Justin Silverton has a list on his blog of some of the PHP-based games out there today, including several RPGs and various smaller, lighter games.

The list includes:

• Heros of Might and Magic
• Anoi Towers
• Chipmunk Riddles
• Legend of the Green Dragon

Not all of them are smaller, independant sites either - the Heroes of Might and Magic site is related to the widely popular Ubisoft game of the same title. Always great to see PHP being used in major ways!

From the Professional PHP site today, there's an interesting new post about a game the author found (via digg) of "Heroes of Might and Magic" online minigame. What makes it even cooler? It's written in PHP and uses Prototype and Scriptaculous for the interface.

The interface is very drag and drop oriented and it uses Ajax to update game status. The graphics are very good. No flash as far as I can tell.

Their server is getting crushed right now, intermittently not responding and running out of MySQL connections. The javascript crashed my browser a couple times. Still, I was intrigued by the combination of Ajax and PHP and I liked the interface. Definitely one to bookmark for later.

The game is a bit less overloaded now, but still a bit slow. The interface is wonderfully done, and easy to understand. It's great to see the popular pairing of Ajax and PHP starting to show up in commercial applications, too.

On PHPKitchen today, Demian Turner has posted a a few words about one of the latest PHP-related books he's read, "PHP5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice" from APress.

I recently read Matt Zandstra's PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice and thought I'd say a few good words about it for those who haven't been recommended yet. A lot of good PHP5 books have come out recently, eg something like PHP 5 Power Programming is an excellent resource for the finer points of charset issues, utf8 in PHP, timezone gotchas. But it's quite unusual in PHP circles for a book to come out that gives overall sound advice on application design.

I found Matt, who comes from a Java background, really hit the nail on the head, this book is an enjoyable read. While the first few chapters make allowances for readers who don't have a lot of exposure to OOP, the rest is quite a stimulating read, helped along in no small part by Matt's excellent unambiguous writing style.

He also mentions other topics that the book covers, things like the Composite pattern, Phing, PEAR, and the Reflection API.