The Download Munkey : A Link A Day ;)

While there are many ways to learn your A.B.Cs, this must be one of the more unconventional and possibly the bloodiest method of learning the English alphabet.

Clearly inspired by Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Caligula, Emperor of ancient Rome and allegedly an insane tyrant. His supposedly depraved character was the subject of the shocking 1979 film and now in this (literally) bloody Flash game from adult swim.

Over in Viva Caligula, you control the mad tyrant himself as he cooks up some half-baked excuse that his fellow Romans have rebelled against his rule and then goes on a massacre of both defenseless civilians and heavily armed legionnaires alike, simply because he can.

Armed initially with a lowly dagger, Caligula sets forth to collect 25 other weapons hidden in 7 different districts split into 97 zones (yes, I counted). The name of each weapon starts with a different letter of the alphabet which means that this cunningly-disguised educational tool actually helps you refresh your A.B.Cs since you need to press that key to activate that weapon (admittedly, most of the words are non-English or absolutely useless in real life like the word “Xyston“). On top of that, it also helps you remember where all the letters are found on the keyboard

Weapons range from those commonly found in the Greek or Roman armory to incredibly bizarre stuff like … you’ll have to play the game to find out since that’s one of the highlights of this mad little game.

After collecting all 26 weapons, you get to enter his palace and if you have seen the film before, you already know what perversity lies in wait inside those walls.

We’re about to enter his palace. Minors not allowed

Definitely not for kids or for those disturbed by excessive blood, unnecessary violence and pixelated nudity in their entertainment. You have been warned!

Play Viva Caligula or read Play This Thing!’s review. Many thanks to Gnome for pointing out the excellent Play This Thing! site to ignorant gamers like me

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Found this short animation on the parts and operation of an AR-15 (M16) from Steve’s relatively new but promising The Firearm Blog. The Firearm Blog happens to be a nice resource for firearm enthusiasts sans the gun control politics which non-American readers like me have absolutely no clue whatsoever.

You can hide, split or set different components of the AR-15 to be semi-transparent to view the process in greater detail. The default Split view is my favourite

© Bushmaster Arms.

Too bad the firing animation ends after the bullet is fired i.e the process whereby exhaust gas is forced back into the bolt carrier to chamber the next round is not shown in this animation - you can find out the hard way in National Service, Wikipedia or from this short animation at LWRC which proposes a nifty little solution to alleviate the problem (scroll, scroll, scroll).

BTW, I found Steve’s blog from A.C.E here.

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Read this on the Friends of EML blog next week and have been playing with this nifty little Flash application for the whole of last week

Orange Mixer allows you to arrange preloaded samples into tracks (max 16 samples per mix) and then apply effects to each individual track like fading and panning (switch to Advanced mode, add points and drag - a bit like drawing and tweaking Bezier curves in drawing applications). Each mix can consist of up to 20 bars which means a song can be up to close to 7 minutes for hip-hop or close to 4 minutes for drum n’ bass.

The included audio samples comprise drum, bass, percussion, music (piano, guitar), sfx, some really hair-raising vocals as well of some of the Chemical Brothers’ bleepy electro stuff.

Electro (above) and drum n’ bass (below) mixes

Here’s my 1 minute long efforts - dnb and electro - hack jobs done in a few minutes which shows how easy it is to create your own stuff from the included samples even for a amateur like me Try my 30 seconds funky house mix too

Before you dismiss this as an application for electronic music only, here’s an absolutely cringe-worthy rock mix to show the possibilities of making non-electronic music - click here for a truly awful experience

The above samples were recorded into .WAV and then converted to MP3 with Audacity. You can also save your mix online and finalize it as MP3 although I find the former process more convenient.

Pros

• Free! Free! Free! Registration is required though.
• Very easy to use.
• Preloaded with audio samples from multiple genres, all samples in the particular being at the same tempo to eliminate the need to adjust the BPM for each sample

Cons

• Unable to load own samples makes it a little boring after a while as there will always be samples that you won’t like and will never use which limits you to reusing the same few samples after making a few mixes:(
• Cannot mix and match samples from different genres due to different BPM for samples of each genre.
• Playback cannot commence from the middle of a bar, only from the start of a bar.
• For an application made in the UK, there’s no breaks samples. WTF!!

Then again, you can’t really fault the application for the cons when it’s such a user-friendly application with such a low learning curve (plus it’s free too!!)

Play the Orange Mixer.

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I present two different takes on the tower defense genre today. Not the freshest games though but still as detrimental to productivity as other tower defense games

Onslaught 2
The first game is Onslaught 2 by Gaby Vanhegan (see jayisgames review). In this variation of the Tower Defense theme, there are only four types of turrets - fast firing machine guns (blue), linked lasers (green), rocket launchers (red) and tazer beams (yellow).

© Gaby Vanhegan

Turrets can be upgraded in terms of damage, range and rate of fire separately. What’s more, if you upgrade the damage of turrets to the max, it will also perform combos with nearby turrets with maxed out damage.

To see which towers are in range for combos, press C to toggle the combo display - when you attempt to build or select a turret, turrets eligible for combos will be highlighted in yellow. The first turret to fire at the enemy triggers the combo so you may need to upgrade the ranges of some of the turret to activate the desired combo. See the list of combos here.

The starting waves may be easy but after that only combos can provide a successful defense against the hordes. It’s very fun if you can get the hang of the combo feature, otherwise it’s pure hell as your defence totally crumbles when the tougher waves roll in.

VectorTD
Next one is VectorTD created by David Scott. (Read about this over at blog de ahpoh)

VectorTD is different in the sense that each tower does 150% damage to one particular color of vectoids and 50% damage to another (other colours receive 100% damage). This means that you will have to build towers of different colours to defend against the hordes of different vectoids coming your way.

Another neat feature is the ability to set your towers’ targeting priorites to fire at the closest, strongest or weakest vectoid. Add the ability to toggle target locking and you have absolutely no one to blame for a sloppy defence

© David Scott

Unfortunately, the damage of lower tier towers (even after maxing up the levels) just don’t match up against the higher tier towers and I often end up selling your lower tier towers (sometimes too late).

© David Scott

Nonetheless, the extremely streamlined gameplay and polished graphics will definitely keep you coming back for more

Play VectorTD and Onslaught 2

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Boxhead : More Rooms

This fiendishly addictive game recommended by Non Signal Input was created by Sean T Cooper, who worked on some of my favourite Bullfrog classics like Dungeon Keeper 2, Hi-Octane, Syndicate and Populous. Boxhead : More Rooms is a deceivingly simple shoot-em-up where you fight against hordes of zombies and their devilish fireball spewing overlords. I love the stylized Lego minifig look of the characters in this game too

The premise may be simple but the mechanics is quite refreshingly different. Instead of the usual accumulation of XP and the choices that accompany RPG-style levelling, Sean has completely thrown out the conventional levelling-up and manual upgrading and introduced a novel way of improving your character instead.

Upgrade time!.

To prepare your character for battle against increasingly tough zombies in the later levels, you have to kill them fast enough to firstly, earn more points and secondly, upon reaching a specific multiplier, collect upgrades to assist you in further increasing your mutlipler. Fail to kill zombies fast enough and watch the multipler plunge - you’ll have to build it back up again to get the next upgrade (58 in total - the last one requiring a 125x multipler). The upgrades are well balanced so you’ll be switching between the different weapons throughout a game depending on the situation at hand.

Press P to pause the game as well as to see the list of upgrades. My best multipler was 85x for Rocket Launcher+ Quad Ammo

It’s not all spray-n-pray over here - for the devious, placing traps like barrels, fake walls, land mines and remotely detonated mines can easily turn the tide against the horde on higher difficulty settings where the zombies come in hard and fast.

Wonder who left those barrels around

Right now, you have to move and shoot with the same cursor keys, meaning that you can only shoot in the same direction that you move. I think it would more fun if you could shoot back at the zombies while running away with the mouse for targetting and shooting and the cursor keys being utilized for movement only.

Play Boxhead : More Rooms and other Sean Cooper games at his official site (Click on Flash Games Worked On).

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