Rajio
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Internet Explorer, the ubiquitous but much maligned browser has been staging a pretty serious comeback lately. For a long time it was less than ideal to use and certainly had more than its share of problems. The latest versions of IE have been surprisingly solid though. If you haven’t checked it out, it may be a good time to do so. Microsoft is trying to raise awareness in several ways to get you to upgrade and try out the newest IE. One push in particular has been towards showcasing how good IE now does with games.
Atari released their first arcade game way back in 1972. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of that fateful event and the launch of Internet Explorer 10 they’ve unveiled the Atari Arcade at arcade.atari.com. From there you can enjoy modern (yet faithful) takes on several popular Atari classic games. Theres old favorites like Pong, Centipede, Asteroids which is a personal favorite. Their all brought to the web playable straight in your browser through HTML5, complete with multiplayer modes. If you’ve got compatible hardware, they even support multi-touch. Theres real-time high score leaderboards to boot.
They work in any HTML 5 compatible browser of course, but perform best in IE with its hardware acceleration. They plan to release new games over the following months from Atari’s huge classic games library. On top of that they’ve rolled out tools to help developers create similar cross-browser, and cross-device HTML5 experiences so we’ll likely see even more from other sources in the coming months.
Oh, and beyond these Atari games, we’ve already seen Cut the Rope come to IE through HTML5. That was already pretty impressive, seeing the successful iOS and Android game come to our web browsers for free. As well it looks like we’ll be treated to the wonderfully artistic game called Contre Jour tomorrow!
