Zerg Rush Google Easter Egg
google.com
google.com
On an unrelated note, it's rather depressing to think of the original StarCraft game as being something 'old people' remember. I'm 29.
Edit : I was kind of surprised to see this meme explicitly explained. I've always thought of it as being one of the most ubiquitous out there.
Do you remember a time before Google? Google was started the same year as Starcraft was released - 1998.
(Weirdly Armageddon and Deep Impact were released in 1998)
But then, for some reason, I thought it was a Toy Story joke.
However, I also remember using BBS systems. TradeWars 2002, anyone?
I remember when Dune 2 came out - the father of all RTS games.
I absolutely loved that game, though!
I don't really recall it having any story, though.
Then the warcraft series, followed by Command and conquer and then Starcraft, which set the gold standard. AoE came next - after that it just becomes a blur of different RTS types which were competing for top billing.
I loved both the games.
Dune really was a brilliant game, and really its balance was pretty good, especially considering it was a time when the word balance itself hadn't been coined.
It had significantly more depth than StarCraft/WarCraft (and better graphics to boot), but the higher complexity apparently made it less accessible and hence less popular.
For anyone curious: The latest refresh is called "Supreme Commander", and last time I checked there was still an active community/player-base around the OpenSource port "TA Spring".
My home machine isn't set up for games and I own SC2 but it doesn't run well - and I enjoy the original more anyway.
This "war against the time" approach was my deal breaker for SC2. The general idea may be fine for training people to fight online, but for single player mode/campaign it's just inappropriate.
Typical SC1 mission is "destroy all enemy bases when you like it and how you like it", typical SC2 mission is "disarm the ticking bomb in time". It's OK to have 1-2 such missions in the campaign, but when entire campaign is made of time-bomb missions, there is no satisfaction from the game.
On the other hand, and I can't explain why, the atmosphere of the SC1 was a lot better. I don't know if it's the music or the graphics but it really had a great feeling of "you are alone in space and everything is hostile".
Best mom ever??
eAPM, or effective APM is a more advanced attempt to filter out spammy actions (as you describe) and was made up a bit after APM first came out as a statistic and people started gaming the APM stat to try and inflate their egos.
In SC2 there is a bug on the live patch where the APM tab in replays or live games shows the eAPM stat, and the eAPM tab shows the APM stat due to some silly mixup that made it past QA.
The "zerg", as it was commonly known to all players, presented itself to me in the beginning of 2002 in a well-known and still active MMORPG called Dark Age of Camelot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_age_of_camelot). DAoC-players refer to a mass of ungrouped, uncoordinated players joining in on the large battles between the realms of the game as a "zerg", and to individual players making up the "zerg" as "randoms" (random players; ungrouped) and sometimes as "zergers". The term certainly sprung from the first StarCraft game, but the phenomenon is today embodied not just by NPC units in this or that game, but by actual groups of players, and is seen in practically every MMORPG with PVP.
For anyone who never played Starcraft: zerglings are created in pair, two per egg and the maximum number of eggs are 3. A player who attempts to do a zergling rush wait for the first 3 eggs to be available, hatch them and subsequently make a new pair of zerglings as soon as a new egg is available.
It's just a matter of adding in the hooked code into the associated field in the DB.
I know I over simplified this, but I would assume that's the gist.
So it's not like they added the extra complexity for a laugh!
Oh well, time to leave.
"Google's Zerg Rush drives thousands to contemplate suicide"
Even longer queries like [como suicidarse sin sentir dolor] on google.es worked. I tried a bunch of things on google.fr and couldn't get it to work.
1) Insert jQuery into the search results page by using this bookmarklet:
javascript:void(function(){if(!document.getElementById('jQscript')){var%20jQscript=document.createElement('script');jQscript.id='jQscript';jQscript.src='https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.0/jquery.mi...;}}());
2) use the console to execute the following, moving all zerglings to 250x250:
setInterval(function() {
$('.zr_zergling_container').css('left', '250px').css('top', '250px');
3) click away. #winning
Then I went and just entered the code to pop up a ShareBox programmatically on the JS console, letting me edit the share message to whatever I wanted it to be. "I took down 1,853,642.93 zerglings with 3.14 * 10^42 APM." And I didn't even need to play the game!
My first approach was the mouseclick (using $('.zr_zergling_container').click()) but for whatever reason that wouldn't work. I got fed up and just decided to try moving the zerglings to a clickable location. Ha!
(APM stands for Actions Per Minute, where Actions in StarCraft are input events that do something, like selecting an unit or ordering it to attack. Professional players tend to have >200 APM).
This is all I'm going to be doing today...
1. Google spends a lot of quality dev hours programming "fun" easter eggs/doodles/April fools sections into their products.
2. These efforts gain a lot of positive spin in the media.
3. This positive spin helps to improve the image of the corporation as a fun place to work/do business with etc.
Now given how many hours that go into some of these efforts, I find it difficult to believe that at least some of them must be mandated by management, but to me that's irrelevant: I'd much rather see all of this dev time being spent on:
1. Making Google's products better.
2. Contributing to an OSS project.
"Quality dev hours" are not a fungible resource. In fact, they're so un-fungible that we commonly accept that beyond a certain point the value of a dev hour is negative. Maybe time spent on these projects invigorates engineers to do better work in the rest of their work hours? Maybe not. But the issue is more subtle than you're giving it credit for.
Plus... well... THIS particular simple throwaway Easter egg is what bothers you? You know there are several multi-billion-dollar industries that employ smart people in creating "fun" ways for people to unproductively spend their time, right?
Yes, and they are called games companies, and I love their products and they really are fun. Is Google a games/entertainment company, or a company that sells advertising?
And no, it is not this particular Google Easter egg that bothers me, all of them do. I made that clear in my last comment. The fact that almost every one of them ends up on a thread on HN like this one is distracting (for the record this is the first one I have commented negatively on, but they're all as bad).
Also, google 'do a barrel roll'. Not sure if you've seen that one.