The Download Munkey : Finder of Things …

A review of the Bus Driver demo by SCS Software in which you play a bus driver - unsurprising considering the game IS called Bus Driver Discovered this game from a review of the full game by James Allen’s Out of Eight PC Reviews which gave Bus Driver a 6/8.

A semi-realistic simulation of sorts, you drive a bus around town on pre-determined routes. There are 30 routes in the full game with 6 initially unlocked. I haven’t checked if the demo version allows all routes to be played because my one hour trial has expired

The driving style is a refreshing change from the type of (usually) reckless driving I attempt in most racing games : improper change of lanes without signalling, collisions with other vehicles and road barriers or ignoring traffic lights are penalized so I gradually adopted a slower-paced and more cautious driving techniques as I drove on the different routes in various road and weather conditions.

Some of the mistakes I made in my first few attempts to drive the bus like in a racing game.

Knocking down streetlights

Mounting kerbs

Overstopping and overbraking

Ramming bus stops

Driving into the opposite lane

The graphics are serviceable but the nicely detailed city in which you’re driving in seems to be an empty ghost town where the only people in the city are all at the bus stops. Below are some of the picturesque but empty locations I found myself driving in

The game is also not exactly replayable because it’s limited to only 30 routes without a route editor.

Nonetheless, it’s strangely addictive when you actually deliver your passengers to their destinations with a clean sheet. Not that easy considering that the traffic lights change pretty quickly and it takes several seconds to stop a bus without overbraking (which is heavily penalized). Driving with steering wheels and pedals or analog gamepads is therefore highly recommended over keyboards because of the difficulty of accurately adjusting the braking intensity while tapping the cursor keys.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen this game on retail in SG and the only way to buy it is via Internet for 22.99 Euros or 29.99 USD. Hopefully some budget publisher will pick it up for retail in SG

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Motorstorm Wallpapers
Forza Motorsport 2 Wallpapers
Papercraft Cars from Papercraft Paradise

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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Playing Flash Games Offline
Desktop Tower Defence
Kinetic Singapore Flash Intro
Boxhead : More Rooms

A gentle reminder to all collectors of Shin Tanaka’s Spiky Baby papercraft that Series 08 is available for download as of today.

© Shin Tanaka

As avid collectors of Shin’s paper toys already know, the downloads are completely blind-boxed which means you don’t get to choose which Spiky Baby to download.

After clicking for around 45 minutes, I collected a total of 16 designs for Series 08. 9 have custom graphic designs on them and 7 are adorned with a specific letter from the words SPIKY BABY. The Series 08 box is also one of the possible choices so you end up with a total of 17 PDFs (assuming there are no secret Spiky Babies in this series.

If I have to choose my favourite among the nine custom Spiky Babies, the Sluglife version would be my absolute favourite. The Fingerprints design is a close runner-up

  
© Shin Tanaka

Download your own Spiky Babies from Shin’s official site . (Click on the giant Spiky Baby Series 08 logo at the top of the page)

If you’re a aspiring graphic designer/illustrator, you can add your creative touches to the blank templates for Spiky Baby or the newer Mask Hoody and submit them to Shin. Who knows, maybe you’ll be selected and featured in Series 09 More details on that here.

If you can’t find the blank Mask Hoody template, I have downloaded a copy from Series 03 which you can download here but for the Spiky Baby, you will have to contact Shin directly.

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More about Spiky Baby and Mask Hoody
Papercraft World
Rogue Status Spiky Baby (Series 02)
Elphonso Lam - Artist / Toy Designer / Punk Rocker

Found this wonderful Singapore Navy commissioned pixel art at sparklette.net (some wonderful visual art stuff there).

© Ari & Thalia & Sok Kuan

I actually seen it in a newspaper ad for the Singapore Navy Open House on 26 May 2007 but I didn’t realize that there was a digital version on the blog of one of the creators of this impressively detailed pixel artwork.

Read Veron’s interview with the artists involved over at sparklette.net where you can view a high resolution version of this image.

Anyway, this ad wasn’t the first time I saw pixel art being used commercially in SG. The first was Habbo Hotel and the second was Singapore Institute of Management’s Build Your Own Future advertising campaign. (not linked to SIM’s official site) Found the links instead from The Treasure Trove of Useless Information (which is pretty interesting despite what the title implies).

© eboy / SIM

The main page of Build Your Own Future website shown above. Some pixel art collectables are available from the Build Your Own Future downloads section - 32 icons, 5 wallpapers and 1 screensaver for eye candy nuts like me.

© eBoy / SIM

Watch a pixelart animation used in the marketing campaign for SIM.

Artwork for this campaign was done by eBoy (See how many Singaporean stuff you can identify in the poster below, taken from hello.eboy.com - I see the Esplanade and the Yellow Top taxis.

© eBoy / SIM

Also check out the Berlin, Venice and London pixoramas amongst others in the Pixorama category

© eBoy

Pixelized London - click on the links above to see the high resolution versions.

© eBoy

Foobar (above) is my favourite of all eboy’s pixel art - how many website logos can you spot there?

Some other pixel art (more game-related) stuff that I read the past few weeks (months?) which you may also be interested in

Meteor Busters game for PixelBoy virtual console
Komirad’s Isometric Mapmaker (in Flash)

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startdrawing.org
Shin Tanaka’s Cool Paper Toys
Art Lebedev (including one pixel artwork)

A bunch of cute super-deformed avatars of the Warhammer 40,000 races from the Relic Forums done by forum member Dr Badman. Just remembered them when I visited the official Dawn of War - Adeptus Modificatus forums looking for the excellent DoWXP mod (currently version 4.02) by Riker2800.

On to the avatars … I like the Khorne Bezerker the most Only the 18 featuring Warhammer 40,000 characters out of the 25 available are shown below.

    
    
    
    
    
    
© Dr Badman

From left to right, top to bottom:
Vindicare Assassin, Chaos Space Marine (Emperor’s Children), Necron Warrior, Eldar Guardian, Tyranid Gaunt, Ork Grot, Imperial Guardsman, Chaos Horror, Grey Knight, Kroot, Ork Mega Armoured Nobz, Space Marine (Blood Ravens), Necron Warrior, Ork Nobz, Ork Slugga Boyz, Tau Firewarrior, Space Marine Terminator (Ultramarines) and Khorne Bezerker.

The original avatars are 140×140 PNGs, over here I have resized them to 120×120 PNGs. You can get the originals by registering as a Relic Forums member and going to Control Panel > Edit Avatar and choosing Dr Badman’s Avatars.

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Relic Forums’s Exclusive Dark Crusade Wallpapers
Black Library Horus Heresy Wallpapers
John Gravato - Warhammer 40,000 Illustrator