The folks behind the “got milk?” campaign have done one of the most impressive Flash sites I have seen to date. Get The Glass is a board game done in Flash Video based on 3d-modeled artwork. The whole thing left me speechless. (EDIT: The site was created by North Kingdom. Great job guys!)

While you may be tempted to skip the intro, don’t it done really well, and is completely worth seeing. Once you get to the game, you roll a di to progress. I’m pretty sure the faces of the di are actually done in papervision. If so I think that is the first commercial use of papervision I’ve seen. The mechanism for throwing the di is pretty nice too. it bounces all over your browser like it was the board of a board game. (EDIT: according to a comment it probably isn’t papervision)

Games spaces on the board are divided into one of three categories, mastermind, fortune or misfortune. Fortune and misfortune just send you back and forwards spaces, but mastermind is a set of Cranium-like challenges like word search, trivia questions, fill in the missing letters of the word, and just a whole lot of well done micro-games. At various stages though there are bigger mini-game challenges that range from arcade to puzzle and some frantic sucking up to a PMS-ing crime mom.

Throughout the game you are followed by the police who if they capture you take you off to Milkatraz prison. Here is the REALLY interesting part. You have to make a choice. Lose a life, spin a wheel that either really helps or really hurts you. OR! you can get a friend to bail you out. Cough up a friend’s email address (which they have to respond to in under a few minutes) and you get out of jail. Don’t try this on your own machine though or it will wipe out your own game.

The whole game is beautifully designed, animated and constructed down to the icy hill that gives the cop a good chance to catch up.

If you know which studio built this, let me know. I want to shake their hands. (and thanks to Scott Schnaars for forwarding it to me!)

I got my Wii and it kicks ass. The Wiimote is great and Wii Sports is addictively fun.

I actually waited in line at the local Toys R Us on the night before the Wii was be released. I NEVER do that sort of thing. I couldn’t sleep that night due to some lingering jetlag from going to Taipei and Singapore for Adobe Max so I thought I would put my insomnia to good use. To cut what could be a long story a little shorter, many hours passed and finally a clerk from the store came out to pass out tickets. I was #22 in a line of about 70 or so people.

THEY ONLY HAD 21!! *sigh*

Once regaining perspective and feeling in my now very cold toes, I headed home a bit disappointed.
The next day on eBay to discover 16,000 Wiis in auction with about 10 auctions closing each minute. There were so many that even snipers couldn’t go at all of them. I ended up getting a Wii for a decent deal considering there were pretty much no other bidders on that particular auction.

I got the Wii yesterday and am very happy with it. For a first generation of a completely different control scheme it is excellent. As always, Nintendo did their research and really made a solid product.

If you have a Wii, add me as a friend! Have your Wii send me an email or use my Wii console number:

1046 6605 9241 4673

The big highlights for me:

1. The acceptable angle is great. I can be at a really flat angle to the sensor bar and it still works well
2. Nintendo is pretty much the first console to use some more standards-based features like bluetooth for the wireless controllers (dunno about the 360 controllers). But even more impressive is that the memory is in the form of SD cards rather than proprietary memory.
3. I was surprised that I could still plug in my game cube controllers. I thought I was going to have to buy the classic controller for that.
4. The Mii. Rather than having some annoying account system on the box, it was made much more fun by having Miis. Miis are avatars that are surprisingly configurable. once you have your Mii(s) set up, they can be used to store settings or profile information in games. The game developers even have access to them. All of the Wii Sports games star you! Actually, the funniest was when some friends were over playing bowling I noticed that Ray’s and my Miis were sitting on the bench, hanging out with our friends in the game.
5. Miis deserve a second slot. You can even load the Miis into your Wiimote and take them with you to play on other systems. I wish I could do that with profile configurations for playing Halo on the 360.
6. power button on the Wiimote can also but the console into standby and wake it back up. You never need to touch the console except to swap discs.

The biggest disappointments are:

1. Only shipping with one Wiimote (controller). With the run on ALL accessories, it kinda sucks to only have one controller for what should be a party game system.
2. Having a big brick of a power adapter that only works on 120V input. I had been planning to bring it with me to Flash on the beach, but alas. (and I am not risking a power converter with my precious).
3. You can’t connect other bluetooth devices to the Wii as far as I can tell. It would have been nice to move images there through bluetooth rather than through SD (though that is still cool)
4. Wii Channels. Right now a lot of the information channels seem to be disabled (waiting for service to start). Also, the shopping channel has a pretty small selection to start with of the legacy games. I thought they were going to have pretty much the whole old software library. I would have liked it for the obscure games I could never find growing up. Plus $8 to re-play a game I probably bought for $15 to begin with seems a bit pricey, though I suppose in-line with mobile games.

For any wondering, Ray says I still throw like a girl even when it is virtual. Ah well, some things may even be too much for Nintendo to take care of.

Last month the winners were chosen for Red Bull’s Flash game building contest for college students, Red Bull Build. The student teams submitted game proposals, and the winning team is now building their game in a state of the art development studio built just for them in Orlando.

The team will be riding a red bull buzz for 21 days while making the game. During that time the judges from the contest will dropping in to offer some encouragement, advice, but mostly just hang out with the team. This weekend Jesse Warden and I will be there as the team wraps up their first week on the project. I can’t wait to see how it is going and hopefully will get the chance to post a few pictures.

The last book I worked on was Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Programming which was part of that big book series with the green spliny landscape on the front. The book was originally for Flash 6, but then Flash 7 appeared on the horizon and was re-factored for 7. As with most of the books that come out right after a product release, the concepts are still tied a little too much to the previous version since the authors haven’t really gotten into the workflow of the new version yet. This book was no exception. AS 1 abounds and the new features are only touched upon.

Also like most books that try to ride the wave of readers wanting to learn about a new version, the book doesn’t have staying power and goes out of print pretty quickly. Once again, no exception. The strange thing though is that the book seems to be doing better than ever despite being severely out-dated and out of print. I get email regularly asking for the files from the CD. It turns out that the book is available on Safari Bookshelf (without the relevant files). Also several community colleges decided to use the book as their text book.

All of this leads to a really funny email I got from a reader today. Ron writes that he was thinking about buying the book used on amazon just to get the CD but when he checked, the book is being marked up. Like all technical books, it retailed for $49.99 USD and was often marked down. In the used section of amazon there are three copies available ranging from $110-$141USD! Why on earth is there such a market for what amounts to a Flash 6 game development book plus a gentle introduction to OOP by someone who in retrospect really wasn’t qualified at the time to say much on the subject (me)? Most of my other titles are running at an average of $3 USD.

So if anyone wants to overpay for my book, let me know. I have signed collectors editions all set (well, I will once I go find a pen).

If you are one of those Safari Bookshelf readers that is looking for the CD source. There you go. If however you are from my publisher, Premier Press, let me know if you don’t want me putting the source up. At that point you can also explain why I don’t get royalties from the Safari readership.

The King of All Cosmos took the rainbow road and slid right into Flash in an online mini-game. If you have no idea what I am talking about, you probably haven’t played one of my favorite cult games, Katamari Damacy for PS2 (and soon for the PSP as Me & My katamari).

Katamari Damacy and its sequel We ♥ Katamari are two of the quirkiest games I’ve ever played. You play the part of the son of the King of All Cosmos who went on a bender and destroyed all the stars. You are sent to earth with a spiky ball and have to gather up items like building a snowball. The design, the music and overall Japanese-ness of this game have made it a classic. There were clearly no mediocrity police on duty when this was made.

I actually designed this blog right after beating the first game, and I am still a little embarrassed about how much I was unconsciously influenced by the design of the game.

BTW, a note about the king of all Cosmos. In the first game, every time you see the king he looks like he is smuggling the prince’s purple cousin Odeko in his trousers. In the second game, he was always in some way covered or blocked. Did someone actually complain or is the King just feeling modest these days?

Yahoo! Chess (login required) has been re-designed, re-coded and as of late last week, re-launched in Flash 7. Although Yahoo! has had several single player Flash games, this is the first of our core multiplayer games to be ported from Java to Flash.

As you can see, the design has been completely overhauled as well as the experience of the combined lobby gameplay area. In addition to the design and technical benefits, Flash provides Yahoo! Games with the ability to make a game once and deploy it to all platforms, a serious problem for a lot of the java games out there.

If you are a chess geek, give it a try and let me know what you think.