Micropolis has taken another step online, courtesy of Don Hopkins: It is now available as a Facebook App. Now you can enjoy this fabulous cellular-automatized and open source version of SimCity in-between tending your FarmVille crops.
This new app is in active development, so you may see changes over the coming days. For more on what Micropolis can do and where it is going, see this transcript of a talk Don Hopkins gave when MicropolisOnline first got underway.
Ready for vampires
Batovi Games Studio, a game development company headquartered in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, recently released a long mini-game, Super Vampire Ninja Zero, for the XO. This is the most recent game being developed in parallel for the XO and the desktop PC. Batovi has been around since 2005 and has recently begun expanding to new platforms. It is great to see their handiwork running within Sugar.
Bernie reports that SVNZ is currently a hit in Uruguay and Paraguay, as well as among ninjas. It may be the most polished XO game release since Sim City for the XO came out. Now if only their forces were combined… perhaps in Vampires Take Micropolis, Online Edition?
Update: parents and teachers are often unhappy that their children play games. No less Doom and SVNZ. I sympathize with this. I also remember how a love for games taught me how much you could do with a computer (and how that was my first impetus to program something — how awesome to be able to make something it’s fun to watch others play!). This is part of the genius of Scratch – it combines the sharable joy of games and animations with an easy learning curve for discovering algorithms and techniques.