Bob’s game

The basic concept behind the game is “Who Is Yuu?” Yuu is your character. You control the sprite and do different puzzles and other interactions around a fairly large city.

Robert explains the game on his site, quoted below:

Hello.
My name is Bob, age 25.

This is my game for Nintendo DS, a 20-hour-long retail-size,
retail-quality adventure title by a single human being-
the largest game ever made by one person.

“bob’s game” is a simple 2D adventure game, with focus on
story, puzzles, item collection, and communication instead
of repetitive battles with palette-swapped enemies.

Many characters (over 200 completely unique characters!)
have deep personalities that evolve, and many things
depend on the in-game time, day and weather.
It’s the game I wanted to play when I was younger,
a vision I’ve been following since then.

In a move that represents the Million Dollar Homepage, Arthur Stubbs is giving people the chance for cheap, creative advertising by offering them ad space for only 2 dollars a spot at IntoSpace.org. Arthur tells people his about his passion for the project and what it’s about:

This is my gift to everyone who has ever dreamt of space flights but has always been unable to make it become reality.
This project is about compiling a catalog of photos and logotypes to be sent into outer space aboard a space vehicle. Our catalog will consist of 300 sheets (300 “rockets”), every “rocket” will be able to deliver up to 1000 “astronauts” by occupying the place of 25×40 cm. on a single sheet. You can book your ticket for just $2.

If he ends up selling all the tickets, which he undoubtedly will, he’ll possibly make around 3 million dollars or so, at least before shipping costs to space. This seems like a good opportunity for everyone involved in the project, and major sponsors already show up on the homepage, which should help drive a lot of traffic both ways.

Just in case you somehow missed the past week of awesome articles, here’s the run-down:

• Good Grief, it’s Team Roomba
• How To: Skinning the Team Fortress 2 Characters
• An Interview With the Gib$Ru$ Admin
• Inside the Team Fortress 2 Heavy Update
• Tweak Team Fortress 2 For Max Performance

Thanks to all of you who read and enjoyed the articles, pretty soon I’ll put up a poll for you to vote for your favorite game that you want us to devote a whole week writing about!

AppleGeeks Lite is a comic featuring a guy and a girl that use an Apple laptop, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with Apple. Making fun of all the latest stuff is one of the classics of the comic, Portal and David Hasselhoff not excluded.

chainsawsuit is not a “normal” comic by any means. Most of their comics feature video games, and some of them are totally random, but most of them will probably get a laugh out of you. A good example of their randomness is TGI Knife Fights, while making fun of games Animal Crossing and Transformers shows off the writers’ gaming side.

When the art style of a first grader and the humor of a grown man combine, you get Explosm. One of the funniest comics ever to grace the internet, explosm is a true “masterpiece.” With comics featuring Bigfoot, God, and Space Invaders, Explosm updates daily, so you can get a good laugh every morning before you head out the door.

theWAREHOUSE comic again falls under the “random but funny” category. With comics featuring a shark, Mii’s, and shooting bears, theWAREHOUSE is a great comic to check perhaps once a week, as they only have a few new comics a week.

Penny Arcade is probably the most popular web comic right now (even more than xkcd), featuring video games 24/7. Some of my personal favorite comics that they’ve made have games like Portal, Army of Two, LEGO Online, Spore, and the list goes on. Every comic comes with a nice blog post explaining the meaning behind the comic and current goings-on in the creators’ lives.

Finally, if you’re reading this and you haven’t heard of xkcd, then you better get to reading the comic, because it is one of the most popular with an fanatical fanbase on the web. With stick figures doing all kinds of geeky stuff that other geeks can relate to, xkcd is a great comic to get into, with classics like rollercoaster chess and lots of others.

Now, to celebrate this event, The Pxl Lab is going to bring you Team Fortress 2 all week long next week! We’ll bring you tips, tricks, tutorials, interviews, awesome game sprays, and more! You can subscribe to our RSS Feed to keep up with all the goings-on, and we hope that you are as excited as we are about it!

Homestar

The site itself has 6 main sections: Toons, Games, Characters, Downloads, Store, and Email. Toons consists of a collection of random flash videos put together for any reason whatsoever. The videos range from exploits of an R-Rated movie by Strong Bad to the famous Teen Girl Squad episodes. But even more famous than TGS is the weekly Strong Bad Email. This is one of the original features of the website that many remember from years ago. There are also many games like Peasant’s Quest and Trogdor. Most of the games originated from previous Strong Bad Emails. A lot of these games are purposefully horrific looking, to impose an old school feeling to them. They are rather fun to play, however. Peasant’s Quest is perhaps the most famous of the games on HomestarRunner. You are a peasant whos cottage has been burninated by Trogdor. You must walk around and become a hero by acquiring items and typing “look” and “search”, etc, to be allowed up the mountain before your impending doom. The Character’s section just gives a video description of each character presented by themselves. Downloads is where you can get all of you Homestarrunner sounds for your computers and desktop icons and such. You can get into  the “secret” section by clicking on the “0.00 dollars” in the “$” area, dragging the credit card into the slot at the top-right, and typing in 5675 as the pin code. The Store is an external link where you can buy t-shirts, hoodies, dvds, posters, and many more things to keep the website going! All of the merchandise also originates from toons on the site. The Email section is where you can email them with questions, or complements, and also for the F.A.Q. of the site.

HomestarRunner is a wonderful site that makes me laugh everytime I visit it. Its definitely worth checking out whether you have an hour or ten minutes. Most of the toons run under 3 minutes if you don’t have much time to watch.

P.S. Firefox users can view the site in full screen with the addon known as “Full Screen Homestar Runner“.

Zone Alarm was created initially by Zone Lab’s but was bought by Check Point in 2003. It has only been compatible with Windows XP until recently in 2008 they updated Zone Alarm to 7.1, allowing the program to be compatible with 32-bit Vista only. Zone Alarm’s main purpose is to provide an effective firewall for your computer, allowing or denying no file without your decision. Whenever you boot up a new file or possibly a malicious file, they stop it momentarily until you allow or deny access using a handy pop-up. This means that there is no possible for a program to receive access and harm your computer or send files to the internet without your permission.Zone Alarm also allows for complete program control, allowing you to choose what level of trust you think is appropriate for each program. 1 being restricted, and 3 being full access to your computer. You can also choose to kill the program, which allows no access whatsoever, preventing any threat that program might bring to your computer.

The main feature of Zone Alarm is of course the actual firewall. The firewall is made up of 3 zones: Trusted Zone Security, Internet Zone Security, Blocked Zone Security. The TZS decides how cautious your computer should be within your Trusted Zone, which you define in program control. Even if you have a program that may seem fine at first glance, if somehow it receives a malicious update and you have the TZS turned off, it will not work effectively because you have allowed unlimited access to the program. The IZS decides while your browsing the internet how cautious it should be downloading files or viewing pages. This feature is great if you accidently view a Phisher site. The BZS blocks whatever you decide to, and doesn’t let any communication whatsoever through. It can be analogized to being stranded on a foreign planet with hostile aliens and no communication. This firewall is nearly impenetrable, allowing no file, communication, or hacker in your system without your command.

Not only does Zone Alarm act as an amazing firewall, it also has Anti-virus monitoring, Anti-Spyware, and EVEN E-mail Protection. With E-mail protection enabled no attachment can be opened or sent without thourough inspection. With the Anti-virus monitoring Zone Alarm works in conjunction with a designated Anti-virus program to alert you for out-of-date or possible not useful software. If your Anti-virus program is out of date, then there could be possible new virus’s that it has not incorporated into its automated defense. the Anti-Spyware is not a full program, but a handy attachment to the firewall that scans as you see fit. With the Zone Alarm privacy setting you can prevent pop-up ad’s and certain cookies.

Last but not least there is Identity Protection! You can enter certain figures, such as your bank number,credit card number, passwords to sites such as ebay and others, address, passport number, mothers maiden name, and many more. Then whenever data is communicated that may contain that information outbound from your computer, Zone Alarm stops this. This is very handy for password stealers and those pesky hackers that steal your information!

All in all Zone Alarm is a highly recommended program by me. It is very learner friendly, easy to use, and quite effective. Besides the Firewall, there are so many more things that you can do that will safeguard your computer that it is quite hard to list them, but I somehow managed to. I have no criticism of this software , and for only $30/year, the investment is worth it! I have yet to try out 7.1, seeing as my version is still behind at 6.5.722, but the coverage is still the same! For you gamers trying to log onto servers, Zone Alarm may sometimes get a little annoying. For those situations, simply right click on Zone Alarm and go into gamemode, which does not question repeated server connections during your gameplay! It is also noteworthy to say that Zone Alarm does not slow down your computer like other heavy duty defense programs. I have noticed maybe a slight delay here and there, but nothing significant!

I’ve also included a download of the basic firewall

Free Basic Zone Alarm Firewall

There are very many helpful and amazing features that, after a few days of testing, have proved to be essential to my Firefox experience. First is the new toolbar, nicknamed the Awesome Bar. Basically, you type in a keyword, and it gives you all possible results in a drop down menu that are relevant to that keyword. It becomes increasingly helpful when you can’t simply remember the website you visited yesterday, but you do of course remember the actual content the website contained. I love this toolbar because it is too confusing to bookmark every single site you go across that you wish to view daily. This tool is a great toolbar (no pun intended) that helps keep your bars clutter free and your day just a bit less hectic! This amazing feature is probably the most helpful, but there are many others that deserve a mention. The second most useful tool added to Firefox 3 is the advanced malware protection. This protection is a huge step up from Firefox 2, letting there be a smart list of possible internet attacks being updated every second! This is another step in the direction of perfect protection. This time around Firefox 3 delivers a killing blow with a full screen message blocking possibly dangerous websites that can infest your computer. The virus defense Firefox 3 offers works with your anti-virus program as well! It lets the program know when your downloading something, and automatically scans the file, making sure there is nothing harmful contained within it! I for one am ecstatic about this improvement to the already wonderful browser. The new security measures Mozilla has taken to ensure our safety is a very important part to our internet lives. A few other minor updates that are worth noting are the One click bookmark (which allows faster bookmarking of sites if you are in a hurry), Integrated parental controls, and Full screen zoom and navigation. These provide for an all around better Firefox experience.

I have used Firefox for many years now, and from many of my friends whose first experience with Firefox is Firefox 3, their opinion of the web browser is void of criticism and critique. Firefox again does not disappoint the public, and held true to their word. I want to thank Mozilla and specifically the creators of Firefox for this wonderful, versatile browser!