Frédéric Heintz submitted his Mode 7 prototype to our Articles section. it was developed using the new Flash 8 capabilities, and it shows the impressive speed improvements of the new Flash platform.
For more informations, or to contact the author, you can refer to this post in our forum.

Joep van Leijsen submitted his Striking Saints, in which you have to shoot at “saints” (?) falling from the sky using a flower (quite strange, isn’t it?). They carry a symbol: the “X” indicates the enemies, trying to reach and kill you after they touch the ground, while those with an “O” move out of the game area giving you bonus points/lives (even if it’s hard to realize it, because no message is displayed, or sound played).
The game is quite fast, in fact in a few minutes you can reach level 16 or more and a lot of points. Maybe it’s even too fast, in fact at higher levels the number of enemies falling is huge, while the rotation of your flower keeps being slow.
Game graphics are ok, but maybe they could change from level to level, to give the game more variety. Also it’s not clear why using a symbol to characterize friends vs enemies: maybe different graphics would create a better result.
The overall impression is that the game suffers of being too repetitive: its scheme never changes, and after some minutes you could be a little annoyed.
In the end, in our opinion this game is good for occasional gamers, having just some minutes of relax during the launkbreak at work, while maybe more experienced gamers will look for something less repetitive.
Let us know what’s your opinion in our Submitted games forum.

Our Games collection has 3 new entries:

• X-treme Ball 2 is a strange game developed by LinkOne, where you have to control a ball and fire at other balls crossing the screen; the game’s menu graphics and soundtrack are nice, while the concept should be refined to increase its longevity
• Jawbreaker is the version of a classic puzzle game developed by Jeroen Beckers; this version doesn’t add anything to the original game concept, but it’s the first example we’ve ever seen of a game using Flash components
• finally, Asteroid’s Revenge is a funny “upside down” version of the classic Asteroids coded by Yinan Chen: you control a single asteroid and have to avoid the shots of multiple starships…
  The game’s graphic reflects the original one, but maybe the menu graphics could be improved

As you have seen, from now on we would like to add a brief comment whenever we tell you that a new game is online: in this way we think we can help their authors and all the other game developers to improve their own works… and we hope that you will leave a comment in the blog (as soon as it will be possible again) to tell us if you agree or not.

Mariam Dholkawala and Macromedia gave us the permission to publish Mariam’s article Cryptic Capers: Best Practices for Mobile Game Development that first appeared on the “Mobile and Devices Developer Center” on the Macromedia website. In this article you will learn the basic steps in building complex mobile games for Flash Lite enabled devices.
This is the first article on mobile gaming topic that we host on gotoAndPlay().

Our contributor Neodroid submitted a new prototype implementing a class to create particle effects, and a game named Scrabbler which is a good example of use of those FXs.
Happy experimenting and playing!