Time Sink #5 Update

Here’s what Keith Dawson, renowned publisher of the now defunct and sorely missed “Tasty Bits from the Technology Front” newsletter, has to say on the topic of Pingu vs. Yeti which I covered in this post: Pingu vs. Yeti has been around a loooong time. In late 2003 / early 2004, when I was losing large chunks of time to the game, I remember visiting a site that linked to dozens of ripoffs and improvements on the original game — I assume that the source code had somehow escaped into the wild. The original developers, meanwhile, kept churning out new creative variations on the Yetisports theme.

The following is from a file on my system named pingu.txt, dated 2004-02-14.

_________________________ longest skip: 587.1 longest face-plant: 492.8 shortest skip: 160.5 shortest face-plant: 356.0 longest run of “whiffs”: 7 _________________________

On the evidence, that score of 587.1 is closely crowding the highest possible score. The highest of which I have found evidence on the Web is 588.8 [1] (linked from a discussion at [2], though most Pingu-Yeti discussions are moribund now as the cutting edge has moved on :). The trick, as you quickly discover, is to hit the Pingu so that he travels upward and descends at the largest angle that will produce a bounce — connecting one pixel earlier in his descent would result in a face-plant. Later, and the shallower bounce means less total distance. Operationally this means producing an arc in which Pingu just grazes the top of the playing window at apogee.