I don't know if you're being serious, but you're wrong: Pong is actually a decent head to head game.
For starters: the name is a reasonably clever reduction of Ping Pong.
Heh, and some people got into it, at least enouugh so that it had its own strategy guide!... I'm not kidding, that's from 1976.
The gameplay works well because of the ricochet mechanic: you want to get the ball on the corner of your bat so it's a sharper angle, but go too far and you'll miss it.
Of course I might be biased, I wrote a sequel to it that combines it with Joust on the Atari 2600: JoustPong / Flap-Ping (Atari's lawyers are still cranky about the name "Pong"....) If you thought the control scheme of Pong was simple...JoustPong just needs a single click pushbutton!
Another note: you bring up the hypothetical C programmer who used localtime() and Unix hacker who used sed... honestly I think both of those people are from an earlier era, in that I think people get exposed to Perl now before they get exposed to Unix system calls and sed.
I don't see how you could read any books about Perl and not have any idea where the language came from.
Well, I was well aware of the "weird UNIXisms" in Perl, but I kind of thought that functions like localtime() were still "weird" in Perl because Wall et al. wrote them to be slantwise compatible with what C programmers on the system new, not that they were all pretty much straight passthroughs.
It still blows my mind, actually, that such a loosely typed language has straight pass througs to misc. Unix C functions, just because C is so strongly typed.
I've been a street-taught Perl hacker since like 1993 or so.
Only recently, despite having read a lot of the Perl books and hung around online a lot, I found about the history of Perl that I almost couldn't believe...that originally, it was just a glue language for a big honking chunk of Unix system calls, mostly written in C.
My credulity is because Perl sometimes seems like the anti-C...especially in terms of handling strings, since my memory of C is using chararrays for everything.
But it makes sense.... C offered blazing speed, and Perl was a great duct tape glue for all that. It's amazing that it had such quality memory management, string handling, associative arrays, and loosey goosey syntax for reg ex etc. But it's great.
I think it falls apart once you get to the perl 5 object model, which I've never been able to really get my head around... but for anything that should be written programatically rather than structured from objects, it's really great.
I'm not sure how I feel about Active Digitizers. Most of my "work" is very cartoonish. Active Digitizers freak me the hell out as the mouse pointer starts moving when I haven't even touched the drawing surface.
I'm vaguely considering getting some hardware like this (or perhaps one of those dinky if overpriced Fujitsu lifebooks) as a doodling/art tool.
I'm hoping someday touchscreens will be the standard, not the exception. Or, conversely, that drawing on a blank pad on your lap or on the table while looking at what you're drawing on separate screen will be considered some weird anomaly.
Any suggestions for hardware? I don't need a huge "canvas" but Palm is a little too small (often with flakey digitizers as well)
Ah, who am I kidding--whoever licenses pr0n easiest/fastest will come out on top (no pun intended).
Perhaps, though I've heard a lot of porn actors/actresses (and some main stream ones like Cameron Diaz) aren't looking forward to how highdef will likely accentuate their physical blemishes and flaws...
I still can't think of any new media that succeeded by ONLY offering higher resolution. And customers are at least sometimes very willing to give up high fidelity for good enough fidelity plus convenience: see MP3s for example...
I hate those blue LEDs that are on every damn bit of electronics these days. So many manufacturers don't bother to tone it down, so you have all these power indicators that can light up the damn room. Especially irritating if they're flashing, like when my laptop is suspended.
Oh, and backlit cellphone keypads, blue? Worst idea ever. Blue is the about the hardest color to get your eyes to focus on.
So many designers have no sense of aesthetics. They just go with the trend du jour.
Nevertheless, for the first time since 1996, Sony looks to be fire-fighting, and not quite in control of the battleground. Not only is the shoe on Sony's foot, the company is on the back foot. Nintendo has its chance.
Wow. That's too many metaphors. Fire-fighting battleground shoe on foot competitor on back foot
Am I the only one who thinks that the era of Sony's console dominance (they 0wned everyone with the PS1 & PS2) is finally coming to an end because of their insistance on packaging Blu Ray with the PS3?
Why... what an original thought!
Yes, yes, you are the only one, because ironically only Mr. Anonymous Coward had the courage to think in such a new paradigm!
Don't know how to get your NES game onto hardware, sorry.
AtariAge and a few other sites have been doing it for the Atari for a long time, including I think 5200. I think they sometimes canibalize old super-commons, as well as take advantage of the way Atari used off the shelf compoments for many things.
I'm still looking for a single word that means "shared-view or splitscreen" games. I guess you could say that the overall word is "multiplayer" and then the three subgenres are "online" "shared-view" and "splitscreen"
Can the average person just go online and buy rewritable cards for the Atari 2600, NES, 8-bit Game Boy, Sega Master System, and Sega Genesis? Or is it like a lightsaber in the Star Wars universe, where you have to solder one together yourself?
I guess this has already been answered. As a guy who has his own 2600 homebrew released and sold, I'm glad at least someone here was pointing out the oversight.
Misconception #552: "Multiplayer console game means split screen." Fact: It doesn't.
Ah but the converse "Splitscreen != Multiplayer Console Gaming", isn't true. It's a subset.
As someone who vastly prefers "splitscreen" multiplayer games, I've been thinking about the terminology. "Splitscreen"? (not every game is splitscreen, ala Smash Bros, Bomberman) "Couch"? (too general, a lot of singleplayer gaming happens on couches) "Party gaming"? (too specific, now that it's a subgenre ala Mario Party)
At least Online Console Gaming has a specific term. I guess "splitscreen" is the best to hope for, though a bit inaccurate.
How'd that work? Did you smuggle something into the library? Did they have an atari but you weren't able to play it?
Do compute value, multiply or divide by time?
on
Just Let Me Play!
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Here's a way of thinking about the question: If a game takes more time, does that decrease the "dollar per hour" ratio, so it's a good thing?
Or does it raise the cost, because cost is a function of money AND time?
I'm in the latter camp. I buy a game mostly to use a new bit of interaction. Having additional time that isn't matched by additional novel interaction just cranks the cost up. Novel interaction can be control modes, missions, weapons, enemies, but it has to be something, and it has to be diverse enough that it feels novel, not "this mission the guard is around the SECOND corner"
And I have more free cash than free time in general. People the other way 'round, like students or the unemployed, probably have an opposite opinion.
That's a good point, like with their new "I'm a PC" "I'm a Mac" ads, they still make it clear who's cool, but they don't really argue that you can't do things on a PC... you just don't want to.
I used to think there was something intrisically slow and terrible about PDFs. They're still not my favorite download, but Foxit makes it so much quicker to use, with a better UI...and especially start up time.
PLUS, it's not trying to get me to install every unrelated retarded photo album and what not program Adobe's trying to leverage onto my hard drive. What a crock.
How long does it take to find a WLAN? (if that applies to you)
that's my biggest grip with PC laptops, they take about 30 seconds to refigure out they're network connection. I thought it was a problem with WLANs in general 'til I saw how an iBook does it in 2 or 3 seconds.
Really? Huh, that's not what I would have expected.
personally I much prefer "Picross"/"Paint By Number"/"Nonagrams" -- I love that their payoff is of an image rather than just another damn bunch of numbers, but the puzzle is hampered branding wise by not having a single name (and having games magazine pick the worst of the bunch "Paint By Number")
Anyway, Picross seems rather similar to Sodoku, and while I haven't tried building a solver, it seems like gauging the difficulty of the puzzle would be fairly simple, just keep track of how many "tricks" you had to apply before you got your definite answer. With Sodoku, it seems like you should be able to see how many things you had to cross corelate, or how much you had to "guess", before you started getting the definite numbers.
But like I said, I don't have solid experience with it, just brainstorming, so I bow to your experience...still I find it surprising.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, Prop Cycle Deathmatch: Joust...
I wish there was a decent and not hideously expensive home version of that, I think it could be a great boon to exercise.
I don't know if you're being serious, but you're wrong: Pong is actually a decent head to head game.
... I'm not kidding, that's from 1976.
For starters: the name is a reasonably clever reduction of Ping Pong.
Heh, and some people got into it, at least enouugh so that it had its own strategy guide!
The gameplay works well because of the ricochet mechanic: you want to get the ball on the corner of your bat so it's a sharper angle, but go too far and you'll miss it.
Of course I might be biased, I wrote a sequel to it that combines it with Joust on the Atari 2600: JoustPong / Flap-Ping (Atari's lawyers are still cranky about the name "Pong"....) If you thought the control scheme of Pong was simple...JoustPong just needs a single click pushbutton!
Another note: you bring up the hypothetical C programmer who used localtime() and Unix hacker who used sed... honestly I think both of those people are from an earlier era, in that I think people get exposed to Perl now before they get exposed to Unix system calls and sed.
I don't see how you could read any books about Perl and not have any idea where the language came from.
Well, I was well aware of the "weird UNIXisms" in Perl, but I kind of thought that functions like localtime() were still "weird" in Perl because Wall et al. wrote them to be slantwise compatible with what C programmers on the system new, not that they were all pretty much straight passthroughs.
It still blows my mind, actually, that such a loosely typed language has straight pass througs to misc. Unix C functions, just because C is so strongly typed.
I've been a street-taught Perl hacker since like 1993 or so.
Only recently, despite having read a lot of the Perl books and hung around online a lot, I found about the history of Perl that I almost couldn't believe...that originally, it was just a glue language for a big honking chunk of Unix system calls, mostly written in C.
My credulity is because Perl sometimes seems like the anti-C...especially in terms of handling strings, since my memory of C is using chararrays for everything.
But it makes sense.... C offered blazing speed, and Perl was a great duct tape glue for all that. It's amazing that it had such quality memory management, string handling, associative arrays, and loosey goosey syntax for reg ex etc. But it's great.
I think it falls apart once you get to the perl 5 object model, which I've never been able to really get my head around... but for anything that should be written programatically rather than structured from objects, it's really great.
Well, you're probably looking for "tags" rather than keywords....
I'm not sure how I feel about Active Digitizers.
Most of my "work" is very cartoonish. Active Digitizers freak me the hell out as the mouse pointer starts moving when I haven't even touched the drawing surface.
I'm vaguely considering getting some hardware like this (or perhaps one of those dinky if overpriced Fujitsu lifebooks) as a doodling/art tool.
I'm hoping someday touchscreens will be the standard, not the exception. Or, conversely, that drawing on a blank pad on your lap or on the table while looking at what you're drawing on separate screen will be considered some weird anomaly.
Any suggestions for hardware? I don't need a huge "canvas" but Palm is a little too small (often with flakey digitizers as well)
I'd love to see Apple get on this.
Ah, who am I kidding--whoever licenses pr0n easiest/fastest will come out on top (no pun intended).
Perhaps, though I've heard a lot of porn actors/actresses (and some main stream ones like Cameron Diaz) aren't looking forward to how highdef will likely accentuate their physical blemishes and flaws...
I still can't think of any new media that succeeded by ONLY offering higher resolution. And customers are at least sometimes very willing to give up high fidelity for good enough fidelity plus convenience: see MP3s for example...
Yeah, that's the trick to feeling good about your shiny new hardware...
I hate those blue LEDs that are on every damn bit of electronics these days. So many manufacturers don't bother to tone it down, so you have all these power indicators that can light up the damn room. Especially irritating if they're flashing, like when my laptop is suspended.
Oh, and backlit cellphone keypads, blue? Worst idea ever. Blue is the about the hardest color to get your eyes to focus on.
So many designers have no sense of aesthetics. They just go with the trend du jour.
Nevertheless, for the first time since 1996, Sony looks to be fire-fighting, and not quite in control of the battleground. Not only is the shoe on Sony's foot, the company is on the back foot. Nintendo has its chance.
Wow. That's too many metaphors.
Fire-fighting
battleground
shoe on foot
competitor on back foot
It probably did fly under the radar a bit, but was really popular at my school, Tufts, in the early/mid-90s.
Am I the only one who thinks that the era of Sony's console dominance (they 0wned everyone with the PS1 & PS2) is finally coming to an end because of their insistance on packaging Blu Ray with the PS3?
Why... what an original thought!
Yes, yes, you are the only one, because ironically only Mr. Anonymous Coward had the courage to think in such a new paradigm!
Heh, I remember submitting a rejected article when it returned from hiatus.
Man, a lot of us "grew up" with this comic, it really was the geek hallmark on the early web.
Don't know how to get your NES game onto hardware, sorry.
AtariAge and a few other sites have been doing it for the Atari for a long time, including I think 5200. I think they sometimes canibalize old super-commons, as well as take advantage of the way Atari used off the shelf compoments for many things.
I'm still looking for a single word that means "shared-view or splitscreen" games. I guess you could say that the overall word is "multiplayer" and then the three subgenres are "online" "shared-view" and "splitscreen"
Can the average person just go online and buy rewritable cards for the Atari 2600, NES, 8-bit Game Boy, Sega Master System, and Sega Genesis? Or is it like a lightsaber in the Star Wars universe, where you have to solder one together yourself?
I guess this has already been answered.
As a guy who has his own 2600 homebrew released and sold, I'm glad at least someone here was pointing out the oversight.
Misconception #552: "Multiplayer console game means split screen."
Fact: It doesn't.
Ah but the converse "Splitscreen != Multiplayer Console Gaming", isn't true. It's a subset.
As someone who vastly prefers "splitscreen" multiplayer games, I've been thinking about the terminology.
"Splitscreen"? (not every game is splitscreen, ala Smash Bros, Bomberman) "Couch"? (too general, a lot of singleplayer gaming happens on couches) "Party gaming"? (too specific, now that it's a subgenre ala Mario Party)
At least Online Console Gaming has a specific term. I guess "splitscreen" is the best to hope for, though a bit inaccurate.
How'd that work? Did you smuggle something into the library? Did they have an atari but you weren't able to play it?
Here's a way of thinking about the question:
If a game takes more time, does that decrease the "dollar per hour" ratio, so it's a good thing?
Or does it raise the cost, because cost is a function of money AND time?
I'm in the latter camp. I buy a game mostly to use a new bit of interaction. Having additional time that isn't matched by additional novel interaction just cranks the cost up. Novel interaction can be control modes, missions, weapons, enemies, but it has to be something, and it has to be diverse enough that it feels novel, not "this mission the guard is around the SECOND corner"
And I have more free cash than free time in general. People the other way 'round, like students or the unemployed, probably have an opposite opinion.
That's a good point, like with their new "I'm a PC" "I'm a Mac" ads, they still make it clear who's cool, but they don't really argue that you can't do things on a PC... you just don't want to.
Ditto on foxit!
I used to think there was something intrisically slow and terrible about PDFs. They're still not my favorite download, but Foxit makes it so much quicker to use, with a better UI...and especially start up time.
PLUS, it's not trying to get me to install every unrelated retarded photo album and what not program Adobe's trying to leverage onto my hard drive. What a crock.
So the money only goes to a particular branch? That could easily be staked out?
How long does it take to find a WLAN? (if that applies to you)
that's my biggest grip with PC laptops, they take about 30 seconds to refigure out they're network connection. I thought it was a problem with WLANs in general 'til I saw how an iBook does it in 2 or 3 seconds.
That's big talk coming from you, Erwax.
Really? Huh, that's not what I would have expected.
personally I much prefer "Picross"/"Paint By Number"/"Nonagrams" -- I love that their payoff is of an image rather than just another damn bunch of numbers, but the puzzle is hampered branding wise by not having a single name (and having games magazine pick the worst of the bunch "Paint By Number")
Anyway, Picross seems rather similar to Sodoku, and while I haven't tried building a solver, it seems like gauging the difficulty of the puzzle would be fairly simple, just keep track of how many "tricks" you had to apply before you got your definite answer. With Sodoku, it seems like you should be able to see how many things you had to cross corelate, or how much you had to "guess", before you started getting the definite numbers.
But like I said, I don't have solid experience with it, just brainstorming, so I bow to your experience...still I find it surprising.