Word: besting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Computers are good games players, and the best games this year are fiendishly addictive challenges to physical dexterity and mental sharpness. Not all of the addicts are children, and this pleases toy manufacturers because it is beginning to be clear that adults can be very self-indulgent in buying expensive computer games for themselves. Indeed, adults usually outnumbered the kids last week in the fast-growing electronic games departments of stores across the nation...
...just doesn't make any sense that I've spent all morning twiddling this knob." Then his expression changed to a high-voltage gloat: "But look at that score!" The readout on the small, gray, liquid crystal screen said 542, which is middling-titanic for Blockbuster, the best of several mind-destroying games that can be played on the midget console. Blockbuster is a test of reflexes and anticipation; twiddling the machine's knob moves an electronic paddle back and forth across the bottom of the 1½-in.-square display screen, and the object...
What is not likely to change is that the games that succeed will work because they use their memory chips and lighted readouts to create melodrama. The best example now in production is a brilliant quarter-arcade game called Space Invaders. It is a reaction-time contest: shoot down the massed, marching aliens shown on the big TV screen before they shoot you. The refinements are satanic. The player has four blockhouses behind which to hide his man, but as the blockhouses catch fire under attack, they crumble. As the sound effects become more ominous, the aliens begin to shoot...
Written by the British art critic and historian Ian Dunlop, Degas (Harper & Row; 240 pages; $37.50) is by far the best introduction to the life and work of the painter of boulevards and ballet dancers now in print. A student of Ingres's and the great contemporary of Manet, Flaubert Sand the Goncourt brothers, Degas was one of those ocular witnesses without whom the cultural life of France in the 19th century cannot be understood; and no writer has done a better job of placing this tetchy, formidable genius, with his astonishing powers of observation iand his bitter tongue...
Kilims, or flat-woven rugs, have long been considered the s poor relatives of the Oriental knotted pile rugs that have proved to be one of the best -though specialized-hedges against inflation in recent years. Kilims by Yanni Petsopoulos with Michael Franses (Rizzoli; 394 pages; $85) gives these weavings their proper due. It should be welcomed by both collectors and decorators, the former because the author has provided clear and much needed scholarship on origins and techniques, the latter because of the rare and glorious examples of kilims from Anatolia, the Caucasus and Persia that are reproduced...