Archive for the ‘online games’ Category

Kicking some monkey butt

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

Back in December I wrote about a game called Monkey Kick Off, which you can read about here. While others had posted clips of themselves kicking the ball into the 6000 to 7000 range, I was only able to kick the ball 5806 meters. Of course, I was able to produce videos of myself kicking the ball into the 6000+ range (and even 9 872 171 meters) after cracking the video playback encryption. You can produce a code to “prove” a kick of any distance you want, but I actually proved my 5806 meter kick with a screenshot.

So, I haven’t played the game for months, and yesterday I suddenly had the urge to play again. I hoped that the long break would give me a new perspective on the game. It took a while to remember the timing to get a 5000+ meter kick, but I was eventually able to get two kicks over 5500 meters. My record didn’t seem likely to fall, so I gave up for the night. Tonight I took another shot at it, and I got a really good kick within a few minutes. The first bounce landed well past 1000, the second bounce landed well past 2000, and the third bounce just barely broke 3000. That’s generally the criteria for a great kick, but the ball can already be running out height by that point and can run out of momentum in the Monkey Village. Then the ball was still bouncing off the screen in the 4000 zone, and I realized that I had just kicked a new record. I wasn’t surprised when I saw the counter turn from red to green, indicating a new record, but I was shocked when I saw the ground turn purple.

5963 meters

I knew that the 6000 zone had purple ground and the space ship from Monkey Lander from the fake playback videos that I and others have been able to create, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it in full 640×480 resolution in-game. I still didn’t break 6000, but I got enough of the 6000 zone onto the screen to see the whole space ship. I can now say that a kick of 6000 meters is probably possible. Here’s the URL to see me kick the ball 5963 meters.

Just for fun, let’s analyze why this kick went so much farther than my previous kick. The code for my kick of 5806 meters was qporqUottouuUorFBoUBopptotFBuo4KA9hmoEsut, which we can translate to 21,329,55,669,380,90,115,5806,DOSGuy,7465. The code for my kick of 5963 meters was qqorpEotEouEUorFBoUBopqqotUuro4KA9hmoEurB, which translates as 22,317,57,679,380,90,122,5963,DOSGuy,7630. The stats for the kicks are as follows:

Old New
Kick height 21 22
Gravity 329 317
Kick angle 55 57
Power 669 679
Unknown 380 380
Throw angle 90 90
Throw height 115 122
Score 5806 5963
Name DOSGuy DOSGuy
Checksum 7465 7630

The kick height of 22 means that the ball was slightly higher in the air when I kicked it, which explains why the angle was slightly higher at 57° instead of 55. Kicks are always farther when the second number is lower, but I was never able to figure out if it represents gravity, atmospheric density, or wind resistance. At any rate, the conditions were more favourable on this kick than the last one, which is a good start. The real story is having the power increase from 669 to 679, which is probably because the ball was falling from a throw height of 122 instead of 115. I knew as soon as I saw it that this was a very high throw. So it seems to just come down to the fact that the ball was thrown especially high, and the timing of my kick produced a good angle.

Now let’s abuse the replay code to find out how I could have kicked this ball better. If I had waited a split second longer and kicked the ball at a height of 21 instead of 22, producing an angle of 55° instead of 57, would the ball have gone farther or shorter? Let’s mess with the code and replay the result. The ball only went 5841 meters! Of course, the power (in theory) would have been slightly higher if I had let the ball fall for that extra split second, but it seems like 57° is just a better angle to kick from. When my record was record was 5633, the kick height was also 22, the power was 671 (higher than the 669 on my kick of 5806), but the angle was only 50°. I can only guess at the numbers if I were to have kicked the ball at 23 instead of 22, but let’s assume that my kick angle would have been 59°, and power would have decreased to 675. The replay video shows that the kick would have gone 5904 meters. If the power had remained unchanged at 679, the replay shows that it still only would have gone 5974 meters, for a gain of 11 meters. Basically, I got all of that one. The angle was perfect, and the throw height and second variable were both favourable. It doesn’t look like a kick of 6000 was possible on this throw, and I don’t know if the ball goes any higher than 122. Is 6000 possible? It’s a definite maybe, nothing more. It definitely looks like I came pretty close to having a perfect kick.

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Solving the ISC problem

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

A month ago I wrote an article about a Scrabble server called ISC. My first impression was colored by the fact that new members are automatically subscribed to channel 0, where staff members answer members’ questions. The helpers respond with sarcastic, and sometimes outright contemptuous remarks. As someone who has made his living providing customer service, it’s infuriating to watch customers be treated that way. When you see it, you feel compelled to say something about it, but if you say something about it, you get muzzled or banned. I simply have never seen anything like it.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any other Scrabble servers and, fortunately, I love to be proven wrong. After a short hiatus, I decided to return to ISC and remove channel 0 from my subscribed channel list so that I wouldn’t have to see the staff abusing their members. I advise all newcomers to do the same. Remove channel 0 and just ask your questions in channel 20. Hundreds of friendly, helpful members will answer your question within seconds.

So, it’s been more than a week now and… it’s been bliss! ISC is just a wonderful place to play Scrabble once you muzzle the staff. I wish someone had given me the advice that I’m giving you now. Do yourself a favor and type “channel -0″ as soon as you log in. If everyone did that, I suspect that no one would ever have any problems on ISC. Frustration leads to bad behavior, so just eliminate the source of frustration and everyone can be happy. Even the staff are pleasant when they’re chatting instead of “helping” people.

I’ve had great fun ever since, and I even got to do something that I’ve never done before. A gracious opponent played a D along the edge of the board, and I was able to play stIPEN(D)S, hitting two triple word scores! That means that the word value was tripled and then re-tripled, and 50 points were added for scoring a bingo. The word was worth 10 x 9 + 50 = 140 points! The game had been close up to that point, but that word put it away. Far from being angry, my opponent congratulated me. That’s class. Actually, that’s typical from almost everyone I play on the server. People are usually polite and professional. When you run afoul of someone who isn’t, just put them on your noplay list and you’ll never be bothered by them again.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the strength of any online community is its members. The members of ISC are tops in my books. With the provision that you remove channel 0 from your listen list as soon as you log in, I can now enthusiastically recommend ISC to any Scrabble lover.

My opponent showing class and sharing my joy

My opponent showing class and sharing my joy (click to enlarge)

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Bad customer service ruins a great game

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

I’ll admit, I’ve gotten addicted to Scrabble. I had trouble getting into the game a few years ago because it’s a bit frustrating to have to memorize “words” that aren’t really words in the sense of actually being used by speakers of the English language. But then someone told me about Facebook, and soon after I discovered Scrabulous. Being able to play my friends made it worth suffering through that difficult initial stage of memorizing lists, such as words with a Q but no U.

So, a friend of mine recently invited me to play Scrabble on isc.ro. ISC is a Scrabble server. I took up internet chess in 1998, so I’ve been to a few servers in my time. Some of them were empty, or had bad customer service, but none of them have left half as bad a taste in my mouth as ISC.

First, the good. You connect to the server with a Telnet-based client called WordBiz. WordBiz is a clean, simple interface that does everything you could expect a Scrabble interface to do. WordBiz is a lot like Blitzin, the client for ICC (the Internet Chess Club), which includes the way Blitzin creates a hyperlink out of anything inside quotation marks. This allow you to link to a help file by typing “help channels” (inside quotation marks), or link to an external website. I’ve often wondered why they couldn’t have chosen some other character, like asterisks or something. You have to train yourself to use single quotes when you want to, you know, quote something, to avoid creating hyperlinks within mundane conversations. That’s a bit annoying, but ICC started it, so I can’t blame ISC for that.

And the members? Talk about friendly! A nicer group of people you will never meet. In fact, civility is strictly enforced. More on that later.

The first thing you’re likely to notice when you’re new to the server is that there are no Helpers or Admins online. There are certain times of the day when a Helper is there, but most of their answers are sarcastic and insulting. Don’t bother using the “ask” command, unless you want a stupid answer. Just ask in one of the chat channels. The fellow who runs the server, a man named Carol, supposedly is reluctant to add more Helpers and Admins because he doesn’t trust the membership. He apparently prefers that customer service be non-existent, and the lucky few who get to volunteer their time seem to have contempt for the other members. Perhaps their limited membership creates a culture of entitlement and elitism.

But let’s get back to the “ask” command. If you really want to be made fun of, there’s a command called “ask” which sends your question to the Admins and Helpers. Just type “ask <your question>”. This is similar to the “assist” command on a chess server I used to frequent. There’s one critical difference.

If the Helpers choose to ignore your question (as they did with mine), or if there are no Helpers online, your question will be stuck in the queue. You can’t ask a new question while you have a question pending, and there is no way to rescind or expire your question! If the staff ignores your question and you want to ask a new question, you’re screwed! You can’t clear the old question to ask a new one. No more questions for you, sucker!

The “assist” command on the chess server I was referring to was a bit more sensible. You could cancel your request, or it would expire automatically if you left the server. Assuming that there would be no reason for anyone to answer your question after you log off, I logged off. Then I logged back on, and my question was still pending! “Yes”, the other members confirm, “they will sometimes answer your question after you leave.” Why would do they that? What possible sense could there be for a question not to expire after you leave? So you can’t even clear your question from the queue by logging off and logging back on. Is there any point to that at all?

Anyway, everyone has a “Number of unfinished games” ratio. Mine is “very low”. A person with a higher ratio might be losing connection on purpose to be a bad sport. This is actually a useful piece of information. But sometimes you start a game and the other person isn’t at their computer. After it becomes obvious that they aren’t going to play, you can abort the game and it has no effect on your rating. But it does affect your unfinished games ratio. How does that make any sense? I mean, if no moves were made, then a game didn’t occur. If a game didn’t occur, how can it affect your unfinished games ratio? It just punishes you for aborting the game, when it’s really the other person’s fault for walking away from their computer while they had a pending game request. One of the members asked why ISC would do such a thing, and got a typically sarcastic response. It was pretty obvious that they were simply refusing to acknowledge that the member was right. Then the Helper logged off to avoid having to answer any further questions. Nice.

So, I decided to ask the members about their customer satisfaction. I used the Helper’s poor handling of the question as an example. One member said that the Helpers are just volunteers with no special powers, so there was no point asking them to fix something that they have no control over. Fair enough, but I’ve volunteered on chess servers before, and when a member had a concern that I couldn’t handle, I would escalate it to someone who could. I assume Helpers on ISC would do the same. “That’s an unwarranted assumption,” another member tells me. I replied that I was only assuming that if the membership had a concern, the site operators would be interested in hearing it and make some attempt to resolve it. “Go to a better server,” says another member. (more…)

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Miniclip scandal!

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

I discovered Monkey Kick Off on Miniclip.com, but I chose to play at Totebo.com to avoid the Miniclip intro and extra junk it places on the screen, but mostly because I wanted to support the author, Niclas Åberg, instead of Miniclip. He did a great job, and he deserves some credit. Since he works for Miniclip, I don’t know how much it matters to him, but I wanted to promote Totebo anyway.

So, I went back to the Monkey Kick Off page on Miniclip and saw my rather pathetic high score and decided to improve it. That turned out to be very difficult. Monkey won’t throw the ball high enough!

I have previously said that if you wait for about 30 seconds, Monkey should throw the ball above his head, by which I meant the entire ball. On Miniclip, Monkey will often throw the ball high enough that the top is over his head, but you can wait a full minute for the entire ball to get over his head, and he will never throw it as high as he will at Totebo.com. The effect is that it limits the maximum power of Monkey’s kick, reducing scores by roughly 1000 points!

Whereas I was able to kick the ball 5806 meters on my first day of playing Monkey Kick Off, in two days I have been able to kick the ball no farther than 4781 at Miniclip. Let me put that another way. By patiently waiting (up to 30 seconds) for a good juggle from Monkey, I can kick the ball 5000 meters almost every time at Totebo. In fact, I hit “Retry” as soon as it becomes obvious that I’m not going to get 5000 meters. 5000 meters may not even be possible at Miniclip!

Now, I know, I can see that some people have kicked the ball that far. The current high score for the past month is 6001, which is probably the highest possible score on Totebo’s website. But how are people breaking 5000? I’ve been studying the game for weeks, and I can’t do it. Let’s analyze how the games differ.

Monkey Kick Off on Miniclip

There’s a Miniclip.com symbol on the screen, and you can submit your high score, which is much more reliable than the easily cracked encryption codes that you can send to your friends. Then there’s something in the top left corner.

04 at magnification 2x

I’ve magnified the number. What does 04 mean? Version 4? Clearly the game has been reprogrammed beyond the addition of the Miniclip advertisement and the ability to submit your high score. I guess the real question is why Miniclip wanted the scores to be lower. Can you think of a reason?

“Version 4″ still uses the same encryption, so I can change the domain name and use the code from one site on the other site. This means that I could pretend that I scored 5806 on Miniclip using the code I got at Totebo, which isn’t fair to my friends who are playing on Miniclip.

I decided to see if Miniclip had changed any of Totebo’s other games. (more…)

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Smashing is not so smashing

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

Continuing my review of Totebo Flash games, I recently tried out Smashing. George Santayana famously wrote that, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This appears to be relevant here.

Smashing is a Breakout clone, and sadly, it’s one of the better ones. It’s sad that the game is one of the best of the genre because it isn’t very much fun. A history lesson is clearly in order.

In 1972, Pong became the first arcade machine to achieve significant commercial success, only a year after the first coin-operated arcade machines were invented. Pong required two players and was designed to be “so simple that any drunk in any bar could play.” It had the novelty of being new, but the lack of variation or complex gameplay eventually limited the replay value of the game. It also required two players.

In 1976, Breakout was released. It could be played by a single player, and the addition of a breakable wall added new dimensions of strategy and gameplay. A good strategy is to break a passage all the way through the wall on one side or the other, then send the ball up it and let it destroy the wall from the top. The only downside to this strategy is that the ball speeds up as it hits the blocks at the top, and it’s moving pretty fast when it finally comes back down. It was exciting, and it allowed players to compete with each other’s high scores, which was impossible in a game like Pong. The one fatal flaw of the game was that it could be incredibly difficult to hit the last block.

This flaw was passed along to future clones, such as Arkanoid in 1986. Arkanoid breathed new life into the genre by introducing new elements of gameplay, such as unbreakable blocks and blocks that required multiple hits to destroy, and various power-ups, such as multi-ball and laser beams. Most importantly, every level was different. Instead of repeating the same wall over and over forever, each level had the blocks arranged differently to change the strategy and keep the gameplay dynamic. It is also known as a ridiculously difficult game, mostly thanks to the unbreakable blocks. Breakable blocks are often shielded by unbreakable ones, and it can take forever to get the ball where it needs to be to clear out the screen. The game is so difficult that it just isn’t very much fun.

Then came Moraff’s Blast and Super Blast in 1991. A new “adventure” mode used a different layout in every level, and lots of helpful powerups, but the goal was no longer to clear the screen! Hitting every single block is simply too boring to complete an entire adventure like Arkanoid, so the goal in Blast was simply to hit one of the exit squares to get to the next level. Blast was a lot of fun, and is a gaming classic. Although to a much smaller extent, it still suffered from Breakout’s original Achilles heel: it could be incredibly difficult to hit that one exit square in a huge empty screen. The level design in all versions of both games was generally excellent, but there were a few levels that were just needlessly frustrating. There’s giving the player a challenge, and then there’s just wasting his time. Blast and Super Blast took multi-ball to a new level. Some levels were filled with power-ups that split the ball into 4 or 8 balls, and the screen could get filled with balls! Overall, both of these games were way more fun than every paddle game that had come before, and they remain classics of the genre.

Finally, in 1996, Psycon Software fixed the problem. Cybersphere was a revolution in the genre. Aside from featuring gorgeous graphics and great music, the big empty screen became a thing of the past. The blocks are brought closer to the paddle, making it easier to hit them, but maintaining the challenge because the ball bounces back much sooner. It also added angled corners, so that the ball could bounce off of them and back into the center. The angled corners and edges virtually eliminated the problem of hitting that one last block, and the genre was saved! Finally it was possible to have a game that had a variety of levels and power-ups for dynamic gameplay and excellent replay value, that had a high enough difficulty level to be challenging, but eliminated the tedious task of hitting a single block in a huge empty screen. New elements like invisible blocks and bonus screens also increased the challenge and fun factor of both games. Cybersphere and Cybersphere Plus are, to the best of my knowledge, the best Breakout clones of all time.

So, it’s 2007 or so, and Totebo decides to make a Breakout clone. It’s a good idea because it’s very easy to program (I had to make one in a high school computer class), and hours of gameplay can be created by simply designing new layouts. If done properly, this could potentially become my favorite Flash game ever. Hoping for hours of non-stop brick-smashing fun, I assumed that Totebo had learned from the mistakes of the past and made a game with all of the genre’s strengths and none of its weaknesses. I was quickly relieved of that delusion. (more…)

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Zed Walkthrough

Saturday, December 8th, 2007

I liked Monkey Kick Off so much that I decided to try Zed yesterday. It’s an easy enough game that I can beat it without losing a single life, and yet it has a charm to it that I really enjoy. A game doesn’t have to be hard to be good. I like the fact that there’s a bit of exploration to it, which any good game should have. You should always throw in an Easter egg for players who enjoy the game enough to look for them. Let’s talk about the game.

Zed

So, this is Zed. Zed is an android who dreams of having a space suit made of gold. I don’t know why. It’s a good enough excuse for me to play a game. So, you’re a robot and you enter a gold mine that is full of monsters that look like dinosaurs. Good things include:

200 points 200 points (103 in the game)
500 points 500 points (105 in the game)
800 points 800 points (30 in the game)
gold Gold, mandatory, 3 per level
key Key to open a door (10)
energy Energy, restores energy to 100% (6)
invisible Invisible, makes Zed invincible for a few seconds (2)
speed Speed, makes Zed faster, jump farther (3: 2-1, 4-2, 10-1)
jump Jump, makes Zed jump much higher (3: 5-3, 7-1, 8-1)

The effect of the Speed and Jump power-ups are permanent, but the abilities are lost when you lose a life.

There are six kinds of enemies. I don’t know what they’re really called, so I made up the names.

purple walker Purple Walker, just walks back and forth (4 in the game)
red walker Red Walker, walks back and forth, breathing fire (3 in the game)
green walker Green Walker, walks back and forth, occasionally with a burst of speed (5 in the game)
purple flyer Purple Flyer, just flies back and forth in a horizontal line (2 in the game)
red flyer Red Flyer, follows Zed and drops fireballs, can only move horizontally (2 in the game)
green flyer Green Flyer, chases Zed horizontally and vertically, can fly through walls, has occasional bursts of speed (3 in the game)

The six monsters make their first appearance sequentially in the first six levels, in order of deadliness. Green Flyers are, by far, the most dangerous. Zed has no weapons, and the monsters can’t be killed or trapped. The only way to deal with them is to avoid them.

The game is a platformer, but not a sidescroller. That is, the screen doesn’t scroll; you move from screen to screen.

There’s really no way that I can write a whole post about this game without significant spoilers, so consider everything from here on covered by a spoiler warning. This is a complete walkthrough of the game. Codes for each level can be found in the screenshots. (more…)

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Monkey Kick Off

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Here’s a fine example of why DOS games are still popular. I just discovered a Flash game called Monkey Kick Off, made by a company called Totebo. Having mastered Monkey Lander several years ago, the name caught my interest a few hours ago. It’s a simple flash game in which a monkey tries to kick a ball as far as possible. I’ve always said that DOS games are great because they just take a simple concept and make it fun. Well, it doesn’t get any simpler than this. The only thing you do in this game is press a key or mouse button when you want the monkey to kick the ball. Simple, certainly, but is it fun?

It’s addictively fun. It’s fun because you want to see how far you can kick the ball. It’s a matter of trajectory. For years, artillery engineers have had to learn how to calculate trajectory. For as long as there have been projectiles, there has been knowledge of an ideal angle to maximize distance and calculate weapons range. If you fire at a very straight angle, the projectile will waste less energy on upward motion (which it must fight against gravity to achieve) and spend more time going forward, but when it runs out of momentum it will have less distance to fall. A projectile that is shot almost straight up will spend longer falling, but it won’t get as far before it runs out of momentum. The ideal angle is somewhere in between. It has to be straight enough to get distance before it runs out of momentum, but high enough to get a good arc instead of just running straight into the ground.

In high school computer classes, most students will have to write a projectile game at some point. The user enters the speed and the angle and you see how far the projectile goes. Those are games where you type in the numbers, so there’s no skill or reflexes involved. Then there are dozens of golf games where they add reflexes to the mix by angle and power bars to determine your swing, and you have to press a button at the right moment to get the maximum distance. Monkey Kick Off is even a bit more advanced than that.

In this game, the monkey juggles the ball (with his feet), and you must determine when he kicks the ball. If you kick the ball at the top of its arc, it will be angled upwards. If you wait for it to come most of the way down before hitting it, it will be straighter. The monkey also juggles the ball to different heights. The higher the ball is at the beginning of your kick, the more powerful your kick is likely to be. By patiently waiting for the ball to be juggled high enough for a really good kick, and timing it right to get the ideal angle and power, you can really launch the ball. Physics in action!

Unlike artillery simulations, the ball will bounce, and your score is how far the ball travels before it comes to a complete stop. In a simple artillery simulation, the first “bounce” is the only consideration. With a bouncing ball, there are more options. With a high angle, the ball will have more height, so it will bounce more times, although it won’t get as far on each bounce. A lower angle will get less bounces, but it will get more distance out of them. There is still an ideal angle, but there’s more than one way to get the ball the same distance.

Once you kick the ball, it sails through the air and whistles through the trees, which are full of monkeys. The environment is broken into zones that repeat over and over for 1000 monkey meters, at which point you enter a new zone. 0 to 1000 meters is a forest, the 1000+ zone is a desert, the 2000+ zone appears to be a castle or fortress with an obvious lunar inspiration, the 3000+ zone is full of palm trees, the 4000+ zone is the monkey village, the 5000+ zone is full of banana trees, and everything beyond 6000 meters has a spaceship, presumably to take you back to your home planet for being so good at this game (actually it’s the ship from Monkey Lander). (more…)

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