I just reproduced the "blue forever" bug in 2 player mode (it's pretty obvious how to trigger it), but have yet to see it in the normal mode.
I still say the ghost AI is pretty close.
Yeah, I bet it is... From the various articles it sounds like they tried to reproduce the original ghost movements (which are well-known among avid players, fairly predictable) - but with the different maze layout they fall into predictable patterns...
As for the 2-player power pellet bug - I guess I missed something. I didn't think you had to do anything special to trigger it....
You don't really need to look at the speedometer if you have a car with a manual transmission. Listen to the engine and keep track of what gear you are using.
No need for a fuel gauge either. You should know how much gas you have put into the tank, how much you car uses and how long you have traveled.
...And if you can't keep track of all these things in your head, you could probably get an iPad application to do it for you!
How many people knew Pacman was 30 years old today?
I'm a serious collector of Pac-Man memorabilia (I once paid over $100 for a box of Pac-Man cereal and my wedding next month will be Pac-Man themed.) and I had no idea it was Pac-Man's 30th anniversary today!
Did you ever get those Pac-Man candies they had in the early 1980s, where the different-shaped candies were all contained in a blister-pack "maze" and to get the candy out you had to navigate it through the maze?
I think you played a different Google Pacman than I did. Granted, the layout is "bad", but that's because it has to spell out the company name. Other than that, the ghosts seemed to generally chase as well as the originals and they absolutely did not "stay blue forever".
Somebody else mentioned that the ghosts stay blue forever in 2-player mode. I haven't tested this (and if I did, I don't know when I'd be able to get an answer to you) but certainly, if I get a power pellet and then go somewhere the ghosts won't come and find me, they will stay blue for several minutes at least.
The main difference to me is that it felt like the game was in slow motion (including Pacman) but that might just be the size.
This may be due to the turbo settings that tend to be configured on a lot of the coin-op games. A lot of the machines you'll see out there play faster than the originals. My local movie theater has one of the Ms. Pac Man/Galaga machines, and in that, right from the first level, Ms. Pac Man is fast. In the newer machines I think it's a configuration bit you can set - in the older ones I believe the faster gameplay came from hacked ROMs and so on. (I don't know all the history, really.)
And I also heard that Twin Galaxies don't accept Google Pac-Man high scores. So why bother?
Well, they will, actually - if you're Billy Mitchell they'll even take your word of honor that you didn't cheat. If you're not, then you'll have to travel to Funspot and play the game on their reference PC.
mmmm... Funspot... I gotta take another trip up there sometime. I would go this weekend, but Weirs Beach Drive-In is still under repair.
I don't think it's an issue of ambidextrous skills -- it's trivially easy to control both of them -- it's dividing attention between the two long enough to play both effectively that is the issue.
I tried it for a little while - I found that it gets a lot easier once you start to realize that the two pacman characters don't actually need constant attention to play the game. It's enough to just make sure that you give them a bit of attention when they reach their next turn. I still haven't gotten the hang of playing both characters simultaneously, but I really think with a little practice it wouldn't be too hard.
They weren't annoying becuase they were ads! They were annoying because someone wassticking distracting nonsense in the way of what I was trying to do.
I have fucking PacMan on MAME on my PC at home. I played it last week, even. It doesn't belong on my search engine.
Personally, I find it even more annoying when someone's walking around with a call on speakerphone, or using their phone like a walkie-talkie... Why do you suppose that is?
I mean, apart from the fact that I'm slowly turning into a grumpy old man.
What this video doesn't tell you is that MIDI could allow pacing of music to the action. MIDI could allow for real climaxes and transitions between different passages depending on the kind of action; a good sound card could give you, in many cases, a better experience to a pre-recorded digital piece.
Great examples: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and X-Wing.
I don't know...
I mean, in X-Wing, you'd normally be flying around and if there were enemies around, you'd hear the "Millennium Falcon vs. TIE Fighters" music. And then if you destroyed a target you'd get a little triumphant musical phrase thrown in there for your victory...
One of the problems here was that it didn't distinguish targets. You'd get the crescendo even if you just destroyed an immobile, unarmed cargo container with no shields.
And there were missions where you had to destroy like 30 of those damn things... So you'd wind up hearing those two "triumph" phrases, alternated one after the other, nearly back-to-back sometimes...
Not to say the system couldn't be made better, but sometimes I think it's better just to have good background music in a loop, and don't worry about matching the action. You can match music to film because you can control the timing of film through editing... That's just not true of a game.
If you came to my home circa 1994 and suggested playing a game on the PC, here's something you might have heard mere minutes before the game's audio encountered some bizarre, esoteric form of failure:
"S.B.O.S. Installed!"
Things were so much better once I got myself a card with actual Soundblaster-clone hardware in it. For a while I sort of limped along with a crappy Soundblaster clone as my second soundcard, you know, so I could have the wavetable synth for the music but also be able to hear game's digital audio... And then later on I got a Turtle Beach Tropez+ sound card that had the wavetable in ROM and the one card also had the SB clone on it... Never any need to load drivers for it. That thing was glorious, back when I had ISA slots in my computer...
I haven't been to university for 9 years, but are students really using laptops during class???
You're kidding, right? Did you forget a digit?
The first laptops came out, what, a little over twenty years ago? They appeared in university classrooms about five minutes after that.
I was in college around the same time period - late 90s. Yes, laptops existed. Personally, though, I couldn't afford one. My sister bought herself a laptop running Windows 95 - a 90 MHz Pentium, I think it cost her over $1000 at the time. (And since she bought it on a credit card, with interest it became a real beast to pay off...) I don't think she used the battery very much - mostly it was to replace her old dedicated word processor machine and act as her dorm-room PC.
And then, apart from the whole cost issue, battery life wasn't so great back then, either. I think you could maybe expect a couple hours, tops? Not real sure, as I said I didn't own a laptop back then. Being practically tethered to an outlet seemed to make the whole process a bit silly - and personally, I think using a laptop in class would have mostly just been a distraction for me.
Though I did have an urge to not be stuck in my dorm room any time I was working on stuff... The large number of computer labs around campus helped there, but I also had a TRS-80 model 100 (and, later, a Palm III) that I could use for writing papers and such from any place I felt like being.
But, you know, things change. Hardware got better and cheaper. I wouldn't say I'm jealous, exactly, but the gear that's out there these days is very cool... If today's college students find it useful in class, good for them. Technology should work for you, after all.
You don't HAVE to do anything. Unless you want to get on the plane.
That's why I choose ahead of time to not get on the plane. Or go into the airport.
Driving may take more time and cost more money, but it's a hole lot prettier and nobody assumes I'm a terrorist.
I like traveling by train, myself.
It takes loads more time than flying, and I think it's more expensive, too - but the boarding process is almost completely stress-free, and even if I'm on the train for 20 hours, 30 hours, whatever, I can spend that time sleeping, reading, using my computer, or whatever else I want to do, as opposed to the time wasted at airports where I'm in line, awaiting my next boarding call, etc. I can relax.
Like you, I don't want to give my money to the airlines until the process of flying can once again be made enjoyable. I don't realistically expect my stance will change the state of things any time soon, but I am happier with my approach than I would be if I used airlines.
And here I thought I had a fundamental right to travel without being searched.
This right was violated even on public transit (i.e. subway, etc.) when the Democratic National Convention was in Boston...
I can understand the need for heightened security when major contenders for the presidency are in town and you've got subway rails going directly underneath the building, but still...
The thing that makes an aircraft so interesting as a target is because it can fly anywhere. If you can't reach the cockpit the aircraft is no more intresting as a target than for example a train or a bus.
People can always attempt to stop or jump off of a train or bus when a guy starts lighting his crotch on fire.
Nuh-uh, Dennis Hopper is watching the bus very carefully - if anybody tries to get off he'll blow it up!
I agree that's not as useful as it could be, if it was able to do it on the fly easily.
But it could theoretically (I've never tried it) be done using Xmove, which "allows the movement of X Window System applications between different displays and the persistence of X applications across X server restarts".
xmove lets the client disconnect from its current X server, and connect to a new one, at any time. The transition is completely transparent to the client. xmove works by acting as a proxy between the client and server. It is a "pseudoserver" which stores enough server state so that clients can connect to a new server without being disrupted.
The downside to this kind of approach is that applications need to communicate via this X proxy all the time, just to reap the benefits in those cases where the X server must be restarted... I don't know if this would impact performance, but it does seem like an unnecessary overhead. Though if you're using a compositing window manager (compiz, etc.) then you've already got this overhead, so I guess the feature could be inserted there if it's not already present.
Somebody else mentioned the idea of making migration between X servers a feature of the client (application) - I think that would be a very nice feature to have - tell a running X application to disconnect from the X server (without terminating) or start a new display on another X server. And if done at the toolkit level, a lot of apps would get this feature "for free"... But I think the real solution is to simply add support in the X server to reinitialize the display (i.e. for different hardware) without killing the X server itself.
This assumes that a professional acts in a professional manner at all times. That is not always true. Doctors, scientists, etc. are all human as well, and not always sensible enough to keep work and personal life separate... which is a real bitch anyway - I mean, if you spend 80% of your waking hours in your job, that's where you're going to get most of your interpersonal contact. It's natural to use this as a place to try and form relationships - but the legal environment surrounding this makes it very perilous...
Is it politically correct to be for oral sex in fruit bats or against it? Could someone please explain?
It is politically correct to be completely ambivalent about the subject, perhaps even avoiding the subject altogether, at least when dealing with tasty (but litigious) bitches you want to bone.
Now, sharing this article could have been just fine, if not for his particular delivery.
See, he didn't just forward this article via e-mail or inter-office memo - he delivered it, in person, dressed up in a Batman costume, and quoted the song lyrics "You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals"
Somewhere in there I think he may have crossed the line.
Slashdot Mirror
I just reproduced the "blue forever" bug in 2 player mode (it's pretty obvious how to trigger it), but have yet to see it in the normal mode.
I still say the ghost AI is pretty close.
Yeah, I bet it is... From the various articles it sounds like they tried to reproduce the original ghost movements (which are well-known among avid players, fairly predictable) - but with the different maze layout they fall into predictable patterns...
As for the 2-player power pellet bug - I guess I missed something. I didn't think you had to do anything special to trigger it....
You don't really need to look at the speedometer if you have a car with a manual transmission. Listen to the engine and keep track of what gear you are using.
No need for a fuel gauge either. You should know how much gas you have put into the tank, how much you car uses and how long you have traveled.
...And if you can't keep track of all these things in your head, you could probably get an iPad application to do it for you!
The website mentions that it is covered by patents... And sites the
PARSER ERROR
I'm a serious collector of Pac-Man memorabilia (I once paid over $100 for a box of Pac-Man cereal and my wedding next month will be Pac-Man themed.) and I had no idea it was Pac-Man's 30th anniversary today!
Did you ever get those Pac-Man candies they had in the early 1980s, where the different-shaped candies were all contained in a blister-pack "maze" and to get the candy out you had to navigate it through the maze?
I think you played a different Google Pacman than I did. Granted, the layout is "bad", but that's because it has to spell out the company name. Other than that, the ghosts seemed to generally chase as well as the originals and they absolutely did not "stay blue forever".
Somebody else mentioned that the ghosts stay blue forever in 2-player mode. I haven't tested this (and if I did, I don't know when I'd be able to get an answer to you) but certainly, if I get a power pellet and then go somewhere the ghosts won't come and find me, they will stay blue for several minutes at least.
The main difference to me is that it felt like the game was in slow motion (including Pacman) but that might just be the size.
This may be due to the turbo settings that tend to be configured on a lot of the coin-op games. A lot of the machines you'll see out there play faster than the originals. My local movie theater has one of the Ms. Pac Man/Galaga machines, and in that, right from the first level, Ms. Pac Man is fast. In the newer machines I think it's a configuration bit you can set - in the older ones I believe the faster gameplay came from hacked ROMs and so on. (I don't know all the history, really.)
And I also heard that Twin Galaxies don't accept Google Pac-Man high scores. So why bother?
Well, they will, actually - if you're Billy Mitchell they'll even take your word of honor that you didn't cheat. If you're not, then you'll have to travel to Funspot and play the game on their reference PC.
mmmm... Funspot... I gotta take another trip up there sometime. I would go this weekend, but Weirs Beach Drive-In is still under repair.
I don't think it's an issue of ambidextrous skills -- it's trivially easy to control both of them -- it's dividing attention between the two long enough to play both effectively that is the issue.
I tried it for a little while - I found that it gets a lot easier once you start to realize that the two pacman characters don't actually need constant attention to play the game. It's enough to just make sure that you give them a bit of attention when they reach their next turn. I still haven't gotten the hang of playing both characters simultaneously, but I really think with a little practice it wouldn't be too hard.
They weren't annoying becuase they were ads! They were annoying because someone wassticking distracting nonsense in the way of what I was trying to do.
I have fucking PacMan on MAME on my PC at home. I played it last week, even. It doesn't belong on my search engine.
Whatever, dude. It's awesome and you know it.
Just don't insert a coin then you idiot?
If you sit on the Google front page for about 9 seconds without hitting "insert coin", the game starts anyway.
(I think it would've been better to make it just go to a silent demo mode instead...)
I simply can't believe we've come this far and we STILL don't have a mute button as a standard item on web browsers. By Lucifer's beard!
By Grabthar's Hammer!
And the Lords of the Underworld!
Darkness fills my heart with pain!
When the girls start to sleep with girls,
Beelzebub will rise again!
Personally, I find it even more annoying when someone's walking around with a call on speakerphone, or using their phone like a walkie-talkie... Why do you suppose that is?
I mean, apart from the fact that I'm slowly turning into a grumpy old man.
What this video doesn't tell you is that MIDI could allow pacing of music to the action. MIDI could allow for real climaxes and transitions between different passages depending on the kind of action; a good sound card could give you, in many cases, a better experience to a pre-recorded digital piece.
Great examples: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and X-Wing.
I don't know...
I mean, in X-Wing, you'd normally be flying around and if there were enemies around, you'd hear the "Millennium Falcon vs. TIE Fighters" music. And then if you destroyed a target you'd get a little triumphant musical phrase thrown in there for your victory...
One of the problems here was that it didn't distinguish targets. You'd get the crescendo even if you just destroyed an immobile, unarmed cargo container with no shields.
And there were missions where you had to destroy like 30 of those damn things... So you'd wind up hearing those two "triumph" phrases, alternated one after the other, nearly back-to-back sometimes...
Not to say the system couldn't be made better, but sometimes I think it's better just to have good background music in a loop, and don't worry about matching the action. You can match music to film because you can control the timing of film through editing... That's just not true of a game.
If you came to my home circa 1994 and suggested playing a game on the PC, here's something you might have heard mere minutes before the game's audio encountered some bizarre, esoteric form of failure:
"S.B.O.S. Installed!"
Things were so much better once I got myself a card with actual Soundblaster-clone hardware in it. For a while I sort of limped along with a crappy Soundblaster clone as my second soundcard, you know, so I could have the wavetable synth for the music but also be able to hear game's digital audio... And then later on I got a Turtle Beach Tropez+ sound card that had the wavetable in ROM and the one card also had the SB clone on it... Never any need to load drivers for it. That thing was glorious, back when I had ISA slots in my computer...
I haven't been to university for 9 years, but are students really using laptops during class???
You're kidding, right? Did you forget a digit?
The first laptops came out, what, a little over twenty years ago? They appeared in university classrooms about five minutes after that.
I was in college around the same time period - late 90s. Yes, laptops existed. Personally, though, I couldn't afford one. My sister bought herself a laptop running Windows 95 - a 90 MHz Pentium, I think it cost her over $1000 at the time. (And since she bought it on a credit card, with interest it became a real beast to pay off...) I don't think she used the battery very much - mostly it was to replace her old dedicated word processor machine and act as her dorm-room PC.
And then, apart from the whole cost issue, battery life wasn't so great back then, either. I think you could maybe expect a couple hours, tops? Not real sure, as I said I didn't own a laptop back then. Being practically tethered to an outlet seemed to make the whole process a bit silly - and personally, I think using a laptop in class would have mostly just been a distraction for me.
Though I did have an urge to not be stuck in my dorm room any time I was working on stuff... The large number of computer labs around campus helped there, but I also had a TRS-80 model 100 (and, later, a Palm III) that I could use for writing papers and such from any place I felt like being.
But, you know, things change. Hardware got better and cheaper. I wouldn't say I'm jealous, exactly, but the gear that's out there these days is very cool... If today's college students find it useful in class, good for them. Technology should work for you, after all.
"A big enough box could hold the world" -- Carl Sandburg
Where's your mom when we need her?
You don't HAVE to do anything. Unless you want to get on the plane.
That's why I choose ahead of time to not get on the plane. Or go into the airport.
Driving may take more time and cost more money, but it's a hole lot prettier and nobody assumes I'm a terrorist.
I like traveling by train, myself.
It takes loads more time than flying, and I think it's more expensive, too - but the boarding process is almost completely stress-free, and even if I'm on the train for 20 hours, 30 hours, whatever, I can spend that time sleeping, reading, using my computer, or whatever else I want to do, as opposed to the time wasted at airports where I'm in line, awaiting my next boarding call, etc. I can relax.
Like you, I don't want to give my money to the airlines until the process of flying can once again be made enjoyable. I don't realistically expect my stance will change the state of things any time soon, but I am happier with my approach than I would be if I used airlines.
And here I thought I had a fundamental right to travel without being searched.
This right was violated even on public transit (i.e. subway, etc.) when the Democratic National Convention was in Boston...
I can understand the need for heightened security when major contenders for the presidency are in town and you've got subway rails going directly underneath the building, but still...
The thing that makes an aircraft so interesting as a target is because it can fly anywhere. If you can't reach the cockpit the aircraft is no more intresting as a target than for example a train or a bus.
People can always attempt to stop or jump off of a train or bus when a guy starts lighting his crotch on fire.
Nuh-uh, Dennis Hopper is watching the bus very carefully - if anybody tries to get off he'll blow it up!
I agree that's not as useful as it could be, if it was able to do it on the fly easily.
But it could theoretically (I've never tried it) be done using Xmove, which "allows the movement of X Window System applications between different displays and the persistence of X applications across X server restarts".
The downside to this kind of approach is that applications need to communicate via this X proxy all the time, just to reap the benefits in those cases where the X server must be restarted... I don't know if this would impact performance, but it does seem like an unnecessary overhead. Though if you're using a compositing window manager (compiz, etc.) then you've already got this overhead, so I guess the feature could be inserted there if it's not already present.
Somebody else mentioned the idea of making migration between X servers a feature of the client (application) - I think that would be a very nice feature to have - tell a running X application to disconnect from the X server (without terminating) or start a new display on another X server. And if done at the toolkit level, a lot of apps would get this feature "for free"... But I think the real solution is to simply add support in the X server to reinitialize the display (i.e. for different hardware) without killing the X server itself.
Oh, it was a typo, obviously. It was supposed to read "nooner" - in reference to a good way to spend lunchtime with your mom.
This assumes that a professional acts in a professional manner at all times. That is not always true. Doctors, scientists, etc. are all human as well, and not always sensible enough to keep work and personal life separate... which is a real bitch anyway - I mean, if you spend 80% of your waking hours in your job, that's where you're going to get most of your interpersonal contact. It's natural to use this as a place to try and form relationships - but the legal environment surrounding this makes it very perilous...
Is it politically correct to be for oral sex in fruit bats or against it? Could someone please explain?
It is politically correct to be completely ambivalent about the subject, perhaps even avoiding the subject altogether, at least when dealing with tasty (but litigious) bitches you want to bone.
Now, sharing this article could have been just fine, if not for his particular delivery.
See, he didn't just forward this article via e-mail or inter-office memo - he delivered it, in person, dressed up in a Batman costume, and quoted the song lyrics "You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals"
Somewhere in there I think he may have crossed the line.
It's been years since I watched NG, but I think I recall the Eva's being a lot taller than 9m...
They didn't build the whole thing. It's a bust.