Ping

K.D.: Bring your appetite on Monday, I have plenty of Girl Scout Cookies.

K.T.: Do they have real Girl Scouts in them?

Groan. Nothing like making bad jokes to your professor.

***

Aside from the weekend, its been a slow week. Well, perhaps not a slow week, but I’ve definitely been less attentive than I would normally be. Along with the inevitable winter’s chill encroaching upon Maryland, this has slown my mind and my perception down to that of a three-toed sloth. It’s so slow, I didn’t realize that slown isn’t recognized as an actual word in MS Word.

With precious little to discuss with all of you in these e-missives, I’m going to have to default to a video game review. Yes, many of you will be bored out of your soccer-ball-sized heads, but so be it. I am willing to kick you all in the head in order to post.

Pong

Players: one to two
System: I used an Atari Twenty-six Hundred, but several different versions exist.
Rating: Zero stars, Five possible

Story: The development team should be defenestrated from the top floor of the Empire State Building for their near-complete lack of story development. As it appears, there is a game of table tennis, and you must triumph over your opponent. While many sports games have thin narratives, especially in the multiplayer arena, here the flow is nonexistent. Table Tennis. Ping-pong if you prefer. Wow. No tournament to slug through, no sick relatives that need prize money, no nothing. To be fair, they did do a good job of avoiding all of the video game clichés that have cropped up throughout the years, but really, they were the first. They could have come up with something, anything, and it would have been acceptable.

Gameplay: Insofar as that you are playing a game, we must commend the developers for lending that little bit of verisimilitude to their digital baby. However, note that it doesn’t get more basic than this. Even Tetris, one of the oldest, greatest video games of all time, has a more complicated interface than Pong. The action is top-down, and the entire playing field readjusts to fit your television screen, albeit with some manual help from the television settings. There is a mid-line separating the field. A rudimentary scoreboard centered at the top of the screen keeps track of which player has scored more points. Points are earned, laboriously, by smacking the “ball” (a white square) past your opponent’s paddle (a white line segment) with your own (ditto). The paddle is stuck in two dimensions, able to move from top to bottom of the screen. You can’t apply spin or English to the “ball’ when you hit it; only the angle of contact and the speed of the paddle as it moves will influence the “ball’s” trajectory. The top and bottom of the screen are walled to keep the ball in play.

This is as straightforward as you can get. Play till neither person can stand it anymore. Free game programs that come with computers are more entertaining than this. This game is so vanilla Breyers is jealous. It’s so straightforward Donald Trump is studying it for next seasons’ Apprentice firings. It’so boring and tedious that I’m putting myself to sleep analyzing it. Let’s move on.

Control: Perhaps the sole bright point in this game, but with a caveat. You must use the dial control, shaped much like a safe’s combination dial. Hold it as you would grasp the lip of a glass with all five fingers, and you are good to go. The fine-tuned motions allow you precision movement over your paddle, and let you shoot up and down in the span of a second. Stopping is tight, never overrunning when you cease input. If I ever require a line start/stop simulation, you can be sure I’ll be contacting these people.

Graphics: I can, and have, drawn more impressive graphics in my notebook while killing time in class. It is a bunch of straight lines. Remember pick-up sticks? The programmers cribbed from that game, but forgot about multiple colors. Damn. White, black. What is this, nineteen sixty? Daguerrotypes once constituted the finest form of photography, but now we have digital cameras. Move on!

Fun: I had a lot of fun laughing at it.

Conclusion: This was the apex of video gaming once upon a time. Now, it is a pile of trash. No, let me take that back, such a comparison insults refuse everywhere. It is a pile of George W. Bush. (Oh no he din’t, he went there!). I know you can find this for free on the internet, and could probably program a true-to-life recreation in thirty minutes or so if so inclined. Save your time, and spend your gaming dollar and gaming time elsewhere. Forty-year old technologies do not hold up to today’s gaming extravaganzas.