Looks good, enjoying the games on there now…
Good delayed account creation, and re-uses your Runescape account if you already have one.
looks nice. Their MP stuff isn’t as advanced as their UI is tho
Another anonymous style-less heap of dross to toss in with all the others. Does a site like this actually make enough money? Do people actually buy stuff? Do people even look at a game based on how interestingly the letters of the title are drawn? I despair.
Cas 
Sorry, being overly negative there. But other than the fact it’s Java I can’t see why it stands head and shoulders above any of the hundreds of Flash-based sites out there.
Cas
Most of the flash sites share the same games. This games seem original and some are quite hard to code + has nice graphics… It can’t fight the flash sites though,but, as you said , it’s java. I didn’t see any java games site that was much better than this one.
And talking of Java games, Java 6 really needs to do something about the default GC settings, the pauses are just intensely annoying and a throwback to the bad old 1.2 days.
Cas
Not bad.
Not great, though. The loading experience is horrible (multiple progress bars that often appear stuck, putting a menu in between loading screens, asking for permissions).
Neither the text or graphics are anti-aliased.
Also, it breaks in Safari if you tab away. Which I did about 10 times, and cursed every time.
It creates a .jagex_cache_32 in your home folder, which is weird, because Java 6 already does caching.
There are some interesting animations though. See the nice page-turning animation in Lexicominos.
Anyone play any games they really liked?
Might try a few more tonight.
What they need is… some Puppygames applets
Cas
I think it’s actually very nice… though they could put a bit more efford in the community aspect. The games are more polished than those featured on most (flash based) portals and play/load very fluid (at least here on my config). These games seem to be offer exactly what I was aiming for with my java game portal (Arcazoid.com, but I failed miserably 
).
The only thing that I miss is a search box soon or later I want to use a search box, ppl don’t seen to be able to design good navigation in medium to large sites. this is at first glance.
Anyways I don’t know as far as these sites go it seem to be on pair with most, I should let my nephew test it since he’s probebly the target age.
All in all it is excellent with respect to java on the desktop as it provides a real usecase, mix it with the influence they have runescape wise . These are the things that allow it to move forward.
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The integration between JVM and website is awesome. e.g. navigation in web browser is detected and reacted to by the games (works in FF). Menus for the overall site can be accessed in-game any time (hit esc), etc. There’s a very large number of “achievements” (XBLA style), that within just one play you normally pick up at least one. I suspect the inspiration is more Pogo than Kongregate.
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This is being pushed to the 12 million or so Jagex account holders; because I have a Runescape account, I didn’t even need to sign-up. That kind of thing is widely regarded in business as a major way to make a success out of something that is otherwise in no way clearly better than the incumbents.
nice as it is, applets still have that lag when the first one loads, and the sounds stop a few seconds after leaving the page. they have the security pop up too, i guess for the code loading bar to avoid the java loading animation, tho tbh the loading animation they have is no nicer looking than the sun one.
Hmmm, one of the Jagex guys was recruiting on another fora I frequent and said they were going to do this. That was last year. Nice to see they actually launched a site. I have to wonder at the business decision to stick with Java though.
Indeed. They will be necessarily chucking away half their potential “customers”, but for certain the use of Java won’t be giving them twice the money intrinsically. Just a bit crazy really. Unless they plan to start using LWJGL and do some rather amazing stuff but even then… it’s not going to suddenly convert into cash twice as effectively as plain old Flash.
Cas
Aren’t we being short sighted here?
Runescape is java and they are drawing from that pool of customers, this means java is already installed asking users to also install flash is where the hassle is at. Also going for flash instead of java creates the hassle of supporting two languages, sticking to java is cheaper since they already have developers that are familiar with it. Actually l don’t see what the added value for jagex would be if they would have gone for a flash based one, if this blows up in there face they can still potentially use the workforce on runescape or use these games as prototyping for features for runescape etc. Having a bunch of flash developers you’d have to lay them off, where as with the java you could keep the good ones and skip the recruitment costs for the next project.
I’m happy with the site with respect that it can be like netbeans and glassfish etc, it will bring the sharp edges into the spotlight. and hopefully motivates sun to do something about it.
I’m actually fairly impressed with the site. The style of the loading bar didn’t bother me, nor did the fact that it lacked anti-aliasing like a lot of flash applications. In fact, I thought they did a rather good job, since most (all?) of the loading is done in the middle of the “orb” screen, which lets you stare at something cool looking while the bar goes by (and gives you the feeling that it’s doing stuff and not just sitting there).
I found the starcannon game quite entertaining actually (if you play it set it on hard mode - anything else is a bit too easy for reasonable gamers I think). It’s one of the few shooters that you don’t actually go down ridiculously far in power whenever you die. I got fed up with a lot of scrolling shooters in the past because you basically had to not die at all or you basically screwed yourself over, since losing your ship meant losing your guns, which meant losing your ship again (or, at the least, finding the game considerably less fun at that point). Some people might not like that the power doesn’t go down, but I found it worked just fine, and on hard difficulty it was still more than challenging enough to deal with the waves of bullets coming at you.
Also, if you haven’t guessed by now, I rather like the fact that I’ve seen multiple difficulty levels for every game I’ve tried so far. It let’s everyone pick their own level they want to play at.
And you can be sure I was glad that I wasn’t playing a flash game when the starcannon game starting rendering several hundred particles on the screen at once. Hate flash lag.
326,640 highscore btw =)
I show it to my little brothers and they were a little unimpressed, they said that miniclip.com and other sites were better looking and had better games.
I thought the graphics on the game I tried were pretty hopeless (a top-down view upward-scrolling shooter, I think the same one nva225 was playing) - no anti-aliasing.
Also, the applet froze firefox for a while it was loading up grrrrh. But java update N with Ken Russell’s new plugin2 should fix that.
No antialiasing = yuk
Difficulty levels = papering over cracks in the design
Just being opinionated, but then, everyone has the right to my opinion :-*
Cas
One of the nice things that you don’t get on any Flash games I have seen is the option for fullscreen on a bunch of the games. As well, the games don’t all have the same “feel” as flash games typically do.
Agreed. Unfortunately thats not a good thing.
Kev