Monday, June 13, 2005

Top Ten Star Wars Games -- 10:14 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Now that you've seen Episode III, what's a Star Wars geek to do? Tom's Hardware gives some suggestions. They posted their top ten Star Wars video games. My favorites (in order) would be:

1. X-Wing Alliance
2. X-Wing
3. Jedi Academy
4. TIE Fighter
5. Dark Forces
6. Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
7. Lego Star Wars
8. Episode I: Racer
9. Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back (Atari 2600)

Honorable mention would have to go to the ray-traced arcade game that I spent way too many quarters on back in the day.

J.t.Qbe comments: Your choice for #9 puts the rest of your choices in question. I had that game, and it was really a disappointment.

A.T. Hun comments: Well, there really isn't much to recommend it, I'll grant you. It's more of a nostalgia thing. It was really the first Star Wars game (for me) other than the ray-traced one that gave you a feeling of being a part of the movies. I also was desperately trying to come up with 10 games that I played and liked :) There is a rather cavernous drop-off between #8 and #9.

Icculus Interview -- 8:35 am CST, Update by The Master

Phoronix posted an interview with Ryan C. Gordon, better known as Icculus. It's an interesting read. My favorite quote (since I'm a programmer and I completely agree):

I never received a "formal" computer education. I took AP Computer Science in high school, but really, that's a joke. I was working on how to coerce my programs into sending IPX packets while everyone else was struggling with "Hello World" in Turbo Pascal, which was a "serious" language at the time, I guess, as far as public school believed.

I hear that after that, the school switched to C++, so just to be clear, public schools haven't really improved their curriculum, they've just kept searching for credibility at the expense of their students. Giving new programming students of any age a "respectable" language isn't so much throwing them in a lake to see if they'll swim as it is throwing them off a cliff to see if they'll fly. They should swallow their pride and give them Logo or something similar. If they think that's not cool enough, then they should remind them that this is possibly the last time that programming will be about creation, exploration and fun. Debugging yet-another-linked-list-implementation really stopped feeling l33t almost immediately, in my opinion.

No Old News

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