Gareth Jones

A few weeks back we were commissioned by Bug Interactive to develop a viral game for the Active Ashfield initiative and to promote the launch of their new website. The brief was to develop a sports-themed game that featured their two food-based characters (Brocky and Peggy) which would promote healthy eating and an active lifestyle.

The result is Active Ashfield’s Conversion Challenge, a game that tasks the user with scoring as many conversions as they can within the two minute time limit. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds though, as you have to factor dynamic wind (both in terms of direction and speed) and variable kicking power into your aiming!

For more information and screen-shots, head over to Quak Multimedia.

Around a year ago now I was working at my computer one night. Suddenly it made a few clicking sounds and immediately I knew that this was bad news. Unfortunately, while I considered my immediate backup options and tried to decide how best to save all of my files before my computer finally died, it blue-screened on me and refused to start up again. Yep, catastrophic disk failure. It hadn’t even given me enough time to make some essential last-minute backups.

I spent the next hour or so researching the best way to get my data off a broken hard drive and found a forum where one guy had frozen his drive in the freezer, arguing that the extreme cold would slightly shrink the parts inside and bring any contacts closer together. Why not try that? The disk had already refused to yield anything to the six different bootable recovery disks that I had tried so I felt that I had nothing to lose.

I wrapped the drive in a plastic bag to prevent moisture from getting inside it and placed it in the freezer. The next morning I removed the drive and found it to be so cold that my fingers stuck to the metal. I connected the drive to my computer and turned it on, not really knowing what to expect. Amazingly, it booted into Windows. I managed to move everything of any importance off the drive onto a second drive before the disk finally warmed back up to room temperature and failed again.

After buying a new drive and re-installing Windows and all of my other software, the first thing I did was look for a backup solution. I found one in Carbonite. Carbonite automatically and securely backs up the contents of your hard drives for roughly £30/year and offers unlimited storage. It’s continuous and automatic, secure and encrypted. It’s also available for Mac. The peace of mind that I get from knowing that even if my flat was to burn down to the ground, all of my music, my photos, my work – everything – is all backed up off-site on secure servers.

As a happy customer I’d recommend it to anyone.

Quak Wordsearch is an application that allows you to play a different wordsearch game every time you view it. Whenever you load the game it selects at random from a list of words that you have specified and places these words on the grid in random locations. To see this process in action, try refreshing your browser a few times on the game screen!

The application is ideal for puzzle websites, and as it allows for you to print the game out and complete it on paper it is also ideal for use in schools as an after-lesson activity.

For more information and screen-shots or to buy the game, please visit Quak Multimedia.

Name that Note is a Flash game that improves the user’s music-reading skills by tasking them to read music from 2 different clefs through 3 different difficulty levels. The challenge is to correctly name as many notes as you can within a time limit, with the higher difficulty settings giving you more difficult notes to work with in less time. Scores are saved to a leader board to promote friendly rivalry.

The game has proven to be very popular among music enthusiasts and has received very positive feedback.

For more information and screen-shots or to buy the game, please visit Quak Multimedia.