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From: bson@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (Jan Brittenson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.handhelds
Subject: Re: Update to H. Piper! ver 1.1 (bug fixes and enhancements)
Message-ID: <16101@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 22 May 91 23:55:34 GMT
References: <29589@hydra.gatech.EDU> <16081@life.ai.mit.edu> <29635@hydra.gatech.EDU>
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In a posting of [22 May 91 18:23:05 GMT]
   vapsppr@prism.gatech.EDU (Paul Raines) writes:

 >> [[ENTER] key to restart]

 > And of course, if your score is lousy or you are losing in a big way,
 > you want a quick restart.  I will make it top priority.

   That's how I found it out! :-) I'm not a game fanatic, but H.Piper!
is a winner. Is there a possibility of improving the graphics somewhat
- for instance, to make the pipe bends curved? H.Piper! has the same
qualities as Tetris: almost hypnotic in its simplicity. That's what
makes it a great game. (I haven't visited an arcade the last, er, 7
years I think.)

   Now, how's work proceeding on the Qix, the Centipede (I wrote one
in Macro-11 to run over a fixed 1200 bps muxed line on an ASCII
terminal in 1983 :-)), the Pac-Man (with a little more genuine feeling
than the previous CHIP post), and... :-)

   Oh, another thing. About games and random generators... My personal
opinion (gosh, I'm starting to sound like an arcade rat!) is that they
ought to be *banned*. The more that's under the player's control, the
better. A Centipede, for instance, might appear on the left/right side
depending on whether an even/odd number of shots have been fired since
the last Centipede segment was mushroomed. The starting point of an
H.Piper! round can be wherever the last round finished. Likewise, the
actual pieces selected seemingly on random, but the True Arcade Rat
knows better! :-) Choosing these "random" algorithms is probably what
is the most difficult part of designing a game. (We all know what
result is if you don't do it *right*!)

 >> Oh, and what does the `H' stand for?

 > Hewlett Packard <--> H. Piper (groan)

*Sigh*.  :-)

						-- Jan Brittenson
						   bson@ai.mit.edu