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Posts Tagged ‘games’

Has anyone ever imagined that there can be a game for teaching table manners to children at mealtimes so that they can display better social etiquettes at parties and follow the same at home too. Well for people who havenot come across it before, I am sure they will be astonished and excited to know that such a game exists in the gaming world. The game has got the name MannerIsms. In fact, the game is for the whole family, but more so for children and children enjoy it too while learning the basic culture on the table during mealtimes.

So, how did the game come into being ? Roz Heintzman, a woman from Toronto observed one night in early 2004 when she was at her friend Gillian Deacon’s house for a dinner that her friend has a unique way of teaching her children manners – in which she asks her kids to take manners out of an envelope and follow them, one for each night. This observation led to the inspiration for MannerIsms. Roz Heintzman alongwith entrepreneur Carolyn Hynland (also from Toronto), started looking to fill a gap in the market for all things relating to manners – specifically manners and children. After some informal market research, a business plan was formulated and, with the help of friends and family, the game MannerIsms came to life.

How is the game played ? One box of MannerIsms comes with twenty-five cards, each bearing one code of conduct. Each is sweet, lyrical, and easy to remember, such as “Food to mouth, not mouth to food. In this way, you won’t seem rude.”. Another is “Mabel, Mabel if you’re able, keep your elbows off the table!”. It is played over a series of nights and each night, children in your family draw a new card from the stack and spend the meal perfecting it. Depending on the age and number of children playing, MannerIsms provides several options for rewarding good manners. And you can further tailor the game to your family. Read the rest of this entry »

Tetris was the first computer game that involved falling tetromino pieces that the game player must align in order to create an unbroken line which subsequently disappears in order to free up more game play space. If the player is unable to make an unbroken line, the game play space quickly gets crowded until the point where no more space is available and the game is over.

The game of Tetris was first programmed in 1985 in the former Soviet Union by Alexey Pazhitnov. It ran on a machine called an Electronica 60 but was quickly ported to run on an IBM PC in the same month of its initial release. One month later and the game had been ported for use on the Apple II and the Commodore 64 by a programming team in Hungary.
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A short overview of the history of arcade games and flash games will show that there is a huge connection between these two types of games. Arcade games have a long history and, even though the arcade games were not in the past what we know them to be today, the same concept is the main ingredient for the new ones as well. The arcade games are usually simple, have iconic characters, a certain number of levels with increasing difficulty and they do not require high skills or much learning time. In addition, they do not have deep storylines as most console games have in our days. Today’s PC or console games with the same qualities can be considered arcade games.

Starting from the early 1920’s with the use of old ‘arcade games’ in the amusement parks (such as ball toss games, coin-operated machines or pinball) this whole ‘industry’ has evolved immensely. This passion for arcade games motivated their producers to always search for something better and more entertaining. They have outdone themselves every time something new appeared on the market. From wood made machines and mechanical or electronic scoring readouts to the playing of games online, all games have conquered the hearts of the ageless children. Because people enjoy these arcade games so much they want to play them all the time. This is why they have not even completely left aside the coin-operated arcade games. They resort to them in restaurants, shopping malls, bars or pubs. However, they are only a substitute to the computer versions because playing games online is much better.

When speaking of flash games, we must take into consideration the fact that they are a more complex, more modern, even if their ancestors are definitely arcade games. Flash games take their name from the platform used for their building – ‘Flash’, a program made by Macromedia. This modern interactive platform named ‘Flash’ has three major components: the player, the file format and the authoring tool. The main advantage of this program is that of being very easy to use. Because of this fact, the games built with the help of the platform have more options than others do. For example, a house the player destroys will burn down with different effects. In order to be more convinced of the high importance that this platform has for us when playing a flash game we should know that it is usually necessary to download a free version of Macromedia Flash Player each time one feels like playing free games online. Generally, you can download the latest version of ‘Flash’ from Macromedia. That is if your browser gets errors relating to Flash.

If you simply like to play good games online without knowing the whole technique that stands behind graphics, too many details about the designing of flash games are unnecessary. Flash games are all the games you play at home on your computer and have the ending ‘.exe’ (meaning ‘executable’). As long as they make you enjoy the spare time spent at home, the flash games will be your best friend. A favorite application can turn into a real sport because playing flash games stimulates competition and trains reflexes. Web sites that host these kinds of activities and offer you free games give you the opportunity of joining teams of players and of participating to mass championships online.
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