HOME
*



picture info

The Space Bar
''The Space Bar'' is a 1997 graphic adventure game developed by Boffo Games and published by Rocket Science Games and SegaSoft. A comic science fiction story, it follows detective Alias Node as he searches for a shapeshifting killer inside The Thirsty Tentacle, a fantastical bar on the planet Armpit VI. The player assumes the role of Alias and uses his Empathy Telepathy power to live out the memories of eight of the bar's patrons, including an immobile plant, an insect with compound eyes and a blind alien who navigates by sound. Gameplay is nonlinear and under a time limit: the player may solve puzzles and gather clues in any order, but must win before the killer escapes the bar. ''The Space Bar'' was conceived and directed by Steve Meretzky, a former Infocom employee who had previously created titles such as ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''. Meretzky hoped to design a graphic adventure in the spirit of text-based interactive fiction games, and to recapture that genre's ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Boffo Games
Boffo Games was a video game developer founded in 1994 by Steve Meretzky, Mike Dornbrook, and Leo DaCosta. The logo was designed by Gayle Syska, formerly of Infocom. Boffo produced two games, ''Hodj 'n' Podj'' and ''The Space Bar'', before closing its doors in 1997. ''Hodj 'n' Podj'' was originally designed for Media Vision but it divested all of its multimedia interests following a securities-fraud scandal and the title was purchased by Virgin Interactive. ''The Space Bar'' was originally to be published by Rocket Science Games (RSG) but SegaSoft bought out RSG and became the game's publisher. History In late 1993, designer Steve Meretzky began to consider founding an independent game development studio with his friends Mike Dornbrook and Leo DaCosta. The three of them had gone to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology together, and Meretzky had worked with Dornbrook at Infocom and with DaCosta during the 1990s. Following the 1989 closure of Infocom, Meretzky worked on a cont ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (video Game)
''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' is an interactive fiction video game based on the comedic science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, of the same name. It was designed by series creator Douglas Adams and Infocom's Steve Meretzky, and it was first released in 1984 for the Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, CP/M, MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari 8-bit family, and Atari ST. It is Infocom's fourteenth game. Plot The game loosely mirrors a portion of the series' plot, representing most of the events in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novel), the first book. Arthur Dent wakes up one day to find his house about to be destroyed by a construction crew to make way for a new bypass. His friend Ford Prefect (character), Ford Prefect, who is secretly an extraterrestrials in fiction, extraterrestrial, helps to calm Arthur down and hitches them a ride on one of the ships in the approaching Vogon constructor fleet, moments before the fleet destroys the Earth to make way for ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Non-player Characters
A non-player character (NPC), or non-playable character, is any character in a game that is not controlled by a player. The term originated in traditional tabletop role-playing games where it applies to characters controlled by the gamemaster or referee rather than by another player. In video games, this usually means a character controlled by the computer (instead of a player) that has a predetermined set of behaviors that potentially will impact gameplay, but will not necessarily be the product of true artificial intelligence. Role-playing games In a traditional tabletop role-playing game such as ''Dungeons & Dragons'', an NPC is a character portrayed by the gamemaster (GM). While the player characters (PCs) form the narrative's protagonists, non-player characters can be thought of as the "supporting cast" or "extras" of a roleplaying narrative. Non-player characters populate the fictional world of the game, and can fill any role not occupied by a player character. Non-player ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Free Look
Free look (also known as mouselook) describes the ability to move a mouse (computing), mouse, joystick, analogue stick, or D-pad to rotate the player character's view in video games. It is almost always used for 3D game engines, and has been included on role-playing video games, real-time strategy games, third-person shooters, first-person shooters, racing games, and flight simulators. Free look is nearly universal in modern games, but it was one of the significant technical breakthroughs of mid-1990s first person (video games), first-person perspective games. Many modern console games dedicate one of the several analogue sticks on the gamepad entirely to rotating the view, where as some older console games, when gamepads usually had fewer or only a single D-pad or analogue stick, had a feature where the single D-pad or analogue stick would move the view instead of the character whilst the player held down another button at the same time, often labelled in game as the "look button ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Pointer (user Interface)
In human–computer interaction, a cursor is an indicator used to show the current position on a computer monitor or other display device that will respond to input from a text input or pointing device. The mouse cursor is also called a pointer, owing to its resemblance in usage to a pointing stick. Etymology ''Cursor'' is Latin for 'runner'. A cursor is a name given to the transparent slide engraved with a hairline used to mark a point on a slide rule. The term was then transferred to computers through analogy. On 14 November 1963, while attending a conference on computer graphics in Reno, Nevada, Douglas Engelbart of Augmentation Research Center (ARC) first expressed his thoughts to pursue his objective of developing both hardware and software computer technology to "augment" human intelligence by pondering how to adapt the underlying principles of the planimeter to inputting X- and Y-coordinate data, and envisioned something like the cursor of a mouse he initially called ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Adventure Game
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or Puzzle video game, puzzle-solving. The Video game genres, genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games (List of text-based computer games, text and List of graphic adventure games, graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include ''Zork'', ''King's Quest'', ''Monkey Island'', and ''Myst''. Initial adventure games developed in the 1970s and early 1980s were text-based, using text parsers to translate the player's input into commands. As personal computers became more powerful with better grap ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

First-person (video Games)
In video games, first person is any graphical perspective rendered from the viewpoint of the player's character, or a viewpoint from the cockpit or front seat of a vehicle driven by the character. The most popular type of first-person video game today is the first-person shooter (FPS), in which the graphical perspective is an integral component of the gameplay. Many other genres incorporate first-person perspectives, including other types of shooter games (such as light gun shooters, rail shooters and shooting gallery games), adventure games (including visual novels), amateur flight simulations (including combat flight simulators), racing games (including driving simulators), role-playing video games, and vehicle simulations (including sailing simulators and vehicular combat games). Game mechanics Games with a first-person perspective are usually avatar-based, wherein the game displays what the player's avatar would see with the avatar's own eyes. Thus, players typical ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

The Space Bar Gameplay Screenshot
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pron ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Casual Game
A casual game is a video game targeted at a mass market audience, as opposed to a hardcore game, which is targeted at hobbyist gamers. Casual games may exhibit any type of gameplay and genre. They generally involve simpler rules, shorter sessions, and require less learned skill. They don't expect familiarity with a standard set of mechanics, controls, and tropes. Countless casual games have been developed and published, alongside hardcore games, across the history of video games. A concerted effort to capitalize on casual games grew in the 1990s and 2000s, as many developers and publishers branded themselves as casual game companies, publishing games especially for PCs, web browsers, and, after 2007, smartphones. Overview Most casual games have: *Fun, simple gameplay that is easy to understand *Simple user interface, operated with a mobile phone tap-and-swipe interface or a one-button mouse interface *Short sessions, so a game can be played during work breaks, while on pu ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


WorldWinner
WorldWinner is a cross-platform, skill-based games community that operates competitive cash tournaments for web, mobile web, and mobile (iOS and Android) platforms. Games include Solitaire Rush, Wheel of Fortune, SCRABBLE Cubes, and Two Dots. In 2018, WorldWinner launched Angry Birds Champions, the official cash tournament version of Rovio Entertainment's Angry Birds. WorldWinner is based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and operates under the Game Show Network’s GSN Games division. History Worldwinner was founded in 1999 in Newton, Massachusetts by Alex Bloom (formerly Saidakovsky), Alex Ganelis, and Daniil Utin, raising over $17 million from leading venture capital firms, including HarbourVest Partners and Benchmark Capital. WorldWinner launched on August 17, 2000, as the first online gaming destination allowing participants to compete in skill-based tournaments for real-money winnings. The company established partnerships with leading casual games sites, including ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Computer Gaming World
''Computer Gaming World'' (CGW) was an American computer game magazine published between 1981 and 2006. One of the few magazines of the era to survive the video game crash of 1983, it was sold to Ziff Davis in 1993. It expanded greatly through the 1990s and became one of the largest dedicated video game magazines, reaching around 500 pages by 1997. In the early 2000s its circulation was about 300,000, only slightly behind the market leader ''PC Gamer''. But, like most magazines of the era, the rapid move of its advertising revenue to internet properties led to a decline in revenue. In 2006, Ziff announced it would be refocused as ''Games for Windows'', before moving it to solely online format, and then shutting down completely later the same year. History In 1979, Russell Sipe left the Southern Baptist Convention ministry. A fan of computer games, he realized in spring 1981 that no magazine was dedicated to computer games. Although Sipe had no publishing experience, he formed ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Bankrupt
Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor. Bankrupt is not the only legal status that an insolvent person may have, and the term ''bankruptcy'' is therefore not a synonym for insolvency. Etymology The word ''bankruptcy'' is derived from Italian ''banca rotta'', literally meaning "broken bank". The term is often described as having originated in renaissance Italy, where there allegedly existed the tradition of smashing a banker's bench if he defaulted on payment so that the public could see that the banker, the owner of the bench, was no longer in a condition to continue his business, although some dismiss this as a false etymology. History In Ancient Greece, bankruptcy did not exist. If a man owed and he could not pay, he and his wife, children or servants were forced into ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]