To be fair, we are talking about arcade games. You were not supposed to finish them, but to finish your money before that :-) [].
You are paying for a game, so you have the right to continue playing until you die. In that context, restarting the game (hopefully with an higher difficulty level) is the proper course of actoin
[] The authors of Pacman probably didn't even think you would be able to reach level 256 and overflow the variable. That's how you get to a kill screen that corrupts memory.
(I was a kid in the 80s and I played in arcades a lot. I think I could still tell in which arcade I played each game).
> There was an economic motivation for this difficulty, in getting more coins from players quicker, but Fujiwara would later insist that wasn’t the primary motivation and that they were meeting a demand from strong players for challenge.
Thats' not completely true. If it was that way, players would quickly grew fed up and stop playing. You need a balance between getting money out of people and people keep playing because they have fun.
I think one of the most efficient way to do that is having MOST of your players being suckers that keep pouring money, but allow a few to get very good at it, and play an inordinate amount of time with a single coin. That way the suckers will keep playing hoping to do the same. Most people would last 5 level in Bubble Bobble, but you had the occasional "genius" that would finish it.
Very difficult games like GnG were well regarded but not as played as others, as much as I can remember.
> Fujiwara later responded to a question about SNK’s Ikari and its resemblance to Commando by saying that was just how things were, although he was disappointed that they had got to release more sequels than him.
In the 80's there were not many game mechanics available []. I dare say that 90% of the games were either
vertical shoot 'em ups (think Galaxian)
* horizontal shoot 'em ups (think Gradius)
* beat 'em ups (think Double Dragon)
* platform (think Mario)
* to a lesser extent, racing games (think Outrun)
I think mostly due to HW limitations.
So if you are going to have a soldier going around killing people, of course it is going to resemble Command in some way. Doesn't mean they are the same, in the same way that Poker and Bridge are not the same despite using the same set of cards.
[*] There were some outliers, and some of them were great (Tron, Star Wars) but they more the exception that the rule.
Yes this is what made GnG and other difficult games like it great. While some games balanced the financial side on forced limited play time, e.g. timers or constant depleting health, others like GnG were just hugely difficult. You can play for 4 minutes or 40 depending on skill.
As a kid with no money, I learned to get good at these and avoid the obvious cash crabs
Also it was impressive when someone was good enough to play 40 minutes. Usually a small crowd would gather, which could inspire bad players to plunk in more quarters to improve.
I remember beating Zaxxon when I was only 6 years old in '82, in large part because I probably spent at least 100 hours watching older kids do it.
The countries in middle east want Iran to be weak, not to fall.
I think that from the point of the neighbouring countries, Iran is fine as it is. Israel and the USA keep it in check, it is under sanctions, which are both beneficial for its adversaries.
If the regime in Iran were to fall, first of all you would have repercussions on the neighbors, (refugees and the like), and instability. But also, in the longer run, the chance of a more better government, which could make the country stronger than it is.
The microwave has two big related issues (both mentioned in the article).
The first is that it is not easy to make a mental model of how it works. The second is that since it takes little too cook the food, it is unforgiving and you have to be very careful with both timings and amounts.
This makes it hard to learn how to properly use it just by trial and error. Also since now we have inductive stoves there is even less reason to use it.
But on most of them the power setting just changes the percentage of time the magentrotron is 'on', but while it is on, its full power. So something like 'low for 40s' becomes a game of russian roulette
I still use Facebook. Not often, let say once or twice a month, but I live abroad and FB is the only way to contact some people.
My feed is far from good, but not horrible. Once you interact a minimum with it (like in clicking on some posts, not even putting a like), FB will adjust the content appropriately. Right now for some reason I regularly get problems from International Mathematical Olympiad, chess, and nerd stuff about engineering.
I am not surprised that those that access FB after many years find the timeline full of half-naked women, pseudo-porn and the like: it's probably what men (those still on FB at least) on average crave for.
rant incoming
It is sad. I think that the original FB, the one from middle 00's, was really peak social media: you see stuff from people you know, you interact with them, even playing games with them. You would get in contact with old classmates that you couldn't speak with for 20 years... wonderful.
The point of original FB was to use it as an aggregator for your RL; go to a party, meet some gal, and the following day you would have a new contact on FB that you could contact to go out together again. Think about getting their phone number, but one order of magnitute better.
Heck I remember somehow waking up with a terrible hangover after a party and having a number of new girls as a contact on FB and asking myself "who the heck are they?". Fun times.
Current social media (Tiktok, Instagram, etc) is about seeing how people that you don't know get a life much better than yours. Not necessarily true, but it gets under your skin. How do youngsters use social media without going mad?
I think that most people don't really care about tracking, but the fact that often ads make their experience miserable.
You open a link, you get a full screen ad, and have to wait 10 seconds or more. When you finally can close the ad, a popup appears asking if you want to subscribe to their newsletter. you close that too. A cookie banner reminds you that they care about your privacy, that's why they share your details with 1000+ partners. When you find the hidden button to say that you don't accept finally the article appears, but the bottom half is occupied by an overlay with a video ad. All the while the page scrolls terribly because of the amount of javascript loaded.
Or, sometimes, you get ad, cookie banner and then they tell you that you have to pay to access the content.
I suspect that if people had to choose between ads without tracking and tracking without the ads, they would choose the latter.
Historically the US did care a lot, in a way it reminds me of the Crusade for Freedom [1] and Radio Free Europe [2].
So I find this in line with the behavior of many American administration, the weird thing being that this time the target is not the just usual suspects (China, Iran, etc.) but also European allies.
(not saying this is a good thing btw, just trying to put it in perspective)
This is true for humans too. Tests should not be written or performed by the same person that writes the code
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