5ywjdPumpkinPrincess
25388
604
23
Nov 17, 2025 3:21 PM
5ywjdPumpkinPrincess
25388
604
23
MrHappySmiles
This is why I don’t remember finishing any games ever…
BellsTheorem
Or ran out of money. Just like in real life.
JaromirAzarov
Bullshit, a lot of games had a regular ending, even back in the 80s.
walpurrga
i think that may have to do with the fact you had to throw in a coin to play, idk if that was rly so much better haha
Neurisko
There were some Activision games on the Atari 2600 that got to a certain point and froze. Keystone Kapers, the numbers turned to little cop hats. In Megamania, they turned to little space ships. Ask me how I know! I beat Yar's Revenge as well, but I don't recall what happened exactly.
aristera
Keystone Kapers was one of the last games I got for Atari before I got my NES. Decent graphics but limited game play. I think I traded Yar's reveng for Mouse trap with my cousin. I need to pick up another copy.
IhopeUgetwhatUvoted4
Not true. There is a death screen. The game would quit before it let you win.
chaoswarrelt
Well, I finished "Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards".
SgtPakcrat
To be fair these "computer games" began life as arcade games.
Arcade games sole purpose was to separate you from your quarters.
Tyrrlin
Adventure had an actual, achievable ending.
nintendolunchbox
Well. There were kill screems
Ionico
200% accurate. Seems accurate.
AreWeNotDoingPhrasingNow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RASMwD60Zg0
hogninja
The Tetris theme still haunts me.
Madringo
I beat space invaders on Atari, the screen at the end goes blank for quite awhile, then it goes to the game over, with credits
BladeTurMoiL
And we’ve come full circle. Now modern video games cant be won, they have either infinite updates or are open world with so much additional side content that you get so side tracked that you stop playing.
DownUpUpDown
And just like in real life they ended as they ran out of memory.
pdarkfred
Cabinet dramas: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0923752/
wherethehorriblethingsare
Until they hit 40, then it's all back pain and erectile dysfunction.
alcamar
My erectile functions just fine for now, but the back pain is covering those bases
Iliekbirbs
Hot flashes for me here :(
joeyecho101
If you don't mind, how old are you? My wife is 45 and everyone in our family sees she's going into menopause except her. Temperature swings, mood swings, zero energy, etc.
just4thelolz
Pirsquar
Emma! My penis is also fine. Thank you.
joeyecho101
45. I'm getting surgery for the back pain in December. I'm hoping that helps with the erectile dysfunction cause the little blue pills ain't helping.
randomwalrus
You can borrow my erectile, until yours starts working again. Its in a pickle jar, at the back of the fridge, help yourself.
FallenWyvern
Blue pills only prevent blood from leaving, so maybe get your cardiovascular system checked up too. Obviously back surgery doesn't help that. Hope you get the help you need and are back on and off your feet soon!
echonite
Real life doesnt get harder and faster, we just get slower.
Tokoloshe
Couldn't beat Aldo after the third or fourth repeat, timer was too short.
wobblecopterrrr
that's not what ur mom said...
5ywjdPumpkinPrincess
elvisdumbledore
"Just like real life"... and sex.
le petite mort
CylensTheDiscourse
Well no, that's not a good example since Pacman and many others eventually reached a point where if you lived long enough, the game simply glitched out and became an incoherent mess. You didn't die, you just were in a state of pure insanity. Maybe that can be considered an analog to getting dementia?
SocoFox
Life is like a video game. Bigger than it looks and fundamentally strange, then you die.
ThomasTheWankEnglne
the cheat code is and alwasy has been being rich
FacelessAce
No, even money can't stop time. But it can make the first few levels a lot easier, just like in real life...
ThomasTheWankEnglne
lol how many poor people do you hear talking about wantin more time
FacelessAce
Lots. You?
ThomasTheWankEnglne
maybe more time in the day to work, not more time to be alive. quite the opposite actually
5ywjdPumpkinPrincess
azazyel
Shappy Seasholtz covers "When I Was a Kid" by Ernie Cline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuThboZgfME
riparian
So happy for the Ernie Cline reference.
azazyel
When I was job hunting I listened to 'curriculum vitae' a lot and really wanted to say that in an interview.
riparian
That would have been AWESOME!
azazyel
Mainly this "I've been a puppet, a poet, a preacher, a popper, a pawn and a king" Or 'I'm the one the legends spoke of'
cousteau
And with effort and dedication, you could get as far as you would set your mind to. New computer games are mostly pay-to-win. So yeah, getting more realistic.
Badprenup
Besides what other people said, there are literally tens of thousands of modern games with absolutely no pay-to-win elements.
This assumes you're including games without direct person vs person conflict, since the image in the OP is an example of that. Best Pac Man had was score competition between players but you didn't even need a 2P mode to do that.
FacelessAce
I'm sorry, do you not remember how much money those arcade machines could suck up? I used to play Galaga during my brother's basketball games, and I can promise you those machines were not free.
SinStar87
arcade games are the embodiment of pay to win.
BenYourFriend
Pay-to-win is where you pay money to gain an advantage over other players. Unless you mean that you pay to play to get better, then I disagree.
cousteau
I mean being able to buy loot boxes with real money, be it in single player or competitive games. Sometimes getting to the point that the game is unbeatable without them.
SinStar87
You think buying continues isn't an advantage over other players?
BenYourFriend
Pay to win usually refers to player-versus-player games, which is the context for which I was making my argument. I may have misunderstood, are you talking about buying continues while competing for a high score?
BenYourFriend
In a single player game, to be clear. If there was an arcade pvp game that let you pay to revive, that’s super lame
SinStar87
yes, any arcade games that dont have high score tracking?
IMakeLotsOfReferencesAndRemakes
Pay-to-play... and mostly lose. That is the business model.
SinStar87
it tracks high scores of players, making them competitive games, more quarters means more continues to get the highest score.
IMakeLotsOfReferencesAndRemakes
I know this is a bit pedantic but that is not what pay to win means. Pay to win is like "Hey look at this nice balanced experience... what is this? A DLC that gives me god tier equipment making the game trivial? Nice." Or worse when its in a competitive multiplayer when its a weapon/ability/character that is just clearly unfair.
SinStar87
That's fine, you can have your own definition but by the accepted standard as I understand it, buying continues in a high score game is very much p2w.
maybeamonster
this particular game concluded by eventually breaking down into gibberish
TheGodEmperorOfChaos
So this is why my workplace is crumbling on itself.
ChelChehalem
Just like real life
GloveFullaVaseline
Man I had the book and the patterns down... I never hit 256 but my friend told us at school he got to the end and said he "cracked the screen." I imagine what you posted to be that thing he was describing exactly.
AbelardSnazz
Yeah my friend at school told me his dad flew Concorde so…
VictusVonGuyver
So if we try this in real life, we'll inevitably destroy the fabric of reality.
OriginalSyn
Tetris does something similar as well. I think it's still playable but the blocks textures start getting pretty crazy.
OriginalSyn
edit: on the console it seems it eventually also crashes when processing the score gets too much.
SavageMyStarAnise
I believe these are referred to as 'kill screens'
Roqinn
I could barely get to level 3.
cousteau
Wasn't this level "technically playable", only super hard due to the atrocious bug that made the map horrible?
wraith203
Playable, but not beatable. The 'best' you can do is eat all the dots and ghosts, die and repeat until you run out of lives. Supposedly the 'dots' in the gibberish area can be eaten again after you die.
Mostlydeadpool
in theory, yes. because there was a specific pattern that you used to complete the level at that point. if you timed it right, you could do the same pattern blind on the half of the screen you couldn't see. it would be insanely hard but doable.
SinStar87
there's not enough dots to complete the level so you can't beat it.
maphilli14
The Book, "Humble Pi - When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World by Matt Parker" covers exactly why the limtations of math and computer engineering resulted in this.
PicassoCT
256
ChelVanin
I’m gonna have to read that book for the title alone.
cousteau
I get the "integer overflow" part, once that happens, the results can be unpredictable.
Magnar1183
"Matt Parker"? Sounds like a mashup of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Lol
UprootedGrunt
He does (did?) stand up comedy based on math -- unsure how often or if he still does, but that's how I learned about him. His youtube is @standupmaths
suiseiseki
Good ol' overflow bugs. 255 is the limit for maximum byte size but it starts counting at 0 instead of 1. Once you exceed that it loops around again and turns to digital soup.
HeadJamistan
*laughs in ghandi nuke-happiness*
cousteau
Oh, so it wasn't an overflow per se but a loop that looped using a counter that was too small? (had a coworker almost do that last week)
suiseiseki
Pretty much. I'm working on a project that has a weirdly low unit counter of 96 and if the game spawns any units over that the game begins to play random audio files. It's spaghetti code all the way and I'm not really a programmer so I don't know what to make of that other than as a computational oddity.
cousteau
There's this thing old programmers tell children to scare them called "undefined behavior" (especially in low-level languages such as C) where certain things such as overflows can make the program act in the most unpredictable ways imaginable. Basically the compiler/interpreter reaches a scenario that it was specifically instructed to ignore for the sake of efficiency, and its way out can be something that seems completely unrelated to the issue.
maybeamonster
behavior was undefined because different platforms did different things and those standardizing C just said "don't do that, it's fucky". they were documenting more than prescribing it at that point, and there were dozens of operating systems with dozens of C compilers. moreover, it was undefined because you might generate it in a macro knowing it would never be called. negative indexes to arrays or rolling over sign numbers or null derefs /