News You Can Bruise for 2006 October 13

Permalink [Comments] (4) Fri Oct 13 2006 18:32:

I came up with a new genre of game by combining two game genres I really like in the abstract, but which cause me only frustration when I play them. These would be the gravity game so beloved of the Finns (old-school example: Lunar Lander) and the robot programming game (old-school example: Core Wars). In the hybrid game, you would program a spaceship to fly through the spaceship caves of Finland, destroying other spaceships and not crashing into the walls. Sounds exciting! Sounds boring.

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Comments:

Posted by Jarno Virtanen at Sat Oct 14 2006 05:32

I'm so not in the scene that I have no clue what you're talking about, so could you please extrapolate more on this:

"These would be the gravity game so beloved of the Finns"

?

I do remember several of my friends being addicted to the game, but I just assumed that it's the same all over the world.

Posted by Kevan at Sat Oct 14 2006 05:41

XPilot had bot ships, although I don't remember how directly programmable they were.

Combining boring games with robot-programming is a good call, though - my thought process on abandoning games like Sokoban and Sudoku is that it's a puzzle that's best solved by a robot, and I don't want to be that robot.

Would be nice to have a generic robot-programming engine with screen-scraping inputs and keypress outputs, that you could clamp on top of any computer game. Do these exist?

Posted by Leonard at Sat Oct 14 2006 08:28

My stereotyping is mainly based on a statement on the homepage for Luola: "It's genre "Luolalentely" (Cave-flying) is (or was) very popular here in Finland. Though cavern-flying games are not originally Finnish, nowdays most of them are."

I don't know anyone else who's played those games. Obviously Kevan has, but it never came up between us. Since you have multiple addicted friends I think there is something to the notion of a Finnish obsession. Where others think of Finland as a country full of lakes and forests, I think of it as full of caves for spaceships.

Posted by Jouni K Seppänen at Sat Oct 14 2006 12:07

This reminds me of the IFCP 2003 programming contest. It was organized by Swedes, so it's got cars instead of spaceships.

Oh, and Sokoban is way too hard for robots.

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