Sponsored
Techradar |
| In Depth: Like Tiny Wings? Then you'll love these games Posted: 16 Jul 2011 05:00 AM PDT There's a long-held belief in gaming that simple games are best, and there's certainly some truth to that. Having depth is fine, but present any gamer - whether a dedicated, grizzled, unnervingly scary veteran or someone who plays the odd casual game on an iPhone - with a focused, playable, highly intuitive gaming experience, and addiction is almost guaranteed. This is especially true if the gameplay mechanics are tight and the presentation is top-notch, all of which explains the success of Tiny Wings. Fundamentally, there's really not much to Tiny Wings. The entire screen is a button, which makes a bird retract his stumpy wings and dive-bomb. Let go and he unfurls his wings and flaps for all his might. The key to success is in the timing - you prod when the bird is over a hill's downward slope and while he's sliding, and you let go when he's on an upward slope and soaring through the air. There's plenty of randomness in Tiny Wings, due to the way levels are generated procedurally, but there's skill in the timing.
And because the game is easy to learn, it's more of an equaliser than the likes of Complicated New 3D Shooting And Exploring Game VII. The basic mechanics behind Tiny Wings aren't new, though - they're the distillation of ancient platform games such as Pitfall! and Hunchback. But instead of you being able to move your character and leap or duck to avoid a hazard (the hazard in Tiny Wings, in case you're wondering, is landing in the wrong place), the game automates movement, leaving you to concentrate solely on timing.
This focused, honed-down dynamic has been used by a number of iOS games that have built on these basic foundations to create new and instantly playable games. One of the most famous - and the title that kick-started the endless genre - is Canabalt (£1.79, universal). Originally a Flash game, Canabalt made the leap to iOS and wowed gamers with its tiny running man leaping across rooftops. The grim colour scheme and moody soundtrack made it feel like a dystopian take on exaggerated parkour, and wonderful touches - jet engines slamming into rooftops, flocks of birds flying as you pass, buildings crumbling underfoot - distract from what is ultimately a limited (if playable) one-note game. Today, it's tough to recommend Canabalt outright, not because it's poor, but because many other games have taken the basic formula and improved it beyond measure, often by way of simple add-ons. Some integrate arcade-style double-jump mechanics, enabling you to jump again while plummeting towards failure; others include extra gestures, for sliding under obstacles or punching things out of your path; and a sub-set of titles add weaponry, turning games into two-thumb challenges where you off foes while avoiding falling to your death.
The weapon add-on is particularly popular. Our favourite game of this kind is Halfbrick'sMonster Dash (69p, universal), which has time-travelling hero Barry Steakfries battling his way through exotic locations, blasting demons, mummies, vampires and yetis to oblivion.
The game retains Canabalt's endless nature, but multiple environments (Steakfries teleports every thousand metres) and weapons add longevity, even if the lives system (you get three) only assists when colliding with foes - fall to your death and your game's instantly over.
Rogue Runner (free, iPhone) deals with that problem, mercifully enabling you to continue after death-dives. Although its jump mechanic feels a bit floaty, it's a good choice for anyone who's exhausted Monster Dash, not least because the selection of themes and characters is huge. Another option with varied content is Air Supply (£0.69, iPhone), set on alien worlds and boasting sharp retro styling, although its unlock mechanic to access new content is disappointingly gruelling.
Some games ditch guns for more tactile weaponry. Angry Rhino Rampage (69p, iPhone), Robot Unicorn Attack (69p, iPhone; £1.19, iPad) and Lame Castle (69p, iPhone) all use charges to smash objects away. The first two games are 'cartoon cute' and 'bizarre kitsch', respectively.
Robot Unicorn Attack is particularly oddball in having you guide a robot unicorn through a pastel landscape while being serenaded by 1980s pop group Erasure. Lame Castle, though, is the standout; there's a mix of finite and endless modes, with you guiding a knight on a hobby horse to rescue his love from the titular lame castle, punting chickens along the way in an amusingly Phythonesque manner. I Must Run (69p, iPhone) dials down the humour but ups the intensity and adds further gestures; the protagonist's Canabalt-like escape takes him over rooftops and on speeding subway trains, requiring you to swipe to duck, and tap to punch and jump - simple actions that become surprisingly easy to forget when you notice a bridge approaching your head at 100mph.
The logical conclusion of such games is ultimately found in the gloriously bonkers Run! (69p, iPhone) - which lets you karate-kick sharks in the head and repel alien invasions with a trusty pocket bazooka (not a euphemism) - or EA's somewhat more traditional platform game Mirror's Edge (59p, iPhone; £2.99, iPad), which isn't endless but uses similar controls to I Must Run.
Elsewhere, further smallish changes to the template lead to unique endless gameplay experiences. Dino Rush (69p, Universal) is akin to a prehistoric Angry Rhino Rampage, but multiple taps make the fruit-munching hero fly; this action expends energy, making the game about risk versus reward, a theme also fundamental to the wickedly funny Grim Joggers (£1.49, Universal). That game has a troupe of joggers determinedly making their way through hostile territory, regularly falling prey to spike-pits, explosives, polar bears and aliens. Having a string of crazy people to control makes proceedings frenetic, although, surprisingly, not any easier than Canabalt or Tiny Wings from a progress and survival standpoint. And if you're still gagging for more, you could try vermin doing gnarly stunts in Rat On A Skateboard (69p, iPhone); intense neon gravity-flip madness in DOT5URBO (free, iPhone); or a climbing ninja, leaping between two towers in Ninjump (free, iPhone and iPad).
If you want to mix things up a bit, you could try the odd bit of swinging instead of jumping in Hook Worlds (69p, iPhone), which offers four separate modes that can be roughly described as: swinging; swinging plus guns; swinging plus gravity-flipping; and swinging plus ludicrously difficult and retro.
It's great fun, as is the rather simpler MrAahH!! (69p, iPhone), which almost provides the opposite experience to Tiny Wings, challenging you to land on a central spot or fall to your doom while going "aaaaahhhhh". Finally, with the amusing and cute penguin-on-ski-slopes dive-bomb leaper Pilot Winds (free, iPhone), we're back where we started with Tiny Wings, having leapt, punched, unicorned, chicken-punted, flipped and swung through over a dozen great but simple games. 
| ||
| Tutorial: How to recover lost Windows passwords Posted: 16 Jul 2011 03:00 AM PDT Many of us have a love-hate relationship with passwords. They're great for dissuading youngsters from logging onto our machines and wreaking havoc with our files, but they're just as likely to turn around and bite us. Forget an obscure, intricately crafted password and you're in a world of pain. It's true that all versions of Windows enable you to create password recovery discs, but what do you do if you find yourself locked out without that disc? There are several tools out there that can help you recover the forgotten password, and the best of the lot is Ophcrack. Its key utility reads the Security Accounts Manager (SAM) files in Windows - the files that keep user account passwords in LAN Manager (LM) or NT LAN Manager (NTLM) hash format. It uses pre-computed rainbow tables to recover the passwords. Security researcher Dr Philippe Oechslin developed the tables and the tool. Ophcrack
Ophcrack is licensed under the GPL, and is available as a free download for Windows and Linux. To retrieve your password, you'll need to boot into another OS installed on a separate disc or partition. We assume you know enough about your Bios to change your PC's boot order. The best way to use Ophcrack is via its Live CD, which works if you don't have a dual-boot PC, or have forgotten the login password for all installations. The Live CD is based on the minimalist SliTaz Linux distribution. You can either burn the Ophcrack ISO onto a CD, or use the YUMI Multiboot USB Creator to copy the ISO onto a USB drive. The Live CD is available in two flavours: one helps you crack Windows XP passwords, and the other targets Windows Vista installations. The two CDs package the same program, but with different rainbow tables, because Windows XP and Vista use different hashes to store passwords. Using the Live CD When you boot from the Ophcrack Live CD, you'll get a bootscreen with several options. Usually, 'Ophcrack graphic mode - automatic' should work. Once the Live CD boots you into the SliTaz graphical environment, it automatically launches the graphical Ophcrack tool. It will list all the user accounts it has found on your computer under the User column, and attempt to recover their passwords. Unless your password is fairly complicated, contains lots of characters or you're on a dated machine, the tool shouldn't take long to crack your passwords. When it's done, the passwords are listed in the NT Pwd column. If the password field corresponding to your user is empty, there is no password for that user. That's all there is to it. Now all you have to do is note down the password for your users, reboot into Windows, and log in with your username and the newly found password. The automated password recovery procedure on the Ophcrack Live CD should suffice for most situations, but if it doesn't, you can configure the program more comprehensively. Password cracking is a time consuming task, but you can speed up the process by asking Ophcrack to employ all the cores on your multi-core processor.
To do this, switch to the Preferences tab in Ophcrack's interface and set the number of threads to a figure one greater than the number of cores. For example, on a quad-core machine, set the number to '5'. Make sure you restart Ophcrack after changing this setting. Another way to speed things up, especially if your Windows installation has several users, is to delete any user accounts that you don't need to recover the password for. Even if you're the only user, Windows will have a couple of extra user accounts such as Guest and Administrator. Finally, you can increase your chances of cracking the passwords by installing additional tables. Depending on which Live CD you've downloaded, you'll either have the XP Free Small or the Vista Free table. Get more tables You can download additional tables from Ophcrack's website. Besides the aforementioned tables, only the 703MB XP Free Fast table is available for free. The others can be downloaded for a fee, and can be used to crack passwords that aren't based on dictionary words, include special characters, German characters or numbers, and are of various lengths. Once downloaded, simply copy the tables inside the 'Tables' directory in the root of your USB drive. Ophcrack will pick them up automatically on startup. Although the Ophcrack Live CD will automatically detect users on the system it's running on, it gives you the option to load the password hashes manually. This comes in handy when you're running it on a dual-boot machine or a remote machine. The 'Load' hash button gives you several options to load the hash. The 'Single hash' option lets you specify the hash manually. With the 'PWDUMP file' option, you can import hashes created with a third-party tool such as fgdump. You can also manually point Ophcrack to the SAM file you've grabbed from a remote machine. The SAM file is in the 'system32/config' directory. Offline NT Password and Registry Editor
Depending on how complex the password is, there's a remote possibility that Ophcrack might not be able to crack it. If you've been unable to discover your Windows password this way, you can always try resetting it with the Offline NT Password and Registry Editor, but be aware of the implications before you start. If you asked Windows to lock your files with your password during installation, resetting it will give you access you the installation, but the locked files won't be recoverable. With the Offline NT Password and Registry Editor, you can reset the password for any version of Windows. It's available as a 4MB live CD. When you boot from it, it will detect all the drives and partition on those drives that have valid Windows installations. The first step is to select the partition that houses the Windows installation whose password you need to reset. Windows 7 creates a small, bootable partition as well as the regular Windows partition that contains the OS files, so make sure you point to the larger of the two. Next, the tool asks you the location of the password registry. In most cases, the default path should work, unless you've tinkered with its location - in which case you should have a fair idea where this needs to point. After reading the password registry, the tool prints a list of users, and gives you the option to set a new password, wipe the password, enable/disable a user, or escalate their privileges to those of an admin. Make sure you write the changes to the registry before exiting the tool. Once you're able to log back into your Windows installation, remember to change the password to something complex that you can still recall easily. How to create a Windows password-reset disc
All versions of Windows let you create a password-reset disc using the Forgotten Password wizard. The exact steps for doing this vary somewhat depending on the version of Windows you're running. In Windows XP, head to Control Panel and select User Accounts. In the Pick an Account to Change area, select your username, then under Related Tasks in the sidebar, click 'Prevent a Forgotten Password'. This will launch the Forgotten Password wizard. In Windows Vista, head to User Accounts and Family Safety in Control Panel. Here, under User Accounts, you'll find the Create a Password Reset Disc option. Follow the same route under Windows 7 to get to the Forgotten Password Wizard. In all versions of Windows, the wizard will ask you to insert the removable drive, prompt you for the current account password, and create the password-reset disc. You don't need to create a disc every time you change your Windows password - it'll work no matter how many times you've changed it. On the other hand, this means that your Windows installation can be compromised with ease if you ever lose the disc. 
|
| You are subscribed to email updates from techradar To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment