WARNING: What follows is a game only a Geek could love.

Today’s design is a twist on the venerable game of chess, via quantum mechanics (See…I warned you).

If you’re the kind of savvy reader that hangs out at the Chrome Cow, you doubtless are familiar with a certain theoretical feline belonging to one Erwin Schrödinger. This cat has the misfortune to be confined in a box with a deadly device that has a 50-50 chance of triggering with an hour. At the end of the hour, goes the thought experiment, the cat, sealed from observation inside the box, is neither dead or alive, but is in superposition, a combination of these possible states. The cat does not live or die until the box is opened by an observer, who through the act of observation collapses the possible dead/alive states of the cat into one or the other state.

So what’s that got to do with Chess? What, indeed!

Enter Superpositional Chess (Super Chess? EigenChess? Quantum Chess? Schrödinger’s Pawn?).
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Ok. I owe you a Lazarus and the Time Machine Part 2, but I can’t resist the chance to post a quite nearly timely World Cup inspired design.

I’ve consulted with experts in the field, and the consensus is that the World Cup involves Soccer.

In my mind this is quite nearly the same thing as Foosball, except that in Soccer the games are much longer and harder schedule.

I admit it. I’m not really an organized sports guy, and today’s design is less inspired by the World Cup and more by Rockstar’s latest table tennis opus.

The idea is simple:

Foosball + Wii = Awesome.
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Here is a re-write of the base eRadiRace code, using the new Flash 8 Draw API to make the trails and do the simple collision.

Added a musical score. Now at v0.254

It still has a few bugs:

• Not all sounds seem to be playing when called (intermittent).
• [Fixed] A last minute change to add the Tutorial screen has made the avatars disappear after the first round.
• Collision could be tightened up just a bit.
• The frame where the player collides with the line is delayed in drawing by about a half a second, which makes it look like they shouldn’t have lost.

I’ll fix that avatar thing and post up the game loop code.

One of these days, I’ll start making games that fit in my pages.

Instructions

• Move the mouse left and right to control the paddle.
• Score by hitting the ball into the Green top and bottom goals.
• If the ball hits the Red left and right goals, that’s bad.

Because this is a flash game, you need to keep the mouse cursor within the active window to move the paddle. If the paddle stops moving, you’ve wandered out of the window.

"Design is the successive application of constraints until only a unique product is left."

Richard Pew

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