On the second year of my A levels, I took a City and Guilds Advanced Diploma in Software Development at Liverpool Community College with my friend Tom, with whom I run MoDCAMeRa. There was a Java module on this course, this could only spell bad things for the people of planet Earth.

Javarena is a Java adaptation of a BlitzBasic game by Edd called Blast Arena. Click here if you'd like to know more about Blast Arena. You might also be interested in my GameBoy Advance version called Blast Arena Advance.

The objective of Javarena is to use the mouse to collect as many blue 'flanges' as possible without being hit from any shrapnel from the green 'swirlies'. Share scores with your friends to see who can survive the longest and collect the most flanges!

The Java course Tom and I enrolled on was more about coding general purpose console applications rather than applet development, so I read further into the subject. With the help of Mike McGuffin's Java Applet Tutorials, I created for myself a graphics/input applet toolkit of sorts, allowing me to create applet based games with ease. The Blast Arena concept and the Java applet technology were just made for each other and I created the game in a matter of hours.

Also, I like Blast Arena. I like the whole concept, it's genius.

There's plenty of Java applet games out there, but none of them'll be Javarena.

The reason you don't see a whole bunch of Java applet remakes up here, like Java HSL and JavaCalm is because when I released Javarena, I was hit by a wall of complaints about browsers spontaneously closing and flickery graphics and other weird errors. (One of which is happily sat in a Google Cached FireFox crash cause summary page here!) Which is strange because the Java VM is meant to even the playing field. Eh, Sun? But anyway, it's more hassle than it's worth to try and fix all the bugs caused by... whatever it is that causes them. I'll probably stumble back into Java someday, but it won't be someday soon.