Where are the 'Construction Set' Games? 567
"I know that most PC games today have editors where a player can create their own levels and share them but users still need the original software. Even worse, consoles, which have the larger market, don't have enough storage (except maybe for the XBox) and aren't open enough to encourage players to create their own games and share them."
C :I think I see mbishop's point. Legos are still alive and well, but I don't see as much evidence on these types of toys in today's TV commercials. It seems those commercials are more interested in pushing the latest licensed crap instead of pushing toys designed to stimulate your child's own imagination. Of course, a simple Google search may yield a result or two, but that still doesn't answer the real question. Computer-based sets, would be a nice alternative, but nothing beats the real thing where children can use their own hands to create something they can show their paernts. Where have all of the Heathkit's, the chemical experiment toys and the other types of "builder" sets gone, and are they due for a revival, soon?
ZZT Was an awsome game, along the lines of a (Score:2, Interesting)
worlds in ZZT and have great fun. The script editor was kinda klunky, but once you got used to it, it was really powerful
Of course, once you learned how to edit the levels, and you got the unlocker that could unlock the shipped levels, beating the game was pretty easy ;)
Computer based? (Score:2, Interesting)
How about spending hours playing w/roller coaster kits and watching the roller coaster fall upside down time after time because it was just about impossible to make it do a loop.
I used to love building forts, using construx, etc. I was never a fan of Legos (parts were too small?) nor was I a fan of any "computer level builders". Roller Coaster Tycoon lasted about 3 days in my house as a college student. Even w/all the cheats it wasn't fun.
We need to bring back hands on experience. Computers rot your brain
Re:Robocode is pretty cool (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately.... (Score:2, Interesting)
This brings to light a bigger problem:
What ever happened to natural selection? You know, the kid who swallows too many marbles doesn't grow up to have kids of his own?
Why are parents now making kids wear a helmet for everything but jerking off? All of the fun toys had "swallowable parts" so they aren't popular anymore because some parent raised a stink over it...
*steps off soap box*
Money. (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason they don't make any "stand alone construction sets" anymore? Well, for one, the name "___ Construction Set" just isn't cool enough for mainstream consumer. But the biggest reason is money. If you can make a standalone NWN game, the people you distribute it to don't have to buy the original game. Game companies don't want that. They're in business to make money.
My little sister... (Score:3, Interesting)
I am happy to say that my little sister is four and she plays with legos. She is mostly into building cars so they roll the fastest across the floor in my dad's kitchen, but like I said, she's four. I think that proof that this has stimulated her creatively because the other day she was telling me that she had designed and then her mom had helped her cut out all of these pieces to put together to make a 3D basket. It's just a basket, I know. But it seemed amazing to me that a kid so young was designing things in 2D to be put together in 3D.
I can only hope that there are still toys like that available when I have my own kids. I don't have my legos anymore (my mom sold them when I was away for a summer), but maybe I can convince her to keep hers so that the next generation has all of those neat little pieces that always seem so scarce when you really need them... like the ones that transfer the block stack from up/down to right/left. And the pulleys. Must have pulleys.
Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set (Score:5, Interesting)
You could wire flippers, bumpers, everything with your own point system. PBCS would also let you 'paint' your selected parts any of 5± colors including 'erasing' the part. Using 'invisible' bumpers was quite entertaining.
It was also possible to adjust gravity, bounce, and friction of the ball, IIRC.
The coolest feature of all is that you could take your finished game and 'compile' it to run stand-alone! Trading pinball games was great...ah, Apple 2 memories....I also had a program for the Apple 2 called Gamemaker. It let you create simple games like 2600 Pitfall clones and the like. Never got the hang of it....
The best 'Constructon Set' in recent memory was the level editor in Crack Dot Com's sidescroller, 'Abuse'. It used a lisp driven engine to allow you to make levels easier than anything I recall at the time. Just like wiring a simple circuit. (Much like PBCS!)
What's Bill Budge doing these days?
Even the better puzzle games are going (Score:2, Interesting)
Not only were they good puzzle games but they were fun too. I've played quite a few edutainment games that were more painfull than fun but what happened to the fun puzzle games. Is this a lost art?
Baseball (Score:2, Interesting)
C'mon MAN MOD me up. or NOT, oh well....sigh
What happened to Legos? (Score:2, Interesting)
Changes in childhood (Score:2, Interesting)
I never played computer games when I was a kid. The few computers that existed back in the 40s and 50s were reserved for governments and major corporations. :-) The only toys I had were things like Erector Sets (Meccano in Europe), electric trains, chemistry sets, games, toy guns, etc.
Children's play seems much more organized today -- with a concomitant loss of freedom for children. Play dates, T ball, organized sports even for small children. Some time ago in the Washington Post magazine I read an account by a mother who had taken a half time job in order to spend more time with her kids. I felt sorry for everyone -- their schedules basically precluded free time, the chance to explore on one's own, etc.
I don't necessarily blame computer games -- the games in many ways reflect our current society. My recreational computer use reflects my life -- some art, some facilitation of my athletic, social and political endeavors. Others' use of computers I expect reflects their lives. But still, I consider these developments to be less than healthy for our society and for us as individuals.
Bridge Building (Score:2, Interesting)
The best part about this is that it is REALLY EASY to use and understand.
My 7 year old daughter plays with it, and it is not suprising to hear her make comments (I made a bride with the same kind of triangles) or hear her ask questions about a bridge ( Why isn't this bridge too tall with the supports as wide as they are?).
This game is great. I reccomend it.
flogger
My favorite (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:For this simple reason (Score:5, Interesting)
The first machines I used in school were Commodores and all of the software was set up to boot from floppy. There was a "command line," but we only used three of those commands:
LOAD *,8,1
LIST
RUN SUMMERGAMES
I have a more detailed OS experience at a cash machine.
My house had macintoshes since I was very young. I learned how to program using Pascal to program "Core Wars" bots on my Classic SE. I used to write reports in AppleWorks and my earliest online experience was a graphical CompuServe.
I didn't learn DOS until midway through high school...and didn't learn un*x until college. For years, the only commands i knew, the only commands I needed, were cd, ls, cat, pico, man and pine. Did I learn how to actually think, with all these GUIs doing shit for me and such a limited shell vocabulary? Well, I've an MA in Rhetorical Theory and a BS in Software Engineering, and they certainly didn't come in a bag of Doritos.
Any idiot can be taught to bang away commands at a shell, same as any idiot can be taught to click away at a screen. Intelligence comes from the ability to combine your banging or clicking into a useful string of actions that produces results. A shell command line may feel more elite and productive because it doesn't have any pretty picutres, but it's certainly not proof of intellect...CAD programs have been using GUIs forever and nobody claims that architects can't think.
However, to look at some of the perl code I've seen, I would make that assertation of certain sysadmins. One line simplicity, indeed. Until you try and debug it!
Here's one game that does (Score:4, Interesting)
The game let's you build not only personal levels for yourself and to share with friends, but also allows you to post your favorite personal levels into a TQ Universe where other members can play your games as well.
Additionally, TQworld has begun to open up the internal language (the forum on the TQworld site has this information beginning to appear). Since the games are stored on your hard drive in clear-text format, you can tweak them (or completely rewrite/design new ones) in your favorite editor.
Re:Chemical Experiment Toys (Score:4, Interesting)
If someone were to try and use the court system to steal all of my money without a good reason, I starting to think that it should be treated in the same manor as a bank robber with a gun - It's ok to defend yourself any way possible.
Two Classics . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Chipwits, for the original Mac, allowed you to program a robot by hooking together various bits of code that sort of resembled ICs. A google search turned up a Chipwits web site [chipwits.com], but it doesn't appear to have anything to say at this point.
Another was "The Incredible Machine", where you solved problems by putting together various components to build Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions. It appears that some version of this game is still in existence, see this page from Sierra [incrediblemachine.net]
Now I may have to actually try the new IM.
Computer-based set "beats the real thing" (Score:2, Interesting)
Cliff wrote: Computer-based sets, would be a nice alternative, but nothing beats the real thing where children can use their own hands to create something they can show their paernts.
I'd like to argue with that. Software is so much more flexible and maleable than things in the real world. You build a robot arm with LEGO Technics and it doesn't work what do you do? You have to pull it apart to fix a small bug. Then you get it working and you want to add a nice little new feature. What do you do? You pull it apart to enhance it. Software is magical in that you can change it without disassembly and reassembly.
To my way of thinking there are lots of great software based construction kits and many have been mentioned in this thread (e.g. Pinball Construction Kit, ClickTeam's Klik and Play, Incredible Machine, StageCast Creator, and SimTunes) but the ones mentioned are either not universal Turing Machines or are universal only in a theoretical sense (way too awkward to do some things). (Or are professional programming languages that are really not kid-friendly.)
What gets me excited are universal construction kits. Examples of this are Squeak (and its EToys), Agentsheets, Logo, Boxer, and my ToonTalk. These are all kid-friendly program development environments. Software-based special purpose construction kits are fine, but general-purpose ones give kids access to the true power and magic of computers.
And of course kids can "show their parents" software they have built. And the parents are likely to be more impressed than a LEGO construction.
The Incredible Machine (Score:2, Interesting)
While it's great to solve the puzzles to put the ball in the bucket, start the contraption, turn on the light, etc., I also ended up spending considerable time constructing "Loony Tunes" style contraptions that rolled the ball, triggering the fan that blew the balloon, that triggered the mouse trap that cut the string, that dropped the ball that hit the cat.
Great fun building stuff here.
Re:Here's one game that does (Score:3, Interesting)
Man, you just made my day! I used to absolutely love playing 'tq' on my old SGI, but finally gave up on finding a port from IRIX. I had no idea that anyone had continued its development...
Re:Chemical Experiment Toys (Score:2, Interesting)
When I was in high school my friends and I spent a lot of time, um, "exploring the properties of redox reactions". I even bragged about it in the local newspaper (proudly stating that we "never blew anything up that wasn't on purpose."). But I realize that if I had done those same things 10 years later I would have been expelled (at best), and probably arrested. Better safe than smart, I suppose.
If you know where to look, you can find them (Score:2, Interesting)
I work at a public library and I have to catalog all of the non-book materials (CD-ROM's, videocassettes, DVD's, etc.) that we get. Among these I have to catalog a zillion children's CD-ROM's, which seem to be aimed at every grade level and every subject in existence, including reading, music, math, construction, etc. Admittedly, I think a lot of them are rather linear math quiz type things, but quite a few seem to have a creative element. My library has 153 children's CD-ROM titles which are all educational games, so listing them all here would be a boring exercise, but some titles include:
I never really look at the things in detail unless someone complains it's not working, but they are all very popular and are always getting checked out. They are geared towards a much younger age-group than NeverWinter Nights and Diablo (more my fare), but so was the Music Construction Set in it's day. I would imagine if someone gave me one of the creative games I used to play and a computer to run it on, it would be entertaining for a short time as I was hit by a wave of nostalgia, but I don't know how long I could maintain interest, as my expectations from computer games have changed.
It is my impression that for the 7-13 year old crowd, these kinds of games exist and are as fun as they were when I was that age even now, however.
Re:Unfortunately.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's [cpsc.gov] a bunch of recalled toys
Some of the cool ones I saw before I got bored:
Puppettime - 3d story construction set (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Puppettime - 3d story construction set (Score:1, Interesting)
lazy link for mirrored page [earthorbitdesign.com]
Re:Mods? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never worked on or tweaked a mod so my impressions may be far from the truth. However, I was under the impression that creating a mod took a certain degree of coding talent (without getting in to exactly what degree of talent was displayed by your favorite / most despised mod). If creating a mod is much easier than basic (or not-so-basic) coding, then I would find it easier to accept the argument that the mod scene sits in the same category as the old Construction Set series.
Re:Mods? (Score:2, Interesting)
-Kevin
C64 Shoot `em Up Construction Set (Score:1, Interesting)
Problem is that most people don't want to invest the time or energy (or posess the design skills) to make good use of a "Construction Set". It's far too geeky to appeal even to the already-semi-geeky video game-loving masses. I think probably this genre has evolved into things like "Roller Coaster Tycoon" or "Sim City 2000".