Tetris Battle 2015

Oh, Video Game Fanatic... so stuck in your old ways.  So unwilling to try new products.  I know, I know.  How do I expect to get anywhere in this life?  But all I need is about 4,000 XP to get to the next "level" in Tetris Battle!  Yes, no matter how much they change the rules, I can't help but go back for my occasional adrenaline fix, and get my ass beaten by my fellow Tetris battlers anew.  Arguably, I did a little ass-beating myself... to my fellow Tetris travellers, that is.  And yet, when I've lost about three times in a row, I can't help but keep trying!  You know, it wasn't so long ago that we would get 100 "energy points".  Now it's still down to 30.  Apparently, people aren't using their credit cards enough with this one.  Almost makes me want to write my own web-based version of Tetris, but I dunno.  The video games that I make just don't have the same thrill of one that someone else made.  Plus, the ones I make are kinda lame anyway.  I know... "kinda"?  Spare me.

3/10/'15 - Ah, the new jittery Google Chrome.  Is my computer getting hacked again without my knowing?  What did I do to deserve this?  Not upgrade to Windows 8?... oh, that must be it.  I know, I know.  No, you see, with the things moving slower, and more blurry?  That's a good thing!  Probably because it forces you to stop playing and go on to something else.  Well, I guess the hackers haven't guessed my password yet.  Must be a low-value target or sumpthing

Nice try

Welp, I studied the ad closely... and then moved on to the one about the toughest games.  Ba-BOOM!  Drumroll please...  Oh, right, the World's Hardest Game.  Well, we all know the world's hardest game is "Rock, Paper, Crashing the International Monetary System" but sure, the second hardest one is this one to the left.  Quite simple, really.  Three colors, three rooms, four blue dots.  Well, first of all, the red is ALREADY in the green, so boom!  It's over.  Busted.  But okay, the grass is always greener, so let's try to get past the blue dots to the other patch of green.  But wait!  The spaces in between the dots is too small!  Our red square cannot pass without assistance.  Here's my only question: do they take Visa?

Atari emulator -> Arex

I used to play this one a lot with an actual Atari computer... for some reason, I seem to recall flipping the score twice!  When did I have all that free time?  Maybe I left the computer on overnight or something.  In order to do that, by my hasty calculations... why, you'd have to get to level 241 to do that!  Well, I guess I found such endeavours less boring back then.  Nowadays, I'm in a rush, more or less... but God bless the geniuses who created the ability to save the game state.  Now I always make sure to restart whenever I lose a life.
Anyway, I tried organizing the levels by theme; a little pointless, arguably.  There are some thematic similarities, some that are completely out there.  That level 31 reminds me of that one challenging room in that Montezuma's Revenge, Part 1 game.

Atari emulator -> Fortune Hunter

I'm just a sucker for tempests in a teapot like Romox's "Fortune Hunter"... then again, I'm also relieved I didn't spend $39.95 for it back in the day thirty years ago.  For those of you who want to know what computer speed was like back then, this is a great example.  Graphics 7 was a particularly slow mode.  Sure, not as slow as 8, but still.  This kinda reminds me of "Temple of Apshai", the one that you had to run in Basic, and not "Gateway to Apshai," which was larger in scope by far.  The closest thing we had to Doom for the Atari was "Encounter" by Synapse Software.  Not as violent, anyhow.

Another one

And the tits just keep on coming... hits!  I mean hits.  First of all... they can't use the name "Under Siege"!  There's only one Under Siege, God damn it... oh, right, there's a second one too.  And second... she's supposed to be a damsel in distress, right?  She don't look very distressed! ..are they trying to get some kind of freaky three-way going, like Stephen Colbert's always talking about?

General War: Memories

Mostly the happy memories, apparently......................

Megalegs (Atari emulator and non)

Ah, Megalegs by Megasoft.  Wonder whatever happened to Megasoft?  Guess their lawyers weren't as good as Microsoft.  Ah, Microsoft.  Reminds me of that David Letterman joke in one of his top 10 lists.  I believe it was Top 10 Bill Gates pickup lines.  Number one, of course, was "It's not micro, and it's not soft."  Good ol' creepy, undersexed Uncle Dave.  Anyway, back to the game proper.
When you play one of the classic games with the three lives paradigm, like Centipede or Pac-Man, is it just me or do you ever notice that you seem to do well on the first life, then really blow it on the second and third lives?  Man, does that seem to happen to me a lot.  Of course, with Megalegs, it's way way harder to get to those extra lives unlike on Centipede or Millipede.  There's a totally different points structure in Megalegs.  Things are worth a lot fewer points, to say the least.  For example, with Centipede, you can shoot twelve scorpions and boom!  Extra life.  Of course, in Megalegs, there are turtles instead of scorpions, and I believe they are worth 150 points a pop.  Now, if I've done my math correctly, that's... 66.66667 turtles!  How do you get a fraction of a turtle?  Doesn't make any sense!  They do poison only half of the mushroom sometimes, on the other hand.
Other differences: the fleas fall pretty much nonstop in Megalegs.  Sometimes in Centipede, they let up, don't they?  Unless it's the Atari 8-bit version of Centipede, of course.  Fleas are only worth 25 points, so again, you've got your work cut out for you.  Now, as in Centipede, the fleas lay the occasional new mushroom.  Let's just skip that extra chapter of the book on the Birds and the Bees for now.  Here's another difference from Centipede and definitely Millipede: if the fleas reach the maximum number of mushrooms on the screen, they stop... kinda creepy, dontcha think?  The playing field has now become a bar with a maximum occupancy!  Why didn't we listen to the Luddites?
One other difference between Megalegs and Centipede is that, once the megalegs hits the bottom of the screen, nothing happens.  In Centipede, new centipede heads start appearing from offscreen.  They spared us the indignity of that extra burden in Megalegs.  Kinda neat!
Then, of course, there's the spiders.  Reminds me of having to do the jump rope in grade school.  You gotta time it just right when you jump into the Ellipsoid of Death.  Never did get good at that.  Of course, the "spiders" in Megalegs have much more predictable movements.  And yet, they still get me a lot.  I guess my fate in life is to fall prey to one psychopath or sociopath or another.  Maybe the video games help stave off that fate.  I know that video games are going to be cruel to me, but I can at least control the extent of the cruelty sometimes!
Now, if I were a really smart player, I'd just stay on level 1 and shoot everything while it's nice and slow, but I just can't operate that way.  Can't.  Can't do it.  I need progress.  Which brings us to the sound effects of Megalegs.  I never really thought about it before, but there's no crunch or crash or explosion sounds, unlike Centipede and Millipede!  What's THAT all about?  Guess it's starting to bother me now!  Also, I noticed that sometimes after you shoot a poisoned mushroom, the space where it was is still poisoned, so when the megalegs hits it, then down to the bottom right away it comes.  Sloppy programming, Dubno.  Sloppy programming.
Okay, I think that that's all the witty and perceptive observations I had about Megalegs.  Back to Candy Crunch, as my brother calls it!