The Ultimate History of Video Games

In this rollicking, mammoth history of video games wow gold from pinball to Pong to Playstation II Kent, a technology journalist and self-professed video game addict, covers almost every conceivable aspect of the industry, from the technological leaps that made the games possible to the corporate power struggles that won (and lost) billions of dollars. For as long as first person shooters have been popular, we honestly feel the original Half Life from Valve with all of it's bonus add-ons like Blue-Shift and Portal had some of the biggest replay ability simply because it was just great fun. Anecdotes are legion. Readers learn that early Atari, for example, had the corporate climate of a dot-com startup, with rampant drug use and meetings staged in outdoor hot tubs.

Then Valve changed the gaming world with one of the finest 3D world space engines and gravity designs with Half Life 2 allowing players to pick up any random objects, garbage, etc, and when dropped to the ground, the item actually reacted with the surface material and shape rolling or moving according to its own weight.  The original name for Pac-Man turns out to be Puck-Man; its creators changed the name after worrying that vandals in arcades would replace the P with an F. In 1978, there were so many people playing Space Invaders in Japan that the game caused a national coin shortage. Kent meticulously documents the rise of home video games and the console wars of the past decade, when Sega, Nintendo, Sony and others raced to produce the fastest, most powerful game system.

Along the way, Kent interviews www.games.com/www.flywowgold.com virtually every key player in the industry. At times, Kent's comprehensiveness is exhausting 500-plus pages on video games may be a bit much, even for their most ardent admirers. But most often Kent's infectious enthusiasm is enough to carry the reader along. This finer attention to detail along with extremely robust crisp and beautiful graphics utilizing light in ways that have only been mimicked by other game engines, along with extremely intense action and storyline scenarios that draw you so far into the game, it's hard to stop playing.

Given what has already been exhibited for Portal 2 via press release and video demos, we can gather that the abilities required to overcome serious puzzle solving aspects in the game is going to be geared toward a much more intelligent gaming community, and it's quite possible that any given problem may very well have multiple solutions for a given task, where an objective may be passable with one solution, it might not allow one to encounter the next without revisiting previous puzzles and solving them again in a different way.  Equal parts oral history, engineering study, business memoir, game catalogue and Gen-X nostalgia trip, Kent's book is a loving tribute to one of the most dynamic (and profitable) industries in the world today.

See also:
http://flywowsky.socialgo.com/members/profile/1/blog-view/disarming-traps-and-picking-locks_3.html
http://www.flyhighwow.ewebsite.com/articles/avoiding-detection-for-fun-and-profit.html