Brass Monkey

[fuchikoma]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmeGzzCknuw

So, Brass Monkey is pretty interesting. Just go to their site, grab the iOS or Android app and fire it up, join the game session on your LAN, and you can play various webpage-embedded games using your smartphone as the controller. Some games use custom controller layouts, others also make use of sensors on your phone such as tilt and motion controls.

I tried it out last night at a friend's place and it worked very smoothly. A lot of games seemed like one-offs of existing titles, but still, it felt pretty polished in the few games I tried - sort of like a console unto itself. Has anyone else here tried it out? What do you think of it?

[Thursday Next]

That's pretty amazing. Obviously some feedback and latency issues, but overall very slick.

[SomTervo]

Weird. There are two great pubs, part of a chain, in Edinburgh, called the Brass Monkey.

 

The uptown one has a back-room with one giant bed in it and a projector, with a movie-juke-box, so you can get a pub lunch and lie down while watching a movie of your choice from their pretty decent collection. Or just get a load of people on a weekday night, get some pints from the bar, and enjoy movies and drinking till closing at 1-2am. Amazing time.

 

On topic: Good idea.

[Waldorf and Statler]

[fuchikoma]

Yeah, Brass Monkey is almost Googleproof since it's such a common expression...

 

I played some more of their free game library and it's nice overall, but the games aren't really of the quality I'd expect to be good and disruptive - especially the few made by Brass Monkey. Still, some are good enough I come back again (Psychout, Race the Sun) and I think with some more good third party support it could really become "a thing."

 

I was also pretty suspicious of them at first because it seemed too good to be true. There's a tiny bit of banner advertising though, and a game-coin based microtransaction system for certain games. I'd like to think that explains it, though I still can't imagine them making a LOT of money this way... maybe it's a bit freer for now to attract players and beta test it.

[fuchikoma]

What I love about the idea though is that loads of people have touch/tilt smartphones and web browsers, so you could go hang out with friends almost anywhere and set up a game session. Depending on network security getting in the way, you could even start up impromptu sessions at school or work.

 

I asked some questions to their support address, and to clarify the colour-coded wi-fi connections: It's not about NAT level or ping time; it's just an arbitrary colour flag in case you're on a net with multiple instances of the same game and you want to join a particular one.

 

Their setup guide has some ports that have to be "open on your network" and they didn't clarify about whether that was for port forwarding to the PC or phone, etc, but I've found I didn't have to make any special allowances for it at home, other than to loosen security on their site to not only load plugins on demand. They must run some HTML 5 or something because regardless of this setting, they have a video playing in the background of the site, which made me think it was loading but not connecting... nope, it was displaying but not loading.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

This might be fun to drink a brass monkey and play with.

[Waldorf and Statler]

I gave some games a chance yesterday but yeah, the game are so bland for the most part it won't really go anywhere.