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Online Video Games or Online Casino Games...
While video-game systems are used solely for games, gaming is only one of the many uses for computers. In computer games, players can use a keyboard to type in commands, a mouse to move a cursor around the screen, and sometimes both can be deployed. Many computer games also allow the use of a joystick or game controller. In 1972 Gregory Yob of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst created the first text-based computer game, called Hunt the Wumpus. In this game players followed a narrative containing clues about the location of a creature in a series of caverns. Using clues in the text, the players objective was to locate the beast and shoot it. In 1975 a programmer named Will Crowther created Adventure (also known as Advent and Colossal Cave), a highly influential text-based game later expanded by a researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In this game, players used one- and two-word commands to respond to situations in a story. For example, in a room with a treasure chest and a staircase, a player might type open chest, then down stairs. Wrong answers often resulted in an interactive death.

Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s these text-based adventure games dominated the field of computer games. After playing Adventure on her husbands computer, a California woman named Roberta Williams persuaded her husband, Ken, to help her make games. Wanting to go beyond text-based technology, Roberta created simple illustrations that Ken encoded into the game. Their game, Mystery House, released in 1980, was the first computer adventure game to combine text and graphics. To tap into the growing excitement over video games at the time, many computer-game publishers marketed both authorized translations of arcade games and thinly disguised versions of arcade hits. Many publishers also created their own arcade-style action games. In 1982 Broderbund released Choplifter, a game in which players flew a helicopter over a desert to rescue hostages. Marketed shortly after the Iranian hostage crisis, Choplifter was an instant success.

Computers brought a new flexibility to electronic games. Because computers stored data, they made a good platform for lengthy adventure and role-playing games. Players could store their progress and continue the games at a later time. With consoles such as the Atari 2600, players could only start games from the beginning. This situation changed slightly in the mid-1980s, when Nintendo built a battery-backed chip into The Legend of Zelda that allowed players to record their progress. Computer systems such as the Commodore Amiga and Apple Macintosh brought other advantages to gaming. These machines used mouse controllers, devices that gave players fast and highly precise control. As technology progressed, computer monitors offered higher resolution than television screens, giving computer games a crisper look. This improved resolution made computers ideal for running strategy games such as SimCity and Civilization, which featured highly detailed graphics.

Although some computer-game publishers dropped out of the business, others-such as Broderbund and Sierra On-Line gained prominence. Electronic Arts, which was founded in 1982, became one of the biggest names in the industry. The companys success was fuelled by aggressively recruiting top game designers away from competitors and by packaging its games in attractive boxes. In 1984 Electronic Arts paid professional basketball stars Julius Erving and Larry Bird $25,000 each to use their names and likenesses in a game called Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One. The game was an instant success, leading Electronic Arts to strike up a similar relationship with National Football League (NFL) announcer and former coach John Madden to create a football simulation game for the Apple II computer in 1989. For many years personal computers (PCs) were plagued with compatibility problems that hampered them as a gaming platform. Apple manufactured Macintosh computers, however, had standardized parts and operating software. Programs that ran on one Macintosh computer could run on any Macintosh that had sufficient processing power. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Compaq, Packard Bell, and several other companies all manufactured different PC machines, seldom using standardized components. As a result, games that ran on one type of PC might not run on PCs made by other manufacturers. Singaporean entrepreneur Sim Wong Hoo began to solve this problem in 1989 when he introduced a PC sound card called the Sound Blaster. Although other companies previously had released sound devices for PCs, Sim succeeded at establishing Sound Blaster as the standard for PC sound. Future sound cards needed to be Sound Blaster-compatible, meaning they needed to use the same software (often called drivers). Having a standardized sound protocol enabled PCs to run games with robust music and voice files that sounded as good or better than the audio in console games.

In 1993 id Software published Doom, one of the most influential computer games of all time. Doom popularized a three-dimensional, first-person perspective camera-allowing players to see the game through the eyes of the character they controlled. The game also popularized multiplayer online games (playing with or against other people through LANs or the Internet). In the early 1990s a drop in the price of CD-ROM technology led to a wave of multimedia games (games that combine audio, video, animation, photographs, or other media). Compact discs (CDs) can store from 650 to 700 megabytes of data, more than 400 times the storage space of standard floppy disks. With this extra storage, designers could add voice files, digitized video of live actors, and other assets to their games. Companies such as Digital Pictures, Access Software, and Viacom published interactive movies, or games that combined digitized footage of real actors and virtual sets.

About Author

The PC game market declined in the early 2000s as video-game consoles became more powerful, incorporating high-end graphics, hard drives, and Internet features that were formerly exclusive to home computers.If you prefer your Dominos to Dooom, or you would rather play Craps for money than built an army in Civilisation, then head down to Mecca Games where you can play traditional online casino games for free.

Source: ArticleTrader.com
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