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Filed under: Fun, Games

Fullmoon: delicious ten-minute Time-Waster

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 12th 2009

Fullmoon is one of those delightful little games where you almost don't want it to be over. A bit like Portal, I guess. You know the end is coming -- all too soon, usually -- but... you can't stop. The end be damned! You just have to shut your eyes, finish the last puzzle and pray there's a sequel (which I'm sure there will be in this case!)

This isn't your standard pixel-hunting point-and-click affair. It's actually a lot easier than most Flash games. This probably won't last you more than the ten or fifteen minutes it takes you to drink your morning coffee -- but that's OK! Games don't have to be long -- they only have to be enjoyable.

Read more →

Tags: flash, point and click, PointAndClick, puzzle, time-waster

Filed under: Developer, OS Updates, BlackBerry, Mobile Minute

Mobile Minute: Open GL and Flash support coming soon to your Blackberry

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 10th 2009

Not being pretty and white, nor slender, shiny and fashionable, the BlackBerry devices don't get as much attention as its SoCal sister the iPhone.

But that doesn't mean the clever folks over at RIM aren't busy developing and releasing exciting new technologies for their latest OS 5.0 devices! You just don't hear about them quite so often, which I hope to rectify with this little bit of news. As covered by our clever cousins over at Engadget, you can expect the following additions and changes to soon become available:
  • Open GL ES support -- this is the big one. This is the single change which will see the BlackBerry shift away from the black-straight-edged-suits and more towards the cool-chic-students. The developer kit is already out, so games makers should really get on to that right now...!
  • Extensive Adobe technology support -- not only will we be seeing great Flash support (as covered by Engadget Mobile previously), there will also be more integration with rest of the Adobe Creative Suite.
  • And much more -- the BlackBerry Payment Service, Theme Studio, and Advertising Service will all make an appearance at the end of 2009 or beginning of 2010.
These changes should cover all Storm and Curve owners, along with anyone that's lucky enough to own a Storm2!

So what does the iPhone do that the BlackBerry devices don't?

Does RIM really have to release a white-plastic-and-aluminum BlackBerry...?

Tags: blackberry, flash, iphone, opengles, RIM

Filed under: Fun, Games, Internet, Time-Wasters

Scare yourself senseless with Inculcation -- Halloween Time-Waster

Time Wasterby Sebastian Anthony Oct 30th 2009


I didn't really know what to expect as Inculcation loaded up. 'Best played in the dark with your sound turned up loud' the loading screen tells me. Gulp. I'm not a fan of horror films or games. I accidentally scroll down a bit while it's loading and see a small snippet from the game's author: 'A Point & Click survival horror inspired by Silent Hill, Resident Evil and Exmortis.' Oh shi--

Unsurprisingly, you start off in a room with nothing. It's the de facto rule that all of these Room Escape puzzles share: you don't know how you got there, or why you're there, but damnit -- you're there, and you need to find a way out!



Inculcation is the first room escape game that I've played with real-time combat elements. There are actually monsters -- zombies? -- that pop up and require shooting. Fortunately it's very easy to shoot them dead, but it does mean that you occasionally lose health. There are syringes about the place that can restore your health.

Mostly the gameplay is what you'd expect from such games -- pick up objects, open doors, solve rudimentary riddles that involve some observation skills. It is nothing special in this regard -- in fact, some of the puzzles feel a little random and rely on guesswork rather than applying your knowledge of the game.



I played through the first house in Inculcation, and I can tell you this now: the enhanced elements of music, artistic direction and creatures that can actually kill you really add to the tension, the danger. I admit I yelped out loud a few times. I admit my hand slipped off the mouse a few times when attacked by zombies. I admit I'm a wuss when it comes to the horror genre.

There's one part in the first house where a door shakes -- as if something is behind it, desperately trying to get out -- and it keeps shaking. Over and over. Louder and louder. And when it finally comes to open the door... well... you're in for a big surprise. Give it half an hour of your time at least -- you won't regret it...

[via JayIsGames]

Tags: flash, games, halloween, horror, room escape, RoomEscape, scary, time-waster

Filed under: Security, Social Software, web 2.0

Bad guys now launching attacks through hacked Facebook apps

by Lee Mathews Oct 19th 2009

Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook can already be dangerous places. Things like short links and bogus messages from friends with compromised accounts put unsuspecting and under-prepared users at risk.

Now, AVG's security researchers have discovered a new threat on Facebook. For the first time, they've found hacked Facebook apps. According to AVG, the apps are being used to launch drive-by attacks which target vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash. AVG reports finding seven hacked apps, but they admit there could well be more.

First things first: if you're not running up to date versions of either of those, download them right now. Here's the link to Flash and here's one for Reader. Using anything but the most current version could leave you open to attack.

The attack works like this. Visit the Facebook page for any of the hacked apps and click to install. Instead of the normal process, the page will try to push a poisoned PDF document to your machine. Once open, the infected PDF infects your system with a bogus antivirus application - which are often notoriously difficult to remove.

I've mentioned fake antivirus programs like these before on Download Squad. If you've been infected, you can try the tools listed on this post to clean up your system.

To keep from getting infected in the first place, make sure you:
  • have a good antivirus program installed and that it is fully updated
  • update browser plugins like Java, Flash, and Adobe Reader as soon as you are prompted to do so
  • install any critical Windows updates that are available
  • check comments on new apps before you install - others may have already been infected and left a post on the wall!

Tags: adobe, avg, facebook, facebookapps, flash, hack, hacked, pdf

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters

Tetris'd - reverse Tetris Time Waster

Time Wasterby Jay Hathaway Oct 17th 2009

I've seen a ton of Tetris variants in my day, and Tetris'd is a wild one. It's not even a puzzle game: it's a platformer, with Tetris blocks as the platforms. You play a tiny, acrobatic person (a ninja, maybe?) who can jump and climb on the blocks as they fall, and the object is to survive for as long as possible without getting squished or falling off the board.

The controls are tricky: there are only arrows, a grab and climb button, and a button to jump onto a midair piece. Theoretically, you could get pretty high in the air by jumping up onto a series of falling blocks, but I found the controls a little too unresponsive to do that effectively. It's still a fun game, though, especially when you manage to pull off a clutch move to escape certain death. Like in real Tetris, pieces fall faster as the game goes on. Unlike in real Tetris, lines never clear, so you just have to keep climbing up and up and up ...

Tags: blocks, flash, game, platformer, tetris

Filed under: Developer, Games, Adobe

Adobe Flash CS5 converts Flash to iPhone apps

by Jay Hathaway Oct 6th 2009

Flash is coming to the iPhone! Well, sort of. Adobe is showing off a new feature of Flash CS5 Professional that will convert Flash/Actionscript into iPhone apps. The public beta of CS5 with Flash Platform is due out later this year, but for now, you can test out some iPhone games that were created with the new system. For comparison, check out the puzzle game Chroma Circuit on the web and then on the iPhone.

This is good news for Flash developers who want to get their games into the App Store without having to write iPhone-native apps themselves, especially because it allows them to reuse the same code on the web or on Flash-friendly mobile platforms. This might mean that we'll see some of our favorite Flash time-wasters on the iPhone, too. There's also the possibility that the App Store will be flooded with the same awful Flash games that plague the web now. Developing a lame Flash game for the web doesn't have the same $99 pricetag that signing up for the iPhone developer program does, though, so that might keep the quality of iPhone game offerings from taking a huge dive.

Tags: adobe, cs5, flash, games, iphone

Filed under: Security, Mozilla, Beta, Browsers

Turn your head and cough, Firefox! Mozilla's plugin check is live

by Lee Mathews Oct 5th 2009


Whichever browser you happen to be using, there's more to keeping it up to date than running automatic updates for the browser itself. There are all those nasty plugins -- like Flash, Java, and Quicktime. Each one presents new opportunities for malware pushers, so an outdated plugin can put an unsuspecting web user at great risk.

Mozilla announced a while back that they were tweaking the "What's new?" landing page to alert users to possible danger. After a Firefox update installs the page is displayed in a new tab when your browser re-opens, hopefully urging you to update an unpatched Flash player.

Taking things a step further is the new Plugin Check, which looks at all the popular plugins. If things are up to date, you'll see only green "Learn More" buttons. If you fall behind and aren't running the latest version but there's no major risk, you'll get a yellow "Update" button.

If there's a known exploit fixed by a newer version of a plugin, you'll get an un-subtle red "Update NOW." And in the event that some horrible exploit is floating around with no known patch, the button will offer to disable the offending plugin for you.

Am I the only one daydreaming about a 1950's style public service announcement warning Johnny about this sort of thing?

"Not so fast, Johnny! You shouldn't be browsing with that old Flash Player plugin. Haven't your parents talked to you about unsafe browsing?"

Tags: firefox, flash, java, mozilla, online-safety, plugins, quicktime, security

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters, Web

The Walls are Not Cheese - cheesy Time Waster

Time Wasterby Jay Hathaway Sep 23rd 2009

The Walls are Not Cheese is an old-school pixelated platform game. It's so old-school, in fact, that your character is a square. While the graphics may not be that detailed, the gameplay is pretty entertaining: you shoot your way through soft walls that make you suspect the game's title is a lie.

Blasting through the walls gets you into new rooms, but your ammo is limited.To replenish your shooting power, you have to suck up the debris from the walls (not cheese?) that you've previously demolished. Jumping over pits and tangling with enemies is par for the course, as in any platform game.

If you're the cheating type, you can make The Walls are Not Cheese a little easier by digging a tunnel in the floor or ceiling and using it to avoid the obstacles in each level, but it's more fun to play it straight.

Tags: 8-bit, flash, game, platform, walls are not cheese, WallsAreNotCheese

Filed under: Business, Developer, Adobe

Adobe gets into advertising biz, teams up with Gigya

by Jay Hathaway Sep 21st 2009

After Adobe's recent acquisition of analytics giant Omniture for $1.8 billion, there was a lot of speculation that Adobe was beginning a foray into the advertising. Now we've got some more clues, since Adobe's partnering with Gigya, a company that distributes widgets and advertising. Now, Adobe's got its fingers in every part of the process, from content creation to ads to analytics.

Adobe's new Distribution Manager lets developers share their Flash widgets on 70 sites, tracks traffic for the widgets, and serves ads. Destinations include Facebook, MySpace and iGoogle, amongst others. It also supports mobile devices, including Windows Mobile and Symbian phones. The iPhone is also (sort of) supported, but without Flash, the widgets have to be part of approved app store apps. Developers can follow their traffic and ads with - what else? - an Adobe Air app.

[via Techcrunch]

Tags: adobe, ads, advertising, distribution, false, flash, widgets

Filed under: Security, Adobe, Mozilla, Browsers

Firefox catches 50% with insecure Flash, only 30% click through to update

by Lee Mathews Sep 18th 2009


Two weeks ago Mozilla prepared a new landing page for Firefox updaters to check for outdated versions of the Adobe Flash Player plugin. When the page went live last week for some six million Firefox 3.5.3 and 3.0.14 users, Mozilla compiled some interesting -- and disconcerting -- statistics.

Just over 50% of users shown the page were found to be running an insecure Flash Player version. That's an alarming number, especially considering the number of times Flash vulnerabilities have been exploited in the past two years alone.

The bad news doesn't stop there. As it turns out, the warning only convinced about 30% of viewers to click through and immediately update the plugin.

When you consider the amount of time most people spend browsing and massive number of threats lurking on the Internet maintaining a secure, updated browser is imperative. That, of course, means keeping plugins like Flash and Java up to date and there's no time like the present to do it.

Hopefully Mozilla's next push will meet with more success.

Tags: firefox, flash, flash-player, plugin, vulnerabilities, vulnerability

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters

Meloball: addictive, bounce-tastic Time Waster

Time Wasterby Jay Hathaway Aug 17th 2009

It's not often that I run across a Flash game so addictive that I have to pull myself away to write about it, but it's a feat of epic willpower that I'm not still playing Meloball right now. Sure, it's fun to watch a ball leaves the launcher and lazily pick up colored bricks and stars, but there's more to Meloball than that. It's all about the medals. It doesn't take much to pass a level, but to achieve silver or gold medals, you need to take out most or all of the bricks on the screen.

If you're a perfectionist, I suggest you clear your schedule for the rest of the day before you start playing Meloball. Restarting levels over and over until you find the perfect spot on the launchpad, the perfect angle, and the perfect velocity can take up a lot of time. It probably doesn't help that the reward for your obsession is a selection of new levels to unlock. If you've got an hour or two, though, follow the bouncing ball

Tags: bounce, bricks, flash, game, meloball, time-waster

Filed under: Utilities, Video, Windows

SilverX converts Flash video to Silverlight

Windowsby Jay Hathaway Aug 14th 2009

SilverX is a Windows app that converts Flash (.SWF) videos to Microsoft's Silverlight format. It recognizes all the vectors, images, text and animations from the original Flash file, so you can extract all of those elements and edit them in a Silverlight app later. If you want to manipulate the individual elements, you can edit them like any other Silverlight solution, and even apply XAML. If you just want to play the movie back in your browser using Silverlight, you can do that too.

There's not a lot of fiddling necessary to use SilverX. Just pick a SWF file and an output directory, and everything happens under the hood. You can either output the file as a standalone app or a Silverlight solution. To work with solutions, you'll need Microsoft's Expression Blend 3 or Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

[via AddictiveTips]

Tags: convert, flash, silverlight, silverx, swf, vector, video, xaml

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters, Web

Red Remover - physics puzzle Time Waster

Time Wasterby Jay Hathaway Aug 10th 2009

Red Remover is colorful physics puzzle where every part of a level can be moved in some way. The object of the game, as the title would suggest, is to remove all of the red pieces on the board. Light red pieces are easy, because you can click them and they'll disappear. Dark red ones are a bit more tricky: you have to manipulate other pieces to cause them to fall off the screen. That's not all, though: you also have to make sure not to lose any green pieces in the process.

Red Remover offers 45 levels of puzzle fun, with some bonus levels to unlock at the end. The first 10 levels are straightforward enough, because gravity moves in the usual direction. When things fall, they fall down. Later on, pieces each have their own gravity, and they can fly off the screen in any direction. Timing eventually becomes quite important, and you'll need to bump pieces into one another at a precise moment to keep your green guys safe.

Tags: flash, game, physics, puzzle, red-remover

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters

Bubble Boom - chain reaction Time Waster

Time Wasterby Jay Hathaway Jul 31st 2009

Bubble Boom is a fun, simple Flash game that's all about chain reactions. You play by placing a single expanding bubble, and hoping that enough other bubbles run into it to clear the level.

When bubbles hit your chain and expand, they only stay onscreen for a short time, and if nothing runs into them, your chain is over.

There are also some special colored bubbles that have a wider burst radius, or provide extra points or multipliers. The game is ridiculously easy to play, but the bubbles move so fast that it's hard to apply any strategy.

If you're a chess person, Bubble Boom is probably not for you. If you're the kind of person who enjoys popping sheets of bubble wrap, on the other hand, definitely give it a try.

Tags: bubble-boom, flash, game

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters

Push is a quirky, challenging platformer - Time Waster

Time Wasterby Jay Hathaway Jul 27th 2009

The platform game, centered on running and jumping action, has been around so long that's it tough to introduce new innovation to the genre. Push is a Flash game that manages to twist platform conventions by introducing a force field effect that you can use to push part of the terrain and clear a path for your character. The controls are a bit difficult to manage, and the graphics are very basic, but Push is a good time waster because the harder levels are really challenging.

The object of each level is to reach a yellow goal square by running, jumping and pushing. There are plenty of ways to die: you can fall, you can accidentally get squished if you let go of your force field at the wrong time, or you can hit obstacles. The problem is that you run and jump using the arrows keys or WASD on the keyboard, but you push by pointing and clicking. The combination of keyboard and mouse controls was frustrating, and ultimately turned me off before I beat any of the hardest levels. If you have the patience, though, Push will reward you with 75 different maps and a terrain editor that lets you build custom levels.

Tags: flash, game, platform, platformer, push, time-waster

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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