2 if you want to play at high fps. Apple is going to release a graphic patch soon.

Update: 10.6.4 Enhanced Graphic Stack update has GREATLY improved the FPS, now it’s smoother. Thanks Apple!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Google loves Pacman

PACMAN turns 30th today. Everybody loves Pacman, so does Google. To celebrate the 30th birthday, Google upload a fully playable Javascript Pacman game on google.com. If you click on Insert Coin button, you could play Ms.Pacman too.

The game is made with pure Javascript with Flash for Sound, which is a bit sux. There are few efforts to port the Flash to HTML5 audio, I will keep you up-to-date if there’s new progress.

UPDATE: The game went off from google.com today, if you missed out, you can play it at:

Official Google Pacman game

OR

Macek’s extracted version

If you want to play the game locally on your PC, please use GIT to clone the source at http://github.com/macek/google_pacman.

StarCraft 2 Beta for Mac OS X

Blizzard released the Beta Mac Client 2 days ago and I did not know the news until yesterday. So is the release worth the wait? Let’s check it out, shall we?

Similar to Windows release, the Digital Downloader download 2.99GB straight down to your computer. I expect that the final release would take whole 2 DVDs when it’s to be shipped with Single Player assets. On my slow connection, it took 3hrs to complete the download.

Once the download is complete, you will get a DMG file. Mount it up and simply click on the SC2 icon will install the whole SC2 into your Mac in seconds. I was in awe with the new GUI, it’s just full with details and attentions. Below is the screenshot of the patch downloader:

SC2 is probably one of the first game taking advantage of Torrent technology. While the patch is running, I discover few torrents file in the StarCraft folder

The game is resources hungry, it constantly use 120% of CPU resources (~ 2 cores). But it’s just a piece of cake on my 8 cores ;) . After I loggin, I turn all graphics to max and the game still play smoothly though. If you are a SC fan, you should buy a good spec computer before buying the game. A Q2400 and GT250 should do the job fine.

There are not much differences between the Windows version, except that you could resize the window size. I also encounter few glitches with vertex shading while playing, but I guess this is due to the crappy gfx driver. Apple should do a better job on graphic side, the driver just bite the dust compared to Windows driver.

Overall, Mac client is really stable and as good as Windows client. You now can tell people stop installing BootCamp with Windows on a Mac and stick to their OS X environment :) . If you want more screenshot or any info about SC2 on Mac, please feel free to contact me on Comment.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 57 other followers