Game Animal

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I hope you had an enjoyable Labor Day holiday. I remember having fun with this 2009 A&J when I drew it. I’m afraid it’s obvious that my video-gaming experience was limited to early versions of Nintendo, but we are talking about a cat here. Ludwig can’t be expected to master “Call of Duty.” That is a video game, right? I was pretty good at “Duck Hunt,” to which Ludwig’s game above owes much.

74 thoughts on “Game Animal”

  2. I still question whether holidays are really worthwhile. I always seem to have to work twice as hard the next day. (Well, 187% harder, to be exact. I did the math.)

    Oh, Ye Heartless God of Commerce, I’m back.

  7. I mostly stick to computer Monopoly and Scrabble, but can knock out a quick iPad Yahtzee in the bathroom. I have this really really cool years old Monopoly that has animated scenes for each property and travelling around the board and because I’m really really dorky I love it

  10. Jimmy, the above strip made me recall “Penguin Shooter”, one of those “I’ll just play one more game…one more…this is the last one…can’t stop on a losing streak so just one more…rats, it’s 3:40 a.m.!” games.

  11. Trapper Jean: I had remembered the name “Neil Hamilton” but I could not remember in what context. Thanks! Hard to think of that young man as the Commissioner.

  12. Lilyblack, ever played “Tropico”? I managed to get the originals in a box set and they will run on Windows 8. I tried the remade versions and they won’t run! Tried to contact the manufacturer via their help email on their website. Never got an answer so threw the discs away.

    Age of Empires 3 will run on Windows 8 too, but I think the earlier versions are more fun to play. However, the earlier ones won’t run on 8 either, unless you go to Steam and buy their revamped version.

  14. I have one cat that would enjoy the above video game. He likes to play “slap the carp” on my wife’s iPad and is always trying to interrupt her “chase the minions” games.

    Getting back to the grind myself after 11 days off, 7 of those camping in the mountains with a few hundred friends. Good friends, good food, good beer. I was even gifted a bottle of 18yo Glenmorrange. I really did not feel like contributing to Jerry’s kibble fund today but I managed to drag myself in to help put out a dozen or so fires erupting before the end of the fiscal year.

  17. No cat. No “shooter” games. (Just real ones.) No other games, either. My time-wasters and stress-relievers are decidedly low-tech.

    If I ever make the plunge and acquire a computer game, it will most likely be aviation related.

  21. Such a thing is too much realism, eh, Munchkin?

    No offense, but you’re statistically in much more danger driving your English School Boy Car than you’d be in an airplane. Well, maybe not in an F-16, but you know what I mean.

  22. Lilyblack, I don’t do downloads either. I got both my Tropico and Age of Empires 3 from Ebay. Tropico is under a new publisher, whose name I won’t give here because why give endorsement to a non-responsive company who produces a bad product!

    Windows does have a compatibility mode for running older software, but it does not work for everything. I have seen one seller on Ebay selling older games with a guarantee that the extra disc he includes will let them run even on the latest version of Windows. Never tried them, so cannot recommend them.

  24. Lily, if anyone ever tries to tell you “guns aren’t for girls” (and that certainly would not be me) and you don’t feel like wasting your breath on them, refer them to this young sabra, who, I’m given to understand, is a member of the Israeli Defense Force.

    http://i.imgur.com/KsDzDqh.jpg

  27. Ghost: I live in Texas. Nobody ever tells me that.

    emb: All I know is that there wasn’t a white uniform for British admirals (or officers) in the nineteenth century. But, of course, an admiral afloat could wear any darned thing he wanted to

  31. Current games: three versions of a bridge-playing game (name escapes me) for which one needs to shell out several dozen dollars each. The newer the version, the better the bridge and the more rapid, but the game’s idea of what ought to have happened on a given hand is sometimes totally unbelievable! It beats my play, and easily….

    http://www.lufthansa-vp.com/vp1/play.html gets to a good game of “know your European geography”. It is challenging, especially as there is a time limit of, say, 5-8 seconds. Three sublevels are included, easiest identifying cities (by anonymous dots), a second without dots but still with country borders, and the last without even country borders. Give it a shot; it is worth your time. I have had it in my favorites list for a few years.

    Used to have a challenging miniature golf game; addictive to the extent of playing 15 – 25 games in a row. My love of things geometrical (to figure out at which angle to hit the ball) was the attraction. Finally, I aced the game – all 18 holes-in-one – then printed out the score sheet as proof, and ditched the game since improvement was no longer possible.

  33. I’m volunteering at the office of a local nonprofit organization. Their website needs some editing; I’ll use the tools they’ll provide. The biggest problem is someone converted several of their files from .HTML to .PHP format without updating all the links.

    Can one of you recommend a tool for finding the bad links in a website that is cheap (free would be best!), safe (will do no harm), and reliable? An understandable list of bad links and which files to find them in would be good to have. I understand some tools put out a list of all links, good and bad, for the user to wade through.

  34. Probably my favorite game of all time was “Going Postal”. Just a simple little thing that I called up when having computer issues. As long as you held the mouse button down it fired off rounds and blasted the bejeebies out of the screen. You could sniper that meddlesome usoft command or you could open up rapid fire and lay the whole screen to waste. Once you felt like you had gotten your revenge on whatever program was giving you fits (usually it was some sort of code for me, at that time) you just hit ctrl-z and everything returned to normal.
    I’d still use it but I could never convince my current mal- virus hunter software that it really was not evil code and finally gave up the fight.

  35. That’s Beda’s “A Gentleman Bemused.” The source of his bemusement is, of course, left to the imagination of the viewer. My guess: Something he’s heard from the next room through the doors ajar.

    The modern day caption is amusing, if not particularly bemusing.

  36. Well, c ex-p, where my Lufthansa airliner didn’t reach the desired destination, I did at least manage to land in both the correct country and within a comfortable train ride to the correct destination…with one exception. And who’d want to go to Latvia, anyway? 🙂

  39. Mark: Thanks. In that site, it is aptly entitled ‘Eavesdropping.’

    Just thought of another question. We’re indoors in a substantial bldg. of some sort. Here’s a dressed up gentleman[?] of importance with his hat on in the house. He is not a Hassidic Jew. What sort of manners is this? Of course, eavesdropping itself is impolite. Whatever. My guess also is that the hat is not necessarily a military one. Somebody else can investigate that.

  48. Apple has announced that the nude photos (or otherwise revealing pictures…I haven’t seen them myself) that were hacked from the owners’ private iCloud accounts were obtained the old fashion way…by cracking targeted accounts’ user names, passwords, security questions, etc.

    While that means that you and I (well, me, anyway; not sure about you; you may actually be a gorgeous female celebrity with a penchant for getting nekkid in front of iPhones) probably don’t need to worry too much about our information or privacy being compromised, it does serve to remind us that we should use strong security and passwords for our accounts. (Hint: “ABC123” is not a “strong password”.)

  52. “SweetSusie#1? wouldn’t be strong in your case. Too easy for anyone who knows you to guess. 🙂 As a password for me, however, it would be totally unquessable.

    So should I then be on the lookout for nude photos of you on the InterWebNet?

  59. I didn’t see it, but someone told me it was, “We will manage them to the Gates of Hell.” But that would be a mixed message, plus not making any sense, so surely not.

  61. No politics from me. Not really pro-NRA either, but a gun owner, hunter, and proponent of broad interpretation of the US Constitution’s Second Amendment. I pretty well think the current crop of all parties are generally corrupt and self-serving. I believe that we have lost the ability to behave with any degree of statesmanship and that unfortunately, compromise has become a four-letter word.

  62. I’m pro-Second Amendment to the US Constitution, not pro-NRA. In fact, I’m pro-US Constitution in its entirety, to the point I once took an oath to defend it “against all enemies, foreign and domestic”, which I took to mean with my life, if necessary.

  64. What’s interesting, TruckerRon, is that both Joe Biden and J. Danforth Quayle were highly-regarded members of the US Senate right up until they became Vice President, when they suddenly started being considered idiots. There seems to be something about the job that makes people put their brains into cold storage until their term ends.

  66. TR, most presidents want their VP’s to be little more than sock-puppets for their administrations, no matter how capable they were before the election.

  67. ‘. . . forced to attend . . ..’? The funeral gig is a legit job for a VP. If Queen Elizabeth cannot go, maybe Prince Charles can. I’ve attended funerals when someone else in an organization had a conflict, or more important things to do. I could have been forced to when on active duty in USAF, but the occasion never arose. When stationed it the UK, had a BOQ roommate buy the farm in W. Germany [B-26, notorious plane], but have no idea where the funeral occurred. Maybe stateside.

    There’s a long, detailed, and well-balanced article on Joe Biden in a recent New Yorker. He’s been more useful than some VPs. The article also makes it clear Joe is not simply a yes-man or a mouthpiece for anybody.

    Took the same oath, as did my fellow officers [and maybe airmen] who spent a fair amt. of time selling coffee and tobacco on the black market in occupied Ger. I didn’t drink coffee then, but I had taken that oath, and avoid law breaking in general. Maybe 2-3 mph over the speed limit.

  68. In an LA Times article on Richard Nixon’s 1962 book, Six Crises, Marvin Seid wrote, “ ‘The vice presidency,’ John Nance Garner [FDR’s VP] once confided to fellow-Texan Lyndon Johnson, ‘isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit.’

    I’ve also heard that even that statement was bowdlerized.

    And I guess it’s best that Veeps are kept busy and not plotting against their bosses.

  69. The B-26 Marauder had a horrible reputation for killing its crews. It was a fast twin-engine attack bomber with narrow wings, which meant there was very difference between its normal operating speed and its stall speed. Crews called it “The Flying Prostitute” because it had “no visible means of support”.

    Airmen in exile from the Netherlands (The Flying Dutchmen) trained on the B-26 during WWII at the Jackson Army Air Base (now Hawkins Field) after the Nazis overran their country. I have visited Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Jackson MS, where more than 30 of them who died in training accidents are buried.

  74. We started playing games on main frames in college – no graphics. When you managed to blow up a ship it said “BOOM”.

    Then we moved along to Atari – game and 800 computer. They had a real good version of the 3M company game of “Stock Market”. Also there was an “adult” game very elementary in design.

    Then along to Commodore 128 and it’s games.

    Then to the real thing – an Epson IBM compatible 286 computer – hard drive and everything.

    Since then we have had a series of computers (one about 4-5 years, but we each keep ours 6-10 years). There have been a couple of other computer games over the years – the first Wii being the last one.

    I am still using the DOS version of Monopoly in my computers, it is better than the fancier later ones.

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