Michelle's Empty Nest’s
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(group member since Sep 26, 2022)
Michelle's Empty Nest’s
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from the Game Night group.
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It looks like most teams are just picking their sign. Is that what we want to do as well?
* **Aries:** ♈︎ 🐏 [available]* **Taurus:** ♉︎ 🐂 Read a book with all the letters in the word BULL in the title [available, held by Team Taurus]
* **Gemini:** ♊︎ 👯♂️ [available]
* **Cancer:** ♋︎ 🦀 [available]
* **Leo:** ♌︎ 🦁 Read a book with a character who is a shifter. Bonus points if it's a lion shifter [available, held by Leo Librarians]
* **Virgo:** ♍︎ 🤍 [available]
* **Libra:** ♎︎ ⚖️ [available]
* **Scorpio:** ♏︎ 🦂 Read a book off your favorite Scorpio's *ME* shelf [available, held by Scorpio Stingers]
* **Sagittarius:** ♐︎ 🏹 Read a book with a MPG of fantasy [available, held by Gemini Gems]
* **Capricorn:** ♑︎ 🐐 [available]
* **Aquarius:** ♒︎ 💧 Read a book with a body of water in the title. I.e. river, ocean, sea, creek, etc. [available, held by Aquarius Alliance]
* **Pisces:** ♓︎ 🐟 Read a book with a fish on the cover or where the characters go fishing [available, held by Peculiar Pisces]
picking order:
Peculiar Pisces
Aquarius Alliance
Team Taurus
Gemini Gems
Scorpio Stingers
Leo Librarians
Cancer Crusaders -> Up
Aries Avengers -> Next
Sassy Sagittarius
Voluptuous Virgos
Libra Horror Scopers
Capricorn Crew
We're near the bottom for the first swap.Exchange: 1:
Peculiar Pisces
Aquarius Alliance
Team Taurus
Gemini Gems
Scorpio Stingers
Leo Librarians
Cancer Crusaders
Aries Avengers
Sassy Sagittarius
➡️ Voluptuous Virgos
Libra Horror Scopers
Capricorn Crew
Funk Flock will go with Voluptuous Virgos.
I see the only other team that's left talking about Scorpio something, so I'm going to turn us in for Voluptuous Virgos. Hope that's OK!
Susan A wrote: "🕹 Read a book that was based on, influenced by, or turned into a movie.Does Apple series work for this?"
Sure, I'll take that.
Yes, the teams are picking very quickly!
We've got a few new folks so far...here's what we're looking like.Team 6: Funk Flock
Maddielucy
Anna
Preeti
Geri
Catsalive
Michelle's Empty Nest
Anita
Jill
Catsalive wrote: "Hi Team, I'm with you this time around."Welcome!
I like Sizzling Scorpions or Voluptuous Virgos!
We're supposed to pick a Zodiac name for this round. Any ideas?
🕹 🎮 👾 Week 4: January 27, 2025 ~ Pitfall! 👾 🎮 🕹
Pitfall! is a video game developed by David Crane for the Atari Video Computer System (later renamed Atari 2600) and released in 1982 by Activision. The player controls Pitfall Harry, who has a time limit of 20 minutes to seek treasure in a jungle. The game world is populated by enemies and hazards that variously cause the player to lose lives or points.
Crane had made several games for both Atari, Inc. and Activision before working on Pitfall! in 1982. He started with creating a new realistic-style walking animation for a person on the Atari 2600 hardware. After completing it, he fashioned a game around it. He used a jungle setting with items to collect and enemies to avoid, and the result became Pitfall!
Pitfall! received mostly positive reviews at the time of its release praising both its gameplay and graphics. The game was influential in the platform game genre and various publications have considered it one of the greatest video games of all time. It is also one of the best-selling Atari 2600 video games. The game was ported to several contemporary video game systems. It has been included in various Activision compilation games and was included as a secret extra in later Activision published titles.
Pitfall! is a video game set in a jungle where the player controls Pitfall Harry, a fortune hunter and explorer. Pitfall! has been characterized as a platformer by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, the authors of Racing the Beam. Similar to Superman (1979) and Adventure (1980), the game does not feature side-scrolling and instead loads one screen at a time, with a new screen appearing when the player character, Pitfall Harry, moves to the edge of the screen. The goal is to get Harry as many points as possible within a twenty-minute time limit. The player starts the game with 2,000 points and can collect a total of 32 treasure hidden among 255 scenes to increase their total, ranging from a money bag worth 2,000 points to a diamond ring worth 5,000 points.
Pitfall Harry moves left and right and can jump over and onto objects, swing from vines, and climb up and down ladders to seek treasure and avoid danger. The player can lose points from hazards, such as falling down a hole or colliding with rolling logs. The player starts with three lives and loses one if they sink into quicksand, swamps or tar pits or are hit by a scorpion, cobra rattler, or crocodile.
Pitfall! was developed by David Crane for Activision. Crane had worked at Atari, Inc. in the late 1970s, developing games for the Atari Video Computer System. The system became known as the Atari 2600 after the release of the Atari 5200 in 1982. After discovering the high profits Atari had made off games he developed, including Outlaw, Canyon Bomber and Slot Machine, he asked the president of Atari, Ray Kassar, for recognition on these titles and a better pay. When he was turned down, Crane and other Atari programmers left the company to form Activision in 1979. Crane was the senior designer at Activision and created Dragster, Fishing Derby, Laser Blast, Freeway and Grand Prix for the company prior to the release of Pitfall!
Crane stated his game design philosophy involved making the Atari 2600 do new and unexpected things. Crane said he "used this technique to lead me in a new direction of game design, and some of the tricks were to me as much as an accomplishment as solving the Rubik's Cube the first time." Early development of Pitfall! started with Crane trying to create realistically animated graphics on the Atari 2600. This led to developing a moving man (which became the basis of Pitfall Harry) and, later, the scorpions and snake obstacles. For three years, Crane experimented using the running-man character in different scenarios, such as a cops and robbers game, but could not find a proper situation for it. Crane began implementing it into a game in 1982. Crane stated having the running man animation led to putting him on a path, which led to placing the path in a jungle and giving the man a reason to run in order to hunt treasures and avoid enemies. The jungle setting of the game was influenced by the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Other influences came from Heckle and Jeckle cartoons, where two magpies outwit their enemies, including having the magpies run across the heads of crocodiles and just escaping their snapping jaws. This led to the ability of Pitfall Harry being able to cross ponds infested with crocodiles if their jaws were closed. Initially, to jump from one alligator head to another, the player had to move the joystick and jump at exactly the same time which Crane described as being "almost impossible to play. So I changed the code to allow you to direct Harry’s jump to the side, if you moved the joystick within a small instant from the time you pressed the button to jump. From a programming standpoint this was a tiny change, but it changed the gameplay from nearly impossible to an easily learned skill." Crane tried to make the sprite artwork for obstacles and the environment recognizable to players, despite the limitations of the Atari 2600. The process involved what Crane said was "a lot of trial-and-error." When asked if the arcade game Donkey Kong (1981) had inspired his game, Crane responded he did not draw any parallels to Pitfall! at the time and had already developed elements in his game that were present in both games, such as a human character, paths, and ladders.
Crane commented that "The entire [game design] process took about 10 minutes. About 1000 hours of programming later the game was complete." Much of Crane's time was spent optimizing and compressing the code so that it would fit into a four-kilobyte ROM cartridge. Unlike Haunted House (1982) or Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982), where the environments were hard-coded into the game, Pitfall! was generated constantly by code. The game generates each screen based on a counter that could run either backwards or forwards depending which direction the player moved from screen to screen. Each number in the counter used 8 bits to load certain details such as the background, trees, ground and object patterns, allowing 255 screens to occupy fewer than 50 bytes of ROM. Activision had created design centers for their games, which were small, close-knit teams of four to five people. These teams encouraged peer reviews and shared prototypes of games. In Pitfall!, Crane's team changed the initial number of lives in the game from one to three during the final week of development. Crane said that "my buddies practically tied me to my chair until I put in extra lives and I'm glad they did."
Complete ONE of the following:
🕹 Read a book with punctuation in the title.
🕹 Read a book that was based on, influenced by, or turned into a movie.
🕹 Read a book with a simple design on the cover. {Your discretion.}
🕹 Read a book that quickly became a favorite, since Pitfall! is my favorite game of all time!
I posted that all but Keri will continue on in the Recording Studio thread. Hopefully that is still correct.
Team 8: Funk Flock✔️Maddielucy
✔️Anna
✔️Preeti
✔️Geri
Keri
✔️Michelle's Empty Nest
All but Keri will continue on.
OK, team. I've got serious FOMO!! It's only one book every couple of weeks, right? 😅 I'll stick around when the new exchange starts next year, if that's alright.
Exchange 10 Participation✅ Maddielucy(Patti)
✅ bamaace83 (Anna)
✅ Preeti
✅ Geri
Keri
✅ Michelle's Empty Nest
Round 10 Completion PostBook: Mistletoe Murder
Author: Leslie Meier
Task: ❄️ Deck The Halls: Read a book with a festive cover, your interpretation.
How it Fits:
Santa on cover.Pages: 222
Date Read: 12-19-2024
I have enjoyed doing this one with all of you! Unfortunately, I've decided not to move forward. I'm really planning to cut down on some challenges for next year.
It looks like this exchange is complete, so it's ours.Books are due 12-31.
