For those of you who like games with unlimited lives, look here! Click on the links to play the games.

Space Dexterity
This is one of those gravity games, with its own style and graphics. Although I do like the graphics, something is lacking the game. First, it does not count down for the lives you’ve lost, it counts up the times you died. Now beating the game with at least deaths can be challenging to some. The game is also not fair. Many times when you enter a level, you die immediately, because your spaceship is moving in the wrong direction. To make matters worse, between dying and starting over the level, you do not have time to pull yours fingers of the keyboard, so you’re thrust easily against the border of the screen or some spacerock. Besides that, the game is somewhat fun to play.

I keep bouncing into those rocks, but it doesn’t matter…

Llama rescue
Fun Gianan Sisters or Mario Bros clone. You are a yellow blob and you can kill green blobs by jumping on them. However if you touch a green blob, you lose a life. If you’ve missed the life counter, then you don’t know you have died. You start a level with three lives and if you lose all, you restart the level with three lives again. Well, that is just plain unlimited lives. You can also kill green blobs by riding a Llama, which appear if you jump against boxes with a question mark. Okay, not perfect, but still fun to play.

Moving platforms help you through the maze

Zombie Outbreak
Well, no unlimited lives here. But sure good game to mention. It has difficult controls, but the graphics are great. And what is better to spend some time on killing zombies if you have some spare time right?

Very dark game, but great graphics

An anonymous developer leaked that Microsoft is stimulating developers to migrate their iPhone games to Windows Phone 7. Microsoft is helping with money, and giving out mobile phones. Microsoft has confirmed this news and explained even more how Microsoft is helping developers to switch to their platform.

However, the developers have a problem. iPhone apps are written in objective C, while Silverlight and XNA games are written in C#. A migration would therefore involve a complete game rewrite. Of course, if you can make money with it, this should not be a big problem.

Unfortunately, I haven’t heard that Microsoft approached Silverlight game developers with the same deal. It is my own speculation, but perhaps Microsoft’s interest in iPhone games is to get the developers to switch, and because the iPhone developers created games which proved to be commercially successful. I don’t know of any Silverlight game which became a large commercial success, but SL game developers have invented their wheel.

There are many shooting games out there. Here are some great games I found. Click on the links to play the game.

Space Madness

This is not really a shooter game in the classic sense. It is actually one of those gravity games, where you need to move your ship from platform to platform, while gravity is at your disadvantage. But this game has a maze with shooting things. So if life is not bad enough with the gravity factor, you now also need to aim and shoot bad stuff. Good game to kill some of your time.

Watch that shooting turret, which blocks your way

Sniper Duty
A good old First Person Shooter. Yes! A first person shooter. But in contrast to all those advanced 3D games, you do not move. This is a typical eighties and early nineties first person shooter. I really loved these games. You need to shoot bad guys which walk around. You need to be quick otherwise they disappear. Kill all enemies to advance to the next scene.

Great scene, you can also use target view!

Deep Sea patrol
Space, air and water have something in common: you can float to anywhere, from any position. Who would say a classic 2D horizontal-scroller shoot ‘em up needs spacecraft or planes. In Deap Sea Patrol you are a submarine, dodging and shooting stuff under water. A fun bit is that your movement space is limited to the water, while you can be attacked from above surface and from air.

A boat with an underwater gun..

Keywords: nice try, okay and brilliant. What makes a good game? Well, a good game is one which people like to play twice. How do you get there? Well, you need to give the player that special feeling.

Nuclei
Nuclei is a nice try for a game. Quite simple, however takes too long to load. The object of the game is to protect your own ball in the middle of the screen, from incoming balls. You do this by rotating some forcefield around, on which the enemy balls will bounce. Well, that’s about it. After playing a few minutes, you have been there and done that.

That blue thing in the middle needs to be protected from the green things

Spaceball
Spaceball is an okay arkanoid clone. I have never seen anything like this. The object of the game is to play away all the colored bricks in the level. However, you do not control a platform to bounce the ball, no, you control the ball itself. An okay game to kill some time.

Green bricks when the ball-color is green

Coma
Coma is one of those diamonds you find on the internet. Absolutely brilliant. You play some black blob character and you start in some sort of haunted-house scene. When you leave the house, you enter into a cartoonist world, where the flowers wave as you pass them. I’m still not sure what the objective of the game is. But that’s also a positive point, you need to play it to discover the objective.

You walk past that haunty window, and birds fly-by

Many are still looking for a solution for the Silverlight sound problem. What are the problems and what is the solution?

People who tried to create a casual game in Silverlight, encountered problems when they added sound effects to the game. The time between starting a sound effect and actually hearing it, is unacceptably long. This is called “audio latency”.

Short effects, typically less than a second, sound good the first time, while they sound bad the second time when they are played. The source of this problem is not clear, however long sounds don’t have this problem. This is called the “short sound problem”.

Also, it is very hard in Silverlight to play music in an idle loop. An idle loop with the out-of-the-box MediaElement, plays a silence every time the music is repeated. The silence at the beginning is actually caused by the same audio latency described above.

The above problems exist in Silverlight 4 and lower versions.

The audio gap
The music compression format MP3, is standard encoded with a silence at the beginning – the audio gap. This is because the decompression code needs some time to get ready, like an engine which needs time to get started. Tools like WinLame may encode an MP3 without an audio gap at the beginning, but this does no good to Silverlight’s decompression code. An MP3 created with WinLame will sound bad.

The audio buffer
Silverlight uses an audio buffer internally, which needs to be filled with audio data before any sound is played. The size of the audio buffer is measured in time, and it costs exactly that time to fill the audio buffer, before any sound is heard.

Reducing audio latency
The audio latency is caused by the audio gap from the music format and because of the audio buffer. So if we want to decrease the time between calling the Play function and actually hearing sound, we need to handle both the audio gap and audio buffer. Now obviously, a latency of 0.0 is impossible, otherwise Microsoft would have provided this with Silverlight.

The solution: VorbisPlayer
The solution is to choose for an audio format which is gapless. Second, the default length of the audio buffer must be decreased. And for a seamless idle loop, we must stream the next music part into the audio buffer, right after the previous music part has finished.

Ogg Vorbis is a music format which can be encoded without audio gap, however it is not supported by Silverlight. However, Silverlight does allow developers to implement their own audio decoder.

The VorbisPlayer provides exactly the solutions described above. More important, the VorbisPlayer is easy to use, for not so technical people.

The VorbisPlayer allows low latency for sound effects, much lower than Silverlight provides out of the box. Because of the used technique, the short sound problem is also solved. Also, the VorbisPlayer has an easy function to invoke a playlist of music, which will be played seamless without gaps in between.

The Silverlight VorbisPlayer can be found on Codeplex: http://vorbisplayer.codeplex.com/