Defend Yourself! And other news.

Well, long time no see. I've been away and unable to post for various reasons, but now I'm back. It'll be a little bit before the normal posting schedule is resumed, but if you need a diversion try playing Defend Yourself, a small HTML 5 in which you try to defend the moon or something from incoming meteors by shooting ping-pong balls out of a small orifice...idk really, but its a good time waster if you have a few minutes to spare. It works in the latest versions of Opera, Firefox, IE, and Chrome. My highscore is 12980, see if you can beat it.

Canvas Defense

     My last post was about the new surge of HTML5 games that are now available. Since there are so many I thought I'd start posting reviews of different games I come across. The first of these is Canvas Defense.

     In this strategy defense game, your goal is to stop the red blobs from reaching the blue wall on your left. To accomplish this, you have four different unit types you can use to trap the blobs and to kill them. You have limited units in each level, and must survive for a given amount of time. Its a nice casual game to fill up a little spare time.

Playability: I couldn't get the game to work in ie9, but it worked in firefox 4, opera and in chrome. I experienced a little lag on the higher levels, but nothing too bad. 4/5
Appealing: This game has nice visuals and background music. 5/5
Fun: Its a short game, with only 10 levels, but requires speed and strategy to win. Some levels can be frustrating if you can't figure out how to win or use a given unit effectively, but overall a fun game. 4/5

HTML 5 Games

HTML5 has become something of a buzzword over the past months. Browser makers have been competing to have the best support, and even Microsoft, typically lagging behind in standards implementation, has gotten on board with IE9, which brings support for various features of HTML5. Though flash is nowhere close to being displaced as the dominant web technology for rich content, there are more and more situations in which HTML will do the same thing, better. An example of this is the video tag. It can play both video and audio perfectly well on any modern browser, without the need for resource-consuming flash that doesn't work on most mobile platforms.

Another thing that is now possible in HTML due the the canvas tag are games. There are now sites hosting exclusively games coded in HTML, such as this one. In the past, practically every casual gaming site hosted flash games. Now there is a new breed of sites hosting html5 games, many of which work on mobile devices. To me, this is the way of the future. No more plugins, just pure HTML powering beautiful things.

Dropbox and Dropship

You may have heard about Dropbox, a cloud storage and file synching company, trying to kill off an open source project. Of abusive DMCA takedown notices, and Dropbox deleting files from users accounts. Maybe you haven't, so I thought I'd spread the news.

Dropship is an open source python script written by Wladimir van der Laan. It exploits the dropbox hashing system to allow you to download files that other people have on their dropbox, or allow other people to download files from yours without making them public. This has some useful applications, such as if you wanted to give a file to one person without making it public. However, it also has the ability to be used for the downloading of pirated files, and dropper didn't like it one bit.

Dropbox quickly contacted Wladimir van der Laan, asking him to take down Dropship from github (where it was hosted), which he complied with. Several people heard about this, and in typical internet fashion, put up mirrors of Dropship, in various places, including public dropbox folders. Dropbox issued several DMCA takedown notices, against an open source project nonetheless, and deleted the files from dropbox user's accounts. It has rescinded the DMCA takedown notices however.


Its easy to understand why dropbox wouldn't want people to know about the way they do their hashing, and how this could be misused. However, it is also wrong to abuse the DMCA in an attempt to scare people into doing what you want. So is censorship. Comment how you feel about this, here's a link to a mirror if anyone wants one.

Computer Virus

There's been a recent lull in posts, mostly because my computer was infected with a virus. One of those ones that pops up, looking all like some windows security thing, concerned about your computer. "Oh noes!" It says, "I've found some bad, bad viruses and trojans! Pay some money and I'll fix it!" when in reality it is the virus. It screwed over my antivirus, and warned me about every page on the internet being insecure. It also managed to kill of windows defender (not that it did much anyway) and replace the security center with itself. I've gotten rid of it, but there's still some cleaning up to do and file migrations to deal with. I might not be able to post in awhile, so have fun talking in the comments about viruses or malware, or whatever strikes your fancy.

Dragon Age II Preconceptions

I've played the first Dragon Age on the pc the whole way through, and experimented with all the possible class and race combinations. I really liked Dragon Age Origins- it had a rich plot, as well as loads of quests and dialogue. I liked that you could make so many different choices- both in dialogue and in plot- that actually had an effect, and made it so that you could replay the game over and over, picking different choices to change how the game progressed. And part of that replayability and depth came from the fact that you could pick different races and classes, with different origin stories, and people throughout the whole game would react to you differently based on your race and class.

A lot of gamers who liked Dragon Age Origins say they dislike Dragon Age II, or say that the game is ruined by certain decisions made by Bioware. Changes such as the fact that you can only play a human named Hawk- a decision which, though having obvious detriments, does have advantages. Dragon Age Origins had no player voice acting, because they would need so many different voices, and everybody thought of their player in a different way. In Dragon Age II, everyone plays essentially the same character, so voice acting was a feasible option.Voice acting can make your character seem more real, and

There are other reasons why fans of the first game don't like the second as much, but I won't go into all of them. While the sequel to Dragon Age Origins may not be as good as its predecessor, I don't want to let feelings of that color my reactions to the game before I give it a fair crack. I'll try to finish a review within a couple days. In the meantime, I'm posting a new poll asking how you all feel about Dragon Age.

Poll Results

There weren't that many votes cast, which is of course expected for a poll on a new blog. But anyway, the results are in, and the winner is *drumroll* AMD! What does this mean? Well, not much, since this is in no way a scientific poll. But I guess it means that the average viewer is more likely to prefer AMD than marketshare sujests.  Right now I'm coming up with another topic for a poll, and working on a Dragon Age 2 review, which will take a bit longer but should be good. If you have suggestions for a new poll, or comments about Dragon Age, feel free to post below.