We've become a bit lazy here just linking to other peoples stuff and pimping iPhone games. It's partly because we're in the usual state of NDA-ness that means we can't talk about a lot of things ( Such as the great, but very crunch heavy, project we're doing for National Geographic right now ) and partly 'cause all our friends are doing great things which deseve a pimp.

So this is going to be the last one for a while, but it's a great one to go out on. Our friends over at urbaniacs have released their first iPhone game. Want to hear more ? Yeah you sure do.

This is a port of Wedgie Toss 2 ( You can play it on their site right now ), where apparently 14 million wedgie's have been snapped out.



Look at Stephen Colbert there, oh Stephen how your faux right wing views make me giggle. But I'm going to pick an angle and twang your pants on this fun and yet surprisingly cheap iPhone game ( £0.59, which I guess is $0.99 to the 65% of our readers. See how I tie all our posts together ? When it's done it's all going to make sense, a novel in the form of a blog, with a twist at the end which will blow you away ) which is available here.
Also look where I left a tiny part of the edge of the logo at the top left on that cropped image which I'm too lazy to sort out, but is really bugging me already. How can I take my mind off that, short of playing the game itself ? Another grab should do it,

More a case of doing-anything-rather-than-work-on-the-current-project I thought I'd have a quick glance at our stats, see where we are in the grand scheme of things ( Our Alexa rank has had a little bump recently, we're back to a more healthy #324,797 ).

In terms of countries visiting us, our friends from across the pond are number #1,

United States,
hits: 150,381
sexy visitors: 25,793
percentage out of everyone coming here ( And weeping ):  65.56%

The following places were a bit of a surprise though,

2     Republic of Korea     10,606    3,795     9.65%
3     France                   10,864    3,735     9.49%    
4     China                     10,313    1,987     5.05%    
5     Russian Federation   4,518      1,691     4.30%

I didn't realise there was such a passion for Flash combined with reading a blog which doesn't ever actually say anything at all, in some of those countries. It may be a little egotistical ( Me ? ) but I thought Germany and the UK would rank higher.

So if your are visiting here from one of those top 5 countries, it'd be nice if you could say hi in the comments. Actually, it'd be better if you taught us a swear word in your respective language, be fair, you must have picked up quite a few English ones here.

Squize.

Rare we do two posts in one day, but this is breaking news and will affect quite a few people who visit us here.

GameJacket closes. Real pity, not just 'cause we've lost a couple of quid, but we were really early adopters of the system and there were a lot of good people involved in it.

We've not long since received an email officially announcing that GJ ceased trading yesterday, and that they'll pass on more info soon.

Even if you never put a game on their system, it's quite a blow for Flash dev in general, as it's another outlet gone.

On a slightly self-centric note, it means our games using the system are screwed. We'll try and rip the GJ code out and reload them as soon as we can.

Squize.

It's finally occurred to me that there must be some blogs out there that are silly enough to link to us, but because we're so wrapped up in ourselves, we're not aware of them.

If you do link to us ( Albeit out of pity ) and we've not linked back, do us a favour and let us know via the comments so we can redress the balance and keep the whole internet ticking over the way it's meant to be.

Cheers,

Squize.

Yet another post where we just talk about someone else's work rather than our own. It's just so much easier.

This time it's our mate Mark, and his first steps into the world of iphone and all the gold that goes with that. It's a port of his hit game Particle Pong.


Now to be honest, he doesn't really need the money. He pays someone to burn the cash that he can't fit in the bank vault, but if you have an iphone and want a great game, then he's all but giving it away ( Guilt I think ).

Interested ? Yeah I knew it, I could tell by the way you were reading this. K, it's as simple as putting your mouse pointer on this link and clicking it. It's really that simple to have a pong game with an orgy of particles running on your swanky iphone.

Squize.

Our good mate Chris over at Kill5 has put up some games for download.

So if you run a portal, or just want to embed a cheeky game into your blog or myspace page ( If you're 12 that is. Any older than that and it's as wrong as an adult reading Harry Potter. And before anyone jumps in with "Actually Harry Potter is a really good read for all ages", what other books have you ever read ? ).

Anyway, looky here, it's there for all to see.

Squize.

Just a quick X++ stat to keep things ticking over on that front.

Since it's been on FGL the total distance flown has been 643 kilometres, which is the equivalent of going from Paris to Milan.

Boring, but true.

Squize.

PS. And 29274 shots have been fired in anger. That's a lot of anger.

I think all devs have had that scare. The one where they've deleted a file they shouldn't have. The one where their router died on the day they need to send the most important email ever. Vista fucking up big time.

This story is about the latter.

I was installing Visual Studio yesterday, and there were some updates to .net, the kind where you need a reboot and then Vista tells you how it's all going. My gfx card crapped out mid install ( Of VS, the updates were ready and waiting ) and reset the machine.

Hope no files got corrupted there.

As the box booted back up Vista let me know the progress of the updates, but hang on, 3/3 seems to be stuck at 0%. For a very long time. Ah, and it's rebooted without actually finishing.

Never mind, it'll just reboot and sort itself out.

Imagine my delight when the same thing happened. Over and over and over again. Not ideal. Fired up the installation disc, chose the repair start-up option ( Which it actually offered up to me, Vista knew something was wrong and wasn't ashamed of it ), reboot and... 3/3 0% reset.

Ok, let's try a different option, let's just boot up in safe mode. 3/3 0% reset. Safe mode with networking. 3/3 0% reset. Last good config boot ? Fucking hell. Fired up google on the mac[Book Pro. Yeah after paying £2k for it, I'm going to mention it at every opportunity ) and found that microsoft have the solution in their knowledge base. Seems it wasn't the crash that did it, it would have happened anyway.

Idea #1 was to use the repair start up option. Hmmm
Idea #2 was to boot in safe mode... Cosmic

Although the rest of idea #2 was sound, use a restore point. There were a couple just before the crash, so job done, hurray I can get back to my massive crunch of having to do another 4 games by the 15th of this month.

Restoring, restoring. All good. All good until it came up with a file error. It seems some files did get corrupted during the crash, the files being the restore points. God, is this revenge for all the shitty things I say ? Is karma that instant and that brutal ?

Idea #3 looked complicated, and it's boiling hot here and I want the easy option damn it. I want things how they used to be between us.

The easy option ( In my head at least ) was to install vista on a blank HD and then see if I can't fix the issue from windows on the 2nd drive. Installing Vista is like watching paint dry so I didn't have the most fun day yesterday as you can imagine.
Right, finally installed lets see what I can do... that's odd, windows has just hung again after a couple of minutes use. It never rains and all that. Let's try again. And again. And again. Fuck me.

Idea #3 it is then.

I finally got everything back up and running a couple of hours ago, so that's a day and a half wasted.

Do you ever read a blog, and think "What a waste of time, there's nothing I can take away from that, it's just someone bitching about something I couldn't care less about" ?
Yeah, me too.

Squize.