Saturday, December 19, 2009

Teleporting Cat

I really liked this old TI computer game, I think it was called Mouse Hunt, where the goal of the game was to simply navigate your way through a maze. Your cursor was shaped like a mouse, and the end of the maze was marked with a wedge of swiss cheese.

You set the difficulty of the maze on a scale of 1 to 20, or 1 to 40, or some number like that, with 1 being very short and simple and the highest number generating a maze that filled the whole screen and your mouse looked like a tiny grey dot.

If that still wasn’t challenging enough, you could add a cat or two to the maze. It was just a little 2-D picture of a cat’s face, and if it caught you, it was game over. Also, you could customize the cat. It could move slow, normal, fast, or lighting, and could be dumb or smart. Dumb, slow cats were the easiest to avoid: They moved randomly around the maze and at a slower speed than your cursor. Smart, lightning cats were difficult to get around because they would methodically patrol the maze at almost the speed of light.

But there was one unique feature of the game that, to this day, I still smile at when I think about it: the teleporting cat. Sometimes when I see a cat or think about the word cat, my brain sticks the word “teleporting” in there. This was just a toggle feature: Your cats either teleported or they didn’t. But when they did, it was great. The cat would be at one section of the maze one moment, and at another section the next. It took the predictability out of the cat’s movements, and made avoiding it more a game of luck than skill. I think the trigger for the cat to teleport was hitting a dead-end, but I don’t remember precisely. If you were extra suicidal in Mouse Hunt, you’d put two Smart Lightning Teleporting Cats in your maze and watch as you were caught the second you stepped foot into the maze :)

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