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Google celebrates the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man with a very nice logo. The web is all over it.
The logo was created by Marcin Wichary who’s dad was … an arcade game and pinball technician.
If you press "insert coin / geld inwerpen" you get a multi player option with ms. Pac-Man.
Pac-Man was created by Tōru Iwatani , programmer Shigeo Funaki and Toshio Kai for the sound and music in 1980. (If you have an X-Box 360 you probably know that Tōru Iwatani also designed the Pac-Man Championship Edition in 2007). The original concept was to keep it as simple as possible and to try to make more women play games.
Tōru Iwatani did not get any benefit from creating Pac-Man, no salary increase, no bonus since he was just an empoyee of Namco. Nowadays he teaches at Tokyo Polytechnic University.
Perfect play
A perfect Pac-Man game occurs when the player achieves the maximum possible score on the first 255 levels (by eating every possible dot, energizer, fruit, and monster) without losing a single life then scoring as many points as possible in the last level. As verified by the Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard on July 3, 1999, the first person to achieve the maximum possible score (3,333,360 points) was Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida, who performed the feat in about six hours.
In September 2009, David Race of Beavercreek, Ohio, became the sixth person to achieve a perfect score. His time of 3 hours, 41 minutes, and 22 seconds set a new record for the fastest time that a perfect score had been reached.
In December 1982, an 8-year-old boy, Jeffrey R. Yee, supposedly received a letter from U.S. President Ronald Reagan congratulating him on a worldwide record of 6,131,940 points, a score only possible if the player has passed the Split-Screen Level. Whether or not this event happened as described has remained in heated debate among video-game circles since its supposed occurrence. In September 1983, Walter Day, chief scorekeeper at Twin Galaxies, took the US National Video Game Team on a tour of the East Coast to visit video game players who claimed they could get through the Split-Screen. No video game player could demonstrate this ability. In 1999, Billy Mitchell offered $100,000 to anyone who could provably pass through the Split-Screen Level before January 1, 2000; the prize went unclaimed
I spend some time browsing through the 137 years of PopSci Archive.
And its amazing but somehow some diy articles from 1928 could be publised just as well on websites or magazines today.
Like… we are reading apparently already for over 80 years articles on "How to Take better Photos" (this article is from 1931) 
"if you look what do you see…your eyes and thus register on the cells in your brain"
p.s. If you want to have a wider screen, then just head over to Google Books.
Just some of the things I read:
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How many times have we, electronics users, thought the same thing.. shall I wait for the next big thing coming or shall I buy my new device today?
No difference between now and then, even the graphs seem the same although they are probably not created with Microsoft Excel. |
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It seems that in 1931 being Fascist was cool around New York, 9 years before the war.
Ingram’s shaving gel even make Il Duce the example of using their cool cool shaving gel. Really amazing how they looked at things before the big war unless of course this is some kind of humor that I don’t get. |
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Do you think that the battle between Science And Creationism is new in the U.S.A.? That Richard Dawkins says new things? Think again:
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Where I can read again that the Dutch do not recognize great inventions of the future: a plane with a machine gun, which made Fokker later an icon in the Netherlands (after the Germans bought it to fight "Roland Garros"-es).
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Pretty cool idea: an answering machine ("Robot answers phone and take message") (1931) |
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We now have internet bars where you can rent a computer for an hour, back then you could hire a typewriter by inserting a coin |
Monopoly City Streets is a online game which lets you play a Monopoly kind of game on the REAL world map. It is a cooperation between Hasbro and Google (I can’t wait for RiskCityStreets) (yes that is mine now gnagnagnagniffel).It uses both Google Maps and OpenStreetMap and the content is under the CC-Attribution-Share-Alike license.
It was to be expected. The worldwide buzz around this Google maps game that promises to be the best thing ever happened in life …was down, reload, down, reload, down but… at 20:56 … I made it! In the meanwhile in the blog of the game there was a poll to vote for a complete reset of all scores because of the downtime, about 99,99% users voted for it.
So… why does this game make such an impact?
the playing map – Well… because a playing map of ALL streets in the world using Google Maps. Wow… we can actually conquer the real world!
buy every house on the planet – Users get 3 million dollars when starting and can buy actual stuff for it: houses, skyscrapers, stadiums, you name it. The price of a building of course depends on the location of the building AND the length of the street (a longer street contains more houses).
pay rent like in real life – Each day users pay a rent for the houses they bought e.g. 50.000 dollar for a house and 100 million dollar for a skyscraper.
sell, trade or negotiate – yes you can sell and trade your stuff with other players which provides the option for an actual mortgage bases virtual world economy!
cards – you can also gain chance cards that lets you randomly sabotage other players or give you the option to build bonus buildings such as parks, schools, water towers etc…
It opens with the screen above where after it led me choose between languages and… even Dutch was in the language list so that is really superb. Next…. we wait again…. (reload… reload … reload) (in the meanwhile I scroll to Antarctica to set a personal goal to conquer it.
Buying your first street – It starts out by giving you the chance to search for a street to buy. You can do this in the welcome screen or by searching for a street. Obviously I tried the Kalverstreet in Amsterdam first, in the dutch monopoly game the most expensive street.
Registration - Only after you have selected your street you are prompted to register for the game, again I took a fancy name “internet”, which, very cool, was not reserved yet.
Buying more streets – You can now buy more stuff by simply selecting the “buy streets” option and buy more stuff.You then get a map of the streets in the neighbourhood of your street, the ones in purple are available for buying and the ones in blue are owned by other players. The interesting thing here is that you can offer on streets that you do not own.
As you can see above the complete neighborhood of the Kalverstraat was ALREADY sold….and that in just a few hours while noone could login….but on the right you see in purple the streets that were still open. So, this … is too much… I’m heading back to Maastricht…
Then… each time an error occurred, I had to press like 10 times but could not get through, whatever I tried I got not get past the error, probably the site is still to busy and Amsterdam is simply in the cache.
But then….
I OWN THE VRIJTHOF !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(see YOUTUBE or WIKIPEDIA if you dont know the square)
AGAIN: I OWN THE VRIJTHOF !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So… lets put stuff on it:
Hey… and suddenly a chance card pops up: it lets me build a stadium!
So… Let’s continue buying some streets since I still have 2.3 million dollars left Maastricht: you are MINE gnagnagnagniffel.
I hope I gave you a nice little first impression of the game. I will leave off with the most expensive set of buildings you can buy in the game and the rent they make. I wonder If I EVER will make enough money to buy myself a monopoly tower! It makes more than 1.000.000 in rent a day, which makes me wonder if I can best focus on buying streets or best focus on generating money.
p.s. I now own the Vrijthof, the Markt, the Bredestraat, the Grote Staat, the Grote Gracht the Helmstraat and the Platielstraat….
Each player also has a public profile, as said mine is “internet”, so… I don’t know if you can / how you can actually link up with me (actually…. this reminds me of a facebook application… omg im thinking facebook applications…) but if you find out how link me!
and I got some bad luck:
On interesting thing was that on some links of street my virusscanner gave the warning that the “nutcracker” virus was found in the url from monopolycitystreets, so I was wondering if this would be the BIG news of tomorrow (already hacked):
Interesting Links:
- http://www.monopolycitystreets.com
- http://blog.monopolycitystreets.com/ – the blog
- http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfzghp76_3f3s5b6gr – the official FAQ
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_City_Streets – the wikipedia page
- Google Dutch News Feed
Link
GO Contact Sync – synchronize your contacts between Microsoft Outlook and Google Mail
I’m testing this right now, could be very handy (especially for the avatars)
Link
Google Advertising Cookie Opt-out Plugin – StumbleUpon
i think everyone should know the link on this page to opt out or in to google’s profiling to server you personalized banners based on your surfing behaviour.
Only today I discovered the mapping of ancient starmaps on Google Sky (in Google Earth), how amazing! For all those tens of thousands of years our forefathers had only this to orientate themselves (before GPS ). Stunning how this is mapped.
One of these days I’m going to learn all of this, its amazing that this is no longer part of our school curriculum.
