In practice the Caesar cipher offers almost no communication security. There are only 25 possible ways for you to encode your message, so even without the key it’s possible to exhaust decode the message by exhaustively checking all keys. This program has been set up to do just that with the “break” option. Just type in your message and let it try all the possibilities for you.

To increase security with your shift cipher you can advance the key after every letter, changing the key and making it much more difficult to break using an exhaustive method. You will need to communicate to the receiver of the message what the initial shift is (by the value of what A equals initially) and how much to advance the key by every letter. This can be done by simply sending them through separate channels the letter and number they’ll need. So if you received the key “G5″ you’d have all you needed to decode the following message:

Zsu gtka nj Qhkscgwo Zozaoip ds dd ayrzw vwzwqjpzx unlj wnva kebh yw ywxua ljuowre’ft emwwlfhl trkspzjh tj.

Caesar Cipher is written by Joe Larson.

Roguelike Defense doesn’t ramp you up to the task of defending it’s 9 lanes all at once. But it also doesn’t leave you to defend yourself at once. Your initial wall will be enough to mostly slow down the first wave, but you had better develop some strategy quick because every creature that makes it through is a point off your health. When that reaches zero it’s game over. And you may think that you’ve got a grip on thing until the swarm starts rushing your line of defense faster and your mines and woods start running out of resources and disappearing on you.

How many waves will you survive before the horde over runs your castle.

Controls:

• Arrows: Move Cursor
• Space/Enter: Make selection
• Esc: Cancel Selection
• +/- : Change game speed.

Roguelike Defense was written by Marcus Wiseman.

This a topic that I never really get to do justice, so I decided to get up on my soapbox and really rant properly about the greatest game ever… in my humble opinion.

Next time maybe I’ll do a video rant about Robot Odyssey.

Maybe it’d be more accurate to say “StarCraft 2 isn’t as awesome as it should have been” but that won’t get folks attention the same way. I’m planning on making a YouTube video of this rant in the style of my other rants (and explanatory video) on Youtube, but that part takes time, so to be sure I don’t get scooped by anyone else I’m going to take the audio I’ve recorded and release it here podcast style. (If someone else ends up saying this, while they may be more popular I can at least claim to have been first.)

You can download my ranting here in either MP3 or, for that indie cred, OGG  format. I kept it short, less than 6 minutes, so it won’t take all of your day:

8-1-2010-StarCraft-2-rant-podcast.mp3

8-1-2010-StarCraft-2-rant-podcast.ogg

If you find yourself trying to pull of a trick fall and can’t get it to work try using the wrap-around and go the other way. You can aim while you’re falling, but not while you’re flying.

Warpy is written my Marcus Wiseman and utilizes the allegro library for graphics and sound. To hear the sound you will need a “Teleport.wav” sound file that you can either choose yourself or the one included in the executable.

Dice is written by oldlaptop on the Cymon’s Games forum.

Somewhat like BlackBox before it in Laser Sweeper you are trying to discern the location of hidden objects by observing the behavior of shots fired into the unknown space, only in Laser Sweeper the relationship is more direct. The objects you are firing at are mirrors that when your laser hits can reflect 90 degrees. But just because you think you know where the laser turned, don’t be so hasty. Check the distance the laser traveled or you may be surprised to discover it took a less-than-direct route. Even checking the distance your first few guesses may just have to be lucky, but as more of the board is uncovered with skill you will be able to revel the whole board.

Or will you?

Laser Sweeper will take some patience and thought to win. But with some time you may find this becoming your new favorite time waster. Just one more game.

Laser Sweeper was made by Adam Gates (aka radad) and introduced on the Cymon’s Games forum.

Well, maybe a little bit.

Ratfink’s version of the classic game overcomes some of the shortages in the curses input routines by offering 3 different control schemes, each of which are accessible from the (rather cool) main menu or at any time by pressing the 1, 2, or 3 keys. Deflecting the ball with a moving paddle will add or subtract y-axis motion from the ball, which is the trick to scoring against the computer opponent.

asciiPong is written by Ratfink.

Remember back when I said I was going to stop doing weekly program updates for the site and was just going to update programs as they came? Well I didn’t expect to be getting a rash of so many at once. I finish the text adventure for Werewolves and Wanderer, but unable to put the code down make an enchanted version that goes up not 5 days later. Then 4 days later Ratfink finished asciiPong, so I throw that up, but only 3 days later I’ve got a seasonal program that I finish that’s already a day late, so I rush it to the featured page.

I should have spaced things out a bit more. In fact asciiPong is going to be taken down so it can be re-featured next Monday for a solid week, but already there’s another game knocking down the door. Wow.

There’s one more rant coming up too, tho if you’re subscribed to my YouTube channel you’ve probably already seen it.