What's the World's Hardest Puzzle?

One of the most well-known examples of this genre is Room Escape Adventure's "Trapped in a Room With a Zombie," a setup with a zombie chained to a wall. You have to solve the puzzles and escape without getting touched by the zombie, but every five minutes its chain is released another foot! So you're holed up in your office. Why? That's where the narrative comes in. The office room is a great example of the most common narrative: escaping a specific, unpleasant place (see also: prison cell or zombie dungeon). Some narratives don't actually involve any escape at all. As you can imagine, trying to escape a prison or defusing a bomb can really reveal one's true self. These personalities are so recognizable to escape room players that the Internet has created lists of them. There's the aggressive player, who runs around the room yelling, or the competitive player who wants to solve the puzzle faster than anyone else. Some puzzle setups can be as simple as a riddle scrawled on the wall, and others might involve extensive computer programming and elaborate wiring schemes.

You can even combine objects to achieve your goal -- whatever you can imagine comes to life on screen. Scribblenauts and Super Scribblenauts are for kids ages 8 and up, and are available for the Nintendo DS. Scribblenauts Remix can be played on an iPhone or iPad. Scribblenauts is a great example of emergent game play, which is a lot like "choose your own adventure" to the extreme. In other words, the game's complexity changes based on the player's decisions, leading to an infinite number of gaming experiences that are limited only by your imagination. Kids can engage in decision-making, planning, diplomacy, strategy and exploration with this in-depth civilization-building simulation game. Accumulate resources in order to grow and develop your civilization, and Приветственный депозит каждому if those resources aren't in your territory you'll have to negotiate and trade with other civilizations. Each thing you build -- granaries, factories, markets, banks, universities -- opens up new opportunities for development and advancement. Make important decisions about the focus of your civilization: Do you want to build up your military and be a nation of conquerors, or invest in scientific research and win the game through technological development?

Micro Forte worked on the project for several years, Приветственный депозит каждому but eventually left it behind it to begin work on a different game. It's rough when you find out a company has scrapped a game you wanted to play, but it can be even worse if you don't hear anything at all. In the next section, we'll look at some games that may or may not ever hit store shelves. Sometimes even finishing a game isn't a guarantee that it will hit the market. In 1998, a game development company called Paradox created "Thrill Kill" for the PlayStation console. It was a fighting game for up to four players, featuring extreme gore and Казино нового поколения violence. Game publishing company Electronic Arts decided to cancel publication even though the game was ready for the market. Game developer company 3D Realms first announced this PC video game title in 1997. It's a sequel to "Duke Nukem 3D." In late 2007, 10 years after the initial announcement, 3D Realms said the game was still in development but would make it into stores soon.

In the past year or so, you may have heard about a new technology that lets you manipulate 3-D images over the Internet. Many Web sites have been using this sort of software for a while, but it has mostly remained a niche market due to a lack of universal 3-D viewer programs. Macromedia, in conjunction with Intel, NxView and others, hopes to bring this technology to many more Web users with the newest versions of the Shockwave player and the Shockwave authoring program Director. In this edition of HowStuffWorks, we'll find out exactly what Shockwave 3-D technology is and how it works. We'll also explore some applications of the new technology and check out some very cool 3-D images. If you spend much time on the Web, you have probably encountered Shockwave, a graphics format for animation and interactive presentations. Shockwave files are created by a program called Director, which was originally developed for CD-ROM use.

The Earth, our celestial home, is in perpetual motion, gracefully rotating through space. This continuous rotation gives us the cycle of day and night, shapes our seasons, and influences our climate. Over geological time spans, it's gradually slowing down, Приветственный депозит каждому which has led to speculation about what would happen if the Earth stopped rotating altogether. Let's take a closer look at this hypothetical scenario and explore the profound consequences of a motionless Earth, where the climate would shift dramatically and you could say - literally - the Earth stood still. How Fast Does Earth Spin? What Would Happen if Earth Suddenly Stopped Rotating? Is Earth's Rotation Slowing Down? Why Does Earth Spin? You have to admit, it doesn't feel like you're spinning around the center of the Earth at hundreds of miles an hour, so it's not hard to cut our scientific forebears some slack for assuming the planet was stationary and that the sun rotated around it.