-all- of the games are rigged.

[Keyan]

My laptop's motherboard melted. It's usually a 2.4GHz. when I play these arcade games on it, the snake moves so fast, everything flows perfectly, etc..
Now i'm on a 450MHz AMD. And HOLY CRAP. Everything moves so slow! I got so far in snake, Tetris is easier (but more blurry) and Asteriods is like playing "lets see how many rocks on the screen it takes to have the computer bluescreen"

There should be a way to even the playing field, don't you think?

[Elantravision]

So you are saying that people with slower computers have more of an advantage? I guess so, but only if you are willing to spend more time trying to attain higher scores. I have a 2.0Ghz, Pentium 4. So mine is pretty fast, and it seems to be doing the trick for me.

[BlueGT]

Unfortunately, I can't do anything about it. It wasn't me who wrote all those games.

[CaseyGT2001]

did you see my post... HEEEYO :D

http://www.elantraxd.com/forums/showthread.php?t=153

The games are skewed to benefit slow computers.

[Elantra2.001]

what ever... i have an 850 and i cant get a high score to save my life...

[HatchetMan]

2.4 GHz P4, I knew there was a reason why my score on asteroids sucked :D

[SkizziK03elan]

dude, its 2004, if your computer can't handle the arcade games...throw it away.

[O_GT]

Man I have am old overclocked Celeron at 850mhz it was a 566 and they run fine.There must be something wrong with your computer

[SuperGLS]

I have a Pentium 3, 733mhz... and they run pretty fast. My girlfriend has a slightly quicker comp and the games seem to run slower on hers... I have a cable connection and she has T1 at school... so, I don't know. Oh wells, I still suck at the games.

[O_GT]

Me too I suck at these games

[04GTboySC]

same here it sucks:(

[Leviathant]

It's not that the games are intentionally rigged, it's that they are poorly coded. You'll find the same problem in old DOS games like Chopper 2 and Test Drive 2. The games would synchronize to the system's clock... no one figured that in five years' time people would still be playing the games.

Some of the better coded games were independant of the CPU's clock. There's this cheesy CGA game called Pengo that runs exactly the same on my P4 2.4ghz as it did on the Tandy computer my wife first played it on.

This problem still happens in games today. Apparently in various Quake sequels, depending on the refresh rate of your monitor, you could do special jumps because the physics were somehow tied to that refresh rate. i.e. if you were playing the game on a moitor running at 125hz or 85hz, you could utilize this glitch do a special double jump that isn't possible on monitors running at 75hz or 60hz. When Doom 3 came out, it was designed so that it always ran at 60 frames per second (ie 60hz), to avoid the strange physics problems that arose from earlier examples of dependant coding.

Just gotta get new games I guess :p