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Ludicrous Speed!
9 years ago
General
When I was young it was always a good time to visit the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry. And one of the exhibits I remember was off in a corner in the Communications wing. It was called "The Mouse is the Message" and was a two-screen maze game. One screen had a joystick in front of it and was the human controlled mouse, the other was the computer controlled mouse and the idea was to run the maze and beat the computer to the goal. I don't know that I ever read the exhibit explanation (or if there even was one) but I'm guessing it was an exercise in message routing and how computers were better at it than humans.
The evidence from the win counters atop each screen seemed to show that computers were better than humans and if you watched for a while, you'd see why. Of course the AI's path-finding was infallible, so even if the human made the same moves as the AI the best one could hope for was a tie. But inevitably the human would go down the wrong path, or hesitate and then it was over. It was a wonder the human side had any wins at all.
The reason the human side had wins was because at times, in the middle of the run, the maze would shift and change. Simulation of changing communication paths, I suppose. Of course the AI could instantly re-path to the goal and was on its way. The only way I remember seeing a human win was having the great fortune for the maze to change in their favor, where it put them closer to the goal while the AI had to backtrack.
But here's the kicker: when the human won, the game would congratulate them on the win and then say, "Let's play again... at my speed." The game would reset with a new maze, the countdown would run and then before you could blink, the AI mouse would be at the finish line. The game would run at full-bore machine speed, giving the human no chance at all of winning and demonstrating the superiority of computers in their speed.
And that also explained why the computer side always had more wins than the human side. Always.
There were a couple of Commodore 64 games that would do something similar.
The first I remember was "Viper", a clone of "Snake" with the snake that grows every time it gobbles down a pellet/mouse/star. You had to avoid the snake's body, but could also add mazes into the mix if it wasn't difficult enough (but you did get a score multiplier for having mazes). The framework for the game was written in BASIC, but the core of the game was a small bit of assembly code.
At the start, you could choose a speed from 1 to 20. Speed 1 would put you to sleep. Speed 11 was a good place for most players to start. Speed 17 was good for advanced players with no mazes. Speed 19 was like skating on ice... about the best I could do was turn constant circles hoping to loop around and eat the star on the screen.
As for Speed 20? Well... I know some snake clones would start with the snake already in motion. Viper would start out with a diamond at the starting location, waiting for a direction press to start the snake moving. And at Speed 20, when you pressed in a direction the snake would instantly be in the wall in that direction, already dead. Speed 20 was unadulterated machine code speed. The only way I ever scored points on Speed 20 was because the star just happened to line up in a cardinal direction with the snake's starting point so it could be collected on the way to smashing into the wall. I might have done that once.
The other came I remember was "Cut-Off", a clone of the TRON Light Cycles idea. It also had a Speed 20. And it also was at full machine speed and totally unplayable. But it was good for some laughs.
The evidence from the win counters atop each screen seemed to show that computers were better than humans and if you watched for a while, you'd see why. Of course the AI's path-finding was infallible, so even if the human made the same moves as the AI the best one could hope for was a tie. But inevitably the human would go down the wrong path, or hesitate and then it was over. It was a wonder the human side had any wins at all.
The reason the human side had wins was because at times, in the middle of the run, the maze would shift and change. Simulation of changing communication paths, I suppose. Of course the AI could instantly re-path to the goal and was on its way. The only way I remember seeing a human win was having the great fortune for the maze to change in their favor, where it put them closer to the goal while the AI had to backtrack.
But here's the kicker: when the human won, the game would congratulate them on the win and then say, "Let's play again... at my speed." The game would reset with a new maze, the countdown would run and then before you could blink, the AI mouse would be at the finish line. The game would run at full-bore machine speed, giving the human no chance at all of winning and demonstrating the superiority of computers in their speed.
And that also explained why the computer side always had more wins than the human side. Always.
There were a couple of Commodore 64 games that would do something similar.
The first I remember was "Viper", a clone of "Snake" with the snake that grows every time it gobbles down a pellet/mouse/star. You had to avoid the snake's body, but could also add mazes into the mix if it wasn't difficult enough (but you did get a score multiplier for having mazes). The framework for the game was written in BASIC, but the core of the game was a small bit of assembly code.
At the start, you could choose a speed from 1 to 20. Speed 1 would put you to sleep. Speed 11 was a good place for most players to start. Speed 17 was good for advanced players with no mazes. Speed 19 was like skating on ice... about the best I could do was turn constant circles hoping to loop around and eat the star on the screen.
As for Speed 20? Well... I know some snake clones would start with the snake already in motion. Viper would start out with a diamond at the starting location, waiting for a direction press to start the snake moving. And at Speed 20, when you pressed in a direction the snake would instantly be in the wall in that direction, already dead. Speed 20 was unadulterated machine code speed. The only way I ever scored points on Speed 20 was because the star just happened to line up in a cardinal direction with the snake's starting point so it could be collected on the way to smashing into the wall. I might have done that once.
The other came I remember was "Cut-Off", a clone of the TRON Light Cycles idea. It also had a Speed 20. And it also was at full machine speed and totally unplayable. But it was good for some laughs.
I believe someone came out with a Terminate-and-Stay-Resident DOS program called "MoSlo" that would do nothing but eat up processor cycles to tame the fire-breathing CPUs. I used it to play Wing Commander 2 that way, otherwise it was pretty much unplayable.