Adam Norwood

Tag: videogames

  • Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard
    Visit the source: arxiv.org

    Science!

    We prove NP-hardness results for five of Nintendo’s largest video game franchises: Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokemon. Our results apply to Super Mario Bros. 1, 3, Lost Levels, and Super Mario World; Donkey Kong Country 1-3; all Legend of Zelda games except Zelda II: The Adventure of Link; all Metroid games; and all Pokemon role-playing games. For Mario and Donkey Kong, we show NP-completeness. In addition, we observe that several games in the Zelda series are PSPACE-complete.

    Translation: video games might provide interesting fodder for complexity theory, and possibly provide a model for novel ways of looking at difficult decision problems. In any case, I just like seeing Metroid mentioned on the arXiv.

    (Via New Scientist)

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  • Prince of Persia C64

    I was very happy to have gotten this far. I had the Kid, the Prince of Persia, running and jumping on my screen. I was able to control it and perform all the normal actions. And it felt right. Timing, speed, animations. Of course it was spot on, it was using the original code written by Jordan Mechner, lifted from its Apple II grave and brought back to life, with a new purpose.

    At this point I was sure I could do this. It would only be a matter of months. Oh boy, was I wrong.

    From the Prince of Persia C64 Development Blog, in which the author writes with excellent detail about his recent hobby attempt to reverse engineer and port the classic computer game to the Commodore64 (warning: lots of posts about pixels, sprites and assembly language debugging – your entertainment value may vary). The original Apple ][ source code for PoP had long ago been lost, but the game’s creator coincidentally posted a handy excerpt of the game’s design documentation as a PDF on his blog, and many other ports existed, so…why not try recreate the original code?

    Bonus: Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner has collated his original design notes and journals into a nice 300-page ebook. Neat! I’d love to have a whole series of these for classic games.

    (Via O’Reilly Radar)

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  • Grape Nuts Are the Neo Geo of Cereals

    Grape Nuts are the Neo Geo of cereals: everyone knows one guy who likes them, usually an eccentric distant relative, but most people have never seen or tried them.

    Marco Arment on Grape Nuts vs Grape Nuts Flakes. (this is the only videogame-related line from the piece, but I like the analogy)

    (h/t to @fizzboy)

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  • Glados Treadmill

    If GLaDOS is running your treadmill, I suggest finding a new gym.

    (Via GameSetWatch)

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  • Maniac Mansion Disassembled

    The Mansion – Technical Aspects

    If you love the old Lucasfilm games and want a peek into how their venerable game engine worked from a very technical perspective, you should read this article that walks through a disassembled Maniac Mansion. Extra bonus: Ron Gilbert, the creator of the SCUMM scripting language, drops a lengthy note in the comments section with insider info:

    One of the goals I had for the SCUMM system was that non-programers could use it. I wanted SCUMM scripts to look more like movies scripts, so the language got a little too wordy. This goal was never really reached, you always needed to be a programmer. 🙁

    Some examples:

    actor sandy walk-to 67,8

    This is the command that walked an actor to a spot.

    actor sandy face-right
    actor sandy do-animation reach
    walk-actor razor to-object microwave-oven
    start-script watch-edna
    stop-script
    stop-script watch-edna
    say-line dave “Don’t be a tuna head.”
    say-line selected-kid “I don’t want to use that right now.”

    I think it’s amazing that they managed to build a script interpreter with preemptive multitasking (game events could happen simultaneously, allowing for multiple ‘actors’ to occupy the same room, the clock in the hallway to function correctly, etc.), clever sprite and scrolling screen management, and fairly non-linear set of puzzles into software originally written for the 8-bit C64 and Apple II era of computers.

    (Via the International House of Mojo)

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  • Bit.Trip.Runner Blind Gamer

    Mechanical engineering student Terry Garret plays through a few levels of Bit.Trip.Runner, one of my favorite games of the past year. It’s a very challenging game, with simple actions but difficult timings that are set to fun 8-music and sound effects.

    Oh, by the way, Terry is completely blind.

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  • Videogames Are Liquid Architecture

    If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture. Journalist and critic Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy, quoted in an counter-point article by Michael Mirasol posted on Roger Ebert’s blog, Why video games are indeed Art.
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  • Adam West on Videogames

    In the same way a painting allows us to gaze upon the faces and souls of people from another age, or a book permits us to linger on the thoughts of great figures from history and fiction, videogames can expand our awareness of the world as it is, was, or might be.

    Prescient words from Adam West (yes, that Adam West), in Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, July, 1983.

    (Via 1Up’s Retro Gaming)

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  • Akihabara
    Visit the source: www.kesiev.com

    Nice-looking little HTML5 <canvas> 2D game engine and toolkit written in JavaScript. More and more the apps are moving to the browser and out of the land of plugins and standalone RIA clients.

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