Ratloop Games
Ratloop, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Houston, Texas, and founded in 1997 in Richmond, Virginia. In addition to traditional retail game products, Ratloop has also done contract work for various 3D multimedia projects such as training tools and "serious games". Their earliest work used the label "Team Epochalypse", and they also own the DBA brand "Mekada", which is oriented towards casual gamers. In 2007, Ratloop Asia Pte. Ltd. was incorporated to support a development team based in Singapore. In 2017, Ratloop Canada was incorporated. Notable projects * '' Malice'' (Quantum Axcess, 1997) - A commercially released total conversion for '' Quake''. * '' Snap-on Gearhead Garage'' (Head Games Publishing, 1999) - Original game allowing players to customize and repair cars. * ''Rocketbirds: Revolution'' - a 2D cinematic action-adventure puzzler game made with Adobe Flash. *''Helsing's Fire'' (2010): a puzzle video game for iOS. *'' Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Private Company
A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is offered, owned, traded, exchanged privately, or Over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter. In the case of a closed corporation, there are a relatively small number of shareholders or company members. Related terms are closely-held corporation, unquoted company, and unlisted company. Though less visible than their public company, publicly traded counterparts, private companies have major importance in the world's economy. In 2008, the 441 list of largest private non-governmental companies by revenue, largest private companies in the United States accounted for ($1.8 trillion) in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to ''Forbes''. In 2005, using a substantially smaller pool size (22.7%) for comparison, the 339 companies on ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Gearhead Garage
''Snap-On Gearhead Garage: The Virtual Mechanic'' is a PC game where players repair and customize late model cars and trucks. It was created by Mekada, endorsed by Snap-on Tools, and published in 1999 by Head Games (subsequently acquired by Activision). There is no feature for driving the cars but Gearhead Garage introduced an entirely new "bolt-em up" paradigm. The appeal is reminiscent of taking things apart in real life—players can completely disassemble the engine, repair the individual parts, reassemble them, and then exhibit the completed result in their 3D "car lot". The game also features a series of "jobs", wherein the player fixes vehicles owned by fictional characters. This allows them to earn money to buy custom items from the catalog, auction, or junkyard. Popularity Gearhead Garage sold surprisingly well given its unusual design. It received generally excellent reviews, for example an average score of 4.5 out of 5 stars at Amazon.com and 9.5 out of 10 points ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Video Game Companies Of The United States
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) systems which, in turn, were replaced by flat panel displays of several types. Video systems vary in display resolution, aspect ratio, refresh rate, color capabilities and other qualities. Analog and digital variants exist and can be carried on a variety of media, including radio broadcast, magnetic tape, optical discs, computer files, and network streaming. History Analog video Video technology was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) television systems, but several new technologies for video display devices have since been invented. Video was originally exclusively a live technology. Charles Ginsburg led an Ampex research team developing one of the first practica ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Steam (service)
Steam is a Digital distribution of video games, video game digital distribution service and storefront by Valve Corporation, Valve. It was launched as a software client in September 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games, and expanded to distributing and offering third-party Video game publisher, game publishers' titles in late 2005. Steam offers various features, like digital rights management (DRM), Matchmaking (video games), game server matchmaking, Valve Anti-Cheat, anti-cheat measures, social networking service, social networking and video game live streaming, game streaming services. It provides the user with automatic game updating, saved game cloud synchronization, and community features such as friends messaging, in-game chat and a community market. Valve released a freely available application programming interface (API) called Steamworks in 2008, which developers can use to integrate Steam's functions into their products, including in-gam ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
PlayStation Vita
The PlayStation Vita (PS Vita, or Vita) is a handheld video game console developed and marketed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on December 17, 2011, and in North America, Europe, and other international territories beginning on February 22, 2012. It is a successor to the PlayStation Portable, and a part of the PlayStation brand of gaming devices; as part of the eighth generation of video game consoles, it primarily competed with the Nintendo 3DS. The original model of the handheld includes a OLED multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, two analog joysticks, and front and shoulder push-button input, and supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and optional 3G. The Vita features a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU and a quad-core SGX543MP GPU. The PS Vita 2000 series, a revised version of the system, was released across 2013 and 2014. It has all of the same features with a slightly smaller size, extended battery life, and an LCD screen instead of OLED. S ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
PlayStation 4
The PlayStation 4 (PS4) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Announced as the successor to the PlayStation 3 in February 2013, it was launched on November 15, 2013, in North America, November 29, 2013 in Europe, South America and Australia, and on February 22, 2014 in Japan. A console of the eighth generation, it competes with the Microsoft's Xbox One and the Nintendo's Wii U and Switch. Moving away from the more complex Cell microarchitecture of its predecessor, the console features an AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) built upon the x86-64 architecture, which can theoretically peak at 1.84 teraflops; AMD stated that it was the "most powerful" APU it had developed to date. The PlayStation 4 places an increased emphasis on social interaction and integration with other devices and services, including the ability to play games off-console on PlayStation Vita and other supported devices (" Remote Play"), the ability to stream gameplay ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for servers, and Windows IoT for embedded systems. Defunct Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone. The first version of Windows was released on November 20, 1985, as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Windows is the most popular desktop operating system in the world, with 75% market share , according to StatCounter. However, Windows is not the most used operating system when including both mobile and desktop OSes, due to Android's massive growth. , the most recent version of Windows is Windows 11 for consumer PCs and tablets, Windows 11 Enterprise for corporations, and Windows Server 2022 for servers. Genealogy By marketing ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Hardboiled Chicken
Hardboiled (or hard-boiled) fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction (especially detective fiction and noir fiction). The genre's typical protagonist is a detective who battles the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition (1920–1933) and its aftermath, while dealing with a legal system that has become as corrupt as the organized crime itself. Rendered cynical by this cycle of violence, the detectives of hardboiled fiction are often antiheroes. Notable hardboiled detectives include Dick Tracy, Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Slam Bradley, and The Continental Op. Genre pioneers The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined by James M. Cain and by Raymond Chandler beginning in the late 1930s. Its heyday was in 1930s–50s America. Pulp fiction From its earliest days, hardboiled fiction was publi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Gamasutra
''Game Developer'', known as ''Gamasutra'' until 2021, is a website founded in 1997 that focuses on aspects of video game development. It is owned and operated by Informa and acts as the online sister publication to the print magazine '' Game Developer''. Sections ''Game Developer'' has five main sections: #News: where daily news is posted #Features: where developers post-game postmortems and critical essays #Blogs: where users can post their thoughts and views on various topics #Jobs/Resume: where users can apply for open positions at various development studios #Contractors: where users can apply for contracted work. The articles can be filtered by either topic (All, Console/ PC, Social/Online, Smartphone/ Tablet, Independent, Serious) or category (Programming, Art, Audio, Design, Production, Biz(Business)/Marketing). There are three additional sections: a store where books on game design may be purchased, an RSS section where users may subscribe to RSS feeds of each s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Puzzle Video Game
Puzzle video games make up a broad genre of video games that emphasize puzzle solving. The types of puzzles can test problem-solving skills, including logic, pattern recognition, sequence solving, spatial recognition, and word completion. History Puzzle video games owe their origins to brain teasers and puzzles throughout human history. The mathematical strategy game Nim, and other traditional, thinking games, such as Hangman and Bulls and Cows (commercialized as ''Mastermind''), were popular targets for computer implementation. Universal Entertainment's ''Space Panic'', released for the arcades in 1980, is a precursor to later puzzle-platform games such as Apple Panic (1981), ''Lode Runner'' (1983), ''Door Door'' (1983), and ''Doki Doki Penguin Land'' (1985). ''Blockbuster'', by Alan Griesemer and Stephen Bradshaw (Atari 8-bit, 1981), is a computerized version of the Rubik's Cube puzzle. ''Snark Hunt'' (Atari 8-bit, 1982) is a single-player game of logical deduction, a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Helsing's Fire
''Helsing's Fire'' is a 2010 puzzle video game developed by Ratloop and published by Clickgamer.com. The protagonist, monster hunter Van Helsing, and his assistant Raffton battle Dracula and his minions by revealing monsters using a torch and defeating them with tonics. Developed over the course of 6 months by Ratloop co-founder Lucas Pope and programmer Keiko Ishizaka, the game was originally designed to be a roguelike action game, but eventually turned into a puzzler. ''Helsing's Fire'' was released in July 2010 for iOS. It was reviewed positively by critics, who praised the game's torch/tonic puzzle mechanic, visuals, and dialogue between Van Helsing and Raffton; reception towards the game's difficulty was mixed. The game won the "Best Mobile Game" award at the 2011 Independent Games Festival. Gameplay ''Helsing's Fire'' is a puzzle video game with a top-down perspective, set in London. The protagonist, monster hunter Van Helsing, and his assistant Raffton battle Dracula and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |