Archive for May 8, 2007

tehjay | May 30, 2007
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Review: Loco Roco

At first glance you may think Loco Roco is another children’s game, and indeed it does seem like this. That is, until you actually pick the game up and play it. Loco Roco is really easy to get into and just start playing. The controls are very simple giving Loco Roco its own unique style of game play.

Loco Roco is a very fun game which style reminds me a lot of Katamari Damacy. If you enjoyed Katamari Damacy, you should for sure enjoy this game.

The mechanics behind this game are really simple, you press the L shoulder button and you tilt the screen left, you press the R shoulder button and you tilt the screen right, press them both and you make your Loco Roco bounce. You also eat flowers and bugs throughout the level. The flowers make your Loco Roco grow a little bigger by generating another, and the bugs are like coins.

Loco Roco plays somewhat linearly, where you must roll and bounce your Loco Roco from the start to the end of each world. There are many obstacles through-out each level. It’s a really fun game if you are looking to add something lite to your gaming collection.

The graphics are very simple and cartoon-ish, but they work well with the overall theme of the game. The same can be said about the in-game music.

Overall this was a really fun game to play. I enjoyed it a lot. Simple to pick up and play. More games like this need to be released for portable consoles.

Category Score
Game play 9/10
Graphics 8/10
Music/Sound 7/10
Total 8/10


Cheats/Bonuses:

Idle sequences
When playing, split all of the Rocos apart in a safe place (or at a place where they will not fall). After awhile they will start to play with each other, “dogpile” the person singing the chorus, or line up in a line and count to the number of Rocos you have in Japanese.

Category: Games | Tags: , ,
tehjay | May 30, 2007
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Review: Every Extended Extra


If you’re into games that you can just pick-up and play, this is the game for you. Created by Bandai, and developed by Q Entertainment, I would describe Every Extended Extra as an Action based Puzzle game. This game is amazing, with intense game play, spectacular graphics and effects, and a soundtrack that ties the whole experience together. If you were a fan of either Lumines 1 or 2, you will definitely want to pick this game up.

Gameplay is set to the beat of the music as you build up chains of explosions with the objects that float on-screen in the virtual world. The bosses require you to explode chains to defeat them. Some of the objects give you a quicken powerup that makes the chains appear on the screen faster, with more objects in each chain. Once you build up to the maximum value of the quicken powerup the game is running at 100% and can be pretty intense.

There are 4 modes of single player gameplay. Arcade, Caravan, Boss Attack, and Original. Arcade is the main mode of play. You progress through each stage unlocking them for play in caravan mode. In Caravan mode you choose levels to play that you have already unlocked in the Arcade mode. Boss Attack is exactly how it sounds, you skip each stage and head straight for the bosses. Original allows you to play the original version of Every Extend.

Networked mode only supports Ad-Hoc, meaning you can’t play over the internet, you have to be within range of the person you are playing against. However, Game sharing is supported and you can share a demo version of Every Extended Extra with your friends. Bonus!

Bonus: Every Extended Extra comes with the Lumines 2 demo. So if you haven’t checked that title out yet, here is your chance to check out the demo.

Category Score
Gameplay 9/10
Network 9/10
Graphics 9/10
Music/Sound 10/10
Total 9.3/10



Screenshots:


Cheats:

Unlockable: Boss Attack
You must finish Arcade mode once to unlock Boss Attack.
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Category: Games | Tags: , , ,
tehjay | May 8, 2007
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HOWTO: Prevent website bandwidth theft with .htaccess

Some people can be so ignorant. Nothing aggravates me more than a forum user who hotlinks an image or file from your site on a popular forum, but when webmasters create file repositories, and all of the files are linked from other peoples servers. Without permission.

I’m sure there are many ways to prevent these people from harvesting your bandwidth, if you use apache with mod_rewrite, just by adding a couple lines of text to a file called .htaccess will do wonders.

What is Hotlinking?

Straight from Wikipedia:

Hotlinking aka. Inline linking is the placing of a linked object, often an image, from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the site where the object is located. Inline linking is also known as leeching, direct linking or bandwidth theft.

Let’s start by opening up a text editor and creating a file called .htaccess In this file you want to put something like this:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?attackofthegamer.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gz|zip|rar|gif|jpg|js|css)$ - [F]

Basically what this does is check if a request to any file with a .gz .zip .rar .gif .jpg .js .css extension comes from the referring URL http://www.attackofthegamer.com If the request comes from a referral that isn’t http://www.attackofthegamer.com it’s rejected. You will want to swap the domain for your own to make it work.

If you are just protecting images. You can mess with the culprit and change the image on them to something of your choice, with a comical outcome. Just create a .htaccess file that looks like this.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(png|gif|jpg)$ http://www.mydomain.com/badimage.gif [R,L]

Just change the domain name, and the url to the image you want to swap with and you are set. Once you have the .htaccess file created use your FTP program and upload it to each directory you want to protect.

Voila, you should now be protecting against bandwidth pirates. Happy Hunting.

Category: Linux | Tags: , , , , , ,