Windows Mobile 7 for gaming!
So here you can see that Microsoft has unveiled the new mobile phone OS that Windows Mobile users have been speculating on for years.
It's evident that Microsoft have taken a fresh approach to this iPhone copy-cat market and like Palm they seem to have come out with the support of the overwhelming public.
What does it mean? It means that Microsoft are in-line with Apple, Palm and Google with their mobile software at long last and with the inclusion of XBOX Live gaming ability it means you will get some beefed up games running on mobile hardware.
For us that's exciting we're big fans of mobile gaming and this shows that Microsoft is as serious about it as the rest of the industry — I'm glad they took the time to do it right and differentiate themselves.
New Stuff Sunday
Hey-o! You're probably enjoying some Sunday internet gaming, feeding your mum pancakes or spending some quality time with those people who you love-a-lot.
Sunday, lovely Sunday. We made some updates to Johnny Two Shoes to make your weekend a little bit more awesome.
First up, you'll see a slightly re-designed game page to fit the new design. It's easy to see, just check out any games and force your eyes towards the game title.
Next, we want you all to see when we post non-featured blog stuff, so we made an icon that shows the latest post next to the blog link on the homepage and in the forum! So now it's easier to leave a comment and know what's going on.
In addition to all that lovely new stuff, we have added hearts to hip-hap, now when a player hearts a game it will be added to the hip-hap queue! Hopefully it means more friends and another way to see what's going on.
God of War III New Trailer
We over at JTS have been looking forward to this game for a while now, but this trailer makes me think we wont be let down when the game is finally released. Recommend you watch it in HD
Hip-Hap knows what's going down
Hip-hap was in beta a while back, it absolutely kained our servers because it wasn't optimised for the amount of players that loved to sit and watch it roll around, so we had to disable it while we worked out the kinks.
I'm happy to say that this evening we got it running just how we wanted so now it's back! Only for registered players, another reason to get on-board the good ship Johnny Two Shoes.
Pop and Fresh
Check out the new design on the home and games pages. We realised we needed to get with the times and blow-up those tiny little sugar cube images into whopping great wide versions.
In the process we thought, how can we show more games in one place? Well, we threw in the popular sort, it sorts games by how many people have fav'd them.
It seems that by far the most extremely loved and adored game is Attak, if you haven't played Attak yet then grab a buddy, sit them down and proceed to smash them through a series of office blocks with Sibor, Blane or one of the other nutball fighters.
By default you get to see what's fresh right now, the order in which we make 'em, newest right at the top working down to a little gem called Thermostorm. If you haven't played some of our older games, you should check them out — it's where we came from man!
Of course, High Speed Chase 2 is our latest creation, it's like a mix of High Speed Chase, The Heist and a whole bunch of ideas we had floating around in our brains.
We hope you love smashing cars off the road as much as we do, go play High Speed Chase 2 now d00ds.
Also, a quick nod to supergrover who captured the wonderful new Comatose icon, high fives all round.
Learning Exclusivity
High Speed Chase 2 is fresh out of development and it's live for everyone to play, on this site and on a ton of other sites. But what's different about a player out there on the internet and a registered player at Johnny Two Shoes?
Before we launched High Speed Chase 2 we had a number of ideas for how we could reward players for being part of the community, it started a very long time ago when all of our games were released exclusively to Johnny Two Shoes, a lot of them remain that way today, most recently Banana Dash World 4 was released as an exclusive.
We realised to build a proper community we need to integrate feedback and player interaction but we also need to make the experience at Johnny Two Shoes unique. At first that was comments on games, but that was pretty basic (and not very unique) so we re-designed the entire site from scratch with the community at the core. Johnny Two Shoes 2.0 launched almost 2 years ago — we had medals, high-scores, player accounts, profile pages and a blog.
Things have changed since then, but it's been more of an evolution of that basic idea and an evolution of our design. We did have to start make games with other companies because we simply ran out of money — it was a hard decision to make and it lead to about 18 months of incredibly hard work, the worst part was that we were incredibly distant from the community during that time.
In October 2009 we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel, we were coming to a period when we could re-think what the community meant and how we would release our new games. We gave you Banana Dash World 4 as an exclusive, something we were very proud to do! We even tried throwing in a bonus level to see if it changed the reaction to the release.
The positive feedback we got from that bonus level set off a chain reaction with us. We worked out so many different ways to engage with the community and ways to boost the size of the community — we had High Speed Chase 2 half finished collecting dust so we busted open the files and tried to apply some of those ideas to:
- Promote High Speed Chase on the iPhone
- Engage new players
- Encourage player registration at Johnny Two Shoes
- Reward the existing community
So this is where we are now, a new blend on an existing mentality — another way to reward the community and a new way to drive new player registrations. As I write this, we're having a soaring number of new registrations when High Speed Chase 2 has been in the wild for around 24 hours.
So, what does this mean for the future of Johnny Two Shoes? You can bet that it means more community features, new ways to interact with each other (stuff you won't have seen anywhere else before) and a ton of new experiments that you can all get involved with.
This is an exciting time to be part of Johnny Two Shoes. We want to say thanks for sticking around and we're really looking forward to the rest of 2010 with you all!
Want to be a SPY?
This has just come in from an ex-MI6 agent, we're not sure exactly what he's trying to get across in that get-up but he certainly likes a little game called High Speed Chase 2.
You know, it's on iPhone and will be on the web in a few hours, stay tuned on our twitter.
Apple's Latest Creation
Is this the event to unveil the oft-rumoured Apple tablet? We think it is, January 27th — that's this month people, Apple could be unveiling their tablet (rumoured to be called iSlate). We shall see!
The Power-Up Wall
This is a little sneak-peek into the JohnnyTwoShoes development environment for High Speed Chase 2, yes, one of our walls is covered in those power-ups! We live and breath power-ups right now, follow the link to see a higher resolution image.
High Speed Chase 2 Beta
My good friends of Johnny Two Shoes, the much anticipated release of High Speed Chase 2 is nearing. The heat of this release is pretty darn hot, so roll-up roll-up, leave a comment to be considered for a beta invite.
Please note, we don't invite everybody to the beta, but if you don't try, you'll never know. We will start the beta small and grow and grow until it's bursting onto the web.
Tell your friends and your friends friends. Good luck.