Well, I don't think E.T. is such a bad game, in fact I consider it to be vastly underrated. What most people have such a hard time with is falling in the pits. Here's some advice:
1. On the "woods" screen you start out in, any attempt to go to the screen on the right will ALWAYS result in you falling into a pit.
2. As soon as you fall into a pit, you can hit the button and you will stop falling. Press up on the joystick and when you reach the top, keep holding the button and use the joystick to maneuver to the right or left.
3. You NEED to look at the little icon at the top and center of the screen. This is the whole key to the game, the little icons that appear in this spot. A "!" means you can look to see if a phone piece is available. A little face means you can call Elliot to grab your phone pieces and Reese's pieces (the little dots you can collect). A little eating face means you eat a Reese's pieces to get a little extra energy. A little clock will summon the ship once you retrieve all the phone pieces. A little target means stand here when the ship arrives and you will get picked up. If you see an arrow pointing, you can use it to instantly teleport to the screen facing that direction. Use the button to activate any of the icons.
4. Stamina is key to this game. I got the second highest score a few years back by simply playing and not stopping. The game gets really boring but if you are willing to play long enough, you'll achieve the high score, and then Twin Galaxies will misspell your name as Herbert instead of Hebert. Wait, that might just be me.
I started on LOGO when I was maybe 6 or 7. What a great language! It let you easily write simple programs that could do real things! I used it for the most obviously simple things -- drawing a little house with windows and a chimney, drawing google eyes by running loops with code to draw circles and change the colors every few loops. Eventually they started teaching us BASIC, which was great, but without the instant gratification of making the turtle do things and then watching it happen. This was on Apple II+'s and Apple IIe's, a long time ago. I think it's great for kids to learn this stuff. I remember it ran SO slowly. Like, you would hide the turtle, and run a loop to draw a circle. You could watch the turtle slowly draw a circle, then another circle, then another. It took forever, but in a way this was helpful because you could see exactly what your code was doing, visually. I can't wait to check out the Java version.
It's "Solaris is hot, and Midnight Magic's Mean" by the way. I love the old Atari, my favorite game is definitely Kaboom! I can get about 3,000 points pretty easily, that doesn't compare to some of the real Kaboom! champs out there but it's not a bad score.
While I prefer the Iron Chefs, Alton Brown's "Good Eats" is a close second in my Food Network watching.
The book is fantastic, especially for someone who doesn't know much about cooking but is pretty smart and can follow directions well. Each chapter describes a method of cooking -- boiling, frying, etc, and shows the science behind it as well. That's what sets this book apart from your everyday off the shelf cookbook.
It beats eating rocks.
I worked for a company called Miacomet which made the Real Feel PoolShark. it was the first PC controller that allowed you to play a game on your computer with a real cue. It was basically a modified mouse with a roller on top where you place the cue. It couldn't do English or top or bottom shots though. As a poolplayer I thought it was pretty cool, and it was definitely fun to play around with.
These types of devices, however, will not make you a better pool player. Visualizing the angles is something that does come with practice, and once you put the headset away, are you still going to know the angles in your head? They change with every shot of the ball.
Miacomet basically went bankrupt and laid us all off, I don't know about the commerical prospects of this application.
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Well, I don't think E.T. is such a bad game, in fact I consider it to be vastly underrated. What most people have such a hard time with is falling in the pits. Here's some advice:
1. On the "woods" screen you start out in, any attempt to go to the screen on the right will ALWAYS result in you falling into a pit.
2. As soon as you fall into a pit, you can hit the button and you will stop falling. Press up on the joystick and when you reach the top, keep holding the button and use the joystick to maneuver to the right or left.
3. You NEED to look at the little icon at the top and center of the screen. This is the whole key to the game, the little icons that appear in this spot. A "!" means you can look to see if a phone piece is available. A little face means you can call Elliot to grab your phone pieces and Reese's pieces (the little dots you can collect). A little eating face means you eat a Reese's pieces to get a little extra energy. A little clock will summon the ship once you retrieve all the phone pieces. A little target means stand here when the ship arrives and you will get picked up. If you see an arrow pointing, you can use it to instantly teleport to the screen facing that direction. Use the button to activate any of the icons.
4. Stamina is key to this game. I got the second highest score a few years back by simply playing and not stopping. The game gets really boring but if you are willing to play long enough, you'll achieve the high score, and then Twin Galaxies will misspell your name as Herbert instead of Hebert. Wait, that might just be me.
I started on LOGO when I was maybe 6 or 7. What a great language! It let you easily write simple programs that could do real things! I used it for the most obviously simple things -- drawing a little house with windows and a chimney, drawing google eyes by running loops with code to draw circles and change the colors every few loops. Eventually they started teaching us BASIC, which was great, but without the instant gratification of making the turtle do things and then watching it happen. This was on Apple II+'s and Apple IIe's, a long time ago. I think it's great for kids to learn this stuff. I remember it ran SO slowly. Like, you would hide the turtle, and run a loop to draw a circle. You could watch the turtle slowly draw a circle, then another circle, then another. It took forever, but in a way this was helpful because you could see exactly what your code was doing, visually. I can't wait to check out the Java version.
It's "Solaris is hot, and Midnight Magic's Mean" by the way. I love the old Atari, my favorite game is definitely Kaboom! I can get about 3,000 points pretty easily, that doesn't compare to some of the real Kaboom! champs out there but it's not a bad score.
While I prefer the Iron Chefs, Alton Brown's "Good Eats" is a close second in my Food Network watching. The book is fantastic, especially for someone who doesn't know much about cooking but is pretty smart and can follow directions well. Each chapter describes a method of cooking -- boiling, frying, etc, and shows the science behind it as well. That's what sets this book apart from your everyday off the shelf cookbook. It beats eating rocks.
I worked for a company called Miacomet which made the Real Feel PoolShark. it was the first PC controller that allowed you to play a game on your computer with a real cue. It was basically a modified mouse with a roller on top where you place the cue. It couldn't do English or top or bottom shots though. As a poolplayer I thought it was pretty cool, and it was definitely fun to play around with. These types of devices, however, will not make you a better pool player. Visualizing the angles is something that does come with practice, and once you put the headset away, are you still going to know the angles in your head? They change with every shot of the ball. Miacomet basically went bankrupt and laid us all off, I don't know about the commerical prospects of this application.