Gaming

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Notch, the author of the bestselling Minecraft game, officially announced his next creation: a space MMO called 0x10^c.
No, that's not scientific notation for zero times 10 to the power of the speed of light; rather, it's the hexadecimal code for 16 raised to the power of 12.
This is 2⁴⁸, or a really really big number that presents the backstory for the game: people go into stasis in sleeper ships from the 1980s and wake up a trillion years in the future due to a computer glitch. The universe is in the final days of entropy, so there are black holes everywhere and little else.
Energy is at a premium, since almost all the stars have burned out, but your spaceships are governed by 16-bit computers designed when the Super Nintendo was popular.

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If you've been a gamer for a long time, you probably remember these blasts from the past. If any of them are new to you, then you should definitely check them out because they are all genuine classics that helped to define or redefine their genres. These online video game remakes are so amazing, they're just like playing the originals - only better in some cases!

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If you play World of Warcraft, you've probably been pleasantly surprised that the latest expansion has upped the difficulty level considerably. The 7 new dungeons present a decent challenge even on normal difficulty, and require your group to have a basic understanding of each fight. Here's a quick-reference guide for each of the bosses in all the new Cataclysm dungeons that you can refer to until you remember them.

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Even though I'm an experienced programmer fluent in several languages, and even though AS3 is syntactically identical to Java/C++, there have been several things that have thrown me for a loop (or that I just stupidly overlooked) as I've been teaching myself flash game development over the last couple of months. This guide is to remind me what I've learned and hopefully to help others avoid some of the pitfalls I've encountered. Some of these things may seem obvious, even to people just getting started with flash programming. No doubt all of them will seem obvious to experienced flash developers. But they were epiphanies to me and now I can't imagine coding in ActionScript3 without them.

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You can't make very many word games without using a dictionary or wordlist. Even finding such a dictionary took a bit of searching, but eventually I found a Scrabble dictionary text file. In it are the 80,000 or so words from the OSPD4 (Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary, version 4), one word per line. If you need a more inclusive dictionary you can find a similar version of SOWPODS (the international version) if you hunt around for it, but this one worked for me because it's pretty exhaustive and still includes tons of words that most people don't know. Embedding it into a flash game was a little trickier, though.

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Lightbot is a very unique simple flash-based puzzle game -- unique in that it's designed to help you understand some of the most fundamental programming concepts. I've never seen a game like this, and although it only addresses the most basic ideas programmers use while coding, it does an excellent and thorough job of it and turns out to be quite a fun little puzzle game.

Concepts covered include functional programming, conditionals, recursion and, of course, refactoring as you try to accomplish ever more complex goals in a limited number of instructions. Try it out now - Play Light Bot 2 and start learning how programmers think!