Building Atari With CreateJS
atari.comWow, Atari is taking JS games mainstream. It was bound to happen eventually.
Alright, I'm confused. I visited the arcade site on my Android device and it said Adobe Flash was required. Am I to understand their platform takes JS and compiles it into a Flash package?
No, it doesn't. It's possible that whatever browser you're using doesn't support some feature, maybe requestAnimationFrame, but I could onlt speculate here. Flash is used for some ads though. I'd suggest you try either Chrome for Android (if on ICS) or Firefox Aurora for Android (the latter is guaranteed to work because both mobile and desktop versions of Firefox have standards support parity).
Disregarding the technical side of things though, the games themselves are below mediocre from a gameplay perspective.
Well the games are remakes of the classics, so if you don't have any fondness for the originals, you probably aren't going to like them.
Personally I had some fun with lunar lander, though it seemed a lot easier than the BBC micro version I remember :)
No, the response to controls, the "feel of the games" is just bad. The originals where an order of magnitude better.
The games look like subcontracted creations without artistic supervision from Atari just to advertise IE. They are not remakes for the sake of remaking old games, replicating and improving gameplay with modern visuals.
Sure, I think that's fair. The whole thing could definitely have been done a lot classier. And I don't doubt there are better online versions of these games already out there - I've since found a better (flash) version of lunar lander.
The article itself is still pretty nice though and I applaud the effort that went into that.
IE only? I don't know which kind of message they are trying to pass, but going from retro to irrelevant is definitely not the right one.
It is not IE only. CreateJS works well in the major browsers. The games work in new versions of all browsers. The games are only ad-free in IE and should work well especially in IE 10 as this looks to be partially sponsored by Microsoft.
Some of the links at the end also pertain specifically to IE.
Microsoft also got Cut the Rope ported to HTML5 for IE9: http://cuttherope.ie/ (yes, they used Ireland's TLD since it's IE...)
I don't really know why they are pushing IE10 since it's not even out yet (unless someone is sponsoring them). By the way the small demos are working in chrome, quite slowly but working
I can only imagine they're slow because you don't have hardware acceleration working in your Chrome (type about:gpu into your address-bar to see what the deal is). All demos run smooth for me, as do all the games in the atari arcade: http://atari.com/arcade
I'm generally very impressed with what they've done here (aside from the 'install IE10 to remove adds' thing).