I’m a few hours into Mario & Luigi: Dream Team for the 3DS and wow, it’s a bit of a departure from the Mario games I’m used to. Aside from New Super Mario Bros, which is about as perfect an update to the original games as you can get, Super Mario Bros 3 was the last Mario game I played, and gosh but things have changed a lot since then. For a start, Luigi is now more than Green Mario Who Can Jump Higher.
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Mario & Luigi: Dream Team
Game music: Desktop Dungeons
I started 2014 with a pair of shmup soundtracks, so why not continue with another themed pair? To accompany last week’s Dungeons of Dredmor here’s a soundtrack I waited a long while to hear. From Danny Baranowsky and Grant Kirkhope, Desktop Dungeons.
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Game music: Dungeons of Dredmor
Presented without comment, the soundtrack to a roguelike featuring the chunkiest eyebrows this side of Sequential Art. I refer, of course, to Dungeons of Dredmor.
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Reset validation in Flex
Random code snippet time…
In Flex it’s very common to run validation on a form field before submitting – from ensuring a field isn’t empty to checking a phone number or email address is correctly formatted. Generally if validation fails you get a red border and some hover text derived from the component’s errorString field.
Resetting a validation result is less straightforward. The internet is full of this answer:
textfield.errorString = "";
At first glance this seems to work, but future validation fails, since all you’ve done is clear the error message, not clear the validation status. What you need to do is to actually set the validation status to OK:
textfield.dispatchEvent(new ValidationResultEvent(ValidationResultEvent.VALID));
Et voilà. Clear and repeatable.
Game music: Gradius V
There was no way I could post Ikaruga last week and not follow up with my other favourite shmup. I bought an Xbox to play Ikaruga, but the console saw plenty of other uses. On the other hand, I bought a PS2 purely and solely to play Gradius V. It’s that good. And unlike Ikaruga, I’m not entirely awful at it.
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Back in 2011 Creative Assembly Game music: Ikaruga
If you were to plot all the games I’ve ever played on a graph, with one axis representing enjoyment and one representing competence, I dare say there’d be a reasonably clear pattern. There would, however, be one clear outlier. Treasure’s Ikaruga.
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And the “Best of 2013” award goes to…
There was a lot of awesome gaming news in 2013, but what was the greatest little piece of gaming history made in the past year? No competition. Not a game, not a piece of technology, not me getting good feedback on Twitter from my favourite composers, but a cheeky piece of cleverness by a little indie studio and the ensuing gormless response from their “victims”.
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So that was 2013
Coming in to 2013 it didn’t seem like the most promising year for gaming, but looking back it’s been a whole lot of fun and the future is looking rosy. Since this is a gaming blog, such as it is, I’m obliged to do a post looking back at the year gone by. This is a tradition or an old charter, or something.
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Game Music: Christmas Lemmings
Merry Christmas everyone! When I chose Wednesday to be my soundtrack post day it hadn’t occurred to me that it would coincide with Christmas. That left me with a choice – either post on a different day or post something appropriately festive. Having already used Big Giant Christmas EP back in snowy August I now present the greatest Christmas game ever made: Christmas Lemmings.
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