I was (and still am) addicted to Angry Birds, but Rocket Golfing has displaced it for me. This is Morgan McGuire's new iOS game that is just out, but I have been play testing it the last month. Here's his promo video:
I love it. It's not only a really good game, it has an unbounded number of procedural levels. I hope Morgan will publish how he did that. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Morgan's work on Console games and realistic rendering research, which is the context I know him from when we worked together at NVIDIA Research. So I was surprised he did a 2D kid/adult game/education games that is so fun.
A personal thing I really like about it is it takes me back to my first "wow" moment with video games when I saw the coin-operated Space Wars over three decades ago. It was simple graphics but it had terrific gravitational physics and I really liked the game play. Here's a screenshot from Wikipedia:
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| Screen Shot from Space Wars (Wikipedia) |
Only later did I find out that Space Wars was the grandchild of the game SpaceWar! which is so old that it was released the year before I was born! To give you an idea of how primeval programming was then, check out this quote from the wikipedia article: "After Alan Kotok obtained some sine and cosine routines from DEC, Russell began coding, and, by February 1962, had produced his first version." Apparently SpaceWar! was played a lot at the University of Utah and that is part of the Atari Origin Story. I do like Morgan's game better, but I especially love the connections to OLD school computer graphics. In addition, its space trivia gets back at the excitement of the space race when I was growing up (and thankfully seems to getting so new breath, or so I hope). I also like that I don't need to pump quarters into it-- it's a pay once (12 quarters) and no in-app purchases or adds or any of that stuff.
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