The Download Munkey : Finder of Things …

Promotional trailer for Success Corporation’s Raiden : Fighter Aces compilation for the Xbox360 featuring three shoot-em-ups from the Raiden Fighters spinoff series, 1996’s Raiden Fighters, 1997’s Raiden Fighters 2 and 1998’s Raiden Fighters Jet.

© Success Corporation

Raiden Fighters - Classic Raiden fare.

© Success Corporation

Raiden Fighters 2 : Operation Helldive - Seems like it’s only a graphically upgraded version of Raiden Fighters from the look f it

© Success Corporation

Raiden Fighter Jet - Love the little details like the spinning propellers on the massive aircraft idling on the runway in this one but I doubt anyone seriously playing the game notices these kind of stuff while playing.

While the gameplay in the three games is pretty standard shooter fare with the prerequisite fuild animation, eye-watering weapon and explosion effects, what kept me glued to the entire 3 minutes of this trailer was the incredible reflexes of the player being recorded in the video - or was it just a pre-programmed demo?

By the way, if you’re itching for some Raiden action on your PC, there’s a pretty faithful fan-made Flash version of Raiden which you can play online - RaidenX - enjoy!

Download the trailer from Gametrailers (Quicktime or WMV) or the Raiden Fighter Aces (WMV only) site.

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Saw this over a while back at Geeknews, a great source for interesting stuff and despite the title, it’s not necessarily for geeks only . MyMinicity.com is a Flash site by French developers Motion-Twin (creators of one of my newfound online addictions - Dinoparc.com) where you can build your own virtual city @ mycity.myminicity.com.

Geeknews City

The city automatically grows when visitors enter your city by going to mycity.myminicity.com directly. After a set number of inhabitants, the city can only further evolve when visitors enter via the infrastructure links provided on your city page e.g mycity.myminicity.com/ind to expand your industrial sectors thereby reducing the unemployment rate and prevent jobless inhabitants from leaving your city. Different infrastructure links are ‘unlocked’ as the city grows in size and population.

Since visitors have to enter the infrastructure links directly, you have to advertise these links on your blog, forum signatures (and possibly spam email ) for a chance to really expand the city.

While the entire process of city evolution is completely non-interactive, it still feels like a city-building sim where you derive some weird sense of satisfication from seeing a couple of humble huts expanding to a town and (hopefully) to a bustling city like the one below.

Kuala Lumpur - the biggest city in MyMinicity.com for the Malaysian zone. There isn’t a Singapore zone, though

Create your own virtual city at MyMinicity.com or help expand Geeknews City by increasing its population or improving its industry, transport (currently unavailable), security (currently unavailable), environment (currently unavailable)and business (currently unavailable).

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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