Adventure game

An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games (text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multi-player design difficult.Colossal Cave Adventure is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Myst.

Initial adventure games developed in the 1970s and early 1980s were text-based, using text parsers to translate the player's input into commands. As personal computers became more powerful with the ability to show graphics, the graphic adventure game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text commands with graphics, but soon moving towards point and click interfaces. Further computer advancements led to adventure games with more immersive graphics using real-time or pre-rendered three-dimensional scenes or full-motion video taken from the first- or third-person perspective.

Adventure Games

Adventure Games was an American game company that produced role-playing games and game supplements.

History

In the early 1980s Dave Arneson established his own game company, Adventure Games - staffed largely by Arneson's friends, most of whom were also members of a Civil War reenactment group - that produced the miniatures games Harpoon (1981) and Johnny Reb (1983), as well as a new edition of his own Adventures in Fantasy role-playing game (1981). The company also put out about a half-dozen Tékumel related books, due to Arneson's friendship with M. A. R. Barker. Adventure Games was profitable, but Arneson found the workload to be excessive and finally sold the company to Flying Buffalo. Flying Buffalo picked up the rights to Adventure Games in 1985; because Arneson owned a portion of Flying Buffalo, he let them take care of the rest of the company's stock and IP when he shut the company down.

References

Software release life cycle

A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software: ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help improve software or fix bugs still present in the software.

History

Usage of the "alpha/beta" test terminology originated at IBM. As long ago as the 1950s (and probably earlier), IBM used similar terminology for their hardware development. "A" test was the verification of a new product before public announcement. "B" test was the verification before releasing the product to be manufactured. "C" test was the final test before general availability of the product. As software became a significant part of IBM's offerings, the alpha test terminology was used to denote the pre-announcement test and beta test was used to show product readiness for general availability. Martin Belsky, a manager on some of IBM's earlier software projects claimed to have invented the terminology. IBM dropped the alpha/beta terminology during the 1960s, but by then it had received fairly wide notice. The usage of "beta test" to refer to testing done by customers was not done in IBM. Rather, IBM used the term "field test".

PlayStation 4

The PlayStation 4 (PS4) is a home video game console developed by Sony Computer Entertainment. Announced as the successor to the PlayStation 3 during a press conference on February 20, 2013, it was launched on November 15, 2013 in North America, and November 29, 2013 in Europe, South America and Australia. It competes with Nintendo's Wii U and Microsoft's Xbox One, as part of the eighth generation of video game consoles.

Moving away from the more complex Cell microarchitecture of its predecessor, the console features an AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) built around the x86-64 architecture; with a theoretical peak performance of 1.84 teraflops, AMD stated that the processor was the "most powerful" APU they had developed to date. The PlayStation 4 places an increased emphasis on social interaction and integration with other devices and services, including the ability to play games off the console on PlayStation Vita and supported Sony Xperia mobile devices ("Remote Play"), the ability to stream gameplay online, or to friends with the ability for them to control gameplay remotely ("Share Play"). The console's controller was also refined over that of the PlayStation 3, with improved buttons, analog sticks and an integrated touchpad among other changes.

Adventure

An adventure is an exciting or unusual experience. It may also be a bold, usually risky undertaking, with an uncertain outcome. Adventures may be activities with some potential for physical danger such as exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, river rafting or participating in extreme sports. The term also broadly refers to any enterprise that is potentially fraught with physical, financial or psychological risk, such as a business venture, a love affair, or other major life undertakings .

Motivation

Adventurous experiences create psychological arousal, which can be interpreted as negative (e.g. fear) or positive (e.g. flow), and which can be detrimental as stated by the Yerkes-Dodson law. For some people, adventure becomes a major pursuit in and of itself. According to adventurer André Malraux, in his La Condition Humaine (1933), "If a man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?". Similarly, Helen Keller stated that "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."