Baja Blast Duck

baja blast duck

baja blast duck

update to the lost Flash prototype version of Fruit Ninja

so a long time ago, i made a post talking about this version of Fruit Ninja i discovered and later found out to be lost media. it's the original prototype version of the game, and it was available to play on the old Fruit Ninja Anniversary website from 2017 onward. Luke Muscat talked about it in his video 'How I Designed Fruit Ninja', and he shows footage of it at 4:41 seconds. in the original post i made about the site, i found an archive from 2021, tried to fetch the file from the site, got hit with a CORS policy error and found out that the place the network was trying to fetch the file from was turning up with a 404. yesterday and today, i've been trying to work around the CORS policy error by disabling web security on my browser, but i've turned up with absolutely no luck.

for those unaware, a CORS policy (or Cross Origin Resource Sharing policy) is basically a something that allows or disallows a browser to access an asset from a domain that differs from the original domain. there's a website on Mozilla that explains this better than i could, but the way i understand it is that if your browser tries to make a request to fetch something that's hosted on a website but originates from another domain (say, a file sharing website), its regulated by the CORS policy to make sure the site you're fetching this information from is secure. if it's allowed, the content loads normally. if it isn't, the request to fetch that content is ignored (at least i think that's how it works). this, along with the 404, was what was stopping me from being able to fetch the swf from the site.

so, here's the main update: i can't find it. i've tried everything i know how to. disabling web security lead to the discovery that the swf itself was hosted on a separate URL from the main Fruit Ninja Anniversary website that apparently wasn't archived on the IA, and it was also being stopped by the CORS policy. punching that URL into the Wayback Machine turns up with a snapshot from 2022 that's just a 404, and since the Wayback Machine works by fetching every available snapshot of that URL it has in its library to load the content, it's always fetching that specific snapshot, and that's why it can't load the. no matter what archive of the Anniversary page i use, it's gone. it's lost-lost. i've even checked the self-hosted version of the Fruit Ninja Anniversary website on seanockert.com, but it's not there either. the only real options i have are scraping through every single Flash game archive i can find and hoping that someone saved it (which is a very low possibility), or to ask the original developer if they can send a copy my way (and even then, that option is an absolute last resort if nothing else works). i am pretty desperate at this point to find this thing and i'll look through everything i can to try to find it.

also, just to clear some extra stuff up: none of the Fruit Ninja games on Flashpoint are the prototype. none of them were made in Flash and they don't match up with the prototype. it was my first place to look and it unfortunately isn't there. additionally, the name of the swf file hosted on the Fruit Ninja Anniversary site is 'FruitNinjaHBF2010.swf'. searching this on the IA didn't bring up any results, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not on there in some way. i'm really hoping this'll turn up again and that it's stashed away on the internet somewhere.

update 2: made a twitter thread! i hope this catches some more attention on there, i don't use twitter so this topic will be the only thing i post on that account.

i think more people should draw human Garfield as a big, fluffy, fat anthro cat guy with some extra scruff. y'know, just to balance everything out and also because he's so HANDSOME AND BEAUTIFUL AND-

yesterday i posted an sfm shitpost of me messing around with Marina's model, today i got a hang of using the program properly and attempted to recreate Marina's pose as accurately as i could from visual reference :D

this was all done without rigging as i literally cannot rig her properly without her becoming a smashed and compressed mess laying halfway through the floor lmao. also her fingers are the wrong colour for some reason... i'm probably gonna have to mess around with the lighting or something, but as a posing test, i'm really quite proud of this render :)

edit: here's the posing process!

fun fact: Halfbrick as a company has been around since at least 2001, and they have some archives of their old website from that year as well! it holds some very obscure and interesting information about the company's history, including some lost media. some of their earliest known games that were made independently of other companies, such as Defiant, Farma Llamma and Turbelence, were either cancelled, seemingly never went past the drawing board or are lost.

something i find very amusing about this site is this blog post from the 22nd of March 2001, where they remark that the orange colour from their site has been banished. this implies that there is a much older version of the website that was coated in orange rather than this dark blue and silver, but that has since been lost to time. imagining a universe where Halfbrick never used their iconic orange colour is really weird...

(here is a link to the archive on the Wayback Machine.)

data and geordi incorrect quotes (star trek x bicentennial man)

Data, examining a malfunctioning piece of tech in the Enterprise: What a piece of faeces. Geordi: Shit. Data: Excuse me? Geordi: What a piece of shit. Data: I know that. Geordi: No, that's what you say when you're frustrated. You say "piece of shit". Data: "Piece of shit"? Geordi: Yes, but with feeling. Data: Oh. What a piece of shit. Geordi: More. Data: What a piece of shit!