The clever demonstration, featured on the Mozilla Hacks blog, works on both desktops and mobile devices, in all it’s scrolling two-dimensional glory. It’s rendered on an HTML5 Canvas, uses WebSockets to stay in constant communication with the Node.js server, saves your progress with the local storage API, preloads the map in a different thread with Web Workers, plays sound with HTML5 Audio and even uses media queries to adapt to different devices. Oh, and the source code is all available on GitHub.

The game is largely exploring, hacking-and-slashing monsters along the way, while you collect achievements. It has chat, and you can find new items to replace your default gear, but no player-versus-player combat.

My laptop’s fans stayed far quieter than they would while playing a similar Flash game, which I would say says something about the level of optimization browsers have done when compared to OS X/Linux versions of Flash.

I think we’ll be seeing more games built this way in the near future, and 3D games once WebGL reaches the same level of maturity and browser support.

The results are in: Lord of the Rings Online is making three times as much money as it was before it went free back in September.

This is a big win/win scenario for game developers. They have the opportunity to gain more users, as the barrier for entry is lower, and potentially make more money than their usual monthly fee from their most hardcore users. (Imagine $12.99 a month becoming $20 a month in additional quest packs and emergency mana potions…) I’m still hoping Blizzard will experiment with this for World of WarCraft.

Now, if only Turbine would work on OS X clients for their growing MMORPGs…

The big news is just how amazingly successful the game has been thus far. In its first five days, it earned a stunning $1.64 million. Quite an achievement, breaking Cut the Rope’s record of $1 million in its first ten days to boot.

At $5.99 per copy, the sword-fighting app will thus have mustered over $1.64 million in sales for publisher Epic, whose studio Chair Entertainment created what is widely-hailed as one of the most technically impressive iOS titles to date.

According to GamesIndustry.biz, at least 274,000 copies of the app were sold to produce that figure.

This really shows how viable a platform iOS and the App Store are. There is a lot of money to be made, and the barrier for entry is very low in comparison to most other gaming platforms. At last, indie developers are finally on a fairly even playing field with the larger game companies.

Now Turbine is going to see if they can replicate their success with another title: Lord of the Rings Online. It’s currently a subscription game, operating in much the same way as World of WarCraft with a $15 monthly subscription after you’ve already paid for a retail box or download.

It’s nice to see the more accessible freemium model gaining ground against the standard subscription route. It seems to work pretty well for both customers and the publishers. The question remains: will Blizzard give freemium a shot, what with their plateauing subscriptions? I’ve been hoping the MMORPG giant would give it a try for awhile.

The move to make Lord of the Rings Online free-to-play shows Warner Bros. is serious about making a big investment in the Lord of the Rings franchise, which some say may have peaked with the Peter Jackson movie trilogy. But Warner is betting that the interest in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction is everlasting. That’s why it gathered together all of the game rights from Turbine and Electronic Arts. Warner also owns the film rights now.

Lord of the Rings Online goes free-to-play this fall [GamesBeat]

One interesting part of the game is that the entire map geometry is rendered in real time, using fractions of cubes. This makes it really easy to create your own maps to play on.

Perhaps the greatest part of the open nature of the game is that it’s cross platform. It works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

I know this is only narrowly on topic, but it’s a fun game that won’t take up too much of your time (unless you want it to). How many fun and high-quality open source games are there?