Hank Chien Reclaims Donkey Kong High Score 122
An anonymous reader writes "If you can say anything about Hank Chien, it's that he evidently doesn't take defeat very well. Sure, he knew not so deep down that his Donkey Kong World Record score wouldn't last forever, but he couldn't have foreseen that it would have been toppled so quickly. Twice, even. But he also knew that more Kong competition would be coming his way; namely Richie Knucklez Kong-Off in March. So Hank had something to prove, and prove he did. Scoring a massive 1,068,000 points in less than three hours, Hank has officially reclaimed the high score in Nintendo’s 1981 arcade classic."
My Hero (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My Hero (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it was on like Donkey Kong (tm)...
Anyway, goes to show that even if you're an old geezer, you still have the reflexes to beat some young punks...
Re:My Hero (Score:5, Interesting)
With Donkey Kong, it's not about reflexes but rather the opposite: anticipating, so you don't run yourself into a situation you can't get out of, and pixel/frame precision, so you jump at exactly the right time and spot.
For high score chasing, judicious use of the powerup is also rather important, and this has to be planned, not done by reflex.
I'm personally not too impressed with Donkey Kong, Frogger and Pac Man scores, cause it's mostly repetitive action.
I'm much more impressed with masters of Defender, which requires reflexes, precision steering, and being able to handle a boatload of buttons. It's fiendishly difficult in its simplicity.
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Have you ever tried playing Robotron? Just two joysticks in place of the boatload of buttons and the levels are randomly generated. The sheer number of enemies you have to handle at once (while collecting people for points to keep you alive) makes for one of the most intense old-school arcades out there. My current MAME obsession.
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Robotron was a favourite of mine.
I remember screwing two Competition Pro joysticks to a sturdy board just for the few games that would use two joysticks.
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Now if you'll excuse me, I have an old sandwich waiting for me on the porch.
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In GTA Chinatown Wars, Mission #33 Dragon-Haul-Z is of this ilk. It seems designed to fry the nerves of adrenalin phreaques with a one-two punch. Most of the pixelbangers complaining about it seem to be 12-year-olds. That'll teach 'em to play a game rated 17+ before they're able to see the joke, let alone get it. If you're not sure who is and who isn't, read the T. "I'm so cool God is my fangirl" doesn't cut it.
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The King of Kong 2: Kong Harder (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The King of Kong 2: Kong Harder (Score:4, Informative)
He actually already had a big meet and greet along with 3 world record attempts scheduled for this coming Saturday here in Chicago.
http://www.logan-hardware.com/ [logan-hardware.com]
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BTW, Logan Hardware is a cool store. Nice people.
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Everything I've read about "The King of Kong" indicates that it's more fiction than fact.
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Everything I've read about "The King of Kong" indicates that it's more fiction than fact.
Well, yeah, it's a documentary.
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Everything I've read about "The King of Kong" indicates that it's more fiction than fact.
I've heard "victims" make the same complaints, that it was a hacked up character assassination of Billy Mitchell and his cronies. Then I watched the supposed unbiased documentary "Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade" and found out that, yes, in fact Billy Mitchell is a twat.
Well done!!! (Score:2, Informative)
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As far as I remember - the movie touched this subject - there's no theoretical limit to the achievable score, but the kill screen usually thwarts each attempt when reaching those heights, doesn't it?
Re:Well done!!! (Score:4, Informative)
But the odds of this happening are probably on a par with winning the lottery many times over. If the PRNG decides a blue barrel is worth 300 then that's 500 points lost and nothing the player can do about it. And the optimum strategy for a theoretical perfect game is probably very different to the optimum strategy for a typical game.
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plus there is the side fact that the PRNG is NOT a true random number generator. So it is quite possible that getting perfect results from it every time is impossible.
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Seems like we have an AC who doesn't understand exponentials.
Suppose the game used a 10Hz tick (it's probablly faster) and at each tick there were 4 possible combinations inputs (there are probablly more). In 3 hours that's 4^36000 = 2^720 > 10^216 (2^10 > 10^3) possible combinations of inputs.
Of course most of those will be stupid but there is still an unimaginablly large number of sane possibilities.
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Suppose the game used a 10Hz tick (it's probablly faster) and at each tick there were 4 possible combinations inputs (there are probablly more). In 3 hours that's 4^36000 = 2^720 > 10^216 (2^10 > 10^3) possible combinations of inputs.
opps sorry those are the figures for one hour. still makes the point though.
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So a Tool-Assisted run may be necessary?
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This is where the risk/reward idea alluded to in the article comes into play. There are play strategies that will maximize your score on average, but are slightly more dangerous. Let's say these work 10% of the time, increasing your score by 20%, and the other 90% of the time they crash and burn. Almost all of the time, this a losing approach. The more conservative player will avoid these, because it means almost all of your games are useless. But eventually, someone playing with that aggressive style
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I don't think there is a possible absolute perfect score, since score depends on number of barrels you jump and barrels you smash with the hammer, but at the same time, the bonus score (earned at the end of the level) is decreased as time goes by, so you can't keep jumping barrels to earn score. (it turns out to be increasingly difficult too)
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It sucks that the producers didn't create a time machine so that he could have been in a movie. "King of Kong" is a hacked up pack of lies.
This why Rome fell (Score:5, Funny)
Rome had bread and circuses, now we have contests for old games. When a civilization has the time to waste on things like this it's the beginning of the end.
Re:This why Rome fell (Score:5, Funny)
Rome had bread and circuses, now we have contests for old games.
And thus we prove that any civilisation with both bread and circuses is pretty much over. They should build that into Civ VI but it might be a bit TOO much realism - "three people in your empire are playing Donkey Kong excessively, you have three rounds to stamp it out or lose the game".
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You should be much more concerned that only a couple of weeks after Black Ops came out, players had spent 300 million man hours playing the game.
Re:This why Rome fell (Score:5, Insightful)
Good illustration. That's 34,000 man-years. 34,000 men for a year, or one man for 34,000 years (i.e. about 500 lifetimes). The pyramids didn't need that. The Apollo missions probably didn't need that. Most of modern physics and mathematics could have been discovered in that (it's like Archimedes still being alive and just as productive right through to the current day, and still only one-sixteenth of the way of the way through his useful working life).
To put it in context, though, going to the toilet takes much more time than that, per person, over the course of a single life (so multiplied by 6 billion, it's quite a lot of total "wasted man-hours"). We waste inordinate amounts of time doing silly things that aren't strictly necessary, too. Productivity can only be measured on a personal level, not a numerical one. Was Alexander Fleming productive enough (or incited enough productivity in others through his discoveries) even if he was also an accomplished glass-blower? (And that actually helped him make further discoveries in unrelated fields). How do you measure something like that? And how much do we waste in actual wars? I bet it's orders-of-magnitude more, given the budget allocated to it (and thus the tax etc. used to generate it, and the work used to generate that, etc. etc. etc.).
Adding it up, it's a waste of time that could theoretically be used doing better things. On a personal level? Fuck off, I want to play Counterstrike sometimes to rest and actually have a life, not be a machine. Both points of view are equally valid. Neither will ever change except in small details. And posting on Slashdot to complain about it, like the OP did, is probably the *greatest* hypocrisy ever. Let's take five minutes to hit buttons to send a comment over thousands of km of copper and infrastructure so that lots of other people can ignore it and nobody ever benefit from it.
Re:This why Rome fell (Score:4, Funny)
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That's 34,000 man-years. 34,000 men for a year, or one man for 34,000 years (i.e. about 500 lifetimes). The pyramids didn't need that.
I'm sorry, you're flat-out wrong. The pyramids took more than 34 thousand man-years to build.
According to Herodotus, the Great Pyramid took 20 years to build and required the labor of 100,000 men. At just 8 hours a day that's 58,440 man-years, but the "builders" probably worked much longer days...
Note: That's just ONE pyramid, not "the pyramids," which would imply all of them.
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At just 8 hours a day that's 58,440 man-years, but the "builders" probably worked much longer days...
Probably not all year round though. They probably stopped to do useful stuff in the appropriate seasons.
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Far too many assumptions:
1) That's accurate (i.e. an Ancient Greek who could judge accurately how many separate people were involved on a 20 year Egyptian project 1500 years before his time without exaggeration)
2) The builder's ALL worked an 8 hour day, every single day, even religious festivals (and there wasn't, say, one man who knew how to do the bottom bits and then slunk off, or only lifted one stone before breaking his back, etc.) during the night, etc. on hard heavy-labour, as did every architect, pr
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What terrible math!
80years * 20,000men = 1,600,000 man years (24hrs, 7 days/wk)
i.e: 533,333 man years (8hrs, 7 days/wk)
i.e. 380,952 man years (8 hrs, 5 days/wk)
If everyone of the 20K workers were sick half of the time:
190,476 man years (8 hrs, 5 days/wk, but not working 50% of the time)
Using your data, the pyramids at Giza took 5.5 times longer to build than people have been playing COD:BO, and that's if they were a bunch of slackers who took a sickie every other day!
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Best. Sentence. Ever.
:)
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The Apollo missions probably didn't need that.
Actually if you look at the total personal budget for the life time of the Apollo missions it actually take considerably more time than 34,000 man years. First you take the actual NASA teams which included the mission staff, engineers, astronauts, support personnel and backup teams. Next you include all of the personnel needed to design, manufacture, transport and assemble all of the equipment. Lastly you have all of the military and recovery personnel.
The best number I have found quotes that more than 4
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Are we talking about civilization or U.S.?
Re:This why Rome fell (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh ... bread and circuses was not the reason Rome fell, just one of many reasons.
And I think you quite miss the point of the effect of "bread and circuses" contributing to the fall of Rome. It was because millions [archive.org] in taxpayer money were being spent on bread and circuses (like a form of dole) for the non-working poor, and this had economic effects (obviously) when combined with other factors.
When the US government starts spending millions of taxpayer money on Donkey Kong contests, then we can worry about it the role old computer games have on the destruction of modern civilization.
The only thing you could say here, really, is that this may be a symptom of overall decay, not a reason.
The economic aspects of Rome are more complex (Score:5, Interesting)
The economy of Rome is even funnier than that, actually.
For a start, it a right-wing paradise of sorts, in that the Senatorial class -- which was non-elected and hereditary by now in the Empire times that you mention -- paid no taxes, although they owned most of the land. Although many also set up merchant enterprises in the name of their freedmen, with them owning most "shares" so to speak and taking most profits... and again paying no tax whatsoever for that either.
As the rich quickly gobbled up more and more of the former free men's farms, essentially more and more of the Roman economy didn't contribute a cent any more to the state.
I would say that the spending of private coins to import stuff from the East was a much more minor factor than the fact that none of those coins would go into taxes anyway.
Imperial Rome almost at no point actually had a sustainable economy per se. It was a robber economy, simply put. They _had_ to keep expanding and plundering new countries, even to keep paying their legions.
Heck, they plundered even their own citizens, as essentially they paid all the wages in overvalued silver coins and demanded the taxes only in gold.
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Imperial Rome almost at no point actually had a sustainable economy per se. It was a robber economy, simply put. They _had_ to keep expanding and plundering new countries, even to keep paying their legions.
Isn't this the same of almost every currency that has been put into existence? We keep have to repaying the always inflating currency debt by exponentially expanding our economy.
Sorta, but not exactly (Score:2)
Well, sorta, but not exactly. The Roman Empire didn't have to expand its economy per se, it had to keep attacking more countries to plunder them. Trajan needed the gold of Dacia to pay for his war in Persia, and so on. When they ran out of places to plunder, the collapse started. Then came a devaluing of coinage of EPIC proportions, attempts at price fixing, enlistment dropped like a rock because the soldiers' wage and "pension" (so to speak) became worth almost nothing, etc.
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The Roman Empire didn't have to expand its economy per se, it had to keep attacking more countries to plunder them.
I can't really see the difference. It had to keep on expanding, either through growth or plunder. How is it any different than, for example, the British Opium Wars with China, the Nixon Shock, the huge debts the United States is racking up with China, or if I'm really cynical, war with Iraq to keep oil trading in American dollars?
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At a basic level, the difference is that in one case it's "growth or plunder", while in Rome's case it had to be "plunder". One has two options, the other has one.
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How is the rich not paying taxes a right-wing paradise?
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OK, I can play this game. You are wrong. No need for examples, references, or anything like that.
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I wouldn't call the 5% inheritance tax of Augustus to be all that substantial, actually, and certainly didn't even put a dent in the Latifundia. And hardly did much to balance the military expenses. In fact it barely almost covered the discharge bonus (think: pension) of soldiers who m
Well, if you count slavery as "creating jobs"... (Score:2)
Well, that is, if you count slavery as "creating jobs". Those latifundia (great estates) were worked almost exclusively with slaves who not only had no freedom and could be crucified on a whim (even freedmen could be reverted to slaves and crucified on a whim, btw), but were often fed bare subsistence ratios or even less than that. There are documented cases where slaves were basically left to forag
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But the government already spends billions on welfare for corporations, which is equally useless.
Fixed that for you.
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Re:This why Rome fell (Score:4, Insightful)
Sod contests for old games. We have popularity contests beamed to your own personal section of the planet so you can judge people remotely using buttons without having to get out of the chair. We have people who've never touched soil eating nutritional balanced, rich, processed food every single day. We have people who spend most of their time tapping buttons to post ignored opinions on global virtual messageboards that nobody ever reads again.
There are any number of ways of not being productive. The better we are at doing things like growing food and producing things that save time, the more time we have to deliberately do nothing at all. 100 years ago, nobody had TIME to spend 8 hours a day updating their friends about what they did that day, even if those friends lived in the same house.
People doing nothing is actually a sign of how easy it is to stay alive with modern equipment and infrastructure and how little knowledge is required to survive in that atmosphere (I have absolutely no idea/experience about how to grow enough food to feed my family... do you?).
That said, I do think that this is hardly "news" even for a geek. So the guy got a new highscore in an old game. Good for him. And he probably spent months dreaming about the damn game, destroying his muscles and turning his mind to mush in order to achieve that "fame". That's his problem. In my entire life, I can't imagine it ever taking more than a second to acknowledge, even if I *was* interested in the exact area we're discussing. But yet I can afford five minutes to say what a waste of time it is. Modern life, eh? Truly wonderful. :-)
Sorry to break your bullshit bubble... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry to break your bullshit bubble, but Rome had its first gladiatorial combats in 310 BC, according to Livy, and yes often accompanied to distributing food to the poor. Not only it wasn't the beginning of the end, but it was followed by its most rapid expansion centuries. In the couple of centuries after those, Rome went from being a debatable leader of a leader of city states spanning barely half of Italy to an empire sprawled all around the Mediterranean, not to mention most of modern France and half of Britain.
If anything, historians from the era tend to agree that sponsoring lavish shows to boost morale actually served well to do just that, and helped Rome rebound after such massive defeats as Canae and emerge more powerful than ever before.
It would be more than 500 years after that, or still almost three centuries even after the peak of the popularity of gladiatorial combats in the 1st century BC, that Rome even started to decline. And almost 800 years after that, in 476 AD that the Western Empire fell.
Even if you want to go for a post hoc, ergo propter hoc [wikipedia.org] fallacy to associate the two, actually Rome fell shortly after they _stopped_ holding gladiatorial combats. So, hmm, maybe actually the bad sign is when you can't even afford to have fun any more?
So, sorry, but linking such shows to Rome's decline is fucking idiotic. If you want to make a historical case, do read some history first.
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Even if you want to go for a post hoc, ergo propter hoc [wikipedia.org] fallacy to associate the two, actually Rome fell shortly after they _stopped_ holding gladiatorial combats. So, hmm, maybe actually the bad sign is when you can't even afford to have fun any more?
So, like, if the Superbowl in the US gets canceled, they are going to Hell in a handbasket?
So, sorry, but linking such shows to Rome's decline is fucking idiotic. If you want to make a historical case, do read some history first.
This is Slashdot. We don't read, we just post. Read history? Hell, most of us don't even bother to read the article summaries.
I hope that you can appreciate that I merely joking . . . but maybe not.
Re:Sorry to break your bullshit bubble... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's certainly more supportable than the opposite "OMG, we're going to hell because some people have fun" theory. Though still in a fallacious way.
But mostly it just shows that if you just hand-pick a pair of events connected only by chronology, you can argue just about anything. E.g., Rome expanded the quickest after they introduced crucifixion (learned from the Carthaginians actually, with the cross-bar being a Roman twist) and imploded the fastest after Constantine abolished crucifixion. So, hmm, maybe that's the real key to building a successful empire ;)
I'm ok with that too, actually, but then really I expect such people to not use pseudo-history for their canned moralizing points.
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Anyway, Donkey Kong...
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At least according to the historical consultant on "Rome" (which I'm watching on DVD, and is set around 44 BC, since it shows the murder of Julius Caesar), there were gladatorial combats, but nothing like what people nowadays imagine until much later. That is, the Coloseum was later. Earlier ones were much smaller, and one shown on the show was small and held in an area built on the forum. (They do describe the di
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Well, buying and training slaves for it was expensive too, so, yes, usually the shows didn't involve whole armies. But larger ones existed too. E.g., since you mention Caesar, he wanted to sponsor a show with so many gladiator pairs that the Senate forced him to reduce it, because it boiled down to a small army of armed men in Rome.
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Come on, it's only a handful of people in the entire world that do this.
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Sure, video games are pointless time wasters, the opium of the people... as oppose to commenting on slashdot, which as we all know, is the last bastion of resistance preventing the downfall of the western world.
"Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted." -John Lennon
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OTOH, if bread and circuses cease to exist, so does civilization.
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I know this is Slashdot, but making babies isn't boring. HAVING them, yes, but making them is quite fun.
gimme a break (Score:2)
In the '20s and '30s they had dancing marathons, to see who could dance the longest.
Eating competitions have gone on for who knows how long.
Even the Inuit have a game where two men stand across from each other and take turns punching each other in the shoulder until one gives up.
Shit's been going on forever. The world hasn't ended yet.
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Yeah, god forbid that anyone actually have some fun and enjoy themselves. We must all be cogs in the glorious machine!
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Please cite even one of these texts.
Also, please check the meaning of "misnomer" in the dictionary.
I tried looking for "misnomer" in the dictionary and I couldn't find it. The closest I could find was "Misnom, Erin", and the definition was "555-0039".
People are always telling me to look things up in the dictionary, but really, I don't think it helps.
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Funny, most historical texts that I've read suggest the real reason that Rome fell was the rampant homosexuality and hedonism.
Then I suggest you read actual history books, rather than the ones put out by Southern Baptist seminaries. Homosexuality and hedonism were common in Rome long before Rome fell. The main causes were (1) vast amounts of wealth in very few hands, (2) constant military aggression, and (3) corruption of various types.
Of course, like you, the Romans wanted to blame something else on their downfall. So, they blamed Christians, much the same way you blame homosexuals, liberals, and anyone else you don't like.
AI solver (Score:1)
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Part of it is already really based on random chance. Since there is a kill screen and the way certain events occur is (somewhat) random, the person with the highest score usually is the one that just got lucky a few more times than the runner up. At the level he, Wiebe, and Mitchell are at, I doubt there is really much of a "skill" difference between them.
They should all get together for a match of Smash Bros. Chien can play Mario, Wiebe can play Donkey Kong, and Mitchell can play Kirby and spend the whole match hiding in a corner mashing the "taunt" button.
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Today the Donkey Kong highscore, tomorrow The World!
Sincerly
MrMarkie
Lead Developer, SkyNet Deveolment Team
Is there a maximum possible DK score? (Score:3)
From watching King of Kong I learned that it has a killscreen (a level that is impossible to beat). Based on that, I've assumed that there is therefore a theoretical maximum score in Donkey Kong.
There are a lot of variables affecting how many points can be scored on each level (bonus timer, how many of Pauline's trinkets Mario picks up, how many hazards he jumps or hammers, etc.) so this isn't as easy to calculate as the maximum possible score in Pac Man is.
Does anyone know what the highest possible score on DK is, or have a rough estimate for how close this new record is to that score?
Re:Is there a maximum possible DK score? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, the 1-1 barrel round is quite different from the 5-1 barrel round. In the latter the timer counts down far faster, so there's less time to points press. On the other hand, you have far more control over the barrels, which makes higher scoring easier (if you ignore that whole 'death' thing).
If I had to make a guess, I'd say there's theoretically hundreds of thousands more points to score. Maybe even break 2 million if the game cooperates?
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What? The article is dated yesterday. The summary is talking about the upcoming competition in March that he was preparing for.
Yeah, they have March every year.
Obligatory (Score:1)
You have to use your hands?? That's a baby's toy!
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You have to use your hands?? That's a baby's toy!
Those kids must have been Kinect fans or something.
I certainly hope the hoverboards will be released according to schedule...
Awesome! (Score:2)
Honestly, I don't care who has the high score as long as it's not Billy Mitchell. I hate that guy with a passion.
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Honestly, I don't care who has the high score as long as it's not Billy Mitchell. I hate that guy with a passion.
Based on King of Kong?
Documentaries lie. In fact, in general, editing lies. It'd probably be best to base hate on first-hand impressions instead of being swayed by drama.
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My view of him is not based on the movie. I guess I probably should have said this first to avoid the assumption.
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My view of him is not based on the movie. I guess I probably should have said this first to avoid the assumption.
Fair enough. For my part I probably should have avoided the assumption.
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My impression does not extend from the movie, no.
When will Google solve Donkey Kong? (Score:2)
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I don't know whether or not he's single, but I highly doubt he lives with his parents. The guy's a plastic surgeon after all.
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Lives with his brother in Manhattan [vgchartz.com], so presumably single. If you live someplace as nice as a NYC apartment, go ahead and cast those stores. Used to live there myself, and everybody I know who has a nice place there doesn't say LOL; not placing my bet on you so far.
Kind of been there done that (Score:2)
I sometimes look to fall asleep on an uncrowded bus when I'm sleep-deprived like usual without alcohol being involved. Like tomorrow, probably - it's 3 AM already. goodnight. :)