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After 27 Years, a New High Score For Asteroids
blair1q writes "In a marathon 3-1/2 day session, John McAllister, of Portland, Oregon, has broken the 27-year-old high score for Asteroids, set in 1982 by Scott Safran. The attempt was broadcast via webcam."
I have a whole new appreciation for the awesome, interesting things I do with my life.
Thanks.
For those too lazy to read the article, he scored 41,338,740, with the previous high score being 41,336,440
It took approximately 58 hours, not over 72.
LESS THAN TWO AND A HALF.
When you repeat old news, it might help to GET IT RIGHT.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Perhaps he has a son to avenge him.
Hmm. Or given his geek credentials, more likely not.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Duly tagged.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Just had the idea: Wouldn't it be a sort of cool project to build a robot that plays Astroids? I mean the actual arcade version? Shouldn't be that difficult. Such a device could beat the world record, no? ... In fact, it could probably play endlessly.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In the game the score wraps around to zero again so the "score" in this case is calculated by taking note of the number of times the score wraps.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
...when is he expected to be visited by Centauri?
Ezekiel 23:20
For those too young or too old to remember, there is an almost authentic Flash version of the game available over at Atari. http://www.atari.com/arcade/arcade.php?game=asteroids
I bet he has to fight the chicks off with a shitty stick.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
First, props to the quality of old time hardware. Do you think you could still play games on contemporary machines, almots 3 decades in the future?
Another detail about Asteroids - it's a game you really can't emulate without specialist hardware. Yeah you can load up the ROM in MAME and it plays nicely enough, but the true Asteroids machine had vector monitor hardware. This really makes a difference to the feel of the thing and those beautifully glowing intense bullets look vastly better on the real thing than when played on standard raster hardware.
I have a MAME cab and an ArcadeVGA adapter to power a Hanterax 20" screen - it makes even 320x128 look fantastic. But Asteroids is something it simply can't get right - without a vector monitor, you're stuffed.
Cheers,
Ian
If you want to get vector hardware for the home, there's always the Vectrex. A Vectrex in decent condition can be had for less than $100. The built-in game is Mine Storm, an Asteroids-like game, plus with some flash memory you can build a multicart with lots of games.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
An Oregon man named Bill Carlton settled in for a marathon session in 2004, which ended in failure when his machine broke down after 27 hours of play. He had scored more than 15 million points, placing him 15th in the record books.
Oh dear lord - and I thought it was bad when my mouse packed in half way through a CS match!
The strategy behind the game is to clear the playfield of all bar a handful of small asteroids, and then wait for the flying saucers to appear. If you're moving fairly quickly up or down the screen you can avoid the saucers with practice. As the game awards 1000 for the small saucers and a bonus life every 10,000 points it's a somewhat easy task to rack up many extra lives. Once the last asteroid was eliminated, the game would restart, increasing the number of large asteroids at the start up to a limit of around 12.
Early versions of the game were even easier as broken game logic resulted in an area of the screen that rendered the player immune to attacks. There wasn't even any means for making the game harder by setting the game's dip-switches - these only controlled the initial number of lives and other sundry settings such as language and coin count. Suffice to say experienced players could easily play the games for hours at a time.
Atari later released Asteroids Deluxe which was somewhat harder. This included a second type of saucer that split into components which homed in on the player, as well as amendments to other parts of the game logic.
The real killer on Asteroids is the 8 bit life counter, meaning every couple of hours you'd suddenly find yourself with no spare ships. The rules we played forbade suicide to keep the ship count down, otherwise we could just have kept the lives at around 200 and stopped worrying.
On casual days, we'd rack up 240 lives or so, hand the game over to any passing stranger then take 50min off for lunch. The same game was always still going when we came back!
It really is a trivially easy game, so easy we had to invent rules to make it more challenging!
if he beat the record set for the Tron arcade game...
Cousin Dale: "Ya' got Asteroids?"
Rusty: "Naw, but my Dad does."
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
First, props to the quality of old time hardware. Do you think you could still play games on contemporary machines, almots 3 decades in the future?
Nope, because the DRM servers will have been shut down 29.5 years earlier...
"Good news, everyone!"
My uncle had an Asteroids cabinet complete with a vector monitor and all I remember is WOW those lines were bright! I couldn't imagine playing that thing for one hour straight, let alone for 58 hours.
Not all Sysadmins. But many for sure. But Crack smoking is for the weekend,since you'll be really tripping balls. The week is coke time!
My record of coke-induced unix-fixing rampage was 3 years ago, when a 12-machine asterisk system failed spectacularly after some douchebag that was administrating that system screwed up the mysql circular replication and ended up with 12 corrupt copies of a 2TB database, and a backup that didn't work (They had hired me a year and a half prior to that incident to setup that system as an external contractor, and they were going to administrate the system themselves). 106 Hours and 25 grams later, they had a working system again :)
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Setting the high score for desert bus.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.