Up up, down down, left right, left right, B A, Start !

Care of the Apple WWDC 2005 Design Award Winners, I discovered PowerGame Factory by Sawblade Software. And while we can temporarily put aside jokes about gaming on the Mac platform relative to PCs (cough, cough Battlefield 2 and HalfLife 2), this is a sweet application.

Some may recognize the title of this post as the infamous cheat from the NES Console game “Contra” and PowerGame generate exactly this type of a side scroller game. The beauty of the application is that it removes much of the painful minutae of developing a game and provides a solid and easy-to-use foundation for managing splash screens, some of the AI, animation details, physics, collision, and more. Sawblade provides a demo version which provides more than a savory taste, I advise hitting the site up, downloading it, and playing with it.

Let us not forget that PowerGame Factory is made with REALbasic, which just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside!