This walkthrough is for the game Reincarnation BB.

Games for today:

1.Off Roaders 2 — Race large trucks Off-road

2. Offspring fling” — Fling baby animals to the door

So, recently I started to program game apps for the Iphone(hope to release in a few weeks) and I have to say that Apple makes it too hard to set up programming apps. In order to do so, you have to use openSSL to generate a certificate, then submit to apple, download the apple certificate, then convert that into a p12 certificate for flash. After this, you still need to create an APP ID(which for some reason cannot be edited or deleted) and then a provisioning profile and need to associate the two. This takes a few hours and for simple apps takes more time than actually making the app itself. This is totally unnecessary and is there not for the benefit of the developer(although it should be since we have to pay $99 a year to be a developer), but for Apple to maintain a grip on its development and distribution platform and that no one can circumvent it. It ensured that everyone has to buy an overpriced Mac notebook if they want to be an APP developer. Note that with Flash CS 5.5, you can develop the APP on a PC but you must have a Mac in order to upload it to the app store. This ensured apple plenty of profit as it ensured that many people that otherwise would not buy a Mac will be forced to buy one. It is probably the same reason why the Flash plugin was never allowed on iOS. I doubt it had anything to do with performance since HTML5 drains just as much battery life. Its because all the flash content would seriously threaten APP sales on which Apple makes a sizable chunk of their profit.

After looking for at penguin update analysis and early(about 2 weeks ago) penguin fallout, I can say that some of the damage to sites has been restored. Viagra.com actually now shows up as #1 when you search for Viagra and other sites like HTC.com have rightfully regained their position. However, its very apparent to me now that Google has some “high-authority sites” that they have defined and these show up on search results everywhere, even if they don’t contain content that people are looking for. If you search for any book or movie, Amazon is likely to show up. However, I know Amazon and when I search for these terms, Amazon is not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for in-depth reviews and Amazon does not have those. Wiki is another site that pops up on every single search now. Its pretty annoying because when I search for something like “Android phone”, I don’t care about a wiki article of what an “android phone” is, I just want to see new models and sales prices, as do most people. Overall, this penguin update has not made Google any better. It did get rid of some article sites, but it just replaced them with scraper sites that steal other people’s content. This doesn’t really make sense. When I search for an article, I can’t find the original source, just a bunch of scrapers that have copied the article. Google really needs to revise their way of determining what is a “quality” site.

Before I start this article on the Google penguin update, let me just say that none of my sites were effected negatively and overall this was a good update for me as I gained position in several keywords. I rose to the #1 with one keyword and gained a few places with others. My sites are generally old sites or sites that have many sponsored games with original and unique content(content locked to my domain) so I expected them to go up with this update.
However, this update did b-slap many sites, especially those that depended entirely on SEO tactics to get Google traffic. There have been two main theories on why a site’s rank went down. One is that domains with the keyword in them suffered a loss for that search term and the other is that people who use blog networks were hit really hard.

The first suggestion, that keyword-rich domains were penalized, I think, is total nonsense. There is no reason Google would do this. Keyword-rich domains should not have an advantage when it comes to SERPS, but it makes no sense to be penalized based on that. Also when I search many keywords, the keyword domains still come up first so this accusation is false. It is true that homepages are showing up a little less often, replaced mainly by sub-pages of large sites. This does actually fit with the content quality guidelines as sub-pages of large sites usually have better content than the small-name super-optimized sites.

The 2nd one, that sites that garnered links on blog networks were penalized is pretty legit. Many of these blog networks were there for no other reason than to get websites links. Google recently de-indexed several of them and it may have hurt the sites that these networks were linking to also. Personally, I don’t think the sites should be penalized as that opens up the door to negative SEO too much but these links just should be ignored so they have no value. This is generally my opinion on what Google should do with SEO, ignore what they consider “over optimizing” instead of punishing because punishing leads to way to sabotage.

Overall, most of the sites that were hit were article sites or sites that relied on articles. Google has been trying to demote article sites for a while now and this may just be the latest step that also hit other sites that used articles to promote their SEO strategies. Most of the people I’ve seen that were hurt were not actually removed from the Google index, but where demoted in terms of keyword ranking. That is a clue that many of their SEO gains have been ignored now rather than them being penalized, although I could be wrong. If you relied solely on optimization and SEO up till now, its a good time to look for a new strategy, as you will need to. For flash game sites, sponsoring and creating games may be the way to go now. All of my sites do this and they fared very well through this update.

Games for today:

1. Super Norris Advance — Fun platform game where Chuck Norris replaces mario

2. Take care of the trees — Fun rpg and adventure game

3. Undo the End — Reverse the end of the world

So I’ve been playing a lot of Tetris Battle lately on Facebook and up until Level 10, your opponents generally suck and you can just stack two rows and send them 1 line at a time to win. After around levels 13-14, they get much better and you need to actually start building major shapes and send multiple lines at once to win. Around levels 17-20, it gets pretty challenging. You need to plan for combos, know how to hold the right pieces and when to send lines and bring your own stack down so you don’t get KO’ed.

I’ve found the best way to win is actually to send 1 or 2 lines at a time quickly and keep your own stack close to the bottom. When the opponent sends you multiple lines(like they usually do), there are always bombs in those lines. You must use these bombs to combo lines and KO your opponent multiple times to secure victory. Switching your “hold” pieces in and out quickly is crucial to this strategy. I find that after the initial phase of 20 or so seconds, it is not a good strategy to stack and hold out for a 4-line Tetris. It is much better to keep your stack close to the bottom, wait for the other guy to send lines and use the bombs to combo them and get KOs. Most likely, they will be stacking for Tetris and their stack will be pretty high so watch the other screen. Sending just a few lines at the best time may score you multiple Kos and when they do send you lines, use the bombs to finish it off.

Thats my Tetris battle rant for today.

Games for today:

1. Rash Race 2 — Motorbike racing game

2. Crash them all — Crash and blow up other cars.

3. Peace Break Hero — Cool 360 directional shooter

This is re-posted from a post I did at Mochi forums:

I’ve seen several people ask how to build certain kinds of games and get source to do such things. If you want to learn proper OO or programming, get a book, but if you want to just build certain types of games and don’t care about such things, then here are some free and cheap resources you can use to get what you want.

Tutorials:

http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/ — A lot of it is still in AS2, but it works and it has basic tutorials on movement and animation as well as how to work with movie clips

http://active.tutsplus.com/ – Another great tutorial place for starting out in making games

http://www.flashgametuts.com/ — Useful tutorials in both AS2 and AS3

Game resources:

http://www.swishzone.com/index.php — Swish max 4 is $150 and you can publish to the .swf format with it. It has built-in components to easily make Jigsaw Puzzles and Quiz games as well as a few other types of simple games. $150 is a bargain for what your getting.

http://www.somefrogs.com — Also now known as puzzlescripts. They have components for both as2 and as3 to make jigsaws and sliding puzzles, all for $40 or so. Its not as out of the box as swishmax components but it doesn’t take much to figure out how they work

http://activeden.net/ — This place has pretty much all the basic types of code you want for sale, most of it for around $10 or so. There’s source code for puzzles, match-3, difference games, shooting games and more. Most of it is $10 so its cheap. Please pay attention to which version of the Flash IDE you need to open certain flash files.

Games for today:

1. Heroestick — Build soliders to conquer other castles.

2. The Paint Gunner — use paints to rescue the factory

3. Hazardous Area — Stack the faces high

A topic I often see in arcade webmaster forums is whether pop-unders that trigger on-click really effect visitors and bounce rate. Conventional wisdom(what everyone says) is that they have a huge effect on bounce and returning visitors. At first I believed this but then I ran some tests and found just the opposite. I do not use them now but have put them in from time to time and have found almost no difference in return visitors and bounce rate. When I checked with other people that have tested this, I found similar results. The most anyone ever reported was a 5% increase in bounce rates with no decrease in visitors per day. It seems that all arcade webmasters say that it has a huge effect because they haven’t tried it and that webmasters are more annoyed by these things than visitors are. I’ve also discovered that hardly any ad format has much of an effect.

Games for today:

1. Working Stiffs — Shoot the zombies and get to the roof

2. Ion Drift Epsilon — Drift and race around the track

3. Team Killer — A stickman fighting and sniping game.

For beginning arcades that have only a very small budget and have to decide between sponsoring a small game or getting SEO work done, I suggest getting a large chunk of SEO work done instead of going after that half-decent game and there are several reasons why. In general, SEO work is much cheaper. You can get hundreds of directory listings in relevant categories and hundreds of indexed back-links which have a more immediate impact on search engine rankings than a sponsored game will get. The sponsored game may get some clicks and immediate traffic, but this tends to die down after a week or so and traffic will return to normal levels. The sponsored game may also generate back-links, but this is not certain. Google and other big search engines generally are not that great at spidering URLs within flash files and many blogs will link to your game on Kongregate, Newgrounds, or another large portal instead of linking to your actual site. There are some sites that allow a sponsor or creator link but those are few. Generally, you will get better SEO results with actual article or directory links over a sponsored game. You, of course, could get lucky a sponsor one of those games that get tens of millions of plays, but on a small budget, that is very unlikely. SEO work on a small budget is a much more sounds and stable course than sponsor a half-decent game.

Games for today:

1. Reincarantion the final Happy hour — Get the bartender back to hell

2. SOTA — Place cell signals in the right place to cover the entire screen

This walkthrough is for the game WaterFalls 3.

Levels 1-14:

Levels 15-28:

Games for today:

1. Grotembit — Fight and pick up items to help you beat stuff up

2. Tumble fruit — Feed cute creatures food

After hearing person after person bitch about IE(whatever version you own), I still think its the most stable browser out there, at least the latest version. Why? Because for me, it crashes less than Firefox or Chrome. I’m talking about fresh installs without any extensions. If you just use the clean installs, then I would say Firefox crashes the most(or just jams up your computer because of memory leaks), Chrome is next(a lot of the times because it sucks at handling flash), and IE actually crashes the least. The reason IE seems to crash the most for many people is because they install way too many crappy toolbars and don’t realize it. There aren’t as many for Firefox and not nearly as many for chrome. The less toolbars you have, the less likely your browser is going to jam and crash. I think if people just left IE alone and didn’t install install all those yahoo/win prize money/whatever the hell toolbars, they would learn that IE is actually a really good browser. I haven’t really rested Safari and Opera that much but I have used them before. From my somewhat brief experience with those browsers, I was not impressed. For now I use IE and Chrome as my main two browsers.

Games for today:

1. 3d Rally Fever — Run racing/rally game

2. Uber Dungeon — Jump to get past the dungeon.