Word: brilliant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Voice Chess Challenger is a gabby and much smarter version of the computer chess player turned out by Fidelity Electronics nearly three years ago. Back then it seemed remarkable that a tiny computer could play chess at all, even though its play was less than brilliant. Now the chess ability of the reprogrammed chip is high enough to make any parlor wood-pusher loosen his collar and roll up his sleeves, and it is the machine's distinctly machine-like speech that is the dazzling gimmick. Turn the doodad on, and it says, dropping each word like a cinder...
...other and fight. The miniaturization is astonishing. Sound effects are imaginative and frequent; when a spaceman gets zapped (a pictograph showing smashed robot parts flashes on the screen), a descending scale of cheerful beeps is heard. The trouble with Bambino's products is that while the gadgetry is brilliant, the games themselves are not very interesting. The problem is not restricted to Bambino; an observer suspects that in many cases (Microvision and Speak & Spell are notable exceptions), the engineers who made the toys have had more fun than will the kids who get them...
What is not likely to change is that the games that succeed will work because they use their memory chips and lighted readouts to create melodrama. The best example now in production is a brilliant quarter-arcade game called Space Invaders. It is a reaction-time contest: shoot down the massed, marching aliens shown on the big TV screen before they shoot you. The refinements are satanic. The player has four blockhouses behind which to hide his man, but as the blockhouses catch fire under attack, they crumble. As the sound effects become more ominous, the aliens begin to shoot...
...Friederich Preiss, whose names are familiar today only to collectors, shaped ivory as if it were butter; the dancing figures they carved were adorned with bronze and stood or reclined on bases of marble or onyx. Many of the statuettes hover at the brink of kitsch, but their brilliant colors and glowing surfaces (clearly reproduced in the tipped-in illustrations) must be seen to be believed...
Piggy has undergone drastic transformations. The victim of society's malevolence is now a deformed orphan, charred in the London blitz, and tortured in true Dickensian from by a perverted teacher in the Foundlings School who enjoy's fondling. The dust jacket labels it a brilliant exploration of weirdness...