Month: July 2010

U R A, Q T (E?)

Seven years in the making, Dungeon Escape is a flash homage to classic laserdisc games like Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace.

It was the project I used to teach myself Flash and Actionscript way back in Flash 5, and I’ve come back to it from time to time over the years between other projects to slowly add more rooms. This article convinced me that there’s money to be made from Flash games, which gave me the impetus to finish it recently, but apparently since that article was written all the sponsors who spend big money licensing flash games have ditched flash and moved on to iPad games. So, no big sponsorship, but at least I’ve finally finished it, and I’ve put it back in its quaint little home on my website where it’s lived for the past seven years.

Enjoy!

One brief caveat is that, since the game involves quickly clicking spots on the screen, you’re much better off using a mouse than a trackpad.

Strider is Angry Again

Given that:

  • All of the major consoles upgrade at pretty much the same time.
  • Consoles, speaking in terms of raw horsepower, are roughly equivalent to a mid-to-high-end PC when they are released.
  • Consoles, being specialized equipment, are generally cheaper than an equivalent PC.
  • Consoles, being a fixed hardware configuration, generally provide a better ‘user experience’ (EG there is no fiddling with hardware or drivers to get things to work, no incompatibility with minor OS components, etc etc).
  • Available PC hardware steadily gets better over time, while console hardware only gets better at the beginning of a “console upgrade” cycle

It seems fairly obvious that:

  • At the beginning of a “console upgrade cycle”, consoles will seem as or more attractive for gaming as current PCs, particularly for users who are not willing or not interested to shell out for a top-of-the-line PC.
  • As the console cycle continues, available low-to-mid range PCs will eventually meet and then exceed consoles in terms of pure hardware performance.
  • By the end of the console upgrade cycle, PCs will grow to be more attractive gaming machines than consoles.

… so can we PLEASE get away from the “OMG PC GAMING IS DEAD 4EVER!!!!111”, “PC GAMING IS BACK!”, “OMG CONSOLE GAMING IS DEDD FOREVAR!!1112!!!11!!!shift+one11” media cycle that repeats itself like every five goddamn years?

– HC