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Defcon is the latest release from game developer Introversion and places you in power of that lovely shiny red button while being safe in a nuclear bunker yourself! You have radar bases to scan the sky, airfields ready to arm and launch your fighter planes into the sky, but ontop of that, missile silos that either attack or defend, submarines, carriers and battleships all to fight in the sea! Certainly Defcon is one wild game, defiantly worthy of a review even if you have to pay out the whooping €17.40 for the full game. However, from 6pm on August 24th - 6pm on August 27th [Both times GMT] Defcon will be allowing everyone to try the full game out for free! All usual demo restrictions are going to be lifted and like magic, everyone can play! So head on over to the website, download the demo and get ready for the preview weekend!
Another Open Coffee, another video for you to watch! Really enjoying these, hope to see more of them, lets me be there without being there! Just a damn shame I missed the live stream! Anyway, watch! Some interesting talk on Jaiku, Twitter and Social Networking in general!
Watch it here!
This is a new amazing tool I found online over at texone.org. Built in Java with the prohtml tool its certainly something everyone should check out and do with their own website! Just pop in your url into the applet and off it goes making your own sitemap forest!Make your sitemap forest here!
[Sidenote: This is my 100th post! Hurrah!]
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Net Neutrality, a problem? Of course! However, there is a few flaws in this, if we really wanted a “Neutral” net, some of us wouldn’t be able to get faster broadband than others! However thats not the case is it? But if you take the case of having to pay ISP’s so that your website loads faster or actually loads at all! Ridiculous! Its amazing what power hungry companies can come up with these days really! Typical if it was to start somewhere it would start in the USA!
Well I have a few blog posts in progress but none of them totally complete, and rather than give you all a half-done post or no posts for today, I figured I’d do a video of the day! Haven’t done one in a while, so here it is! My favorite comedian! Tommy Tiernan!
Since MultiText closed down, which is a damn shame. JSMS is out, it is made by Finbarr Brady. Who worked on Multitext. It is a much better application considering it is cross platform! Thats right, it works on Windows, Linux and Mac. All you need is the latest version of Java. Really anything above 1.5 . Screenshot of the interface here:
As you can see its lovely and simple! It has some great features as well, for instance if you put your mouse over the message count it will show you the last message you sent, group texting and auto downloading of your contacts from Meteor/O2/Vodafone website. The fact that it is cross platform really sells it to me, aswell as it being Open source! I’m running it under Ubuntu at the moment and not a single issue! Everyone should head over and get it, give those websites a break, they are too slow to load anyway!
“blognation” has today launched with its aim to give you the latest news from the world of Web 2.0 and mobile in Ireland! I wish the best to Conor O’Neill with the blog and I’m sure its going to be another great one to follow! On that note, I love the design of blognation, especially when you click the “Share This” on a post, certainly very professionally done! Anyway, what are you waiting for? Head over and check it out here!
So, after a few weeks of Ubuntu, I admit I’m missing Guild Wars. After Grid Wars its my favorite game. So I went upon the path of trying to get it to work under WINE. Now apparently this works for some people, for others… not so much! I’m classed under the others, maybe I’m just not expierenced enough with Linux and WINE itself to be able to understand the errors, and really in my opinion of the people at Ubuntu Forums can’t help its a lost cause! However, I just found out today that Cedega by TransGaming Inc. officially supports Guild Wars running under Linux. So I’m going to go for that option, since it’s officially supported I don’t know how I would have any problems with it! But if anyone can get it to NOT work, it’d be me! I seem to be stuck with luck that way, the small precentage. Gotta say I love it! Anyway, I’ll talk more about Cedega once I get it! I’ll let you all know how it goes; if anyone has any expierence with it I would love to hear about it!
However, I reccomend everyone try’s the WINE way, which you can get a step by step guide of how to do right here.
Sean:Well firstly thanks for your time Mark for this interview, never imagined I would get to interview you! When did you create Grid Wars? Mark: Grid Wars was started in mid December 2005. Initially posted on yakyak board in mid January. It was an interactive development. People tested, gave feedback and I incorporated suggestions almost daily. I think by February I had reached version 2.0 and hence the name change to Grid Wars 2. Further development eventually led to version 5.4 (Various milestones along the way - Linux and Mac builds, etc)
Sean: Was Grid Wars your first Open source game to create or have you made others? Mark: Most of my games have included source code with them. I’ve learned much from various games over the years by peering into the code. See here.
Sean: How long did it take you to make Grid Wars and what inspired you to do it? Mark: Grid Wars sort of evolved over the course of a couple months. I started with the fluid grid effect and added various enemy types to the framework. I had many more ideas that were pruned out - the public mostly wanted a Geometry Wars game for PC - so I was pushed in that direction. Initially it was inspiration from playing Geometry Wars that is what got me to reproduce the grid effect. But after that it was my love of vector, shooty games that kept me going.
Sean: What coding language is Grid Wars written in, and did you face any problems in making the game cross platform? Mark: It is written in BlitzMax (OO C/Basic mix) and with minor changes to music handling and directx/opengl layers it easily compiled to Linux and Mac versions.
Sean: Do you have any new projects in the works? Mark: I’m working on several new game ideas (in what little spare time I have, unfortunately) in September 2006 I completed coding Polarity+ which was released shortly after. I just completed another 360 shooter, a sequel of sorts to GridWars called AtomHex. It’s being evaluated by some publishers and should be available for download any day now (hopefully this year!) Next up should be Trinistar - a sorta sequel to Sinistar.
Sean: Thats perfect! Thanks again for your time Mark!
Interested in playing Grid Wars? Check out my previous post on it which includes download links!
Digg it! 
However thats not the case is it? But if you take the case of having to pay ISP’s so that your website loads faster or actually loads at all! Ridiculous! Its amazing what power hungry companies can come up with these days really! Typical if it was to start somewhere it would start in the USA!
