So I took a look at Gameshot.org because of a few referrals they sent back here (they grabbed our LUV Tank game) and noticed this pleasant surprise on their front page…
At first I was attracted to the awesome art style. All pretty pixel work. The description said something about it being a platformer with a Yin Yang twist so I wanted to see if it went beyond a gimmick. I was impressed before I even finished the first stage.
I was reading a GameSetWatch post about an interview with the Panzer Dragoon creator and I thought to myself, “Shit, I still haven’t managed to play Panzer Dragoon Saga yet!” If you’re not familiar with the game, it was the last installment of the series on the Sega Saturn, a 4-disc epic RPG. It’s regarded as one of the greatest RPGs but the catch is that it was released in extremely limited quantities in North America. I’ve heard rumors of something like only 25,000 copies were created since it was the end of Saturn’s life-cycle. Copies run for about $120 to this day.
So I went to find out if it was emulated yet. I managed to find a torrent of not only Panzer Dragoon Saga but Radiant Silvergun as well. Regarded as one of the best shooters ever but never released stateside. The game was created by Treasure. I became a Treasure whore solely because of Guardian Heroes but I never imagined what could be so great about a shooter game. Copies of this game sell for up to $200. I finally understand what the hype was about. This is an amazing game.
Gateway II by Anders Gustafsson.
This is one of first Flash games I’ve truly enjoyed in such a long time. I discovered this adventure game on the Newgrounds frontpage and gave it a legitimate chance. It reminded me of Leo’s Great Day, one of the first amazingly well done Flash games I’d played, so I had optimistic expectations. From the title screen I could tell that it at least had great production quality.
I just checked out this impressive port of the Doom engine to Flash. It even loads up the original external .wad map files!
It might not be the first Flash port, but it’s definitely the first that resembles the original in speed and resolution. I could totally imagine playing some deathmatch in this thing. Can’t wait till something like that is available.
It’s also worth nothing that this was not created using Flash. It was developed on Linux using open-source/free Flex tools.
This reminds of back in 2001 or so when I saw a demo for a Quake 3 looking engine in Shockwave running incredibly fluidly. I recall it being a Q3 port of some sort because it was created by the same company that ported Q3 to Dreamcast, Raster Productions. I’m assuming it was some kind of port because they removed the demo after a short while, I believe because of legal matters.
This is one of the most awesome games I’ve ever seen. You shouldn’t be surprised that it’s so amazing, its contents consist of ladies slapping the crap out of eachother! Comedy and genius.
Here’s a YouTube video of the gameplay. Watch and be amazed as the drama unfolds.
You’ve got to play Rose&Camellia by Nigoro.
I purchased a new Lenovo desktop about a month ago to replace my poorly aged HP laptop. Yay! Windows Vista. Amazingly pretty isn’t it? In spite of the bugginess and the lagginess, I think the interface is a big improvement over XP. Anyway, I stumbled upon my Half-Life 2 disc in a random CD spindle and decided it’d be a good time to reinstall it cause I haven’t had it installed for a couple years.
It’s good that you don’t need a CD key for the game! Especially since I don’t have the box on hand. That’s all verified through your Steam account. Luckily I remembered mine. Unfortunately, you still require a net connection so it sucks for the fools still living in the 1800s without electricity and running water. It took about an hour 🙁 to get all the updates for HL2 and Counter-Strike: Source. But I’m happy now and that’s all that matters.
Steam is my new best friend.
Since it’s so much easier to post links to other peoples’ material…
Relating to an earlier post by Chris – A Day at the Wiicade – where he was exploring the possibilities of Wii & Flash, here is Wiiflash!! Wiiflash is what Chris was waiting for, actually this still won’t be enough for him… but apparently this software not only takes the data from the Wii controller but it passes it along to Flash so you can make things move by tilting and swinging and whatnot. This is possible by connecting Wii remote to a computer through Bluetooth. So no native Wii support still but this is better for sure!
It would be great if Nintendo would acknowledge the possibilities with Flash gaming on Wii, but it seems unlikely because they’d rather have you buy Virtual Console titles. They’re still selling out of hardware so there’s not a big incentive to make things easier for Flash game devs. But in a perfect world…
By the way.
I jacked this – verbatim – from another Flash game development blog, PhysicsDev. Check it out!
-Bryson
I know Chris just wrote something about the game but we’re often redundant like that.
The game is Reunion by Mike Bithell, I found it on GameSetWatch a few days ago. This is an amazing game. I believe the execution is phenomenal. I need more big sounding words to show how much I like it! Immediately the game reminded me of something I’d see coming out of Cal Arts, such incredibly good design going into it.
“I like to jump. You like to jump. My mom likes to jump. We all like to jump.” – My 6th grade jump instructor
Little Loki Escapes from Hell, which I developed at Liquid Generation, was my first experience developing a reflex based platformer game. It was the result of a bit of brainstorming and a good deal of freedom during the calm storm between projects. It was the type of project I’d been wanting to develop for a while and I dived in. I invite you to read about a story of its development.
Hello everybody! I am Bryson Whiteman, the one and only. And I’m here to say a few words about all this Sokay business. It may seem like all this happened over night. 
Like I put it all together as I do Ikea furniture, spending half a day flipping pieces around trying to match them to the clearly illustrated drawings, sweating and frustrated, cursing when the drawer turns out to be upside down. I’d like to squash all these rumors and confirm to you once and for all that all this Sokay business did not happen over night. It happened over the course of many nights, as a matter of fact, and I’d like to say some words about it.
In 2002 I created the Sokay label with my good old friend Ricky Enriquez. We had just began work on a new project, a video game made in Flash. The then un-named project was meant to push our capabilities as far as possible. We saw the success of the format in games like Alien Hominid and wanted to go even further to provide an experience similar to popping that new cart you got for your birthday into your Sega Genesis. We weren’t aiming to simply make a single stage. We wanted to create a full game. With a full world. And characters that lived in the world, that weren’t just placed there arbitrarily. This project became Thugjacker, which is the first game released by Sokay.
Ricky and I had worked together on many projects over the course of several years at that point, nothing that ever came to completion. Comics and animations mostly. Thugjacker was our first game. We designed a pipeline that was adapted from a previous Flash project and just saw where it lead us. I worked with my lack of actionscript experience and kept it real, we didn’t want to lower expectations just because it was difficult. We were going to make something that we were proud of.
We released a 2 level demo of Thugjacker to the world on Thugtober 31st, 2004. A month prior to that we released a teaser animation. I was biting my nails because I had no idea how the world would react to it. The game impressed colleagues, fellow artists, but I had no idea how the general public would interpret it. I discovered soon that it was a success, all the work paid off. The release changed the direction we headed.
It wasn’t until this year that significant movement has taken place within the group. 
On February 27th of this year we released LUV Tank. It was a small project that I intended to jumpstart the team again. A few new members join in with David Rodriguez creating the concept and doing the character animation and the duo Trek & Ryan G contributing a soundtrack. Ricky returned to do the cinema scenes and I did the design, planning, Flash work and background art. A much different game but it retained that “Sokay Spirit”.
So what are we doing here? The point of this blog was to get out some ideas. I quickly discovered that there’s a lot more work that goes into game development than one would imagine without the firsthand experience. It’s great to think of great ideas for the “ultimate game” but it’s incredibly difficult to fill in the gaps of your idea to make it a cohesive experience. And it’s even more difficult to make it a fun and enjoyable to a wide array of people. I look at a lot of these principles as common sense because these are qualities that I’ve absorbed from a lifetime of game experience. I’m also keen with expressing these ideals as I’m trained as an artist. It’s great that we have this internet as a vast resource and our technology is all peachy these days so anybody with a bit of spare time and a bit of patience can bust out a game in Flash and show it to the world. 
There’s a lot of talented people out there. But for one reason or another they don’t seem to “get it” or maybe don’t have the determination to “make it happen”, when it comes to making quality work. I thought things were kind of bad a couple years ago when we released Thugjacker but it seems that things have grown even more diluted. More people are out there making stuff but they’re making average games. But if you dig, you just may find gold. And you will. I still think our work is “buried treasure” and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Sometimes it takes time for people to notice brilliance.
You might consider this blog an excercise in arrogance. There’s no problem with that. If you disagree, call us on our bullshit and fight back. We want to bring about discussion of serious topics about a medium that often is not taken very seriously. Sometimes you have to fight for the truth, even if it’s your own.
That’s all for now, thanks for reading! I know that fool Chris types too much but we want to make this a varied experience. I don’t care to get as serious as Chris a lot of the time so we’ll see how things turn out.
Adieu.
-Bryson
Sokay is a Los Angeles native game development crew.
The say it never rains in Southern California.
At Sokay, we make it rain.
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