All entries for Friday 06 July 2007

Stage6.divx.com

Writing about web page http://stage6.divx.com

How the heck is Stage6.divx.com still in business? It quite blatantly publishes complete episodes of current TV shows in high resolution, high quality format, available to watch in the browser (with a small divx plugin) or to download to your PC.

Here, for example, are episodes 18 and 19 of Heroes, all the episodes of Dr Who you could ever want, and Life on Mars series 2, episode 1. Have they got some sort of invisibility cloak or something?

John Dale : 06 Jul 2007 13:45 |  Tags: Musings Tech TV |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Bloxorz

Writing about web page http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/bloxorz

Another day, another chance to fritter away the hours on a clever puzzle game running in Flash inside your browser. Today it’s Bloxorz, a devilishly simple idea where you have to move a 2×1 block around a grid until it can fall down the exit hole. The cleverness is in the way the block moves; it tumbles over and over, so if it’s standing up, when you move it it will “fall” until it’s lying down, and vice-versa. But if the block or any part of it goes off the edge of the grid, you lose, so you have to figure out the right way to manoeuvre the block to get it to the exit without falling off. Sounds fiddly, but it’s completely intuitive once you try it.

There are extra complications such as switches and such-like, but they’re really just ways to extend the “land on the right square” idea. One feature, though, where your block is split into two and you have to move the two parts independently for a while, then bring them back together, is quite fun.

So far, most levels have been reasonably do-able with a bit of lateral thinking, though 17, 18, 21 and 22 all looked unsolvable for a while until the lightbulb went on. If anyone gets all the way to the last level (level 33) without having their brain melt at least once, I take my hat off to you.

John Dale : 06 Jul 2007 11:00 |  Tags: Games |  Comments (9) |  Close comments |  Report a problem