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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • The classic arcade game Venture. Go ahead, make my day:

    https://archive.org/details/arcade_venture#

    Venture is a 1981 arcade game by Exidy. The goal of Venture is to collect treasure from a dungeon. The player, named Winky, is equipped with a bow and arrow and explores a dungeon with rooms and hallways. The hallways are patrolled by large, tentacled monsters (the “Hallmonsters”, according to Exidy) who cannot be injured, killed, or stopped in any way. Once in a room, the player may kill monsters, avoid traps and gather treasures. If they stay in any room too long, a Hallmonster will enter the room, chase and kill them. In this way, the Hallmonsters serve the same role as “Evil Otto” in the arcade game Berzerk. The more quickly the player finishes each level, the higher their score. The goal of each room is only to steal the room’s treasure. In most rooms, it is possible (though difficult) to steal the treasure without defeating the monsters within. Some rooms have traps that are only sprung when the player picks up the treasure. For instance, in “The Two-Headed Room”, two 2-headed ettins appears the moment the player picks up the prize. Players die if they touch a monster or the corpse of a monster. Dead monsters decay over time and their corpses may block room exits, delaying the player and possibly allowing the Hallmonster to enter. Shooting a corpse causes it to regress back to its initial death phase. The monsters themselves move in specific patterns but may deviate to chase the player, and the game’s AI allows them to dodge the player’s shots with varying degrees of “intelligence” (for example, the snakes of “The Serpent Room” are relatively slow to dodge arrows, the trolls of “The Troll Room” are quite adept at evasion). The game consists of three different dungeon levels with different rooms. After clearing all the rooms in a level the player advances to the next. After three levels the room pattern and monsters repeat, but at a higher speed and a different set of treasures.
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    Released
    1981










  • “> driving out rivals, diminishing competition, inflating advertising costs, reducing revenues for news publishers and content creators, snuffing out innovation, and harming the exchange of information and ideas in the public sphere.”

    I feel like it is going to be hard to prove that Google’s anti-competitive actions have inflated advertising costs. Also, did news publishers lose revenue because of Google or was it Craigslist and jobs sites that killed their classified business?

    Google is definitely a monopoly and has acted badly, but proving the harm in this way is going to be tricky. The government should go after them for privacy, the place where they have clearly abused their relationship with the public. Google normalizing spying on users has created the data economy that has resulted in us being spied upon us all the time and having all of our personal data being leaked over and over again.



  • Champions of Midgard - Because Vikings! Its a resource management based game where you go on journeys to fight magical monsters. Its pretty tight and you can play a complete game in one-two hours.

    Pandemic - I mostly enjoy this because it is a co-op game. You all fight the disease! That said the game mechanic is pretty fun and can be challenging.