Wasted Seconds Wasting your precious time since 2009.

6Jan/111

Voxatron - Spiffy looking arena style shooter.

I haven’t seen a game quite like this in a while. The destruction in the video looks awesome and I can’t wait to play me some of this. Here’s from the site :

voxatron

Voxatron is an arena shooter that takes place in a world made of voxels (little cubes, kind of). Everything in the game is displayed in a virtual 128x128x64 voxel display, including the menus and player inventory. If you look closely, you can sometimes see the inventory (score/life/ammo) casting a shadow on some of the objects on the ground.

I've been working on voxel rendering and modeling tools for a long time now, with the ultimate goal of making a large explorey adventure game. About half a year ago it fused with work I was doing on arena shooters for Conflux, and this is the result.

It's quite a simple game at heart -- mostly just Robotron set in a 3d destructible world with goofy creatures. I'm unsure how major the implications of destructibility will be for gameplay, but it sure is fun to blast away pieces of wall. I've also added an experimental wall-building pickup you can use to construct barriers to hide from scary monsters.

The game takes place in a small set of arenas. Some of them feature rooms with set action pieces, somewhere between Knightlore and Smash TV. This is some of the original adventure based design sneaking back in, and an excuse to create thematic environments.

Features:
- Custom software rendering with soft shadows.
- Built-in sound and music synthesizer (also used to make the trailer music).
- Playback & post game recording.

Voxatron will be ready later this year, but I'll create a single-arena preview version too.

Hit the jump for a spiffy video. Thanks to Flare over on the GameGavel forums. One of these days I shall have the patience to do the type of games I want to do. Text based versions of shit I don’t play in the first place. That’s the master plan.

17Jul/100

Halfbrick’s “Blast Off” is free right now for the iPhone/iPod Touch and probably the iPad.

mzl.ylyhnfle.320x480-75 Yeah, the title says it all. Just snag it right here. This is one of those games that I played the trial for on the Xbox 360 and, while it was good, it lent itself to more of a portable platform like the iPod for me.

5Jul/100

Fast & Furious Adrenaline for the iPhone just got a fairly sizable update.

Fast-and-Furious-Adrenaline-iPhone Yeah yeah yeah, I’m well aware that this game doesn’t stand up to other racing games on the App Store like Need for Speed Shift, Real Racing, etc etc … but that doesn’t matter to me. Even though it doesn’t stand up quite as well, and it has it’s little hitches like the draw distance not being all that great. It’s still a pretty fun little game on the cheap at $1.99 and really shows how the games on this particular platform have evolved. It seems like they’re listening to the issues the players have with it and are working with them. Check out this list of stuff.

27Jun/100

Changing gaming habits and old systems.

Atari_2600 Are you the type of person who’s gaming habits constantly change? Maybe sometimes you play nothing but first person shooters for however long and then find yourself wanting to play an old school top down RPG. Or maybe you jump from system to system like I do. When you’re in a position like me and have lots and lots of choices … you tend to jump around. I have at LEAST 7 computers in this house of varying degrees of usefulness with literally thousands of games, an NES, a Retro Duo (a review of which is elsewhere on this site), Sega Genesis, 32X, various versions of the old Game Boy. A few PS1’s, a few Dreamcasts, a friggin’ Atari Lynx, a Playstation 2 and a ton and a half of those cheesy little Play and Play TV games … although I feel a little guilty not having the Atari Flashback 2 … my 29th birthday is soon. Bear that in mind. ;) And that’s not even all of them.

8Apr/100

Can’t afford an iPad? You still want that look of amazement from your friends?

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Now you can buy your very own iPad for 15 bucks. It boasts unlimited battery life, unlimited resolution and measures 7.47” x 9.56” … the catch? What catch. There’s no catch!

That’s because this thing does exactly what you expect, it is 25 sheets of paper (recycled paper to be precise because I know there are the environmental nuts out there) … and that’s it.

It’s an iPaperPad, and it’s available on Amazon for $14.97 for a 3 pack, and if you get it you may not get the look of amazement you were looking for from your friends. It may be a look of “What on Earth is THAT thing? 25 sheets? How much did you pay for this?”

My question is, why did they make it paper? Yeah yeah yeah the name makes sense. But spending 15 bucks on those washable marker white boards would make a little more sense. Hell, even a CHALK BOARD would have made more sense. At least the background would have been black.

Of course, they probably would have made it green.

BUT, naturally, this thing is in existence, and it’s kind of a weird little oddity that some of the more rabid Apple fans will probably scoop up. If you’re one of those, you can click the link above to see about buying this thing. Hit the jump for some pictures.

8Feb/100

Rise of the Triad for the iPhone/iPod Touch makes me very happy.

I have stated before that the old first person shooter called Rise of the Triad is one of my favorite first person shooters. It runs off of an enhanced version of the engine Wolfenstein 3D used, and unfortunately this game suffered from being released just at the WRONG time back in the day. And therefore, DooM ultimately killed it.

But regardless, the full version of this game is coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch which means I can bask in the fast paced pixelly awesomeness  of this shooter whenever the hell I want.

At least, later this year anyway. It's set to release in "early 2010" and includes everything the original game has.

All I've gotta say is hell yeah. And here's a gameplay video.

via TouchArcade