#171 – Pole
Posted on January 18, 2007 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comics
When I was a kid we had a Commodore 64 computer with about 500 games. One of our favorite games to play was leaderboard golf. We didn’t really play it as a golf game. It was more of an adventure game to us. We would hit the ball as far off the course as we could just to see what was there. We would sometimes find little hidden islands with a lone tree on them. There were definitely some games that were fun to play properly but a lot of the others were only fun to try and break.
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I’m afraid I have to agree with that. I hate playing a game the right way, trying to find the glitches and exploiting them is much more fun.
Love the comic, btw. Read all of them in about two days or so. Laughed on nearly all of them. *snagged the link from Penny and Aggie*
I tried pole-vaulting once… Let’s just say that Biff and I have something in common, now…
T.S. you should be afraid of sharing stuff in common with Biff… Though here’s a question, did Biff think up the event, or is he just a participant?
Im non english and there for dont understand what a telephone-pole-vault competition is 😛
He definitely made it up himself.
He must’ve done.
Right?
…right?
Munky: Look up “pole vault” – it is a sport. Then think about doing that, but with a telephone pole instead.
Chris: Great comic, great way to start the day. And I love playing games the wrong way too.
Thanks for all the comments Chryssta. 🙂
I had a 64 as well. i remember the passion on just whacking the ball on leaderboard…
we also had “world games” i remember the fun of trying to injure cliff divers or barrell jumpers
the hilarity 🙂
I think possibly he is just trying to beat his own best score, least broken bones is the winner.
That’s a good theory Skips. 🙂
I like how Biff’s eyebrow is all limp and sad on the ground. 😀
Stuv – I did the same thing with the cliff divers!
thats pretty good for biff considering all the other horrible things that has happened to him
Maybe he misread the rules to caber tossing?
Great comic btw! 🙂
Hey bitpirate, yeah if Biff was wearing a kilt instead of pants that could be an alternate caption. 🙂
For all the passion and fun that I experienced playing computer games on the C64, it had never occurred to me that games coded for a system with so limited resources would contain extras that would have rarely been discovered. How interesting!
I always only played the games trying to be good at them. But lack of instructions (ahem) resulted in mostly trying to make sense of it all by wiggling the joystick, missing out on many things, and moving on to the next game in the box or on the disk.
I wish I could once more play in a proper way all those games that I liked, and on the original machines too.
Ah, sweet youth.
XD I left my comment on the wrong strip.
Oh well, Just forgot to mention I live in Quincy, Massachusetts which is just a wee bit south of Boston. When I do visit the city I get lost, always. After a while you start to wonder if those buildings really hold work offices or are just for decoration and tools to get you lost.
Just read through the ones I hadn’t been able to check yet and must say that they are pretty funny. Very much enjoy your work, Chris.
And I love my Commodore 64 back home…I could never beat the original Test Drive, because I always had a sick obsession with over-reving the car and watching it blow out before the race started.
Lots of fun games on there. Great memories.
Hehe.. I could go on for days about C64.. did commodore invent the pole vault? I gotta say the connection between the comic and the annecdote underneath is vague at best :). My favourite C64 game was Bruce Lee, your buddies could play the bad guys and chase you around.. lordy we played that for hours :).
isnt htis based off a scottish sport? I think its called the kaper toss or something like that.
Yes! I loved the Bruce Lee game. I played that one a lot as well. 🙂
In “Halo 2” my nephews learned how to drive their vehicle into a very deep chasm without death – just so they could explore the game-environment’s limits… Good Times…
When I was a kid we had Rush on our brand new Nintendo 64 and I discovered a glitch one time by purposely driving a course backwards. I saw a little green hill, ramped it, jumped a fence and fell through the ground on the other side. The car just fell through a void forever…. until we turned the console off.
Another ex-C64 owner checking in… this webcomic is GREAT and I’ll be adding this to my list of webcomics links!
This strip appears to be similar to the Scottish sport of caber tossing. I seem to remember this in one of the sports games on the C64 – maybe it WAS World Games. Sometimes the caber would fall the wrong way and ‘pound you into the ground’ or the end would fall on the foot and the character would be holding the flattened foot while hopping on the other (and I SO can see Biff doing that!).
There is a good C64 emulator out there – it’s called VICE and there is also a website that has archived copies of various C64 games – the name of the site is Arnold… internet searches should turn up the sites easily enough.
i started working on computers with a comodore-64 when i was five. i still miss it–Astro Grover was the best game ever. i also was raised as both a Star Wars fan and a Treky, started playing D&D when i was 8 and programing when i was 9. yeah, i didn’t really have much choice but to be a geek…
I had a C64 when I was little too. Those were memories.
yea, in battlefield, ill go off to the sides, scale buildings and batman my way rooftop to rooftop to see how far i can get before someone notices me and blows me up. or ill just take one of the little FAV car thingies, and go offroading from silo to silo looking for stranded teamates or enemies out wandering about, because those are the people who actually like face-to-bumper action.
At least it wasn’t the caber-toss…
Wannabeelf: Huzah for nerdiness. Things are interesting when you’re a nerd. Like me.
I remember aiming my skier at the monster just to see him die in one of those old games.
Once again, Biff invents something amazing!
http://thebookofbiff.com/2006/06/30/79-bread/
i had a sims pets 2 once and if you wash to many cats at the town square, you get stuck in there and you have to wash another cat or swich places to get out.
XD Commodores rocked… I was never good at breaking them, had hard enough time staying alive within actual rules… 🙁 Don’t think I ever got to finish Zork
Ahh…yes! So many good times with the C64 🙂 My friends and I used to play Microprose Soccer for hours and hours… Years later we got the old C64 out again and loaded the game… have to say it felt very, very dated 😉 But still… those were the good times, when all was fun & games 🙂
The first annual telephone pole vaulting competition looks suspiciously like a Caber toss.
The first Caber toss looked suspiciously like a telephone pole vaulting competition.
Hurrah for glitch exploitation and limit finding. My favorite games for limit finding and breaking are the Elder Scrolls, as both number three and four are technically endless. There’s huge amounts of wilderness to explore, and it’s nigh impossible to explore it fully, although I have a friend who mapped all of Oblivion in two hundred and fifty six hours or so. I’ve gotten off topic, but still.
That comment would have made more sense under the GPS comic, or perhaps in the forums. As it is, I’m more confused than usual.
I loved the Commodore 64 we had when I was little, my uncle wrote me and my brother our own game were we had to adventure through the wild west, we never did manage to beat it.
In Zork and a lot of Infocom games there were easter eggs. They go back to ‘plugh’ ‘xyzzy’ which are from “Adventure” by Crowther and Woods.
The most fun I recall from a game on the C64 was a whole group of people playing “Planetfall”. We were stuck on base yet did not have duty. So someone would sit at the computer typing commands, someone would shout out the description of what’s going on, people would shout back things to try.
That went on the three of a four day weekend. We did solve it and it was more fun than I had solving any other Infocom game.
I actually still have a case of old C64 games, but don’t have the C64 anymore. Always hoping to find one at a yard sale or something so I can take a trip down nostalgia lane with the likes of BC & Grogg’s Revenge…