he second part of my "History Of Atari" launched today on Gamasutra.  "Atari: The Golden Years A History, 1978-1981" is long, and self-indulges a lot with the history of the Atari computer line (because the story has told in many places before).   If have a bit of time, please go by and read it. 

K, we are back much sooner than expected.   Since we launched the GameStorm! Retro Casual Game Idea Generator (see below)  today, we decided to use it to formulate another podcast.  Today we discuss several different game ideas and designs including an idea that uses one of our all-time favorite arcade games. BurgerTime!

As well, we have expanded a bit to include news and views on the state of the Indie Flash Game Scene.  This one is about 30 minutes, and the audio has been vastly improved over last week.

Download and Listen after the jump.

orm Soule, who created the great game Magma (featured in our Retro Showcase) has a brand new blog dedicated to Flash Games.

One of his latest entries is a very cool example of a pixel displacement filter created with particles and he wants YOU to have his code too!

Nice work, Norm. Keep it up.

lash Game Development Inter-web mash up:August 18, 2008

The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers.

This time we cover FlashGameLicense.com; How people are cheating and hacking Flash games; How to Pause and Resume a sound in AS3; How to implement A* in AS3; 6 new action games on Kongregate, and more...

Download it here: http://www.8bitrocket.com/podcasts/gamestorm1.mp3

ith a new baby in the house, plus a 3 and 1/2 year old starting to figure out what it means to have a little brother taking up space that was once all his, I have been under the gun to purge into storage (or the bin) as many things as I can. Long ago a decided to get rid of every box and package for pc and console games (DS games being the lone exception). I bought those inexpensive black cd binders and placed all of my PC games and software into them. I like the ones with 4 spots per page for cds (on each side). If a game or software manual would fit in the slim confines of the cd envelope on a page, I placed it in the bottom row and the associated disk in the slot above it. Since I now use an iMac and Parallels to do most of my work, I have no use for most of the software I have collected. Unless I really want to use boot camp, most of my game library is useless. With 6 giant binders chock full of 10 years of PC software, I had a lot of cleaning up to do. Even though these binders takes up little space, I decided that at least 2 of the 6 could eliminated. I wanted to have room to spare in the binders I kept and I also promised two of them to my wife to use be for the pile of kids DVDs we have procured over the last 3 years. That meant I had to be pretty liberal in the things I got rid of and very conservative in what I kept...

Since we often write long-winded stories about how 8-bit computers and video games affected our lives, I just took a look out on the interweb to see if there were any other people wasting their precious living moments doing the same. There are. Here are a few good ones:

We start with a straight-forward reverie about a owning an Atari 800 in 1983. I can very much relate to this one:

My Long Lost Atari 800 by Runningwave

"It's just amazing to review my own little piece of personal computer history and realize I was part of an technological revolution. A child of the 1980s, I was among the first to experience computers on a daily level. Now that is taken for granted."

selection blogs, articles, tutorials, games, and more that might be on interest to Flash game developers (or any other game developers).

This week we have new stuff on monetizing games; sponsor lists; DZONE and Stumble Upon for game devs and site owners; game usability; a discussion on libraries, frameworks, and engines; and a whole bunch of new stuff from Emanuele Feronato; and the absolute basics of AS3. WHEW! Plus 5 great games for you to test and and play across some of my favorite portals. I didn't even make it to all of my favorite sites this week and I have more than a full load to read...