News You Can Bruise for 2004 February 24

(1) Tue Feb 24 2004 10:15 Decision Procedure For Milkshake Quality: Some restaurants serve good milkshakes; others just put them on the menu. If you order a milkshake will it be worth the calories? It's easy to find out with this decision procedure that's a lot simpler than the decision procedure for hot sauce quality.

1. Does the restaurant serve more than one flavor of ice cream?

The reason this is important is that good milkshakes are made out of ice cream that's the flavor of the milkshake. Bad and mediocre milkshakes are made out of vanilla ice cream blended with flavored syrup. This is in defiance of the Fundamental Theorem of Ice Cream Flavoring, which is that you flavor your ice cream while you're making it and not afterwards.

You can apply this decision procedure by looking at the dessert menu and seeing if they ever hint at the possibility that ice cream might exist in more than one flavor. If you're at a fast food restaurant there is no dessert menu, but come on! Fast food restaurants are the classic case of a restaurant with bad milkshakes--they pull vanilla ice cream out of a soft-serve machine and add syrup to it, right in front of you. You can't even pretend it might be good.

NOTE: Unlike the hot sauce procedure, which has been confirmed dozens of times since publication with no known failures, this decision procedure goes to press with a known flaw. In-N-Out Burger flagrantly violates this decision procedure (you can actually see the syrup in its finished shakes), but its shakes are pretty good.

The only thing I can think of is that if you start with good vanilla ice cream, you can make a decent shake out of it by adding syrup. The decision procedure explains the fact that you can't even get a good vanilla milkshake at a restaurant with only vanilla ice cream by assuming that if you don't care enough to get multiple flavors of ice cream, you don't care enough to get good vanilla ice cream either. I guess this assumption doesn't hold for In-N-Out.

(2) Tue Feb 24 2004 18:10 Game Roundup Is The Place To Be: As part of my reacclimation to my canonical life, I've prepared a Game Roundup for you. Lots of game clones in this roundup: just about every game here is a clone of another game or belongs to a well-established genre. This does not bode well. I've got about 25 more games to review before I'm all caught up, though, and fewer of them are clones.

• Mother Of All Gravity Games should be called Child Of All Gravity Games since by its own admission it is based on other games. If you can't get enough inverse-square-law action, Luola is another new game of that type.
• Speaking of gravity games, Linux Lunar Lander and Linux Shuttle Lander each let you land some spacecraft on some planetary body.
• Skystreets is a vaguely Hover Carnage-esque game. It shouldn't be a gravity game, since it takes place in outer space, but somehow it is. It's pretty difficult to control your racing ship, but the background graphics are really nice and you have to wonder who would go through all the trouble to set up racing platforms in space.
• The Bub's Brothers [sic] [sic] [sic] is a really slick clone of Bubble Bobble, the best game in the Metreon arcade. It's easy to set up, it's got multiplayer network play, random level generator, crazy new powerups etc. I don't think it comes as any surprise that this game is written in Python. "A powerup that briefly turns the game into Breakout? Sure, why not? How hard can it be?"
• Roguelike Mini-Roundup

  Several new roguelike games in this roundup. Let's take a look.

  • Avanor is the prize of this mini-roundup. Its interface, feature set, and use of color owe a lot to ADOM (but the interface is not as polished as ADOM's). The only problem is that it's really hard. You play and play, gaining level after level and fancier and fancier gear, but you never get past the point where a little skeleton can kill you by poking you with a stick.
  • Xenocide is a Roguelike... set in the future! For me, Alphaman is the gold standard of such games,. Includes dismemberment ("There's a Human Hand lying here."), takes screenshots in HTML format.
  • Porrog is a promising (=="items don't work yet") new Roguelike with heavy Angband influences. Only Porrog will dare to bring you fearsome enemies like the land plankton!
  • The Sword of Fargoal is a slavish remake of an old C64 game. See remakes.org for more slavish remakes.
• Njam is a Pacman clone with nice squiggly graphics. In multiplayer mode you can eat the other Pacmen like so many ghosts. The indignity!
• Relive the dot-com heyday with foosball on your computer.
• Some games shouldn't be cloned. Other games should, like Spacewar. I'll always relish the old black-and-white Spacewar, but spacewar-sdl is a pretty faithful translation to the modern age.
• Gtkboard is an open source game engine a la Zillions Of Games. It has a clumsy game selection interface, but it dares do what other generic game engines do not, by representing games like Pacman and Tetris. It doesn't seem to know how to play Pacman or Tetris, though.
• My monster truck rally fantasies come true with Soccar, "soccer for cars". I think a lot of games could be improved by replacing the human sprites with cars, actually.
• My other monster truck rally fantasies come true with the Robot Auto Racing Simulation, where you program car-driving behavior into a racecar and then race it against other, similarly-programmed cars. The community has been running races since 1995.
• Tower Toppler is a clone of a game I remember being reviewed in a video game magazine in the late 80s, thus proving that every game in the world will eventually be cloned. You play a green creature who feels that underwater towers these days have gotten just too tall and been built up too far out of the water, so it decides to knock them down. Fortunately things have been arranged so that getting to the top of the tower knocks the whole thing down to the waterline, so that's all you have to do. Then you get in your little yellow submarine and shoot missiles at fish (Seriously! Was that in the original? I was thinking "This is a nice cut scene, but it's going on too long," hit the space bar, and blew up a fish.). The game is cute and fun, but difficult in arbitrary ways (things coming out of nowhere to knock you over); I played for far too long before toppling my first tower. The boards have cool names like "Tower of Eyes" and "Realm of Robots", though.
• Updated Games Mini-Roundup

  These games have already been featured in a Game Roundup (and/or they're games I talk about all the time outside of Game Roundups), but I'm mentioning them again because they've been updated recently.

  • Gnocatan apparently now does Seafarers of Catan.
  • Rocks'n'Diamonds is now even more customizable by level creators. I think there is now a little Rocks'n'Diamonds tour of Versailles.
  • Old standbys Nethack and FreeCiv have been revved since last I checked. FreeCiv is still a solved problem, unfortunately.
• Death awaits you in the CAVEZ of PHEAR, an ncurses version of Boulderdash that really captures the look and feel of an old ANSI DOS game (and thus meets my standards of excellence).
• Bad Onion is a platform game where you play an onion who supposedly has an "attitude", though he doesn't let it interfere with his work. Not that exciting, but the graphics make you feel good about stomping on the enemies. They deserve to be stomped!

Today's winner: The Bub's Brothers, hands down. It gets the traditional prize of a limerick:

While playing that game with a bubble
My keyboard was worn to a nubble
So much time had elapsed
Civilization collapsed
And I was surrounded by rubble