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Penn and Teller's Long Lost Game
Waxy.org has some good news for Penn and Teller Fans. They have Smoke and Mirrors, a long lost Penn and Teller game. The game is available for download, and features (among other things) a bus drive across the Nevada desert as one of the title's mini-games. From the article: "The most infamous part was 'Desert Bus,' a 'VeriSimulator' in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for eight hours in real-time. Then you drive it home. Also, I'd read the bus veers to the right, so you can't just leave the joypad propped up. The rumor was that if you won the game, you got one point. I'd assumed for years that the entire thing was a hoax, but last September, Frank Cifaldi (founder of Lost Levels) received a backup CD-ROM made by a fellow videogame writer of a review copy he'd received a decade earlier. He posted extensive screenshots and a review to the Something Awful Forums. He eventually added a torrent, but it's long since dead."
1. The Kraftwerk back catalogue ...
2. A hell of a lot of drugs
3. er,
4. That's it.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
If nothing else, it sounds like a great game for people who enjoy incredibly repetitive things. Perhaps obsessive compulsives are a great game market?
Something Awful would be a good way to describe a game that has2 minute unskippable silent movie sequences of the characters eating pizza every time you pause.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Seriously though, I think it's a great social satire on video gaming. And remember folks, this was nearly 10 years ago! Huge P&T fan here, I just have to have this.
the skinny one can eat the fat one if they run out of food. Assuming he can stop doing his `quiet one out of the Marx Brothers` routine, that is...
If you listen to the podcast linked on the page they explain that the idea was kind of a reaction against the whole Janet Reno violent video game crusade. Hell of a solution, no?
How else can you explain the massive success of the current crop of big-studio MMORPGs.
I haven't seen much of Penn & Teller, but on TV a while ago they had a trick where one of them would "catch" a bullet fired out of a hand gun, complete with a hole in a sheet of plastic. I was very impressed by it, but, then again, I don't watch many magic shows, so who knows. A much better contest prize would be to be the stand-in for catching the bullet! Or, perhaps not.
Its interesting to see their brand of humor applied to a video game. Its almost like they were making an anti-game. 2 minute pointless videos when you pause, an 8 hour trip in a straight line across the desert, Debbie Harry behind every shop counter...
Can't wait to try it out.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Takeshi no Chousenjou -- Yes this is the same Takeshi from "Takeshi's Castle" (aka MXC on SpikeTV).
It appears that there is an active torrent, and it's available here: Penn_and_Teller's_Smoke_and_Mirrors.torrent
"Had" a contest? You mean "planned" a contest. No one outside of a few game reviewers ever actually had access to the game. It was never released. Of course no one made it. No one was given the opportunity.
I guarantee you, if all it took was 800 hours of mindnumbing tedium to get a big prize, someone would have done it. Assuming their SegaCD didn't die from running for 800 hours straight, and you didn't have any power issues. That's more than a month to go without a single issue.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
They claim that they are the only act to do this trick.
My guess is Teller has a bullet in his mouth that he "catches" at the right time, and Penn has a blank in the gun. The "bullet" that gets drawn on is rigged to come apart easily, and Penn pulls some sleight-of-hand after the shot to present the audience members with the pieces for validation.
Good trick, though... very impressive.
They do this trick now in their Vegas show, but they've upped the ante. They drop a plastic "line" across the stage, and from that moment, no one goes from one side of the line to the other. Then they bring out *two* guns, with *two* bullets, have a different audience member mark each one (never crossing sides) and then they go to opposite sides of the stage, pull back *all* the curtains so you can see the prop cages backstage (and so that clearly no one is running things behind the curtains) and then exchange fire through a sheet of glass on each side (both shatter) and each one catches the other one's bullet in their mouth. Then they show the bullet to the other side's signer (again, without anyone crossing the center line) and "tadah" they're the right bullet.
Great trick. I've seen it twice live in Vegas, and although I thought I caught part of the "trick" the first time, they dropped the back curtain for the second show and ruined the idea I had for the whole "trick".
Definitely worth seeing, as it's the finale of a great show.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
special pen, special bullets that track the pen's motion, send a radio signal to a special bullet that they hold in their mouth which reproduces the design... ok yeah that was stupid...
dammit that's a good trick.
...is the old DOS version of Steve Jackson's OGRE. I bet it would run great under DOSEMU in Linux.
Solution:
Use paid shills for "audience members." They carefully write what will be found on the bullets shown at the end.
Done.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
10 PRINT "Yeah, I would probably like it. I like repetitive things."
20 GOTO 10
Now that's how we do it here...
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
I just have to say that static methods inside a class is "Procedural Java" and not object-oriented in any way. Applying OO analysis to this particular problem is not the best use of anyone's time, mind you...
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
Paid shills are too obvious and inevitably the word gets out. Here's a more likely explanation: http://www.foreworks.com/bullet2.html
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
If you want to play old boardgames / wargames PBEM style, check out Cyberboard. It has an OGRE / GEV module, as well as modules for many other games (ASL, 18xx, Columbia block games etc.).
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
I recognize those two! It's Rebo and Zooty!
It's the quiet ones you have to watch...
Penn and Teller are famous for revealing how they do most of their tricks, and the freely admitted to using shills for some of them.
The solution to most magic tricks are "too obvious" once you know them.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I just followed your link. Your version requires the secrecy of backstage staff, which is just has hard to maintain as the secrecy of on-stage staff (shills), and my way is easier to pull off.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The bullet catch is actually a classic trick, and very dangerous.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Thing is, there are enough people who've been selected for the "bullet catch" trick that have said "I'm no shill", or "I know the guy they picked, and he says he's no shill" that it's unlikely all these people have been paid off and not one of them has admitted complicity. So either P&T have some extremely convincing and ironclad method of keeping people quiet...or they've figured out a way to do the trick without shills.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.