flash posts

Earlier this year Valve announced that they would add what kinds of PC software are installed on the users of its Steam client via its voluntary hardware survey form. Today the first results from the software survey have been posted showing the top 50 programs Steam users who participated in the survey have on their hard drives. The results are just for PC users for now; Mac owners will have its own results posted later.

Not surprisingly, over 96 percent of Steam PC users have Adobe's Flash Player installed in their hard drives with over 73 percent using Adobe's Acrobat software. The Firefox web browser is in over 63 percent of Steam user's PC, followed by Microsoft Office with 57 percent and Microsoft Silverlight with 53 percent.

Other interesting tidbits from the survey include two popular game voice chat programs, TeamSpeak and Ventrilo, installed on about the same amount of PCs (17.99 percent and 17.38 percent, respectively). The game oriented messenger program Xfire is installed on 10.5 percent of Steam user's PCs. Not surprisingly a number of BitTorrent software programs are in the top 50. Finally Microsoft Games For Windows client is installed in over 36 percent of Steam user's PC.

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

We do not normally cover flash games on Freeware Friday, and for good reason. Most are finishable within half an hour of play at the most, incredibly simple, and slightly-tweaked clones of other games. However, sometimes we get blown away by the artistry present in a Flash game, and it impresses us enough to be worth mentioning. Anna Anthropy's latest game and collaborative effort, Redder, is easily one of the most unique, engaging flash games we've ever played. It also helps that the other member of the team is Amon26, whose games have been featured twice before on Freeware Friday. Time to delve into the insanity of Mars!

A shmup with lots of features always seems to be at the top of the charts on popular flash portals, and for good reason. Feature-complete action games are incredibly addicting, and with the addition of persistent upgrades and such, they get even more so. Enigmata is one of these addicting shmups, and it's certainly easy to lose yourself as you gun down loads of enemy ships.

Enigmata takes place on a wide screen as you travel vertically through the stage. Enemies randomly appear as you go, and you gain gold by killing them. Gold can be spent in-between stages at shops to repair your ship, upgrade with new components, or buy new ships. There are achievements (of course), but unlike most games, these achievements actually count towards something. In this case, as you gain more achievements, you gain access to shops with better equipment.

Technical diagrams are incredibly interesting to those that can read them. They speak a wealth of information about both the designer and the object that was actually designed. Fig. 8 is a game based entirely around this technical diagrams, and it's gentle gameplay and peaceful music will no doubt help you enter a state of zen. After all, it's the relaxing games that calm you after a long day at work, not the pulse-pounding ones.

You ride a bike through technical diagrams of a neighborhood. You get points simply by surviving, but also by "grinding" nearby lines (getting close the them). The scoring system is based on if your wheels are together, as the longer they are on the same path, the higher your multiplier gets. You can turn slowly to stay on the same path, or quickly to get around obstacles.

Neural networks are a common theme in science fiction and robotics research alike. If you can teach a robot or a program to learn through feedback, you won't have to program it after every new case comes up. This is the concept of Be My Bird as well, a browser game that tasks you with creating a neural network to help a bird find flowers. It's hard, but fun and sort of educational.

Be My Bird is controlled entirely through the plus and minus at the bottom of the screen. The plus tells the bird that what it is doing is correct, and the minus tells it that what it is doing is wrong. By continually monitoring its feedback and adjusting your responses accordingly, you can eventually get to the point where you don't have to touch anything to get the bird to reach the flowers and bring them back.

Once again, another defense game in the vein of Last Stand or its ilk. The Next Floor is a little different from your normal defense game in a few ways, but overall, it's a clean, well-made game with few surprises. The differences do enough to distinguish it from its contemporaries, but the lack of additional things to do hurt it a little.

The Next Floor revolves around defending an elevator shaft from an oncoming horde of baddies. To do this, you must gun them down before they can attack the shaft. Easy! The kicker is that you have multiple floors to contend with. Luckily, you are not alone: you can build new elevators with turrets inside them as your progress through the game. It's very simple, relatively easy, and fun, so go ahead and give it a try over a smoke break sometime.

Tumbledrop seems to have inspired an entire genre of "shapes with faces" that are popular on the Flash game portals at the moment. Hungry Shapes is yet another one of these games. It's starting to get a little tiresome, but at least the gameplay is solid and the art is clean. We just wish that this trend wasn't so prevalent everywhere we look, and poorly realized in a lot of areas.

Hungry Shapes uses block creation instead of removal as the focus of its gameplay. You have three different colors of blocks, all of which must turn green by the end of the level: green, yellow, and red. Green blocks are sated, yellow blocks require one burger, and red blocks require two burgers. It's used to great effect in the levels, but the game is rather short on official content. Luckily, there is a level creator like so many other casual physics puzzle games have nowadays to extend life.

The Battalion series of flash strategy games is going strong with its newest release, Battalion: Arena. For those that have not played a Battalion game, they are much like the Advance Wars series of strategy titles, only through your browser. The first one was released around this time last year, and now it's time for the new one, There's a huge addition to this new one through online multiplayer and a maps database, so it's certainly more robust than its predecessor.

Battalion: Arena is a multiplayer focused game, and it definitely shows. There's no campaign, with skirmishes against AI being the only thing you are able to do in single-player. Multiplayer, however, is incredibly robust. There are item drops, a persistent ranking system, and player-created maps, on top of the traditional strategic gameplay you can expect from such a game. It's a massive time sink and will no doubt cause addiction in all you strategy fans out there.

Creating your own objects and customizing are all the rave lately, with games like Crayon Physics Deluxe topping the charts in terms of critical and commercial feedback. PaintShip, an entry into this month's Experimental Gameplay Project theme of bare minimum, is one of these customizable games, and is easily one of the best we have played. Best of all, it's entirely browser-based, which means you can play it anywhere you go!

PaintShip revolves around creating a ship, placing your components, and taking on missions. In practice, this comes out to drawing your ship inside a small frame and then placing the components anywhere in the frame. The components can be different colors as well, which changes the color of the things they do. Gameplay is simple, with your ship darting around to wherever your mouse is and attacking ships that your mouse scrolls over. THere are some minor movement issues, and it would be nice if there was a button to prevent yourself from firing, but all-in-all, it comes out to be a very excellent game.

For those that wonder what it is like to be the vast hordes of enemy ships attacking the player in any shmup, now is your chance to finally discover the feeling. The Competitor is a browser game that takes place from the perspective of the commanding officer of the enemy forces. It's pretty simple, but fun and short. In other words, it's a great coffee break game for the average shmup fan.

The Competitor is played much like Pixus. You draw lines on the screen, which then translate into ships. These ships can do things such as block enemy fir or fire at the enemy. The biggest disappointment is the lack of movement. You can make enemies rush at the player ship, and the player ship is sort of dumb. Still, it approached a genre with a fresh perspective that not many people might have seen all too well.

[Via IndieGames]