Does archive.org ever delete files that its archived? I’ve noticed that some of the archived files from the older versions of patorjk.com have started disappearing. I went there the other day to grab up my old Snake game and I was unable to retrieve it. My other Flash games were also gone too. This is no big loss, but it’d suck if they actually routinely cleaned house on files that weren’t accessed much. It’d sort of defeat the purpose of archiving.

However, with some Googling I was able to find another one of my old Flash games. The port I did of Sloat’s Drop Graveyard:

Drop Graveyard

I have no idea what it’s doing there. I never uploaded the swf file to any site other than this one. However, I do find it pretty cool that it made its way around the internet and found a new home, even if it is one with tons of ads.

The game seemed to work pretty well for the most part, however it does have a two annoying problems: First off, the high score table doesn’t work since the php file that handled that was on my server. Second off, once you finish a game you’re redirected to their sign up page, which in my opinion is kind of shady. It looks like they modified the game so it’d do that. Though since I’m kind of amused just to see the game again I don’t really care that much.

With my googling I also found the old Drop Graveyard arcadepod page. If you read the reviews on that link you’ll see I got ripped a new one. I honestly thought the game was kind of fun. Not terribly challenging, but its a fun way to spend a few minutes. When I played Sloat’s original game I liked it, but it was the premise and story that really shaped it for me. If you don’t read the story before playing, you wont really know what’s going on.

patorjk.com Banners

While at archive.org, I also noticed that some of the old patorjk.com banners were gone. Some were missing before, but more are missing now. Luckily I grabbed up the ones I saw last time, since the image I based the old patorjk.com logo on is now gone. You can see it here:

That was probably made mostly with filters, but at the time it really blew me away. Ping was actually a really cool guy, I’m not sure what happened to him.

Snake

I’ve made some improvements to the Snake game that I posted up last week. Though I have a couple more ideas for it, I think I’m going to cool it on this project for a while (with the exception of bug fixes). This is mostly because I want to focus more on tool creation rather than on game creation. Anyway, the updates are enumerated below.

• A control panel was added to the bottom of the screen that gives some useful links and tells you the current length of the snake.
• When the snake dies, the part that made a collision turns grey.
• Various bug/anomalies fixed.
• The game was altered so that it could handle faster key presses. Basically I created a direction queue. This helps when you press a couple of arrow keys really quickly. Instead of using the last pressed arrow key as the direction to move in when you arrive in a new square, the game queues up all of the arrow keys you press and executes each movement as you go along. I noticed that this helped out in those really tense situations where you have to make a lot of careful turns.