Mr. Robot, Level 'F'

Oh boy!  Time for yet another new feature!  Those funny short girders?  Just stand in the middle of them... on the middle of them, press the 'fire' button... that's how you do it, right?  I forget myself.  God bless Instant Amnesia!  Press the button, and you will semi-instantly be transported to a random girder not of your choice... or maybe they're chosen in a cycle, I forget that too.  You know, it's strange... transporters like this are great and all, but they don't seem to be the stuff of truly great and classic game play!  Now you'll say, what about Pac-Man?  Well, that's a little different.  In the original Pac-Man, there's one exit that takes you to the other vertical side of the maze.  There's magic there, sure... especially when the ghosts trap you on both sides, and they can catch you when you're completely disappeared!  For some, it just means that the Pac-Man maze is an example of a torus.  Most of the mazes in Ms. Pac-Man feature two exits, but it's not that kind of magic.  Boulder Dash (TM)(C)(R) only has exits to take you to the next level, and that's one of the greatest arcade-style games of all time!  Quasimodo (TM) of Synapse fame has portals to take you from the bells of the church tower to the three levels of game play.  Frogger?  No transports.  Donkey Kong?  No transports.  Asteroids?  No transports.  Tempest?  Transports only to the next levels.  Crystal Castles?  Secret transports you earn after repeated game play, only to other levels.  Which I certainly like; something about playing two "Tree Wave"s in a row is very depressing.  Pooyan?  NO transports.  No, the only way out of that one is to just stop playing.  Pengo?  No transports.  Shamus?  No transports.  Now, you take something like Doom or Doom II.  They have a few transports used judiciously.  Certainly nothing as diabolical as what we have here, where it's a bit of a crapshoot as to where you're going to end up.  In Doom or Quake, the transport always takes you to the same place, or back from the same place.  Now, in Star Trek, it's all about beaming.  They're always at war with the Vulcans or the Kardashians (TM)(C)(R), but they've all got transports on their ships!  They're not animals, for God's sake!  I don't know what kind of technological revolution it's going to take to give us beaming technology, but it seems to be like clean, abundant nuclear fusion: 40 years off.  Personally, I don't think beaming is ever going to happen, despite its wonderful contribution to science fiction.  Perhaps someday it'll become a neat, high-tech way of losing someone's luggage in the air between ports.