Web-based typing game from the maker of Minecraft, using Unity3D
drop.notch.net
drop.notch.net
It seems like there is a Ludum Dare event going on: https://twitter.com/notch/status/328290085487398913
Also, try to press enter every 4 words for the biggest bonus possible. If you've gotten a lot of short words recently, you can probably enter 5 words before encountering the overflow error.
"install now!"
No. Stop it.
If you didn't have a Flash player and the game was made in Flash (surely that would meet one's expectations for a "web-based game", or at least until very recently) and you didn't have a Flash plugin, would you complain as well?
But whatever your answer to that theoretical question, in practice, I cannot play Unity games because I'm only using linux machines. IMHO not being able use a platform is reasonable cause for complaint.
When Macromedia Flash originally became popular, it solved quite a few very real problems in existing browsers. SVG support was nonexistent. JS performance was horrific which prevented smooth animations. Browsers were VERY inconsistent about how input was handled, and CSS-assisted DOM rendering was extremely awkward, slow, and browser-specific. There was no real "video" or "audio" support. You embedded a video or audio object and hoped the user's browser had a codec available to decode it, and that was a whole world of WTFs indeed. It provided a means of DRM, which is apparently important to people who have too much money and still want more. Last, but certainly not least, there was no way to establish a real-time duplex connection with a server (full TCP access is still not possible without experimental flags, but WebSockets allow most of the needed functionality).
Flash completely filled the multimedia-on-the-web niche. It was such a fundamentally missing piece that it would be eventually shipped with many browsers, and some (Chrome) even included their own Flash players. It became so fundamental, it was ported to almost every major platform. I'd argue it became a de facto, proprietary, web standard.
In this case, Unity3D is a game engine that's meant to target many platforms. It isn't "web based," it's just something that happens to be running in a browser plugin. I thought for a moment that this meant Unity3D was building for HTML5, but alas, the plugin plague continues. And to be fair, Flash is almost completely obsoleted by current HTML5/CSS3 features, but will likely outstay its welcome in the name of backwards compatibility.
Lets not confuse terms here.
And a game where a single error is "start over from the beginning" is a non-fun game, generally.
"And a game where a single error is "start over from the
beginning" is a non-fun game, generally."
These are widely recognised as some of the most fun computer games in history.
I assure you I've played plenty of pre-1990 video games.
Missing a single shot on a target isn't fatal; getting hit could be, but even then there were usually intermediate points/levels or some other way of making replaying it interesting (non deterministic enemy movement or whatever in some games)
Notch needs to get back to work on 0x10c [1]
[1] http://0x10c.com
Concept reminds me of a game I played on Amstrad-Schneider cpc 464. It was a space invaders game with your spaceship being in several positions at once. Each position corresponded to a key on keyboard. When you pressed it, you fired a shot and corresponding key for that spaceship slot was changed. Essentially, that's how I learned to type fast.
My record was 37. Though I only played it for a few minutes. It's just too damn fast and annoying on your eyesight.
Love the animation, too.