"Moria, along with Hack (1984) and Larn (1986), is considered to be the first roguelike game, and the first to include a town level," according to Wikipedia.

And long-time Slashdot reader neoRUR remembers: At the dawn of the computer era there were some games that borrowed from Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons to create an experience like no other. It brought you into the world and you could be one of those characters, roam around, fight monsters, level up your characters. One of the more popular ones that would add to that was Moria (As in the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings) You quest was to kill the Balrog at the end.

This week one of the creators, Robert Alan Koeneke, who wrote Moria because he wanted a Rogue like game to play while at school at the University of Oklahoma, passed away. It has inspired many games and RPG's since.

I played Moria on the Amiga for hours and hours. His contributions to computer game history will always be remembered.
"Koeneke was working on version 5.0 of Moria when he left the university for a job," remembers NME, "though he made Moria open source so others could work on the project." In an email posted by Koeneke to a mailing list for Angband (a subsequent popular roguelike derived from Moria) in 1996, the developer reflected on his legacy.

"I have since received thousands of letters from all over the world from players telling about their exploits, and from administrators cursing the day I was born... I received mail from behind the iron curtain (while it was still standing) talking about the game on VAX's [an early range of computers] (which supposedly couldn't be there due to export laws). I used to have a map with pins for every letter I received, but I gave up on that...!"

While Koeneke never developed another video game, his influence on the gaming industry cannot be understated as his work directly inspired games like the Diablo series.

Those interested in playing the original Moria can do so here.

An anonymous reader writes: When the Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) debuted in 2010, the kill screen was the game's final, unbeatable boss. Players pushed to get the highest score possible before level 29, at which point the game's pieces started falling at double speed. It seemed humanly impossible to keep up with the falling shapes, which would pile up on players' screens and spell death for their game. But in the past four years, what once seemed an impossibility has become the norm in competitive classic Tetris. In the 1989 NES version of Tetris, which is still standard at competitive tournaments, players make it well into level 30 and beyond. This new generation of talent, made up of mostly teenagers, has not only breathed new life into a 30-year-old game, but also completely upended expectations of what's possible within it.

From the beginning, competitive players of classic Tetris tried to push the game past what its developers imagined possible. The first frontier of competitive Tetris was the maxout, when the score was pushed past 999,999 and the game would no longer show an accurate score. Because playing in level 29 and beyond was out of the question, players aimed to break 1 million before the game would inevitably beat them. This meant maintaining "maxout pace" where players would complete enough "Tetrises" (when a player drops a straight I-block vertically, clearing four lines simultaneously and earning more points than single line clears) before the kill screen.

In 2010, players organized the first CTWC, largely in response to the world's first indisputable maxout, accomplished by Harry Hong (other players like Thor Aackerlund and Jonas Neubauer claimed to have maxed out as well, but the proof wasn't definitive). The desire to find out who the best Tetris player in the world was on, and soon, Neubauer began building a very strong case for himself. In the final match of this 2010 tournament, Neubauer, who went on to win seven of the first eight world championships, beat Hong, the only player to interrupt Neubauer's reign by beating him in 2014. Over the first eight years of CTWC, maxing out before level 29 shifted from being an impossible frontier to a badge of honor for the game's elite. It was still a notable accomplishment until the scene began to shift in 2018, when Joseph Saelee, a then-16-year-old from Visalia, California, began dismantling records and set the stage for a new generation's influence on the game. "In March 2018, only five months after picking up the game, Saelee maxed out for the first time," reports Polygon. "As The New Yorker reported, he set records for most lines cleared in one game and fastest time to 300,000 points. Then he started to achieve what other experienced players had deemed impossible. He survived past the game's kill screen, becoming the first player to make it to level 31 and 32 -- then 33 through 35."

Switzerland-based software developer Jean-Christophe Collet writes: A long time ago I got involved with the development of NetHack, a very early computer role playing game, and soon joined the DevTeam, as we've been known since the early days. I was very active for the first 10 years then progressively faded out even though I am still officially (or semi-officially as there is nothing much really "official" about NetHack, but more on that later) part of the team.

This is how, as we were closing on the 35th anniversary of the project, I learned that NetHack was being added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art of New York. It had been selected by the Architecture and Design department for its small collection of video games, and was going to be displayed as part of the Never Alone exhibition this fall.
From its humble beginnings as a fork of the 1982 dungeon-exploring game "Hack" (based on the 1980 game Rogue), Nethack influenced both Diablo and Torchlight, Collet writes. But that's just the beginning: It is one of the oldest open-source projects still in activity. It actually predates the term "open-source" (it was "free software" back then) and even the GPL by a few years. It is also one of the first, if not the first software project to be developed entirely over the Internet by a team distributed across the globe (hence the "Net" in "NetHack").

In the same spirit, it is one of the first projects to take feedback, suggestions, bug reports and bug fixes from the online community (mostly over UseNet at the time) long, long before tools like GitHub (or Git for that matter), BugZilla or Discord were even a glimmer of an idea in the minds of their creators....

So what did I learn working as part of the NetHack DevTeam?

First, I learned that you should always write clean code that you won't be embarrassed by, 35 years later, when it ends up in a museum....
Collet praises things like asynchronous communication and distributed teams, before closing with the final lesson he learned. "Having fun is the best way to boost your creativity and productivity to the highest levels.

"There is no substitute.... I am incredibly grateful to have been part of that adventure."

"Researchers at MIT have discovered an unfixable vulnerability in Apple Silicon that could allow attackers to bypass a chip's 'last line of defense'," writes the Apple Insider blog, "but most Mac users shouldn't be worried." More specifically, the team at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory found that Apple's implementation of pointer authentication in the M1 system-on-chip can be overcome with a specific hardware attack they've dubbed "PACMAN." Pointer authentication is a security mechanism in Apple Silicon that makes it more difficult for attackers to modify pointers in memory. By checking for unexpected changes in pointers, the mechanism can help defend a CPU if attackers gain memory access.... The flaw comes into play when an attacker successfully guesses the value of a pointer authentication code and disables it.

The researchers found that they could use a side-channel attack to brute-force the code. PACMAN echoes similar speculative execution attacks like Spectre and Meltdown, which also leveraged microarchitectural side channels. Because it's a flaw in the hardware, it can't be fixed with a software patch.

[A]ctually carrying out the PACMAN attack requires physical access to a device, meaning the average Mac user isn't going to be at risk of exploit. The flaw affects all kinds of ARM-based chips — not just Apple's. The vulnerability is more of a technological demonstration of a wider issue with pointer authentication in ARM chips, rather than an issue that could lead to your Mac getting hacked.
MIT has made more information available at the site PACMANattack.com — including answers to frequently asked questions. Q: Is PACMAN being used in the wild?
A: No.
Q: Does PACMAN have a logo?
A: Yeah!
The MIT team says their discovery represents "a new way of thinking about how threat models converge in the Spectre era." But even then, MIT's announcement warns the flaw "isn't a magic bypass for all security on the M1 chip." PACMAN can only take an existing bug that pointer authentication protects against, and unleash that bug's true potential for use in an attack by finding the correct PAC. There's no cause for immediate alarm, the scientists say, as PACMAN cannot compromise a system without an existing software bug....

The team showed that the PACMAN attack even works against the kernel, which has "massive implications for future security work on all ARM systems with pointer authentication enabled," says Ravichandran. "Future CPU designers should take care to consider this attack when building the secure systems of tomorrow. Developers should take care to not solely rely on pointer authentication to protect their software."
TechCrunch obtained a comment from Apple: Apple spokesperson Scott Radcliffe provided the following: "We want to thank the researchers for their collaboration as this proof of concept advances our understanding of these techniques. Based on our analysis as well as the details shared with us by the researchers, we have concluded this issue does not pose an immediate risk to our users and is insufficient to bypass operating system security protections on its own."

An anonymous reader writes: Atari pulled the plug on the release of Marble Madness II almost exactly 31 years ago after the follow up to their hit game failed to perform well in location tests. For decades the only way to play this now sought after rarity has been on one of a handful of known surviving units when it was exhibited by a private collector at annual events.

That has all changed after the ROM mysteriously appeared on The Internet Archive and was subsequently emulated by MAME developer David Haywood. Ars Technica provides background information on this story and talks with a number of the digital archaeologists involved. They discuss the events that unfolded, speculate as to why the game may have failed, and look at what it means to the community.

What did you think of Twitter Data Dash?

The Guardian describes it as "a Super Nintendo-style browser game that recaps Twitter's private policy."

And the Verge applauds the game — released Wednesday — for its "delightful pixel art aesthetic." "Welcome to PrivaCity!" reads a description of the game on the site. "Get your dog, Data, safely to the park.

"Dodge cat ads, swim through a sea of DMs, battle trolls, and learn how to take control of your Twitter experience along the way...."

The game itself is a pretty straightforward side-scrolling platformer. Each level is themed around what I can best describe as Twitter Things — one features cats wearing ad boards, another has you avoiding trolls — and your goal is to collect five bones as quickly as you can. If you get the bones, the game will explain something about Twitter's privacy settings related to that level and even offer a button linking to Twitter's settings. When you beat the cat ad level, for example, you'll see a message about how Twitter customizes your experience on the platform and points to where you can turn personalized ads on or off....

Twitter introduced the game as part of a bigger push around its privacy policy, which the company has rewritten. "We've emphasized clear language and moved away from legal jargon," Twitter said on its Safety account.
Gizmodo calls the game "adorable," but also "buggy". And they also have some quibbles with its ultimate message: It's a bit rich that Twitter made a game about avoiding faceless advertisers when the platform is actively doing everything it can to make ads tougher to avoid....

[A]fter watching our personas bounce from level to level with our lil blue dog in tow, it became clear that this game is less for us — or any Twitter user, really — and more for the company itself. It's a way to paper over uncomfortable topics like "privacy" and "consent" and "ownership of our personal data" with a lil blue dog, collecting lil bones by hopping across lil stages. Just promise you won't think about where those bones came from in the first place.

"What can scientists learn by teaching two monkeys to play Pac-Man?" asks the South China Morning Post.

"Quite a lot it seems, according to researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences." A team of neuroscientists from the academy said they used the classic video game to look at the way the primates made decisions. The result was the first study of its kind to show that monkeys were capable of formulating strategies to simplify a sophisticated task, they said. "To our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study that shows animals develop and use strategies for problem solving," Yang Tianming, corresponding author of the study, said on Twitter. The results were published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal eLife last month.

The scientists used artificial intelligence to come up with a statistical model to find out whether the monkey's behaviour could be broken down into a set of strategies.... The monkeys were then trained to use a joystick to manoeuvre Pac-Man around a maze to collect snack pellets and avoid ghosts. The monkeys received fruit juice as a reward instead of earning points. Yang and his colleagues found the monkeys understood the basic elements of the game because they tended to choose the direction with the largest local reward and knew how to react to ghosts in different modes.... More importantly, the researchers found that the monkeys adopted a hierarchical solution for the Pac-Man game by using one dominant strategy and only focusing on a subset of game aspects at a time.

The researchers said the study was significant because it was quantitative and examined complex tasks.... The study said the findings paved the way for further understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying sophisticated cognitive functions.
Plus, teaching monkeys to play Pac-Man sounds like fun.

Though I wonder how they feel about Donkey Kong....

"Digital purchases are mysteriously expiring on classic PlayStation consoles," Kotaku reports, "rendering a random assortment of games unplayable."

The glitch is "affecting users' ability to play games they ostensibly own." Upon re-downloading the PSOne Classic version of Chrono Cross, for instance, Twitter user Christopher Foose was told the purchase expired on December 31, 1969, preventing him from playing the game on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. GamesHub editor Edmond Tran described a similar issue. Trying to boot up Chrono Cross on PlayStation 3, Tran said, gave him the same expiration date and time, only adjusted for his location in Australia. Tran did mention, however, that he was able to download the PSOne Classic from his library and play just fine on Vita despite the game's apparent delisting from the handheld's store.

While at first this felt like an attempt at encouraging Chrono Cross fans to purchase the new Radical Dreamers remaster, Kotaku quickly found evidence of this same problem occurring with different games. Chrono Cross worked just fine for content creator Words, but not its spiritual predecessor Chrono Trigger, the license for which somehow lapsed 40 years before the game was added to the PSOne Classic library.

Steve J over on Twitter asked PlayStation directly why the expiration date for his copy of Final Fantasy VI was changed to 1969, but never received a response....

The only potential explanation I've seen for this issue thus far involves what's known as the "Unix epoch," or the arbitrary date early engineers designated as the beginning of the operating system's lifespan. Some bug or glitch on Sony's backend may be defaulting PlayStation game license expiration dates to the Unix epoch, essentially telling them they can't be played after midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.

"Pong on a Commodore 64 is one thing... but Pong in a single C64 sprite? That's uncharted territory," writes Slashdot reader segaboy81.

Neowin reports: The Commodore 64 is an iconic machine. For many of us boomers, it was our introduction to programming... Josip Retro Bits is a YouTube channel that specializes in fun challenges on old hardware like the Commodore 64. In an older video, Josip creates a game of Pong using Basic. On the surface, this doesn't sound very interesting, but it's a real challenge because Basic is very limited when compared to writing machine code. Basically, the C64 is perfectly capable of a game like Pong, but not really in Basic. Spoiler alert: he does it. However, a commenter on that video had a novel idea. How about creating an entire game of Pong in a single spite?
That's a 24 x 21 pixels object. ("It can be seen as a bigger programmable character that can be moved on hardware on steps of one pixel," explains one tech blog.) And another spoiler alert: he does it again.

Here's the repository for the "Tiny Pong" code. It's written in C, with functions like drawScreen() and batSound().

And about 18 minutes into the video, he not only plays a game of Pong inside the sprite — he simultaneously makes that sprite move around the screen like the ball in a game of Pong.

IEEE Spectrum has republished an article from nearly 40 years ago remembering one of the long-forgotten secrets of the classic video game Space Invaders.

It's about that iconic descending musical notes accompanying the onslaught of the aliens... The more aliens a player shot, the faster they approached; their drumbeat quickened, the tension mounted. Ironically, says Bill Adams, director of game development for Midway Manufacturing Co., of Chicago, Ill., which licensed Space Invaders for sale in the United States, these features of the game were accidental. "The speeding up of the space invaders was just a function of the way the machine worked," he explained. "The hardware had a limitation — it could only move 24 objects efficiently. Once some of the invaders got shot, the hardware did not have as many objects to move, and the remaining invaders sped up. And the designer happened to put out a sound whenever the invaders moved, so when they sped up, so did the tone."

Accident or not, the game worked. As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of the book Video Invaders, more than 4 billion quarters had been dropped into Space Invaders games around the world — "which roughly adds up to one game per earthling."
But Space Invaders also enjoyed at least one special home-grown revival earlier this month. One hobbyist used an Arduino Pro Micro board to build their own Space Invaders arcade cabinet that's just 3.15 inches tall (80 millimeters).

Made from thin hand cut plywood with pinhead joysticks, "Its Microchip ATmega328 microcontroller contains a processor running at 16MHz," reports the projects site Hackster.io, "which is far faster than the processor in the original Space Invaders arcade cabinet."

Three research scientists at DeepMind Technologies teamed up with former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik to "explore what variations of chess would look like at superhuman level," according to their new article in Communications of the ACM. Their paper argues that using neural networks and advanced reinforcement learning algorithms can not only surpass all human knowledge of chess, but also "allow us to reimagine the game as we know it...."

"For example, the 'castling' move was only introduced in its current form in the 17th century. What would chess have been like had castling not been incorporated into the rules?"

AfterAlphaZero was trained to play 9 different "variants" of chess, it then played 11,000 games against itself, while the researchers assessed things like the number of stalemates and how often the special new moves were actually used. The variations tested:

- Castling is no longer allowed
- Castling is only allowed after the 10th move
- Pawns can only move one square
- Stalemates are a win for the attacking side (rather than a draw)
- Pawns have the option of moving two squares on any turn (and can also be captured en passant if they do)
- Pawns have the option of moving two squares -- but only when they're in the second or third row of squares. (After which they can be captured en passant )
- Pawns can move backwards (except from their starting square).
- Pawns can also move sideways by one square.
- It's possible to capture your own pieces.


"The findings of our quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate the rich possibilities that lie beyond the rules of modern chess."

AlphaZero's ability to continually improve its understanding of the game, and reach superhuman playing strength in classical chess and Go, lends itself to the question of assessing chess variants and potential variants of other board games in the future. Provided only with the implementation of the rules, it is possible to effectively simulate decades of human experience in a day, opening a window into top-level play of each variant. In doing so, computer chess completes the circle, from the early days of pitting man vs. machine to a collaborative present of man with machine, where AI can empower players to explore what chess is and what it could become....

The combination of human curiosity and a powerful reinforcement learning system allowed us to reimagine what chess would have looked like if history had taken a slightly different course. When the statistical properties of top-level AlphaZero games are compared to classical chess, a number of more decisive variants appear, without impacting the diversity of plausible options available to a player....

Taken together, the statistical properties and aesthetics provide evidence that some variants would lead to games that are at least as engaging as classical chess. "Chess's role in artificial intelligence research is far from over..." their article concludes, arguing that AI "can provide the evidence to take reimagining to reality."

There may still be cabinets in rows with flashing lights and electronic sounds — but Polygon reports a historic change in the world of videogame arcades: Even though arcades all over the world have been in a steady decline over the past 20 years, owing to the ubiquity of console and PC gaming, they've kept a fairly major place in Japan's gaming culture. However, in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, even Japan's arcades started to falter. In late 2020 Sega sold 85% of its shares in the company's arcades, which are run by the Sega Entertainment division, to Genda. Now, as new variants of COVID-19 crop up and the arcade business continues to struggle, Sega has sold the remaining shares to Genda as well, according to Eurogamer and Tojodojo.

Sega's arcades will be renamed GiGO throughout Japan, according to a tweet from Genda chief executive Takashi Kataoka.
"It's worth noting that although Sega's Entertainment business ran its arcade locations, the company manufactured and sold arcade machines themselves separately and will likely continue to do so," reports Video Games Chronicle.

And "While it is sad to see an era of Sega's history come to an end, this doesn't mean Sega will stop making actual arcade games," notes the Metro, which points out that Sega "has continued to supply arcades with new games right up to the present day."

But Syfy Wire notes the news comes "after a remarkable 56 years maintaining a coin-operated gaming presence from its native Japan." In memory Eurogamer shared it editor-in-chief's posts about visiting Tokyo's iconic arcade and anime district Akihabara.

"On Friday, needing just one point against Ian Nepomniachtchi to defend his world champion status, Magnus Carlsen closed the match out with three games to spare, 7.5-3.5," ESPN reports. "He's been the No 1 chess player in the world for a decade now...

"In a technologically flat, AI-powered chess world where preparation among the best players can be almost equal, what really makes one guy stand out with his dominance and genius for this long...? American Grandmaster and chess commentator Robert Hess describes Carlsen as the "hardest worker you'll find" both at the board and in preparation. "He is second-to-none at evading common theoretical lines and prefers to outplay his opponents in positions where both players must rely on their understanding of the current dynamics," Hess says...

At the start of this year, news emerged of Nepomniachtchi and his team having access to a supercomputer cluster, Zhores, from the Moscow-based Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. He was using it for his Candidates tournament preparation, a tournament he went on to win. He gained the challenger status for the World Championship and the Zhores supercomputer reportedly continued to be a mainstay in his team. Zhores was specifically designed to solve problems in machine learning and data-based modeling with a capacity of one Petaflop per second.... Players use computers and open-source AI engines to analyze openings, bolster preparation, scour for a bank of new ideas and to go down lines that the other is unlikely to have explored.

The tiny detail though is, that against Carlsen, it may not be enough. He has the notoriety of drawing opponents into obscure positions, hurling them out of preparation and into the deep end, often leading to a complex struggle. Whether you have the fastest supercomputer on your team then becomes almost irrelevant. It comes down to a battle of intuition, tactics and staying power, human to human. In such scenarios, almost always, Carlsen comes out on top. "[Nepomniachtchi] couldn't show his best chess...it's a pity for the excitement of the match," he said later, "I think that's what happens when you get into difficult situations...all the preparation doesn't necessarily help you if you can't cope in the moment...."

Soon after his win on Friday, Carlsen announced he'd be "celebrating" by playing the World Rapid and Blitz Championships in Warsaw, a fortnight from now. He presently holds both those titles...
The article also remembers what happened in 2018 when Carlsen was asked to name his favorite chess player from the past. Carlsen's answer?

"Probably myself, like, three or four years ago."

"Billy Mitchell always has a plan," said Billy Mitchell in the 2007 documentary about Donkey Kong high scores, The King of Kong.

And he tweeted the phrase again Wednesday. GameSpot explains why. "Billy Mitchell, the professional gamer and hot sauce purveyor who rose to fame for setting several retro video game high scores, is preparing for a return to court." As reported by Axios, the U.S. appeals court gave Mitchell permission to proceed with his defamation suit against Twin Galaxies, the online video game leaderboard website. In case you missed the legal tussle, the whole saga began when Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records stripped Mitchell of his several of world records for Pac-Man and Donkey Kong after he was accused of using emulation devices to earn his scores instead of authentic arcade machines, as was required for these world record attempts. While Guinness would later reverse its decision, Twin Galaxies has so far refused to reinstate Mitchell's records.

Mitchell would file a defamation suit against Twin Galaxies in 2019, while the site itself fought back with an "anti-strategic lawsuit against public participation" — more commonly known as a SLAPP motion — response, a legal move designed to have frivolous lawsuits dismissed from court and prevent parties from being silenced, as spotted by Kotaku. This week's ruling by the State of California's Second court has stated that Mitchell and his legal team have enough material to continue the lawsuit.

Whether Mitchell and his team actually stand a chance of winning the case is another matter entirely...
Mitchell also tweeted the exact wording of the court's decision, starting with the words "Because Mitchell showed a probability of prevailing on his claims, the trial court properly denied the anti-SLAPP motion."

A newspaper in Austin, Texas shares the story behind a cult-classic videogame, the 1985 Macintosh shareware game "Cap'n Magneto."

It was the work of Al Evans, who'd "decided to live life to the fullest after suffering severe burn injuries in 1963" at the age of 17. Beneath the surface, "Cap'n Magneto" is a product of its creator's own quest to overcome adversity after a terrible car crash — an amalgamation of hard-earned lessons on the value of relationships, being an active participant in shaping the world and knowing how to move on... "Whether I was going to survive at all was very iffy," Evans said. "The chance of me living to the age of 28 or 30 was below 30% or something like that." Regardless of how much time he had left, Evans said he refused to let his injuries hold him back from living his life to the fullest. He would live his life with honesty, he decided, and do his best to always communicate with others truthfully. "I wasn't going to spend the next two years of my life dorking around different hospitals. So I said what's the alternative?" Evans said...

To float his many hobbies and interests, however, Evans knew he had to make money. In addition to doing work as a graphic designer and a translator, he picked up computer programming, which opened his eyes to a digital frontier that allowed for the creation of new worlds with the stroke of a keyboard. When he realized the technical capabilities of the Macintosh — the first personal computer that had a graphics-driven user interface and a built-in mouse function — Evans said he set out to build a world that could marry storytelling and graphics. With the help of his wife Cea, Evans created his one and only computer game: "Cap'n Magneto."

"I really wanted to write a good game, and I definitely think it was that," Evans said...

Australia-based gaming historian, author and journalist Richard Moss says, "What really marked it as different, though, was that the alien speech, once ungarbled by a tricorder item that players had to find, would be spoken aloud through the Mac's built-in speech synthesizer and written on-screen in comic-style speech bubbles," Moss said. "And unlike most role playing games of the time, every character you'd meet in the game could be friendly and helpful or cold and dismissive or aggressive and hostile — depending on a mix of random chance and player choice...."

With "Cap'n Magneto," Evans said he wanted to make sure that players could befriend the non-playable alien characters that the hero encounters. Though the game is beatable without their help, it is significantly easier with the help of allies. A reality in which everyone was an enemy, to Evans, was simply dishonest.

"That doesn't reflect the game of life, you know? Some people, well, most people actually, are probably pretty friendly," he said.
35 years after its release, Evans — now 75 years old — received a message on Facebook informing him that the game was still being played — but no one could finish it because the built-in "nagware" required payments that couldn't be completed.

That problem has finally been fixed, and long-time Slashdot reader shanen now shares the web site where the full game can finally be downloaded.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A trio of researchers from Monash University and Deakin University has found that teaching children to play chess can reduce their aversion to risk. In their paper published in Journal of Development Economics, Asad Islam, Wang-Sheng Lee and Aaron Nicholas describe studying the impact of learning chess on 400 children in the U.K. The researchers found that most of the children experienced a decrease in risk aversion in a variety of game playing scenarios. They also noticed that playing chess also led to better math scores for some of the students and improvements in logic or rational thinking.

The researchers note that the game of chess is very well suited to building confidence in risk taking when there is reason to believe it might improve an outcome. In contrast, students also learned to avoid taking risks haphazardly, finding that such risks rarely lead to a positive outcome. They [...] line between good and poor risk-taking is especially evident in chess, which means that the more a person plays, the sharper their skills become. The researchers also found that the skills learned during chess playing appeared to be long lasting -- most of the children retained their decrease in risk aversion a full year after the end of their participation in the study. The researchers [...] did not find any evidence of changes in other cognitive skills, such as improvements in grades other than math or general creativity.

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: After years of growing technical irrelevance and security concerns, the Flash browser plug-in will reach the end of the road on January 12 when Adobe blocks its ability to display content. The web will survive just fine. But there's a huge library of old Flash games — some of them quirky, interesting, and worth preserving. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman wrote about several grassroots initiatives that will allow us to continue to enjoy these artifacts of the Flash era even after Flash is history.
Some tips from the article:

• If you have a Windows PC, the best way to replay old Flash content is with FlashPoint, a free program with more than 70,000 web games and 8,000 animations, most of which are Flash-based. (Experimental Mac and Linux versions are also available, but are complicated to set up....)

• Conifer lets you run a legacy browser with Flash support on a remote machine, insulating you from any security issues...

• The Internet Archive has made thousands of Flash games and animations playable online in modern web browsers through emulation, so you can play the Helicopter Game or watch Peanut Butter Jelly Time in their original forms.

• Ruffle is the underlying emulation software that The Internet Archive is using. You can also install it as a standalone program or browser extension...

• Newgrounds has released its own Flash Player for Windows that safely loads content from its website, so you still get the full experience of using Newgrounds proper.

But the article opens with a sentence reminding us that "After all the challenges of 2020, there's one thing we can all look forward to in the new year: Adobe Flash Player will finally be dead."

An anonymous reader writes: So on New Year's Eve, the "jam" rock band Phish re-broadcast their legendary 1995 performance on New Year's Eve -- while playing a game of chess against the audience. (Just as they'd done in 1995 -- although during that tour they'd made two just moves during each show.) In a video promoting this year's event, a chess "historian" remembers "No single band in the '90s was playing better chess against their audience" and shares an alleged conspiracy theory that they were being coached by Garry Kasparov. And yet, "Midway through the second of two nights at Madison Square Garden, the audience takes Phish's queen" -- and the band resigned.

This had left their ongoing audience-versus-band match with a score (one game apiece). So 25 years later, for New Year's Eve, Phish finally staged the great re-match.

"However, just as it was time to begin the game (and as the show kicked off with opener "Punch You In The Eye"), Chess.com, the popular chess site hosting the online game, crashed," reports JamBands.com.
Thinking quickly, the band announced on Twitter that "We're making a quick pivot, 2020 style, to live chess mode. We will be using a moderator from Chess.com who will take feedback on the move within the chat and then complete the audience move."

JamBands.com explains how the long-awaited match finally culminated: In between sets, the broadcast cut to a live zoom call between all four band members, during which they discussed their next moves in the game and chatted. At various points, Gordon and Anastasio picked up guitars, and Gordon had a surreal projection of a chess board floating behind him at times. During the first break, McConnell referenced the technical difficulties. "I'm sorry this didn't work out to plan, but nothing this year did," he said with a laugh.

During the break between the second and third sets, the shenanigans increased, with drummer Jon Fishman following through on an off-hand promise to shave his head. (At first, the other three band members didn't even notice.) Ultimately, the band defeated the audience... Down to just their king, queen and a few pawns, the audience resigned as the band was up a pawn and still had a rook and queen on the board...

Phish raised funds for a charity during the broadcast. "For this final webcast of the year, our beneficiary will be none other than The WaterWheel Foundation itself," the band wrote prior to the stream. "Since 1997, the band and their fans have collaborated on a nationwide charitable endeavor by raising funds and donating the proceeds across the country. This year alone, collectively we have raised and donated nearly $750,000 to 27 different nonprofits during the Dinner And A Movie series. Join us in continuing to support those in need...."
You can watch the entire four-and-a-half-hour webcast on YouTube.

"The sky is clear, the breeze is strong. A perfect day to make the long sea voyage to Mythyn," writes BBS history blogger Josh Renaud. "You prepare your galley, hire a crew of sailors, and cast off. But a few hours into your trip, the dreaded words appear: 'Thou seest rippling waters...'"

He's describing the beginning of a 27-year-old game that he'd been searching for since 2013. Slashdot reader Kirkman14 why the game is so special — and so rare: Thieves' Guild is a BBS door game for the Atari ST that came out in 1993. [A "door" connected the software running the dial-up Bulletin Board system to an external application.] What made Thieves' Guild unique was its graphical front-end client, which features dozens of eye-popping pixel art vignettes, along with simple animated sprites, sampled speech, and sound effects.

As a BBS door game (strike 1) for the Atari ST (strike 2), not many people played this game or saw its front-end in the 90s. But it's worth re-discovering.

The game was created by Paul Witte and Herb Flower who teamed up again in the early 2000s to produce the MMORPG "Linkrealms."

The Pascal source code for several versions of Thieves' Guild, including an unreleased 1995 port for PC BBSes, has been rescued and published on GitHub.

How-To Geek has discovered three of the world's most popular web browsers contain Easter Eggs: It seems like every browser has a hidden game these days. Chrome has a dinosaur game, Edge has surfing, and Firefox has . . . unicorn pong? Yep, you read that right — here's how to play it.

First, open Firefox. Click the hamburger menu (the three horizontal lines) at the upper right, and then click "Customize." On the "Customize Firefox" tab, you'll see a list of interface elements to configure the toolbar. Click and drag all the toolbar items except "Flexible Space" into the "Overflow Menu" on the right.

Click the Unicorn button that appears at the bottom of the window....
There's screenshots in the article illustrating all of the steps — and the result.