mod parent up.

Uh. What are you talking about? Yes they do. May I redirect you to the $10 and below section of the games sold at Steam? There's a ton of gems in there.

May I also redirect you to the Mega-Love Indie Bundles: which pack in these excellent indie casual games: Aaaaa! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, Brainpipe, Captain Forever, Cogs, Saira, Space Giraffe or And Yet It Moves, Auditorium, Aztaka, Eufloria, Machinarium & Osmos for $19.99 or all 12 games for $29.99?

Finally, check Steam Game Sales which lists all the recent promos/sales/discounts on Steam, Direct2Drive, EA & Impulse, updated daily. Look! Stuff's up to 85% off right now!

Plants vs. Zombies? Machinarium? Canabalt? Bookworm? Desktop Tower Defense? Portal 2D? All these games kick ass. Don't knock the genre because of the wannabe-clone-"me too" knockoff garbage. There's been more innovation in the casual gaming scene than there's been in the big-budget 3D hardcore gamer scene this past decade.

Actually it's the big game development studios that have been destroying the game development industry. Because there's so much risk involved with their formulae which requires millions and millions of dollars to develop a title, they keep sticking to old formulae and pump out crap like Madden NFL games year after year to avert "risk".

The rise of casual games has brought about a new indie gamedev golden age. It's really nice knowing that 3-5 guys can pump out really fun games loved by many players just like back in the 80s on the PC.

In general, that is what has been plaguing the entire gaming industry since the late 90s: graphics over gameplay. That being said, the rise of casual games these past few years has been a welcome change over shiny 3D graphics with dull repetitive gameplay formulae.

I second that with Flash. Being an intergrated hybrid illustration/animation tool, it'd be the easiest to teach fine arts students with.

You can easily make a lot of games just relying on "gotoAndStop();", "gotoAndPlay();" and just button click events for code

Why do most slashdot geeks always think "3D" when thinking game development these days? Most of the fun casual games available today are in 2d.

Plus, you don't have to do any coding to do animation and sprite objects in Flash. There's a reason there's so many amateur Flash games on the web today. It's the friendliest environment for non-coder art-oriented people.

wtf... Am I in the right website here? Is this Slashdot? Where's the rabid Flash bashing? It's like I stepped into a bizarro parallel universe!

Testing for slower systems & lower CPU has become a big problem w/ us right now, especially since access to older "obsolete" machines is very very difficult now.

How do you guys do this? I mean with the only off the shelf PCs available running over 1GHz these days, how do you test for a 200-500MHz platform these days? Personally, I used nested VMs running a la Russian Dolls or matrix within a matrix within a matrix for you geeks who don't know what a VMs are. I was running Puppy Linux & DamnSmallLinux inside Ubuntu inside WinXP

Virtualbox is very idiot friendly compared to VMWare and rockses sockses :)

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http://gamersgate.com/ is another good alternative to GOG and Direct2Drive. The nice thing is that they're having a *massive* summer sale right now :) Like GOG, it's re-download all you want.

That being said, mobile developers would be a heck of a lot happier if Android devices would run J2ME/JavaME apps out of the box instead of needing to port & recompile apps for Android/Dalvik.

How much would it cost for Google to pay Oracle a license to bundle the JavaME VM on Android? If anything, hopefully that's one thing that comes out of this as porting for different platforms is a $%@#$^. The less steps needed, the better.

But hasn't Java been doing a good enough job splintering and fragmenting the platform with J2EE, J2SE, J2ME MIDP 1.0/2.0/3.0, JavaFX on its own?

Adam Savage's talk on the 2008 Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference on why Mythbusters was forced to not do the "how easy it is to hack RFID tags" episode is very, very interesting.

Weight gain is a common side effect for *many* anti-depressants. Increased appetite and hunger is common.

There are already a bunch of touchscreen netbooks out there. Check out the: ASUS T101MT, HP Mini 5102, Gigabyte Touchnote T1028M, and MSI Wind U150 nebooks.

The article Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either) by Cory Doctorow is a good read.

Steve Jobs is deliberately destroying the web and trying to remold it as he sees fit. He would rather that content creators only build native iOS apps that work only for iDevices rather than use already-existing channels & platforms that work perfectly fine.

His war on interpreted code/runtimes and (WORA) Write-Once-Run-Anywhere is a big headache for content creators everywhere.