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Hank Chien Reclaims Donkey Kong High Score
An anonymous reader writes "If you can say anything about Hank Chien, it's that he evidently doesn't take defeat very well. Sure, he knew not so deep down that his Donkey Kong World Record score wouldn't last forever, but he couldn't have foreseen that it would have been toppled so quickly. Twice, even. But he also knew that more Kong competition would be coming his way; namely Richie Knucklez Kong-Off in March. So Hank had something to prove, and prove he did. Scoring a massive 1,068,000 points in less than three hours, Hank has officially reclaimed the high score in Nintendo’s 1981 arcade classic."
I can't help but to admire people like this.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
I actually feel a bit bad for Steve "The King of Kong" Wiebe. Such a lovely film/documentary. I reckon he'll flex those Kong muscles once again and beat that score before summer.
I think its a shame that he was omitted from "The King of Kong" movie. Wiebe took Hanks score and there wasn't so much of a mention of Hank. He's a good guy and Im happy for him. Also it there a theoretical maximum score for donkey kong? Just wondering what the asymptote is.
Rome had bread and circuses, now we have contests for old games. When a civilization has the time to waste on things like this it's the beginning of the end.
...as the Death Star that is Slashdot has now fired its lethal ray, goodbye twin galaxies. . . .
I'm wondering when the time will come, when some guys start writing AI to defeat the game with optimal high-score. Even if a coin-op is required, the robot parts to handle input shouldn't be that difficult to program, and would make the whole thing even fancier. Screw chess, arcade AI solvers sound immensely more fun!
Sorry to break your bullshit bubble, but Rome had its first gladiatorial combats in 310 BC, according to Livy, and yes often accompanied to distributing food to the poor. Not only it wasn't the beginning of the end, but it was followed by its most rapid expansion centuries. In the couple of centuries after those, Rome went from being a debatable leader of a leader of city states spanning barely half of Italy to an empire sprawled all around the Mediterranean, not to mention most of modern France and half of Britain.
If anything, historians from the era tend to agree that sponsoring lavish shows to boost morale actually served well to do just that, and helped Rome rebound after such massive defeats as Canae and emerge more powerful than ever before.
It would be more than 500 years after that, or still almost three centuries even after the peak of the popularity of gladiatorial combats in the 1st century BC, that Rome even started to decline. And almost 800 years after that, in 476 AD that the Western Empire fell.
Even if you want to go for a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy to associate the two, actually Rome fell shortly after they _stopped_ holding gladiatorial combats. So, hmm, maybe actually the bad sign is when you can't even afford to have fun any more?
So, sorry, but linking such shows to Rome's decline is fucking idiotic. If you want to make a historical case, do read some history first.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
From watching King of Kong I learned that it has a killscreen (a level that is impossible to beat). Based on that, I've assumed that there is therefore a theoretical maximum score in Donkey Kong.
There are a lot of variables affecting how many points can be scored on each level (bonus timer, how many of Pauline's trinkets Mario picks up, how many hazards he jumps or hammers, etc.) so this isn't as easy to calculate as the maximum possible score in Pac Man is.
Does anyone know what the highest possible score on DK is, or have a rough estimate for how close this new record is to that score?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Wow, this guy looks like one of my very quiet classmates from High School. I had no idea he played Donkey Kong.
Why is TFS talking about March? Is this 9-month old "news"? Was the tournament held in Cambridgeshire? Or is that part just completely irrelevant to the meat of the story?
The economy of Rome is even funnier than that, actually.
For a start, it a right-wing paradise of sorts, in that the Senatorial class -- which was non-elected and hereditary by now in the Empire times that you mention -- paid no taxes, although they owned most of the land. Although many also set up merchant enterprises in the name of their freedmen, with them owning most "shares" so to speak and taking most profits... and again paying no tax whatsoever for that either.
As the rich quickly gobbled up more and more of the former free men's farms, essentially more and more of the Roman economy didn't contribute a cent any more to the state.
I would say that the spending of private coins to import stuff from the East was a much more minor factor than the fact that none of those coins would go into taxes anyway.
Imperial Rome almost at no point actually had a sustainable economy per se. It was a robber economy, simply put. They _had_ to keep expanding and plundering new countries, even to keep paying their legions.
Heck, they plundered even their own citizens, as essentially they paid all the wages in overvalued silver coins and demanded the taxes only in gold.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1303
"Too bad it’s loaded with falsehoods. And by loaded, I mean packed, and by packed I mean like the last Japanese subway car before they have to shut down the line. "
Let me guess: you're not quite old enough to understand that a ruling class (government) and a subject class ("the people") are NOT the same.
(It's obvious from your attributing to "civilization" the endeavors of a distinct group of individuals that you have fallen into the trap of believing that society somehow thinks as one borg-like unit, just as government has taught you all your life.)
I don't know whether or not he's single, but I highly doubt he lives with his parents. The guy's a plastic surgeon after all.
Happy people make bad consumers.
And stop comparing any of today's societies to the mighty Roman Empire. Rome stood for a thousand years, and it left a lasting legacy.
In the '20s and '30s they had dancing marathons, to see who could dance the longest.
Eating competitions have gone on for who knows how long.
Even the Inuit have a game where two men stand across from each other and take turns punching each other in the shoulder until one gives up.
Shit's been going on forever. The world hasn't ended yet.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
You have to use your hands?? That's a baby's toy!
You could say he was dogging the old high score.
Well, sorta, but not exactly. The Roman Empire didn't have to expand its economy per se, it had to keep attacking more countries to plunder them. Trajan needed the gold of Dacia to pay for his war in Persia, and so on. When they ran out of places to plunder, the collapse started. Then came a devaluing of coinage of EPIC proportions, attempts at price fixing, enlistment dropped like a rock because the soldiers' wage and "pension" (so to speak) became worth almost nothing, etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Honestly, I don't care who has the high score as long as it's not Billy Mitchell. I hate that guy with a passion.
according to a large number of people on wall-street, it is nothing more than gambling. and we didn't spend "millions" to bail out the gamblers, we spent hundreds of billions.
Lives with his brother in Manhattan, so presumably single. If you live someplace as nice as a NYC apartment, go ahead and cast those stores. Used to live there myself, and everybody I know who has a nice place there doesn't say LOL; not placing my bet on you so far.
Why is Google fooling around with Soduku when they could be figuring out the maximum score on Donkey Kong? C'mon Google, put your brainpower to something important! Google engineering, consider yourself challenged.
Well, that is, if you count slavery as "creating jobs". Those latifundia (great estates) were worked almost exclusively with slaves who not only had no freedom and could be crucified on a whim (even freedmen could be reverted to slaves and crucified on a whim, btw), but were often fed bare subsistence ratios or even less than that. There are documented cases where slaves were basically left to forage for themselves or starve, because the owner wanted to capitalize on a spike in grain price by selling all the grain instead of feeding the slaves with some of it. E.g., that's exactly what caused the slave revolt in Sicily, a.k.a., the First Servile War.
And far from creating jobs, that's what created that class of poor "on the dole" in Rome. Their jobs had been "outsorced" to barbarian slaves because it was cheaper, and really there wasn't anyone giving them a job.
And basically the overall effect, if you listen to Pliny The Elder is that it ruined everyone else in Italy and was starting to do the same in the provinces, practically in the same century as it was made official.
On the whole, thanks for illustrating why I tell people to stop doing bullshit pseudo-historical parallels between present day and Rome, when they want to support their canned talking points. Your claim of creating jobs is flat out wrong for Rome, and in the opposite direction, the fact that that Roman system just impoverished millions of people and replaced workers with slaves... I really don't think you want to make that parallel for the present day rich. Call it just a hunch, but I really don't think you were going for _that_ parallel with that "creating jobs" rhetoric :p
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I sometimes look to fall asleep on an uncrowded bus when I'm sleep-deprived like usual without alcohol being involved. Like tomorrow, probably - it's 3 AM already. goodnight. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.