The State Of Israel is an interesting country: Half of the world loves them, and half of the world hates them. They're continuously surrounded by countries which want them dead, which has given them the attitude of a dog backed into a corner in that it will lash out at anyone to survive.

I personally don't care who's going to war with who over there. You can call me awful, but at least I'm consistent. If Egypt has a big war with Syria no one bats an eye. We only care about ISIS's takeover of Iraq because we're annoyed that we spent so much money building that country up. Israel goes to war and suddenly the West is in an uproar. An uproar about what? We don't know, but we're in an uproar about something, damn it!

All I know is that I recently listened to an interview with a woman who lives in the areas that Israel are bombing. Israel may send warnings to the areas that they're attacking, but only Jews get to evacuate. They get their own special areas where they can take shelter. Everyone else is on their own. Civilian casualties are civilian casualties, warning or no warning, regardless of their ethnic or religious background.

That being said, I do agree with the general chatter that you can't bomb a country and expect them not to reciprocate, and when that happens you're going to have civilian casualties. War is Hell. Anyone who wants to get involved in it without doing damage to themselves needs to find a more productive means of diplomacy.

I own a two-volume set containing every single Sherlock Holmes novel and short story ever published. Shortly after I bought it I found out the stories are in the public domain now. D'oh!

They're actually really good. The novels are much better, because they have far more time to tell a story. I feel like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle maybe wasn't that good of an author for short stories (pause for the sound of booing) because he doesn't flesh out as much as he probably should.

Irene Adler, for example, was supposed to be this huge mastermind, the only person, let alone woman (hey, it was the 1910's) who ever outsmarted Holmes. She was quick-witted, highly intelligent, and light on her feet. Of course, her only actual show of outsmarting Holmes in the books was when she figured out that Holmes was watching her and ran away. Hardly a criminal mastermind.

Then there's The Five Orange Pips, which was the basis for the introduction of Moriarty in the excellent television adaptation, Sherlock. That story was actually a huge disappointment. Holmes didn't really do anything. I know that if I got five orange pips in the mail and that every member of my family who had received them so far was murdered for not complying with the K.K.K.'s demands, I would put out a note saying the papers had been burned immediately, not gone to a specialist for advice, and certainly not waited two days to do so!

So Holmes gives this common sense advice to the poor bastard, who is murdered, and then off-screen he goes and figures out whodunnit, and then we don't even get to meet the person whodunnit because they die in a shipwreck. Come on!

The novels are much better, and there's a reason I'm so engrossed in them, but if you want a beginner's introduction into the series, the BBC's Sherlock is probably the way to go. Decide if you like that, then read the books. Believe it or not, the conversion is really good.

I discovered YouTube some time around 2005 when I was looking at Wikipedia's list of Internet memes. I was a very dorky kid. Since then of course the YouTube player has been getting bigger and more high-def. These days high-definition (720p and up) or at least high-quality (360p-480p) have pretty much been taken for granted as the standard. I don't even think 144p was the standard when YouTube first started out; they must have already had 240p. So when was the last time you watched a video on a really tiny quality setting?

I've just moved into a room in a new place, and the Internet is both slow and shared with everyone else in the house. I've frequently had it lock up while watching videos, so every single time I open a new video I tell YouTube to tone it down to 144p, just to reduce the strain on the network. As a '90s kid, it doesn't bug me that much. I wish I could set it as a default setting, but I guess YouTube figures even I can't have that bad of a connection.

I know a lot of folks are still on dial-up (yes, seriously) so they've probably had to watch videos in low quality. What do you say, Vizzed community? When was the last time you watched a video in 144p?

I'd quite like to learn Japanese. My boyfriend is actually learning Japanese right now, but I've been wanting to learn it myself for a while because I've always wanted to work in the video games industry and the tech industry, and of course both of those have very comfortable business ties with Japan.

Engagement rings and wedding rings are sadistic conspiracies by the companies that make jewelry to trick you into buying their products by guilting you into buying an expensive and meaningless gift for your loved one under a romantic pretense. It's not some ancient tradition or necessity; it's a concept that was invented within the last hundred years when jewelers decided they weren't making enough money.

An engagement is a mutual interest in and agreement to get married. Buying a ring is completely arbitrary. Most people wouldn't buy a ring for a pre-engagement, although such a thing does happen (I wear a promise ring myself). Most people wouldn't buy a ring to signal when they've started dating someone. Engagement is just the point where jewelry companies decided to apply pressure to the men of the world.

Really the only function of an engagement ring is as a signal to hopefuls out there that you're off the market. If you can't afford a fancy ring, but you feel like you should give something, you can find extremely affordable rings on Amazon.com. The one I'm wearing now only cost about $16.

I crack my knuckles a couple of times a day, twice as often for my middle and index fingers because they usually require a second attempt (I use the fist method rather than pushing on them with a hand). I usually only do it when they're stiff, but when I do I make it a point to crack every single knuckle whether or not I have to. Sometimes I'll also crack them to psyche myself out, especially at work because it requires a lot of typing.

I feel like I should tell a cool related story. There's an old wives' tale that cracking your knuckles will give you arthritis, but an awesome scientist decided to prove this theory wrong by only cracking the knuckles on one hand for fifty years. His results? Both hands equally healthy. Myth busted!

RetroGameNinja : It's not Sonic on the Atari. It's a bad video game. I don't give the Atari a handicap for being an old system. I give it credit where credit is due. I gave Sonic 2600 credit for having smooth side-scrolling, but that was its only strength.

If Pokémon were real I would live my life completely normal (people who go out and get their pets to fight to the death have no life) except with an eevee by my side at all times.

"I do not fear death. I was dead for billions of years before I was born, and wasn't in the least inconvenienced by it." - Mark Twain

You guys realize there's more than one British accent, right? There are seriously, like, hundreds.

I have a New England accent right now. It's alright, but I think it's kind of boring. It's sort of what people expect an American to have. My boyfriend has an English television accent, the kind that English people use on television shows. I call it a TV accent because no one in England actually talks like that. I'd choose that accent because it sounds very smart and it's ten times sexier than any French accent could be.

Testing a new layout that I'm working on to be sold on the Vizzed layout store. Based on the game Adventure for the Atari 2600, which I have previously described as my waifu. No scrolling text. Formatted using tables. You guys let me know if this thing messes up on any of your computers / browsers, mkay?

Ugh. I'm sorry for this one, guys.

This is a port of Sonic The Hedgehog for the Atari 2600. Now, you know me. I like it when people try porting newer games to older consoles. It makes an interesting challenge for any homebrew developers out there in the crowd. The problem is that Sonic The Hedgehog is most well-known for fast and high-flying gameplay, and you know just as well as I do that there's no way the Atari is going to manage to emulate that.

I'm going to break formula a little bit and talk about the graphics first. The graphics are okay, but the main problem is that the developer tried too hard to make everything look like original Sonic. Sonic himself is lovingly rendered in about as good detail as you could manage on the 2600, and most of the enemies actually look pretty good, but the consequence is that the sprites are huge and disproportionate. A little more restraint is necessary to do this game right.

The sound is actually really good, and mostly faithful to Sonic The Hedgehog. Naturally, it suffers from compression onto the Atari's sound card, but it actually ends up sounding surprisingly good. I have to give kudos to the developer for that one.

The final dagger in Sonic's heart, however, is the gameplay. Like in Sonic, you run around, and you can curl up into a ball and start rolling to attack enemies by jumping. However, you can not crouch to gain speed or curl into a ball; the only way to curl up is by jumping. You can not go on a loop-de-loop while curled up in a ball, even though you curl up while going on the loop anyway. You will frequently find yourself backing up to pick up speed to make simple jumps or go on loops.

Everything is clunky right down to basic game function. Enemies and powerups disappear as they go off to the left, but if you backtrack until their spawn point goes off to the right, they respawn instantly. This has a two-pronged effect on gameplay: It is criminally easy to exploit the game for rings by walking back and forth, and you will frequently be accosted by the same enemies time and time again while trying to adjust yourself to make a jump.

The levels are super-compressed into a tiny layout by the combination of poor graphics and ridiculous player size, meaning that the platforming suffers and enemies and powerups are more difficult to get to than they need to be. You will frequently miss jumps and be forced to go back to try them again, leading to the problem I mentioned before of enemies constantly respawning. You will also find yourself stuck in a position where you can't return to the path because you've fallen into something or gotten stuck in a wall, and you will get stuck in a wall a lot because the collision detection is simply broken.

The scrolling effect is pretty smooth for the Atari 2600, but that doesn't change the fact that the platforming is awful, the conversion just doesn't work, and the game is impossible to enjoy because the enemies keep respawning. On top of that, there's really only one level split into two halves that just repeats over and over. I don't care if this is a demo, because the demo makes me not want to play the finished product, if the finished product ever has the gall to be released.

For a clunky conversion that insults not just Sonic but the Atari, 1 out of 10.

Summary

Graphics: 3/10

Lovely graphics on the character sprites, but unfortunately they get in the way of the game.

Sound: 8/10

Beautifully rendered sound very faithful to the original game right down to the music.

Addictiveness: 1/10

Only a masochist like me would play this more than once.

Story: No rating

This may be Sonic, but it's still on the Atari.

Depth: 1/10

Depth? What depth? There's one level and it's super easy.

Difficulty: 5/10

Five out of ten only because the controls are so bad you're guaranteed to fall into an unfair number of pits and enemies.

Connecticut resident here. We're allowed to have the small fire crackers and sparklers and stuff. You can buy those by the 40 pack in stores around here, albeit you need ID to prove you're at least 18.

The big whizzzz-wheeeeee-bang fireworks are illegal, but in some areas the cops don't really seem to care. Unless you live in a major city or a residential area, you can pretty much get away with anything. I doesn't help, though, that Willimantic is kind of known for its shootings, so any unexpected -blam!- noise gets noticed.

What if I told you someone made a 3D first-person perspective-based game for the Atari? You'd think I'd gone stark raving mad, right? Yet it was true. CBS Electronics must be full of crazy people, because much larger computers at the time struggled to do what this game accomplishes. I suppose it must be the relatively small scope of the project that made it successful. Well, that and the custom-designed 12kb memory chip installed in the cartridge.

The gameplay is very simple and very easy to get a handle on. At the beginning of each level, you get a little animation of the level being generated. At any point during the game, you can press the button to see a map of the maze, sometimes including the position of monsters. Note that performing actions like changing directions (i.e. walking backward), turning, and looking at the map can only be performed at specific points on the grid, kind of like how some versions of Pac Man don't let you turn until you reach a corner.

Free Tip: The longer you continue on your path without stopping, the faster you'll walk. Use this to your advantage by making your movements as smooth as possible so as to outrun monsters.

As with most maze games of this type in this time period, there are monsters to be avoided. While monsters won't always be visible in the maze due to your limited perspective, you can tell they're nearby when you hear music. This is a very clever and popular method for allowing players to tell when they're about to walk face-first into a trap, and it shows off the technical achievement that is this game.

Obviously your objective is to get out of the maze without being mauled by the ghoulies. This turns out to be a really easy task when you use the map. I found myself regularly getting the mazes right within seconds by taking advantage of the map. It does get harder later on as the map stops telling you where the monsters are, but you can still hear them coming, so I wouldn't say that adds too much difficulty. The game gets really hard later on when it stops revealing the map to you in full at the beginning; you have to map it out yourself. However, you also can't always use that trick where you hug the wall, because the game regularly generates mazes with pillars that will lead you in circles if you try that.

Fun challenge: Try to beat the maze without the map or by making your own map.

One of the key traps in this game is false exit doors. You can't tell which door is the real door until you get the key, which reveals the true exit on your map. This is critical because some doors will teleport you to a random location in the maze, making you lose progress and creating an especially difficult situation if you're not using the map to your advantage.

All in all, the gameplay is fantastically entertaining, but not very challenging. This game's main claim to fame is the graphic and sound gimmicks. How do those hold up?

Well, as I said, the game's 3D first-person perspective is unique and incredibly ground-breaking for its time. I've never seen anything like this for the Atari in my life. Is it beautiful? No. The most detailed sprites are for the enemy monsters, the colors can get a bit ugly at times, and the game tends to overuse the Atari's trademark flashing colors effect. However, the game does look pretty darn good, and for the technical achievement alone I'd say the game deserves a 10.

The sound isn't too groundbreaking either. As I said before, you can tell when a monster is nearby by the sound of music playing, and the music gets louder as monsters approach. I think this is very impressive for the Atari, and it's very effectively used. Other than the monsters, you hear a footstep sound when you move which is surprisingly unintrusive and doesn't annoy the **** out of me. Even if the sound isn't technically impressive, it's very well-designed. My only complaint is the sounds the game plays between levels as it's generating, which are loud and annoying and could have used a little bit more restraint.

The combination of graphics and sound come together very well when a monster is approaching you. Imagine being a kid in 1983 and playing this game for the first time in a darkened room wrapped up in a blanket. You're just about to solve the maze when you hear the sound of a disembodied goblin-dog head coming toward you. You panic and whir around, trying to find out where it's coming from. Then it occurs to you to check your map. Oh my god, it's right behind you! You turn around just in time to see it take the last few steps before gnawing your face off. Game over.

That's why I think this game deserves a 10 out of 10.

Summary

Graphics: 10/10

An important technical achievement at the time, even if it's a little bit too indulgent.

Sound: 9/10

Very effective use of sound without being too annoying, with the important exception of the map generator section between levels.

Addictiveness: 6/10

How addictive this game is depends on what kind of person you are, but I wouldn't count on this game aging well over time.

Depth: 10/10

Randomly generated maze levels? Yes please!

Difficulty: 5/10

Too easy if you take advantage of the in-game map. Gets harder later on when you have to explore the map yourself.

Story: 5/10

It's a maze game on the freaking Atari.

Arbitrary final score:

10/10 Spectacular!

tornadocam : No offense, but I do not believe that you know what you are talking about. An ideal clone has 100% of the genetic material from the original animal. That's the point of the cloning process. If you make a perfect copy of something, you don't get those mutations. Ever. That's why we're looking into cloning technology in the first place: So that we have more controlled livestock.

Reading your argument it sounds to me like you've never actually done any research into this kind of stuff beyond the hearsay you got from your professors in college in 2008. I've been to college, and I can tell you right now that in 10 years everything that my professors taught me will be irrelevant or unreliable. It certainly hasn't helped me find a job.

I gave the example of bananas earlier in this discussion and I mentioned that all modern bananas that are available in stores are of perfectly identical stock from a cloned original host. I don't see any dangerous genetic mutations in bananas recently. Do you?

This is going to sound weird, but Knight Jumper 2600 might turn out to be my favorite game in the Retro Game Room. That's really saying something, because Missile Command, Pitfall!, The Empire Strikes Back... there are some classic games in there, and Adventure is my waifu.

"Well, Crawl, why is it so weird to have a favorite game?"

I'll tell you why: Because this entire game is based on the knight's tour puzzle. For those of you that don't know, a knight's tour is when you put a knight down on a chess board and try to get it to touch every square on the board using only legal moves. The knight can only touch each square once, and for bonus points the knight should end on the same square where he began.


Pictured: a knight performing a knight's tour on a 5x5 board (Source: Wikipedia)

This is not a game where you shoot at space ships. It's not a game where you rescue princesses or slay dragons. It's not a game where you bang Native Americans. This is just a board for you to attempt a knight's tour on.

So how does it work? Well, you start with a board and a knight. Move the knight to where you want to start and press the button. From there, you're simply moving the knight around on the board. Every time you make a legal move, the square will change color. You keep playing until you either fill in the entire board or come to a point where you can't move the knight anymore without moving onto a space where you've already been. You're also not allowed to backtrack; every move you make must start from the last space you filled in.

The gameplay couldn't be simpler. I have nothing else to talk about. The graphics are okay, the sounds are simple enough, there's no story... but the game is rewarding in and of itself because these kinds of puzzles are inherently difficult to solve. Whoever made this game only wanted gamers to be able to have a platform on which to attempt this puzzle.

It kind of sucks that the RGR has no information on this game. There's no description, no developer, not even any screen shots. I don't know whether or not it's a ROM hack, and I don't know whether you can get a cartridge anywhere. This game is just kind of there. It's an enigma, like a tall stranger just wandered into my village, shot up all of the bad guys, and walked away.

Often, in gaming, the best ideas are the simplest. This is a very simple idea, and a very simple puzzle. If you like puzzles and you want a cerebral challenge, add this game to your Atari library. For puzzlers and Chess buffs, 10 out of 10.

Summary

Graphics: 10/10

I won't lie to you, there's not much to look at in this game. However, what is there is rendered well.

Sounds: 5/10

The sounds aren't amazing. You only ever hear noises if you **** up, win, or make a legal move. It's pretty much just bips and beeps, without any music to speak of.

Addictiveness: 10/10

If you like puzzles, you'll find yourself playing this game a lot.

Depth: 10/10

You're allowed to start from anywhere on the board, which means that this game has an uncountable number of combinations and solutions. You can find yourself messing with this game for a long time.

Difficulty: 10/10

How difficult Knight Jumper really is depends on how good you are at solving these kinds of puzzles, but getting a perfect score is very difficult indeed. For an additional challenge, I recommend closing your eyes and picking a random starting position on the board. Good luck.

Story: 5/10

It's freaking Chess.

tornadocam : Well, if it's in a textbook, it must be true. We all know how reliable textbooks are, right? That's how we know that Columbus discovered America before the Vikings or the Indians, the U.S. won World War II completely on its own, and your taste buds are grouped by flavor.

2008 might not seem like a long time ago, but it really is. I was just starting college in 2008, the Higgs Boson had only ever been observed through mathematics, and cloning was almost entirely theoretical except for the case of one sheep who died a week later from complications. People were condemning cloning left and right, not because it was rational, but because that's what scientists do.

Now that science has progressed significantly, I'm going to need a bit more explanation for how having only a 94% DNA match with your parents opens you up to horrific diseases.

tornadocam : What kind of "scientists" are you? Do you do biology? Genetics? I ask because I want to know where you get this figure that clones are "94% of the original" and how that opens them up to harmful mutations and diseases. Natural reproduction doesn't give us anywhere near a ninety-four percent genetic match with our parents, but you don't see people keeling over and dying left and right from simple pathogens.