Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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.
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!"