Booty is a computer game released in 1984 for various home computers. The game was one of Firebird's launch titles.
The player takes on the role of a cabin boy who attempts to steal a horde of treasure from his pirate masters. A variety of hazards must be avoided including pirates, parrots and booby-trapped treasure. Should the player managed to collect all the treasure, he is given 45 seconds to find a final key, which will restart the game. There are a total of 20 screens in the game which contain a mixture of collectable treasure, doors to other screens, and doors which act as obstacles and can only be unlocked by collecting the appropriate numbered key. Some rooms contain non-player character pirates, contact with which will cause the loss of one of the player's three lives.
The game was published for the Spectrum in 1984, by Firebird Software in the UK, at a price of £2.50. It was subsequently re-released in the UK at £1.99, and in Spain (by ABC Soft) at a price of 795 pesetas. More recently, remakes of the game have been made available in Java and for the PC.
A video game is an electronic game that involves human interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device such as a TV screen or computer monitor. The word video in video game traditionally referred to a raster display device, but it now implies any type of display device that can produce two- or three-dimensional images. Video games are sometimes believed to be a form of art, but this designation is controversial.
The electronic systems used to play video games are known as platforms; examples of these are personal computers and video game consoles. These platforms range from large mainframe computers to small handheld computing devices. Specialized video games such as arcade games, while common in the 1980s, have gradually declined in use due to the widespread availability of home video game devices (e.g., PlayStation 4 and Xbox One) and video games on desktop and laptop computers and smartphones.
The input device used for games, the game controller, varies across platforms. Common controllers include gamepads, mouses, keyboards, joysticks, the touchscreens of mobile devices and buttons. In addition to video and (in most cases) audio feedback, some games include haptic, vibration or force feedback peripherals.
Marvel 2099: One Nation Under Doom was a cancelled game for the PlayStation developed by Mindscape Inc. It was to be loosely based on the "One Nation Under Doom" storyline in Marvel's Doom 2099 comic. It was envisioned as a 2D side-scroller with 3D rendered characters.
In February 1996, Mindscape announced they would produce a video game based on the Marvel 2099 universe. Promoted as one of their top five games for the year, the game would be released on December 1, 1996, just in time for the Christmas rush. Two versions were announced: PlayStation and Windows 95.
By May 1996, CD-ROM and VHS video demos were being shipped to game magazines for pre-release reviews, along with a one-page color brochure. The first public demo was shown at the E3 show, and featured a playable single level of the Punisher 2099 fighting SHIELD troops, and also opening menus and some cut scenes. Electronic Gaming Monthly had a quarter-page preview of the game in their July 1996 issue and a half page preview in their August 1996 issue, showing screenshots of actual gameplay, and a group shot of the player characters. At the 1996 San Diego Comicon, the Mindscape booth handed out brochures, and raffled off One Nation Under Doom pins, shirts, and posters. Some attendees were even allowed to play the demo at the booth, although no copies of the demo were distributed. September 1996 issue of 3D Design magazine had a cover story on the Marvel 2099 game. After July, due to financial troubles, ongoing production of the game slowed down, and eventually stopped, though the game was never officially canceled.
Mario Party (Japanese: マリオパーティ, Hepburn: Mario Pāti) is a party video game series featuring Mario franchise characters in which four human- or computer-controlled characters compete in a board game interspersed with minigames. The series was developed by Hudson Soft and published by Nintendo; the arcade version was developed by Capcom. The series is known for its party game elements, including the often-unpredictable multiplayer modes that allow play with up to four (and sometimes eight) human players.
After the development of Mario Party 8, several of Hudson Soft's key designers left to work for Nintendo subsidiary Nd Cube, developers of Wii Party. Starting in 2012 with Mario Party 9, Nd Cube has taken over development of the series from Hudson Soft. The latest title in the series, Mario Party 10 was released worldwide in March 2015 on Wii U.
The series currently holds the record for the longest-running minigame series. As of December 2014, Nintendo reported cumulative worldwide sales of 39.6 million game copies in the Mario Party franchise.
Ben Folds Five is the self-titled debut album by Ben Folds Five, released in 1995. A non-traditional rock album, it featured an innovative indie-pop sound, and excluded lead guitars completely. The album was released on the small independent label Passenger Records, owned by Caroline Records, a subsidiary of Virgin/EMI. Ben Folds Five received positive reviews, and spawned five singles. The record failed to chart, but sparked an intense bidding war eventually won by Sony Music. Several live versions of songs originally released on Ben Folds Five reappeared later as b-sides or on compilations.
The album received positive reviews from NME, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and Entertainment Weekly. Allmusic gave Ben Folds Five 4 out of 5 stars, calling it "a potent, and extremely fun collection of postmodern rock ditties that comes off as a pleasantly workable combination of Tin Pan Alley showmanship, Todd Rundgren-style power pop, and myriad alt-rock sensibilities."
An immersive video is basically a video recording of a real world scene, where the view in every direction is recorded at the same time. During playback the viewer has control of the viewing direction. Generally the only area that can't be viewed is the view toward the camera support. The material is recorded as data which when played back through a software player allows the user control of the viewing direction and playback speed. The player control is typically via a mouse or other sensing device and the playback view is typically 4:3 window on a computer display or projection screen or other presentation device such as a head mounted display.
A recent example, as of 2011, of immersive video is provided by the Kogeto Dot panoramic video capture device and associated online community for smartphones, for the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and for the Galaxy Nexus with the Kogeto Dot 360-degree panoramic video accessory.
Sometimes the phrase "immersive video" is used to describe full-size teleconferencing capabilities, such as Cisco's Telepresence product.
Microsoft Video 1 or MS-CRAM is an early lossy video compression and decompression algorithm (codec) that was released with version 1.0 of Microsoft's Video for Windows in November 1992. It is based on MotiVE, a vector quantization codec which Microsoft licensed from Media Vision. In 1993, Media Vision marketed the Pro Movie Spectrum, an ISA board that captured video in both raw and MSV1 formats (the MSV1 processing was done in hardware on the board).
Microsoft Video 1 operates either in a 8-bit palettized color space or in a 15-bit RGB color space. Each frame is split into 4×4 pixel blocks. Each 4×4 pixel block can be coded in one of three modes: skip, 2-color or 8-color. In skip mode, the content from the previous frame is copied to the current frame in a conditional replenishment fashion. In 2-color mode, two colors per 4×4 block are transmitted, and 1 bit per pixel is used to select between the two colors. In 8-color mode, the same scheme applies with 2 colors per 2×2 block. This can be interpreted as a 2-color palette which is locally adapted on either a 4×4 block basis or a 2×2 block basis. Interpreted as vector quantization, vectors with components red, green, and blue are quantized using a forward adaptive codebook with two entries.