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...which I have yet to find again. (for C64)

Basically it was a variant of Q*bert ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q*bert ) where Q*bert was replaced by representation of...penis and enemies by...yep, vaginas.

Why "perfect game for /. crowd" you ask? Well, Q*bert-inspired gameplay wasn't modified much, so when penis touched/entered vagina (with a suggestive sound, as far as SID capabilities went) you actually...lost a life.

PS. Frustrating that I can't seem to find it even using the title - Spermen (but I might remember that wrong)

It's a Q-Bert leap.

http://www.happypenguin.org/list?search=q*bert

I loved the game, and still play it, Qix, and Bert (a mac 68xxx version of qbert) in both its original forms, and with the 2001 Q*Bert game for Macintosh.

Licensed to Konami for Japanese manufacture and distribution. (02/1983)

Inspired by artwork by M.C. Escher who was an artist that Jeff admired. Ron Waxman came up with the idea of Q*Bert changing the color of the cubes. Q*Bert's name originated by the combination of cube and Hubert, but the "Cube-Bert" was changed to "Q-Bert" to make it more unique. The concept game was called "Snots and Boogers" and then "@!#?@!" (which many of the programmers and Gottlieb VPs said would be impossible to get anyone to say) before the final version was called just "Q*Bert". Slick and Sam were a play on the phrase "spick and span" with Sam being named after co-worker Sam Russo. Rick Tighe came up with the idea of adding the pinball hardware which generated the very mechanical KA-CHUNK when Q*Bert falls off the pyramid.

Approximately 30, 000 units were produced.

Grab the rom (valid for mame from .36final to .63 ) here

PLAY INSTRUCTIONS:

- Jump on squares to change them to the target color.

- Stay on playfield! Jumping off results in a fatal plumment unless a disk is there.

- Avoid all objects and creatures that are not green.

- Use spinning disks to lure snake to his death.

- Extra life at 8000 and each additional 14000.

Twenty years ago, gamers were captivated by a foul-mouthed orange mutant named Q*bert. In the two decades following his epic battle with the relentless Coiley, Q*bert's life evolved into a happy, normal existence. Q*bert had a girl, Q*dina (you can tell she's a girl because she's got a bow ), a powerless, frustrated enemy named Q*dirk, and a big cube land to hop around in and show off the enigmatic protrusion that must be the source of his power and charm (yeah, just go on thinking it's a nose).

Recently, with the help of Hasbro Interactive, an insidious corporation called Sega stole Q*bert's female and placed arch-nemesis Coiley in his path, hoping the ensuing confrontation would be enough to revive their doomed platform.

When asked to comment on the situation, Q*bert said, "&%$#@."

I didn't think anyone has seen 5,000 Q*Bert in one place.

C'mon

Stupid..
BTW Q-bert was actually a midway game..

garbage in garbage out.. :)

You don't need algebra to code, but consider https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/68026042/ which is a (not so shitty) Q-Bert clone I wrote while sitting in my daughter's 'Summer of Code' with Scratch class. It could have been done without much Algebra, and for the most part, I don't use much Algebra in the code. I do however make use of discrete mathematics... quite heavily. And to use discrete mathematics, you can be the person who says "I ain't got no pizza", then try to solve your problem because the person you told is confused and is waiting for pizza. Or you can be a person who learns things like boolean algebra and things like Demorgan's theorum and be a programmer.

As for learning online... I am a semi-proficient programmer and when it came time to learn web technologies, I watched 40 hours of Microsoft Virtual Academy over Christmas vacation one year and then read a few hundred blogs and stack exchange articles. I would never ever ever call myself a web developer though. I am perfectly capable of writing web applications now, but I'm more of a codec, operating system, compiler developer. Web developer, I think that I'll leave that to other people. It's too messy and I wonder if the word caustic would be suitable.

Yes, nearly everyone can benefit from coding.... but people need to learn where they fit. I am working on an analogy in terms of Legos for this stuff

Are you :
a) The guy who designs the next Lego technics sports car with sleek sides, differential gears, front and rear shocks, v8 engine, etc?
b) Are you the guy he calls when a) is looking for a premade design for a steering gear box?
c) Are you the guy which a) or b) calls when they need a custom piece designed to make all their stuff come together?
d) Are you the guy c) calls when he needs a compression mold designed to stamp the new pieces
e) Are you the guy d) calls when he needs hydraulics added to the mold for supplying an additional axis to the mold.

Programmers are the same.

Where you might use a regex to pluck a value from a file, and it will work 95% of the time and you can handle it by hand when it doesn't. I instead will write a domain specific language parser like https://github.com/darrenstarr/cDayZeroDeploy/blob/master/HelperScripts/parseMOF.ps1 because it will work right 99.999% of the time and is the right tool for the job. You would use my code for reading MOF files and there's a chance you wouldn't know what to do with the abstract syntax tree, so you would send an issue or discussion asking "How would I read this value" and I'd answer.

Consider that what is in the file is a hand coded recursive descent parser for reading MOF files in PowerShell. I started by writing a parser library which would allow matching text and storing state information on a stack (chose a stack because it's the right tool... to know it's the right tool, you need algebra). Then I wrote the parser as a pseudo-PEG grammar (100% algebra), then I coded the types for the abstract syntax tree, then I manually implemented each PEG rule as code.

To be fair, the code took about 45 minutes to 2 hours to write... depending on how you measure it. The comments took about 4 days to get where I wanted them.

So... yes, you absolutely need algebra to be anything other than the most primitive of coders. There's absolutely no negotiating this. And you can learn coding any time you want to. But algebra is best to learn (the first time) when you're young. Then you're free to forget it, but the synapses have aligned by that point to make it possible to learn it again later.

Now the real issue is... how many people actually learn Algebra?

I know that hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people are forced to study quadratic equations at some point in school. It is by far one of the most useful types of math the students can learn. Would 1% of 1% of 1% of the people who learn it be able to use it for anything?

I needed to buy click-together floor boards f

--2600 Space Invaders, Combat, Defender, Berzerk, Pitfall, Missile Command, Bump-n-Jump, Centipede, and Asteroids were playable for hours. Yars Revenge, Ms Pac-Man, Q-Bert, Frogger, Pole Position, Dig Dug, Adventure, Super Breakout and Vanguard were memorable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

--The Pac-man port to the 2600 was pretty blah compared to the arcade, but still playable. Thousands of ET cartridges literally ended up in a landfill, however. That game was a little buggy...

Atari Vault only includes games created by the company. Classic 2600 games from companies like Activision, Namco, Parker Brothers, and others aren't here, including Berzerk, Empire Strikes Back, Frogger, Joust, Pitfall, Q-Bert, and Pole Position.

Atari published the original releases of Berzerk, Joust, and Pole Position for the 2600.

[...] Asteroids, Centipede, Pitfall, and Pong [...]

Pitfall wasn't an Atari title, it was an Activision title. Not sure why it got included in this list.

Atari Vault only includes games created by the company. Classic 2600 games from companies like Activision, Namco, Parker Brothers, and others aren't here, including Berzerk, Empire Strikes Back, Frogger, Joust, Pitfall, Q-Bert, and Pole Position.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3048362/windows/the-atari-vault-hits-steam-with-100-classic-games-to-scratch-your-retro-2600-itch.html

Or Donkey Kong, Q-bert, Centipede, Zork (any Infocom game, really), Oregon Trail, Pirates!, Sim City, Civilization, Lemmings, Prince of Persia, or Golden Axe, Tomb Raider, or Street Fighter II. I could go on.

Even if we're going to talk about multiplayer RPGs, I think Ultima Online and Diablo were more noteworthy. WoW was a "me too" offering, and while it was a financial success, it didn't really bring anything new to the table.

Missle command, asteroids, Battle Zone, after burner, Tempist, Defender, centipeede, Warlock, Tron, SeaWolf, Rally-X, gauntlet, mortal combat, track and field, street fighter, q-bert, shamus, Ali-baba and the 40 thieves, Star raiders, Lode runner, ???
 

Add on a decent bluetooth joystick to them, you're pretty much there.

I just got the ''A Moga Pro" joystick a few weeks ago, and it makes all the difference when I revisiting older games like 'Defender', 'Joust', 'Ms. Pac Man', 'Tetris', 'Contra', 'Elevator Action', 'Galaga', 'Qix', 'Q-Bert', 'Rolling Thunder', 'Punch-Out' (et al ad nauseum).

Most of the people who know Perl well already have jobs, and aren't looking to change.

Honestly, I think that most people who know Perl also know not to sign up to slog through some unknown Perl codebase. I've seen Perl code that is well-written and easy to understand, and then there's the other 90% of Perl code that looks like Q-bert cursing up a blue streak.

I've long-since removed Perl from my resume.

If they called themselves "Ciscle" they could find another outfit called "E-Bert" and go review movies.

Or not.

You had me at Q-Bert. Bravo!

What a horrible, horrible idea. Not the ethernet aspect, that makes sense, reinventing the wheel is usually a bad idea, and especially so when the competition has a multi-decade lead on eliminating bugs and malicious exploits and offers cheap, reliable off-the-shelf hardware. No, it's the idea of putting anything whatsoever user-accessible on the internal network I object to. If this data bus is carrying the information that tells my increasingly fly-by-wire care to apply the brakes or turn right to avoid oncomming semis then all it takes is one misbehaving flappy-bird clone spamming the network at the wrong moment to kill me, to say nothing of malicious attacks. There's absolutely no reason *anything* but internal systems communication should be on that network. Period. If you want an media network fine, but that can probably be provided far more cheaply and conveniently by including an airgapped $10 wireless hub with a 10' range that can only talk directly to things like the steering-wheel mounted media controls and the dashboard LCD/windshield HUD. And maybe a cellular modem. You're in a pretty decent approximation of a Faraday cage, so non-malicious outside interference should be minimal, and any communication with the mission-critical network should be heavily firewalled, at an absolute minimum. Not much reason to allow bi-directional communication at all - "spam" the wireless network with multicast up-to-the-second system and diagnostc data and you're good, at 0.01% of total bandwidth. No reason for anything not physically connected to be able to say a %$#@!* thing to the mission-critical components. If ever there was a non-hyperbolic use of the term "mission critical", maintaining control of a car is it.

* %$#@! - when no variation of "fuck" is strong enough. Bonus points if you can pronounce it. Q-Bert did, but then he had that hose-nose to work with.

I would think that it's because the other games require more sophisticated planning, which the neural net has trouble learning due to its architecture or the training function they used.

In order to 'learn', the AI needs to evaluate its proposed action by finding a piece of gameplay where the human player did the same thing. It stands to reason that the more complex the statespace of the game, the harder it is to perform this matching.

Pong is almost trivial to represent as four variables: ball position, ball momentum, player paddle position, opponent paddle position. Breakout is a little bit more intense, but still pretty simple, at least if you aren't concerned about speed; just keeping the ball in play is easier than pong is. I would think it would be a manageable task to get Space Invaders working, but Q-Bert, being played on a 29-place board with aggressive enemies, is pretty intense.

Learning from the screen is a cute trick, but not really a huge breakthrough, especially since they can't get it to work even on Space Invaders.

What's not geeky about Beer Pong? Beer Pong, Beer Pac-Man, Beer Q-Bert, Beer Asteroids... admittedly Beer Spacewar gets a bit dicey due to the spill risk.