Monthly Archives: September 2012

Mission in Space: The Lost Colony

Posted on by tjkopena

This was released earlier in the year so I’m a bit late, but I want to highlight Mission in Space: The Lost Colony, a videogame by Storm Alligator.  This is one of the best games I’ve played in some time now, Flash or otherwise.

Lock and load!

Oh man, that hallway looks creepy! I don’t like creepy hallways!!!

For one reason or another I never really played XCOM, but I clearly would have loved it.  Mission in Space plays somewhat like a simplified, shorter, Flash version of XCOM.  You control a squad of space marines as they attempt to clear out an infested colony.  The story is pretty standard sci-fi alien spaceship invasion stuff, but there is a good narrative to the missions: Regrouping with stranded troopers, collecting data cubes, locking important bulkheads, destroying the nest, getting the hell out of there, and so on.

Farro, what the hell are you doing all the way over there?!?! How did you get there?!?!?

The game is turn based and the later missions especially require some thinking about your overall mission strategy.  Toward the end it gets pretty hard, and don’t expect to get all your troopers out alive.  There are just enough inventory and upgrade options throughout the game to add some flair and require real overarching decision making, without becoming overwhelming or boring.  A lot of the skills and kit acquired as you go on are critical in the later missions.  I was hoping for a few more types of aliens, but there’s definitely enough variety in the missions to keep you engrossed.

Gimme gimme gimmeeeee!

Artwork throughout is gorgeous.  It has a fairly distinctive style to it and manages to be fun and just short of cartoony while also having some nice darker hints.  I particularly like the use of shadows, including the fog of war and the vague hints of a larger structure around the borders of parts of the colony you don’t explore.

Perhaps most importantly, the game combines good strategic play with a super intuitive interface.  Unfortunately the release version has thrown in a lot of tutorial info boxes that clutter up and slow down the opening levels a bit, but otherwise the gameplay is extremely smooth.  Essentially no matter where you click, the game takes the action you would want it to take, whether it’s clicking on the map, dragging the map, clicking on an alien, action icons, trooper icons, whatever.  It’s actually one of the most intuitive game interfaces I’ve ever used.

Let the world burn!

All in all, Mission in Space is a rock solid sci-fi strategy game.  It’s actually the only game I’ve played through to the end in years, so I highly recommend it to anyone at all interested in the genre.

There’s a bit more description in the highly positive Jay is Games review.  You can play the game at missioninspace.com as well as a number of portals like Kongregate and Jay is Games.

Redcap’s Corner Update

Posted on by tjkopena

Having been away all summer, last week was my first chance to head over and check out Redcap’s new location at 36th and Lancaster.  It must have been kind of bittersweet for the guys to move, having sunk all that work into updating the previous space.  It’s almost certainly for the best though, this is a much bigger venue.  Quick observations:

  • The retail space got a lot bigger, and they’ve filled it with all awesome stuff.  The 40k, Warhammer Fantasy, Warmachine, and Reaper/miscellaneous miniatures selections have gotten pretty large.  The boardgame selection has become very substantial.

    View down the length of the main space. That is indeed a wall of boardgames to the left. Out of sight are several bookcases of boardgames to the right…

    40k!

    Warmachine stock.

  • The main gaming space is as big as before.  There’s a large number of tables for cards and standard boardgames, plus a handful of double tables for miniatures and big boardgames.

    Yu-Gi-Oh!

  • The previous loft became two or three private rooms for role playing and miniatures.  I believe the guys are keeping these generally locked but available for regular groups looking for quieter space.
  • There’s now separate men’s and women’s bathrooms, each bigger and nicer than the old one.
  • They’ve both constructed and purchased a bunch of terrain.  There’s little reason to bring any for a typical night anymore.  Most of it is at least playable, and some of it’s actually really good.

Pile of terrain.

One of several bookcases filled with terrain.

One of the miniatures tables.

All in all, it’s pretty sweet to see the store seemingly doing well, there was a seemingly substantial crowd in there Sunday evening.

Hiding the Mouse in Flash

Posted on by tjkopena

Hiding the mouse in a Flash app should be a simple matter of calling flash.ui.Mouse.hide().  This works totally fine in the standalone player.

However, in some browsers that doesn’t actually hide the mouse all the time.  For example, this has been a problem off and on in Chrome/Chromium for some time on various platforms.  In Linux under Chromium (build 20.0.1132.57), I could not figure out any real pattern to making it hide or not using just flash.ui.Mouse.hide().  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  You see this a lot in Flash games that show a custom display list cursor under the native system cursor; the latter didn’t hide properly.

Fortunately, assuming you’re using Flash >= 10.2, there is a seemingly reliable workaround.  Set the mouse cursor to the default cursor (!), then hide the mouse like usual.  E.g., in Haxe/NME:

  nme.ui.Mouse.cursor = flash.ui.MouseCursor.AUTO;
  nme.ui.Mouse.hide();

Note that MouseCursor isn’t wrapped by NME so you need to refer directly to the Flash classpath, and it only works for the flash target.

Setting Mouse.cursor triggers Flash’s native cursor support. Presumably doing that is in turn changing some interaction or state between Flash and the browser, such that Mouse.hide() seems to actually reliably hide the mouse.

In RocketHaxe this happens automatically on the Flash platform, e.g., by calling com.rocketshipgames.haxe.ui.Mouse.disable().