by Ben » Fri Nov 01, 2002 11:39 pm
LOLOLOLOOAHAHAH!JFEiho
BTW, Bruce, I just wrote a rambling thing on MR about MAME. Here, I'll copy it here, since it's the type of thing which lends itself more to a "thread" (unless, as is normally the case, everyone just ignores me and I have to take steps.)
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Bruce: I am better now at ALL of the games I care about (Asteroids, Joust, and now Galaga) than I was when they first came out. For a while I thought it was just that MAME makes things easier, since you can customize the controls to your liking, and pressing "left" and "right" keys is faster than moving a joystick back and forth. Except I took my newfound Galaga skills to an actual arcade, and they translated perfectly.
No, your reflexes probably aren't any better (and possibly significantly worse -- mine aren't, because I spend a lot of free time playing musical instruments, typing, and, well, playing video games, which keeps the level of degradation to a minimum), but your mind probably is. One of the reasons I've gotten SO much better at Galaga is that the patterns just seem to present themselves all the more clearly and quickly. If I miss a guy in any of the first four Challenge Stages now, I am pissed off. And decimating the regular stages is much easier just because my mind instinctively knows where the dudes are gonna be now, and when I need to start firing, and where, for the best effect. The only time I ever lose guys anymore is right after they're all "set up" up top, and they launch the first salvo of "attack dudes", because they all come at once, and the only way to survive seems to be to find the hole in their stream of bullets, and switch to the other side of the screen whenever possible. (Asteroids skill actually comes in handy here, because you have to see the whole screen -- or at least the bottom half of it.) The specifics of this dissertation aren't the point, though. The fact that any of this analysis is actually occurring to me IS the point. Nobody ever thinks this way when they're 12. (Or 9 or 4 or whatever any of you were when these things came out the first time.)
Or, maybe it's just because you can play 'em a lot more without going broke.
LOLOLOLOOAHAHAH!JFEiho
BTW, Bruce, I just wrote a rambling thing on MR about MAME. Here, I'll copy it here, since it's the type of thing which lends itself more to a "thread" (unless, as is normally the case, everyone just ignores me and I have to take steps.)
-----------
Bruce: I am better now at ALL of the games I care about (Asteroids, Joust, and now Galaga) than I was when they first came out. For a while I thought it was just that MAME makes things easier, since you can customize the controls to your liking, and pressing "left" and "right" keys is faster than moving a joystick back and forth. Except I took my newfound Galaga skills to an actual arcade, and they translated perfectly.
No, your reflexes probably aren't any better (and possibly significantly worse -- mine aren't, because I spend a lot of free time playing musical instruments, typing, and, well, playing video games, which keeps the level of degradation to a minimum), but your mind probably is. One of the reasons I've gotten SO much better at Galaga is that the patterns just seem to present themselves all the more clearly and quickly. If I miss a guy in any of the first four Challenge Stages now, I am pissed off. And decimating the regular stages is much easier just because my mind instinctively knows where the dudes are gonna be now, and when I need to start firing, and where, for the best effect. The only time I ever lose guys anymore is right after they're all "set up" up top, and they launch the first salvo of "attack dudes", because they all come at once, and the only way to survive seems to be to find the hole in their stream of bullets, and switch to the other side of the screen whenever possible. (Asteroids skill actually comes in handy here, because you have to see the whole screen -- or at least the bottom half of it.) The specifics of this dissertation aren't the point, though. The fact that any of this analysis is actually occurring to me IS the point. Nobody ever thinks this way when they're 12. (Or 9 or 4 or whatever any of you were when these things came out the first time.)
Or, maybe it's just because you can play 'em a lot more without going broke.