Friday, January 07, 2005

Game Nostalgia

Somebody get this freakin’ duck away from me!

Plus: Not really nostalgic, but this card game seems like it would have real potential for a party game.

Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called "Journey to Alpha Centauri". It was a screen with some dots on it. Because, he said, it happened in real time, which no-one had ever heard of until computers. He'd seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, "Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home."
(Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind)

1 comment:

Kwik2Jujj said...

I'm waiting for the punchline where you tell us that you landed the software testing contract for Journey to Alpha Centauri, a one-hundred-generation sinecure. Our company drew the short straw when we landed the contract for porting Journey to the Pentium 4. The clock loop runs a lot faster now -- such that it should get us to Alpha Centauri in only a year -- but now we're plagued with fatal "Faster Than Light" exceptions every time we try to execute. The project manager has ordered us to write a "Lorentz Contraction" module from scratch to address this problem, but we're already three weeks late and wayyy overbudget. It's a fiasco.