Duck Day Afternoon

Today was a Duck Day, for yesterday was a writing day, and tomorrow shall be a writing day as well. Worked on Duck for several hours, until my brain got too mushy to write a simple recursive subroutine. It's really taking shape, but there's so, so, so much to do. It's cool.

Then I showed M how to play 2-player Pikemen, and observed that I really should get some purple Icehouse pieces, since she usually picks up the yellow stash in two-player games. But what I really really should get is a half-dozen empty Icehouse stash tubes, which Looney Labs sells online. It didn't occur to me until recently why anyone would want these, but in truth, I now find dumping out my bag of 90 pyramids, and then sorting and stacking the 30 or 60 we typically need, a tiresome bit of preparation, especially now that I know there's a better way.

Washed a bunch of dishes and then wrapped up the Arcus work left over from that week. This included finding a clever way to replace an ugly kludge I jammed into place Friday afternoon. That makes me feel good. Now I am preparing an invoice. That makes me feel good, too.

Mappy and Me

I have to think Mappy is one of the greatest arcade games of all time. (It's the one where you control a little mouse policeman who has to recover stolen goods from a trampoline-filled house while cute little pink kitty-cats try to beat you up.) After years of playing it now and again, first in the arcades (usually at the Dairy Queen in Marco Island, FL, circa 1985) and more recently through MAME, I'm now on a playing streak due to my sudden achievement of an insanely high score (82,350!) and level (12, where the game rewards you with collapsing floors, giving you more opportunity for cat abuse (normally you fight the cats by slamming doors in their fuzzy faces)).

Furthermore, I found through an arcade game information page that Mappy's bonuses for picking up flashing treasures isn't random -- it rewards you for grabbing loot in like pairs (for example, you get more for grabbing a level's two paintings in order, rather than, say, getting one painting, grabbing a safe, and then getting the other painting). It also rewards you more for grabbing pairs in ascending order value (there are five types of treasure with fixed values of 100 - 500 points), and still more if you can nab the whole sequence without getting killed, since the pair-bonus multiplier increases so long as you stay alive.

Once discovered, this opens up a new, voluntary sub-game, where you try to get treasure in a specific order, and the whole game becomes a completely different challenge as the treasure layout on each level turns from an arbitrary, open-ended scatter into a highly specific path you must follow! Seventeen years after I started playing it, the game has redefined itself because of an insight that occurred on my end. That, friend, is brilliant game design.

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Seeing that page's photograph of the Mappy machine again reminds me of the one thing that MAME can't deliver -- the actual, unique cabinet that each game had. These cabinets were often individually designed for each game, in both graphics and shape, and the better ones had a real aesthetic effect on the game-playing experience. Mappy's cabinet was a lot of fun, with cute drawings of the main characters on its oversized marquee, chasing each other around the screen, and peeping out from behind the coin box. I can think of some games that were practically all about their cabinets — the full-surround version of Discs of Tron was truly a thing of beauty to play, especially when all its woofer-intensive speakers worked.

Now when I play arcade games, I have the same interface every time; my plain white iBook with its teensy little arrow keys. Not the same.