Snake

Snake was always one of my favorite old-school arcade games. Quick reflexes and some intuition were all you needed to become the biggest snake around. Avoiding the walls and making a maze out of yourself to get around in cramped areas were part of the hectic gameplay. This Snake, however, has been restricted to three levels and given an immense cutback in speed. Think of it as Snake on Prozac.

Instead of being limited to the four main keyboard directions, you can move 360 degrees by simply moving left and right with the arrows while your snake continues forward. In each level you have eat a set amount of dots, which make your snake longer. Every so often you’ll eat a blue dot that gives you a “bonus.” Bonuses though usually just make it harder for you to play, with effects like shaking the screen or scrolling clouds over top of it. The main downer here is that the game is just painfully slow. Collecting 25 dots in a level can take minutes of just slowly sliding your snake around the screen. The dots you have to eat only increase with the level. Grabbing a dot can be tricky every once in a while but there’s almost always plenty of room to navigate your snake around the screen. I was actually happy to get the rocket boost powerup (supposed to make it harder to play) because it almost brought the game up to playable speed. Don’t even ask about the snail powerup.

The backgrounds are very nice but all three levels look exactly the same, just being slight variations on each other. The red-dot snake also looks a little out of place on the lush forest backgrounds but it would be pretty hard to make a fluid-moving snake that looked real. Without killing the processor at least. Music is campy but bearable.

Once you pass level 3 you can submit for high scores, if you can stand to make it that far that is. You even get five lives to make it through three levels. It’s possible to become disoriented sometimes but the biggest killer in this game is monotony. While moving my snake around in level 3 I started to trance out a little and ended up running into the wall a few times. Snake isn’t too bad of a game, but the speed factor really kills it. Give this one to Grandma.

Seconds of Madness

Seconds of Madness is a futuristic sports game (well, I’m calling it a sports game) where you navigate yourself through a tube filled with obstacles and see how long you can last. It’s more fun that a lot of high-score minigames I know.

The graphics in this game are pretty interesting, with an 80’s style computer generated feel to them. The tunnel background looks like a video being played. The character looks like something out of a cheesy sci-fi movie, but it fits perfect. Your character only has static frames of animation- that is to say for instance when you duck, there’s no ducking animation. Same with jumping. Not a major issue but a couple frames could have been added for some fluidity.

All you really do in the game is dodge stuff, but there’s not a set method of doing it. You can duck, jump, and move 360 degrees around in the tube. Sometimes it’s better to jump a wall, other times it’s better to move to the side of it. There’s some extra life tokens to pick up along the way but chances are you’ll lose a life (or two) just trying to get one of them. What I don’t like about this game is that if you hit a wall it takes a life and instantly restarts you where you just were. Meaning if there were two walls ahead of you and you hit the first one, you’re almost surely hitting that second one. A couple seconds of invincibility would have went a long way.

Once you get so far the amount of stuff you have to avoid gets pretty dense. Luckily the game is forgiving when it comes to ducking and jumping around the obstacles, but I still think starts throwing too much stuff at you too soon. Even though the game is fairly shallow, it was still entertaining due to the overall style- the way you slide around and avoid things feels the way it should. Nothing too amazing here, but I’d give it a play.

exactly what Google

Just a thought.. As awesome as Google is these days, it would suck if they ended up owning the entire search-engine business. When they get to the point where all competition is impossible (due to their sheer size, financial resources, media influence, etc.), how many alternate search engines will have the resources for continuous improvement and top-quality search results? When this happens, we will have no choice but to do exactly what Google tells us to do.

As deeply ingrained as it is for everyone to instinctively and unthinkingly turn to Google for their search activity, it is time to leave a few alternate search tabs open for as much use as possible. Instead of using Google just because that’s what you always do, try your search on MSN, Yahoo, Ask, or any of the other independent search engines instead. Sharing traffic with other search engines is a nice, quiet way to keep the competitive spirit alive and well in the search-engine business.

n this function, WordPress differentiates between linked comment signatures and unlinked (empty) comment signatures, formatting output accordingly. As you can see, when the comment author provides a URL, WordPress fashions a linked signature featuring the infamous external nofollow attribute. We need WordPress to further differentiate comment links based on whether or not the author is found on our blacklist. Sure enough, injecting a conditional elseif() statement does the trick:

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