I have another great Flash game to share with you today. It’s simply called The Space Game, or TSG by its creator, CasualCollective.

TSG puts you in the middle of asteriod fields. Your goal is to either mine enough minerals or survive enemy attack long enough to pass each mission. This sounds simple, but it is actually quite complex while still being managable.

On the resource side, you have energy and minerals. Energy is provided by solar power stations and is used to power all created buildings. Minerals are mined from the asteroids and are used to build new buildings (as well as creating ammo for missile launchers).

The main building for most missions is going to be the mineral miner. This structure is where you gain minerals which are used to build up everything else (including other mineral miners). Watch out though as the asteroids do have a limited amount of minerals. Don’t let too many asteroids run dry or your supply of minerals will quickly disappear.

To defend your base, you can build lasers that have two different upgrade paths and missile launchers. There are a large variety of enemy units that each have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. You must use your knowledge of the specific types of ships to build the appropriate buildings for defense.

There are also support structures such as energy stores which increase the amount of stored energy (great for weathering large attacks which can cause massive power drains) and the repair station which builds drones that automatically repair damaged structures. These structures aren’t strictly needed, but they can mean the difference between success or defeat.

There is one final building: the energy relay. You can’t build your buildings just anywhere and have them work, they need to be in range of power. Since you won’t want to build power stations everywhere, power relays allow you to bridge the gap between power stations and other buildings. These can be a weak link however as each relay can only connect to a total of five buildings and if a relay is destroyed, the power flow is cut off.

Other than the energy relay, all the buildings can be upgraded. It seems that upgrading a building always produces a better cost/benefit ratio than simply building another matching building.

Not only is this game very well designed, but the visuals are quite appealing. Sure, the enemies may appear retro and the buildings are simple, but the backgrounds are great and the user interface is fantastic. In the reviews, someone mentioned that it should be put on XBox Live. I’m sure that a game like this would do extremely well if ported over.

Great work CasualCollective. I look forward to seeing what else you come out with.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and start mining those asteroids.

I’m very sorry for the late posts the past couple of days. Things have been quite busy, and I just haven’t had enough time to finish things up on time.

Today I’d like to introduce you to Auditorium.

Auditorium is a audio/visual logic puzzle Flash game. In the game, you have to use the different tools given to you to redirect the particle stream. As you begin to redirect the stream into specific collectors, specific sounds start to increase in volume. As you fill up all the collectors, you are rewarded with a beautiful symphonic sound.

Not only is Auditorium an intriguing challenge, it is both beautiful and a pleasure to listen to. There are times where I don’t want to successfully pass the level so that I can keep hearing the symphonic sound unique to that level.

You can play the first few levels for free. For a mere $10.99, you can get access to all the levels.

I highly recommend that all you puzzle and music fans try Auditorium out. I can’t be held responsible for addiction.

In one of my earlier posts, I talked about setting up Ubuntu 64-bit on my Dell Studio 17 laptop. I provided some information on how I set up Flash on my system. This solution used the 32-bit release version of Adobe’s Flash plugin and nspluginwrapper to allow the 32-bit plugin to be used with the 64-bit version of Firefox. I had just a few problems with this solution:

• Google Analytics would crash the entire browser if I tried to change the date range.
• Hulu would always take at least a minute to load any video. Full length videos would sometimes take as long as five minutes to load.
• Youtube would often times not work correctly.
• Random parts of certain Flash applications would not work at all.
• The new Hearts of Space Flash player didn’t work.
• All too often, all Flash apps would fail. This resulted in every instance of Flash being replaced with a light-gray background.

Fortunately, I found a great solution to this problem: an actual 64-bit Adobe Flash Plugin.

That’s right. Adobe has finally released a 64-bit version of Flash. There are two important things to note:

1. They actually released this back in November. It’s my fault for not knowing this until now, but I still wonder why it was so hard to find. Shouldn’t it be offered as an option on the download page?
2. This is not an official release version; rather, it’s an alpha release. This means that the plugin may not be stable and doesn’t have full support currently. They have the following notice on the download page:
   This is a prerelease version of the Adobe® Flash® Player 10 software for Solaris and 64-bit Linux platforms. It is being made available for developers and consumers to test their content to ensure new features function as expected, existing content plays back correctly, and there are no compatibility issues.

Despite the fact that it’s an alpha release, I’ve had no problems with the plugin so far. It works great and fixes all the problems I listed above.

Automated Install

I’ve created a script that will take care of the details of installing this solution for you. Simply run the following commands from Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal):

Since this script uses the sudo command, you will be prompted for your password. I have to use sudo since I need to close Firefox, remove apt packages, remove existing Flash plugins in the /usr/lib directory, and copy the new plugin to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/.

Manual Install

If my script and its use of sudo makes you uncomfortable, this is the sequence of steps you need to install the plugin manually:

1. Download the Adobe Flash 64-bit plugin (the following is all one line):
   wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.d21.1.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
2. Extract the libflashplayer.so from the archive:
   tar xvfz libflashplayer-10.0.d21.1.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
3. Close Firefox
4. Remove old Flash plugins. The follow commands are what my script uses to automate this process:

   sudo apt-get remove -y --purge -qq flashplugin-nonfree \
   gnash gnash-common mozilla-plugin-gnash \
   swfdec-mozilla libflashsupport nspluginwrapper
   sudo rm -f /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/*flash*
   sudo rm -f ~/.mozilla/plugins/*flash*
   sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/*flash*
   sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/*flash*
   sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper

5. Copy libflashplayer.so to /usr/bin/mozilla/plugins/:
   sudo mkdir -p /usr/bin/mozilla/plugins/
   sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/bin/mozilla/plugins

Now you’re ready to load Firefox again and test it out.

Closing Thoughts

Now that Flash works properly, I can even make use of the Hearts of Space‘s new Flash player. When this new Flash player came out last week, I lost the ability to listen to the HoS programming. It was this straw that broke my tolerance for this issue and led me to search for a solution. If you don’t know about Hearts of Space, it’s “slow music for fast times” and is my favorite radio show. I’m happy to have a subscription to fill my day with Space.

The script I’ve included here is the most advanced bash script I’ve ever written. It has colored messages and error checking. It also includes many bash commands that I’m not accustomed to. Creating and testing the script was a great learning experience. I could have just written it in Perl, but I thought that making it a bash script would be a bigger challenge. If anyone knows bash scripting, I’d love to get a critique on my techniques.

As always, if you have any problems with my script or with getting this to work on your system, please leave a comment with details. I’ll do my best to help you.

If you used this script, and it worked for you, please leave a comment.

Today I recommend that you try out Shopping Cart Hero.

The last Flash game that I posted about was all about logic. This one is all about silly, pointless fun.

Try your best to maximize the distance, height, and style points as you ramp your cart into the air. Upgrade your cart to improve it’s ability to roll, attach rocket boosters, add groupies, and unlock tricks to build up the greatest amount of points possible.

Can you get a cart full of groupies in space?

I often enjoy simple games more than complex games. Grid is the latest time killer that I’ve found and became quickly addicted to.

Grid is a spin off of the old style circuit games where you have to get all the pieces connected in just the right order to form a circuit. The exception is that Grid requires you to connect every connector to some other connector. Each “grid” only has one solution, so you have to get it just right in order to move on to the next level.

This doesn’t sound too difficult, but there’s a great twist. There’s a central power point that feeds the circuit. Only pieces that actively have power can be rotated. This means that if you make a mistake, you can disable a piece and leave yourself with no way of sending power to it again.

There is a way to restart the puzzle if you have messed up too much, but fortunately, there is an undo so that you can reverse previous mistakes.

In order to add an extra layer of challenge on top of all of this, you start off with a base level bonus each time you start a new puzzle. Each time you rotate a piece, this bonus goes down by one point. If you use the undo, you lose two points. So, not only do you want to complete the puzzle, but you want to do it in as few moves and mistakes as possible in order to maximize your score.

My final score was 68671. See if you can beat me.