Friday, June 09, 2006

Updates & More Updates

I have an ever-growing list of games to add. Soon the existing organisation of the games list will be inadequate so I'll be forced to think of how to make the list more scalable. I'm thinking of an AJAX driven table where I can assign more information to each game and make it orderable and searchable. However I don't want to commit to something requiring too much manual management; the current list is quite simple to maintain. Ideas on a postcard (or in a comment) please! Anything I can host on blogger.com is best.

Several games got recent updates; Empty Clip 1.0.2, OpenArena 0.4.1, and Vulture's 2.1.0 were some notable ones.

I downloaded Enigma which is a good test of your mouse handling ability. Inspired by two retro games I've never heard of, you manoevure a ball with the mouse to find matching stones. It was simple and fun, and felt like a complete game for what it is. As a potential distraction from work, I had to pay Enigma the compliment of deleting it immediately.

Next up was Yoda Soccer. First thing to note was that only the custom teams were avialable to play with - you need access to the original SWOS data to get the proper teams. Pressing ahead, I relished reliving the memories of repeatedly scoring the perfect Sensi goal. No such luck with Yoda Soccer; on Windows the game was unplayably slow - less than 1fps on my 1ghz laptop, unforgivable given the simple graphics. So I had to pay Yoda Soccer the insult of deleting it immediately. I reported the problem and will try it on Linux tomorrow.

Finally, testing my girlfriend's patience, I tried out Empty Clip. Again there were issues with performance - GUI elements made the game unplayably sluggish. When there was no GUI on-screen the game ran fine but I did not have the patience to stutter through the tutorials and initial stages of the games which were littered with GUI pop-ups. Still it looked fun and, again, I reported the problem and will try again on Linux tomorrow.

I've got a 3D space game special lined up for tomorrow. Ciao 'til then, folks!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I got quite excited by yoda soccer when I saw that screenshot. I'm a little disappointed however. It has one unintuitive ui, I had to resort to reading the forums to figure out how to start a match. And there also seems to be a bug where the "fire" buttons don't work, again reading the forums to confirm that, and all it said was wait for the next version :( On the plus side watching 2 cpu teams play didn't give me any frame rate trouble on my nearly 3 year old 3GHz pc in linux.

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