Just to see if my USB mouse polling rate might be the problem, I downloaded and ran Mouse Rate Checker. I averaged about 120 Hz on my Logitech MX 310 mouse. This site suggests this can and should be improved.

Okay, I installed and ran USB Mouserate Switcher 1.1, and then restarted my Windows XP box. And by god, it did up the polling rate to 250 Hz as advertised, at least if that little utility, Mouse Rate Checker, can be believed. But the proof is in the pudding, as they say. Will I loose the stutter in Arkanoid (World)? And whether it does or not (and I don't think I'm just seeing things in my head), I seemed to have noticed that my mouse is a little smoother just in and around the Windows interface. Yes, I think it's definitely smoother. I thought this even before seeing what certainly appear to be objective numbers backing this up.

Well, I think gameplay improved a little, but the intermittent stuttering is still there. I tried running Arkanoid under Direct 3D thinking that might help. It didn't help.

Okay, somehow I got the stutter to stop, and it's either because I turned off bilinear filtering in Direct 3D (unlikely, since it was doing it without Direct 3D being on) or it was because I changed the "Autocenter Speed" from whatever it was (around 15 or so) to 80. I have Digital Speed set to 12 and Sensitivity set to 20%. All those settings except Direct 3D are accessed in-game via the tabkey via "Analog Controls."

Okay, I tried going back and changing the Autocenter Speed and turning back on bilinear filtering in Direct 3D. They had no effect in making it worse. In this case, I couldn't get the stutter back. I still get a smooth Arkanoid paddle via the mouse. Maybe the new USB Polling kicked in. I don't know. More voodoo. I don't know what else to say. I guess this is sometimes why I overlook the obvious. If rhyme-or-reason doesn't account for much, you sometimes overlook things that *should* have some effect. It's like throwing darts at an invisible dartboard sometimes. But now that I have smooth control via a mouse, I immediately started getting through some Arkanoid screens relatively easily.

But I do recommend increasing your mouse polling rate if you're on a PC and have a mouse that can take advantage of it. That's not voodoo. And MajorGeeks had the advice that setting the polling rate of 250Hz is probably overkill. I suspect they're right.

Well, i checked it out today, it works quite good. But i had to decrease analog sensivity a lot to achieve smooth movement (although it wasn't perfect).

Yes. And I can't really tell you the logic of the difference between "Sensitivity" and "Speed" in the analog controls, but I usually just randomly mess with both until it feels okay. Usually they both end up being set around 10 to 15.

Plus, I guess the OS X mousedriver screws around with its acceleration curves.

That reminds me of another thing I did, smithz. And maybe this was the key. I unchecked "Disable acceleration in games" in the Windows mouse control panel, which enabled acceleration. I did a dumb thing by changing more than one setting at a time which will tend to mask anything that actually does help, so I don't know which thing I changed did the trick, if any (could have been spontaneous gamebustion or something like that). And I'm afraid to turn toggle that mouse setting again for fear that it will get stuck that way. Yeah, voodoo, but why risk it?

Strange that you can't use the mousebuttons, i had no problems using them.

Nothing is really strange on these emulators. What is strange is when something *does* friggin' work. The weird thing is that within the game (via "Input (this game)") I can get the setting "Dial Analog" (in "Input (this game)") to accept the mouse as input. But I've had no luck setting the Player 1 Button 1 in to any of the mouse buttons. In Arkanoid, I can use the spacebar to fire the laser, and that works fine, but I think I'd like to try doing that on the left mouse button.

Another setting in MAME (at least in the PC version) is "High Thread Priority". Might as well have it set to that if you need the extra boost. Overall, even with the controls working, I found the arcade version of Arkanoid to be harder than what I remember the Mac version being. I've got the MAME version set to easy, but it puts out so many of those floating triangle Harry-Potter-hat-thingies that it's nearly impossible. Round 3 is almost impossible, and 4 is probably not doable by mere mortals unless you pick up one of the "bypass level" bonuses. Far too hard for fun in my opinion. Surely that's why I liked the Mac version. It was challenging but not insane.

hm, i played like mr. imprecise, stuttering along, missing chances a gogo.
back in the day i played it on c-64 and amiga, on the amiga the mouse-support was excellent direct, so i was pretty good.
using mame it doesn't felt right, because it wasn't 1:1 control, but strange accellerated paddle-control. i play on os x, the version already used the mouse by default. Hmm... i may have to dig a little deeper now.

Yeah, that "direct" one-to-one feel is essentially when playing these arcade games. Sort of relates to operating systems as well, if you ask me.

Here's an interesting two-person joystick. And here's a two-stick with a trackball. Only two hundred dollars. Don't know how many Euros that would be but it's still a lot.

For $2200 you can get the X-Arcade Machine…if you have that much money just burning a hole in your pocket. It's easier and cheaper just to MAME them, but it's neat idea. Over 200 games in the one console, and you can surely add more.

Check out Zaviga. Nice variety of gameplay, although I've barely glanced at it.

Zektor almost certainly has to be a sequel to Space Fury. It's a nice example of color vector graphics, but the gameplay is less than stellar. The taunting by the android (or alien) in Space Fury (rev a seems to work best) is worth the price of admission. Very good concept. You don't see a lot of that. Maybe it doesn't sell or something, but I always found it to be amusing. It's only been fairly recently that they've gotten Space Fury's sound to work so that you can hear that guy. Like other games, it gets too hard too fast, so we tended to just pass this one up.

I think one of the best vector graphic games of all time was Space Duel. It was surely THE best cooperative 2-player arcade game I can think of. It was an extremely good concept even though it's basically an Asteroid derivative. Very fun to play with two people. Sometimes one guy's ship would be damaged and you'd have to sort of drag him around while you finished the round as best you could. Great stuff. This is one that always made my jaw drop in awe at just good game design. You could throw a bazillion pixels and megahertz at it with modern equipment, but the essential game wouldn't change and it's likely most ham-fisted game designers would just spoil the simplicity.

And if you're not familiar with Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move from the Super NES or other systems, try out the MAME version. Once in a while it's nice to have a sort of non-blast-em-up game. It's a bit Zen.

Zektor also looks like a sequel to Star Castle. The second level with the face behind the force-field seems like a tricked out version of Star Castle. Also, the ships reminded me of SC, so the designer must be the same guy.

Fun! But I have to tweak the controls. This would have been a quarter-eater. And I don't like it when there's no sound when you fire.

Zektor also looks like a sequel to Star Castle. The second level with the face behind the force-field seems like a tricked out version of Star Castle. Also, the ships reminded me of SC, so the designer must be the same guy.

Good point. Maybe all three are related. That brings up an interesting point about the history of Atari…at least interesting to me. The management wouldn't credit the game designers in the games or on the boxes. They wouldn't even let (or tried to not let) outside companies program games for the 2600 game console and, later, the 400 and 800 computers. They kept the specs hidden. And this was truly odd. Remember, this was Warner where the idea of credit and royalties in regards to musicians is standard. One of the top dog programmers of Atari noted this fact and tried to negotiate something similar for the game designers. If that history is to be believed (and one must leave plenty of allowances for "he said/she said"), Warner (and the management they had placed in Atari) basically laughed at the notion. Apparently they were famous for telling many quite brilliant programmers that they could be replaced easily enough by someone off the street. The guy who did Space Invaders, which earned Atari millions, if not tens of millions, got a $10,000 bonus. The schmucks. Cheap bastards. Some guy's History of Atari 8-bit Computers puts it thusly:

quote:

Under Kassar's direction, the creative and relaxed hacker culture of the company was reduced to a Dilbert-like atmosphere of disgruntled nerds and humorless suits.

Granted, even taking account for any possible bias, it seems like another case of the pencil-pusher types trying to own and downplay the creative aspect of a business because they don't understand it, don't have that kind of creativity themselves, and/or feel threatened by it. So you belittle it. Say it isn't very important. Why didn't the Atari become the Macintosh? It's simple. While you had Steve Jobs out evangelizing programmers (the term "software evangelist" was possibly created in reference to Atari game designer Chris Crawford, but he was an exception), you had Atari demeaning their greatest talent and threatening lawsuits against anyone who would dare to program for their game systems. Granted, as I understand it, the major gaming systems today (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) play these same kind of games. It's playing a game of trying to lock out your opponents from the best games. It's quite ugly from what I've read. You know how I feel about those types: cock suckers.


Virtual Apple lets you play Apple II games online. I couldn't get it to work, but maybe you'll have better luck. Right now I'm trying out a Commodore 64 emulator. It's maddening. I can get the games to launch but I can't get them to start. The emulator is definitely recognizing the keyboard, and yet which key starts the damn game? Emulators go to all this trouble to get something up and running and then don't make it at all obvious how to start the game. Like I said, it's maddening.

Smithz, in regards to smoothness, I'm guessing (famous last words) that MAME works better on the PC. I do get totally smooth performance out of most games. Yes, quite a few games launch and then do nothing. Some work but have no sound. But a lot of games are just kick-ass smooth and responsive just like at the arcade, although the dedicated input devices of the arcade game are almost always better. There's no way in my opinion that the D-pad is as good as the original Pac Mac red-knob joystick, although a good joystick works fine. But some people can use those gamepads and some, like me, are gamepad challenged. But take a look at any settings in MAME for giving its thread more priority. That could help in OS X.

Oh, geez, I just figured it out. I'm dealing with the CCS64 Commodore 64 emulator. IF I have caps lock on, then the games are recognizing my F-keys. WTF? And I don't say "WTF?" a lot. I'm not one of those guys who sees something even slightly out skew and goes "WTF?" But…WTF?

There are some basic instructions for the emulator here. It's all a bit geeky. And at first glance this would appear to be a good forum for troubleshooting this stuff. And this seems to be a pretty good place for the game ROMS. You don't need a system BIOS ROM. That's built into the emulator (or comes with it). For purposes of this emulator you want to download the zipped "Game" ROM rather than the "Sid" version. I'm sure the "Sid" version is good for something…probably another emulator. But those files don't seem to do anything for this CCS64 emulator. And after you download the zipped ROMs, you must unzip them. After unzipping you know you have the right ones because they have the ".d64" extension. You then load these via the "Load and Run" command in the file menu of the emulator. And I got some voodoo again when first trying to do that. It didn't work. It didn't work the first time and it didn't worth the fifth time. But I think I had quit the emulator a couple times, and low and behold, I tried it again one time and it worked and continues to work. Voodoo. I'm thinking of running out and getting some live chickens so I can smear some chicken blood over the keyboard once in a while when I get into a fix.

Oh, wait. NOW it's recognizing the F-keys without caps lock on. But it definitely and immediately started to recognize them when I turned caps lock on because I was specifically trying to see if that was the issue. Maybe I nudged something into awareness or something. I swear, when I say this stuff is voodoo, this is exactly what I'm talking about. No rhyme or reason.

M.U.L.E. is one of my favorite games for the Atari 800, so I gave the Commodore 64 version a try, while trying to keep as open a mind as possible. I understand there will be some differences because they used different graphics and sound chips, etc.

In terms of responsiveness, the Atari800WinPlus emulator is noticeably smoother, although the CCS64 is by no means horrible. But it just seems to have a teeny bit a lag on button pushing and joystick movements. Graphically, the Atari version is just slightly richer, but they're both basically the same, and it's difficult to say offhand whether any differences are due to the features and limitations of the computer system themselves or just due to being a different interpretation of the same game. But the sound is clearly much richer on the Atari. I've read how the Commodore 64 has a super-duper sound chip, and it may indeed have. But M.U.L.E. played on an Atari computer (or emulator) is sonically superior without question. The Atari sounds rich. The Commodore rinky-dink. Again, this might be due simply to the programmers not taking the time to do the sounds as well when they ported over to the Commodore 64. (The game originated on the Atari 800.)

One of the really annoying things about the CCS64 emulator is that when you have a game paused it eats up about 50% or more of the processor. The Atari800WinPlus emulator plays very nice with other programs. When you pause it, you basically kill it for all intents and purposes. Both emulators will play the game just fine apparently. (I haven't played a game all the way through on the CC264…games of M.U.L.E. typically take about an hour). But the Atari800WinPlus emulator seems to be much more sophisticated. But I'm going to check out a few games on the 64. That computer obviously was king for a while and has just tons of games for it, most I've never even seen.

Tried playing Mancopter. The Commodore 64 emulator ran it, started it, but I can find no way (including the keyboard) of moving the player. The joystick automatically worked for M.U.L.E. It doesn't for Mancopter. More voodoo. Where are my chickens?

One quite major thing I was missing about the CCS64 is that you have to hit the spacebar after the game loads in order to get any further…usually. Hitting it brings up instructions and a few game options, and then after all this you commonly hit "escape" (or hit F7) to start playing the game. I got Bubble Bobble to work, but Mancopter still refuses to move the player, even after obviously starting the game.

I did get "Impossible Mission" to work. Looks like an interesting game, so I guess I can say I've sort have got it working, at least for some games. But I tried "Ghostbusters" and it took keyboard input but not the joystick. What a hodge-podge. But I must say, despite the hit-or-miss nature of all this, that C64.com website for acquiring games is a pleasure to use. This is one of the best I've ever seen. Kudos for such ease of use. A lot of thought went into building that site. They give you a little preview screenshot of the game and allow you to download it without going through a couple more pages first.

Anyway, hit or miss, the procedures seem to be to launch the ".d64" game via "Load and Run" via the emulator's "File" menu. What a loading process. Don't worry if you think you've crashed because a successful loading looks like the screen is high on acid. But when and if the game does load after 5 to 15 seconds, then hit the spacebar. This will usually bring up some game options. Sometimes you need to hit the escape key when done with the options or when done reading the directions (sometimes it will offer one or the other, or both). It's a bit of a hodge podge. Tried playing Computer Scrabble Deluxe and it kept crashing when asking for the player's name to be entered. Very nice.

So remember the spacebar. And it seems that C64 games have their rules available inside the game (if only as an option at the start screen). I think this was a rarity with Atari games, and having the rules becomes especially useful, of course, when using these emulators where it's not likely you have the original packaging and instructions sitting next to you. As I said, I have a whole warehouse full of arcade games, cartridges, and floppy disks just so I can play all these games more conveniently through the emulator and do so legally. It cost me about 3 million dollars to do so, but better to do it right. I also discovered perhaps one reason for the dead keyboard…or at least a way to get it (and the joystick?) back. Under the "Options" menu choose "Input" which then allows you to change how "Control Port One" is set up. Input can be a joystick or whatever, and you can have different keyboard sets. I got Mancopter working. It apparently doesn't allow for a joystick. It's keyboard entry only. Some of all this is just getting used to a new system. But some of this seems a bit dodgy. I think Atari's games were more straightforward, at least a little. Overall, it works. The Atari emulator which I like is no less hair-pullingly inconsistent and problematic. I'll let you know if I run across any killer games.

One of my favorite computer games ever, on any system, is Lords of Conquest. (You can see a sample of the very nice cover art here.) You can find the C64 game ROM here. (The Cyberpunx cracked version is the only one that is playable.) And here's a quick Java version of it for two or more players. It looks pretty good.

Graphically, the overall board layout of the Atari and C64 games is the same, but the symbols denoting resources are far superior in the Atari version as is the "Attack" dialogue area at the bottom of the screen. (It's damn near illegible.) Small things, but those bragging that the C64 is superior are likely fooling themselves. It had superior market share, and probably little else. But it's a good computer. Don't get me wrong. I owned a VIC 20 (the predecessor to the 64) and liked it. Also, the game logic of the C64 version of Lord of Conquest seems inferior. The computer (with all the settings exactly the same) doesn't seem to want to go on the attack as much. Oh, and in the Atari Lords of Conquest, if the computer thinks it doesn't have a chance, it will ask to resign. (And you have the option of not letting it resign.) The C64 version just outright resigns. Dumb. It just seems to me that at least slightly the Atari has more of the fit and finish of the Mac when compared to the PC. The C64 is a little unrefined.

This would be me sitting down to play something like "Lords of Conquest"....

Hi Thalo!
Hi Brad!
Let's play "Lords of Conquest!"
OK! But I don't know how to play.
It's very simple, you just pick your territories..
BANG!
Thalo? Thalo?
(no answer, shot self in head).

Did you ever play Risk as a kid? We invented a version called "Nuclear Risk." I think we still have the instructions written down. It uses the same game board. And most of the rules are the same. It's just that after each round we would choose a "nuclear" card from the pack. Anything on that country would be totally destroyed and we'd put a red "radioactive" marker on it. No one could inhabit or otherwise cross over that territory for an entire round. A real bitch if you had 30 or 40 men on Brazil, for example. But the dangers of nuclear holocaust are so very real.

I think we HAD Risk, but my sister and I would just hurl the little blocks at each other. Made a tent for GI Joes out of the board. I don't think I ever once played the actual game.

For me, Board games were always "bored" games. Except maybe Monopoly, Chess, Backgammon. Our family was in to cribbage for a while. We had other games, but I found them so crushingly dull, even as a small child (Candyland? Ugh. Chutes and Ladders? Torture). I really couldn't play them. Parcheesi? Cheesy.

Stratego and Battleship? I guess they had some minor appeal, but it was exceedingly short-lived. My friends and I were the type to build models or rockets on rainy days. Or else we'd just do the same things we normally did, except we'd get wet.

Some games like Backgammon had longer "phases" with the kids in my neighborhood. We also played cards more than we'd play board games. We liked Pinochle for some reason. Or gin rummy, rummy 500.

We loved pinball, but it was such an expense, and a treat to play. And this was before kiddy arcades. Most of the pinball I played was in bars, where my dad would take me while he had a few brews with his friends.

The first video games for me were on the Apple II. Then Pong. It wasn't until College where we had the golden age of gaming. Because there were several machines set up in an arcade-type area on campus. I don't think I had entered my first MALL until about then. Where there was also an arcade.

Really the first computer I had, that was bought and paid for with my own money, was the Mac. And whenever I got games for it, I always had that giddy pleasure of not having to put quarters into a machine, lol. It's with me to this day. When I play some of these ROMs and hit the "5" key to add a credit, there's still something visceral, like I'm gaming the system, giving myself free plays, lol.

Bittersweet memories concerning cribbage, which is one of my favorite games. My dad and I didn't get along very well. Every once in a while, when I stopped by his house, he would ask me to play some cribbage. Sometimes I would, but usually I wouldn't. I remember saying no to him just a few days before he died. That sort of thing. There are just too many old wounds. Picture someone throwing a chair out the door because you beat him in a game of cards. Granted, he was trying to quit smoking, but the unhappy incident was just the tip of the iceberg. I used to love playing Monopoly, but as sure as Larry would get poked in the eye by Moe, either my older brother and/or my father would start taking winning a bit too serious. Rarely (and I kid you not) would a game not involve some kind of very heated disagreement. You name the board or card game, we could find a way to fight over it.

But cribbage is one game I'm reasonably good at if I stay in practice. Classic Cribbage is a great way to do that. Other than a few bugs in the logic of the program, the computer is tough.

But despite that early Pavlovian conditioning, I still love board games, except for Chess which is too intellectual. There needs to be a bit of an element of chance. We played Parcheesi, Chutes and Ladders (especially with my older sister and younger brother it was fun and usually no blood was spilled), and Sorry! Now that was a friggin' game ready-made to induce bad feelings. You'd slide that piece down the colored line, wiping out someone's playing piece, and you could always put a little hand-English in it to make it even more irritating. Why just gently nudge someone's playing piece if you can give it a good knock off the board and perhaps fling it under the couch? (Yes, picture how much fun our croquette games were. Do I play off the ball or send it? Guess what we usually did.) And if the hand-English when wiping the Sorry playing token off the board wasn't enough, we (I'd) usually accompany it with a sort of smug upper-crust British accent and say "Sahhh-reee." Granted, I no doubt had it coming to me at least some of the time. But swear to god, you wouldn't imagine a simple board game could cause such bad feelings like they often did.

We played Life, although I didn't like that one all that much. The damn pins would keep falling out of the cars. Original Memory was a game we played very early on. My uncle brought that one back from Germany and no one around these parts had ever heard of it before. We still have that game. It's a little beat up but it's from about 1965. And we played Risk, Stratego (but not that much). But we had some fun too. We all survived with all limbs intact. My older brother had one of those metal vibrating field football games. I'm sure you know the kind. They had hours and hours of fun with that. And they also had a football game, one of the cleverest games I've ever seen, where each side has, oh, about twenty different 6 x 8 green cards (if you were on offense) and about twenty different 6 x 8 acetate overlays (if you were on defense). Each had one zig-zaggy line on it (representing the path of runner or the flight of a ball if it's a pass). They each choose one and then stick it in the game (basically a glorified light box) and then you'd pull back a shutter (like pulling back the sleeve to expose a 4 x 5 piece of film). If it was a running play, the runner would be given as much yardage before the line on the defensive card touched or intersected with the offense zig-zag line. Tough to explain, but an elegant, fun game to play. There would always be mild argument about whether the lines are touching or not, but just like bad calls in the real game, that just added interest to it.

Yeah, no crap. Being able to just hit that "coin" button is a blast. I must have some Jewish blood in me 'cause I really love that. The nice thing about Lords of Conquest (if you like that sort of game) is that you can fire off a quick game against the computer anytime you feel like it. I don't particularly like online games. Those people are just too good and take it a bit too seriously in my experience.

My younger brothel and I got along real well. We spent hours and hours playing Pong, Breakout, and eventually the Atari 2600 VCS system. We played a lot sometimes. Anyone who has ever had Atari joystick thumb knows exactly what I mean. I think we invented carpal tunnel syndrome.

Yipes. No excuse for chair-throwing behavior. Yeah, I know what you mean, when people take gaming too seriously, it kind of saps the fun out of it. I guess I was never SO competitive that I cared one way or the other about winning or losing. Winning is FUN, don't get me wrong, but I never had to go punch a pillow if I DIDN'T win.

But I have cousins like that. You play a game with them, and they're great sports while they're winning, but fucking huge babies when they start losing.

It's much more satisfying to beat the computer. I have no problem saying HAHAAA! IN YOUR FACE! To a friggin' machine. Unreal Tournament is so much fun, I have to try to get that one to work again. I did some online play, and could hold my own... but yes, there are some lifesters on there who can kill anything that moves before you can say jack squat.

I'm getting my Maelstrom legs back. Holy moley, the adrenaline. I used to play jacked up on caffeine, and was unstoppable. Now I've lost a few steps.

Yeah, I know what you mean, when people take gaming too seriously, it kind of saps the fun out of it. I guess I was never SO competitive that I cared one way or the other about winning or losing. Winning is FUN, don't get me wrong, but I never had to go punch a pillow if I DIDN'T win.

I wasn't there, but my brother still tells the story about my dad playing Original Memory with his 3-year-old son. The kid was waxing him. Kids, as you surely know, have pretty good memories compared to us adults. And old pops was sort of getting pissed. Very funny.

The fun for us as kids was always giving our own spin to some game. Maybe we were closet anarchists, but just doing things per the directions in the box rarely suited us. Lawn darts, for instance. If a game isn't conducive to wagering, it isn't un-American. We played a version where everyone put a dollar bill down and if you punctured it with the dart, you'd get the money.

I would probably be diagnosed as mental if you ever secretly videotaped me playing the computer at Classic Cribbage, but I swear to go that bastard cheats. Damn right "In your face." Gotta keep these computers in their place.

Yahtzee was another great game. I love the mix of strategy and luck. I watch those guys playing Texas hold-em on TV and you realize after a while that luck has very little to do with it. The good players can reach each other like the back of their hands. It's really impressive to watch one of the better players go at it. No way could you make it to the final rounds consistently if it was just he luck of the draw. And I could be dealt two kings every hand against these guys and I'd still lose. There's so much strategy involved.

Battleship was another favorite. Pure shit luck much of it, but there was a bit of strategy too. Clue was another popular game, but it seemed to require more organization and effort than most people wanted to put into a board game. We played a bit of Tiddly Winks. Wonder how many remember that? Candyland. I know we played that some. It was another standard. Connect Four was another good game. It was a thinking man's game, for sure. Some games, including Yahtzee, Scrabble, and Risk (or Risk derivatives) work very well on the computer, especially in the ability to play against the computer. Computers need to be kept in their place, but they rarely get cranky. They're just smugly digital.

So why am I mentioning all this sometimes melancholy stuff in such an otherwise happy thread? Because we were all slouching toward Leave it to Beaver as best we could. Board games were a way then, and still are now, for families to either celebrate being together or to try to celebrate being together. Games are a way to have fun and a way to pass the time. Or both. When engrossed in playing a game I sometimes think in the back of my head "What's the point of life? It's gotta be more than just playing games?" But life is about that kind of stuff. People spend hours and hours (I've seen them) playing Free Cell on the PC.

And if you ask me (and I'm glad you did), games get right to the heart of the meaning of life. Games are competitive. Life is competitive. With a formalized game we can make use of our competitive skills with the worst outcome usually being that we are defeated and have to put another quarter in the machine. But even this worst case scenario has been erase...by the computer.


A wonderful variety of cribbage boards here. I prefer the type where the track has three legs (loop left, curve, loop right, curve, loop left again). It's too easy to get confused on the classic one where you go over the same territory twice.

quote:

The fun for us as kids was always giving our own spin to some game. Maybe we were closet anarchists, but just doing things per the directions in the box rarely suited us. Lawn darts, for instance. If a game isn't conducive to wagering, it isn't un-American. We played a version where everyone put a dollar bill down and if you punctured it with the dart, you'd get the money.

That's actually a terrific idea. My idea wasn't so popular, to wheel several babies in strollers into the field and try to avoid their soft little skulls.

I never played Yahtzee. But our family to this day likes Scrabble. I basically have sucked at it my whole life, me, mr. 780 verbal SAT. Put me in front of a Scrabble board and I'm like "hmmm, DOG? THE?" I've always hated crossword puzzles and jigsaw puzzles. I'm not terrible at either, but it always seemed like such a waste of time to me.

For some reason, arcade video games seem less of a waste of time to me. Maybe it's the reaction-time/reflexes component? I mean, probably MOST games are good mental exercise, probably very healthy for us. I really don't know why the more shooter/spacey/arcadey games seem more worthwhile to me. I guess it's honing eye-hand coordination that I respect.

Video game junkies turn out to be valuable assets to the US military, it seems. OK, not the ones that sit on the couch and eat nachos, but there are some translatable skills to today's hi-tech war stuff. A lot of which look
exactly like arcade games.

quote:

I watch those guys playing Texas hold-em on TV and you realize after a while that luck has very little to do with it.

Oh Mercy, enough with the Texas Holdem on TV. Can you believe how that shit has taken off? What really peeves me is how tournament dollars have nothing to do with real dollars. It's all bullshit. These guys aren't playing with their own money. And the checks don't translate to the final payout. That SUCKS! I want all these so-called great poker players to be winning a million bucks OFF OF each other. And they're not. I mean, wouldn't it be great to actually see some of these smug idiots lose tens of thousands of their own money?

I'm with ya on wanting to see a real cash game. On those poker telecasts they often talk about which players are frequent cash game players. If they could move it up to an R rating, I'd love a camera to peek in there. And they'd have to in order to capture the real flavor of it. But I doubt many of those fellows who sell lots of books would want to be captured saying the typical things guys say to each other when they're playing poker and have had a few beers. Most people's sensibilities are pretty delicate, or at least pretend to be.