If the two objects intersect, meaning that they are in the same place at the same time, they are assumed to have made contact. In the Fighting game, if one character's fist and the other character's face are in the same place at the same time, someone has a bloody nose!

2) A monster level:

The relative strength and skill of monsters and NPCs may also be indicated by level. For example, a 1st level monster is very weak. But a 23rd level monster is a much more formidable opponent.

3) A difficulty level: In some games, the player is able to control how easy or difficult it will be to play the game. For instance, playing the game on the "easy" or "please don't hurt me" setting makes the game easier, while playing the "difficult" or "I'm completely insane" version will be much different.

4) A game level: A section of the game. Most modern games require the computer to process a tremendous amount of information. These data cannot all be stored in the computer's main memory at the same time. (Sound files in particular take up a lot of space.) So the game is broken up into sections, or levels.

When a game level is to be played, the computer loads only the information which is required for that section of the game. When that portion of the game is finished, the computer loads the information for the next game level. (Because this usually means that the player must wait before continuing to play the game, some developers have chosen to implement "streaming", in which portions of the game are alwaysbeing loaded.)

5) To gain a character level: Some allow the player's character to increase in level. When the character attains the next level, the character is said to have "leveled up". It is not uncommon for players to refuse to stop playing an RPG until a character has reached the next level.

Although the mood of a game is often overlooked by players, it is very important to every game.

Some game genres, such as Horror, must pay very strict attention to the mood of their games. This is because if a Horror game doesn't capture the right mood, it will fail completely.

The player directed Pacman through the maze. The maze was strewn with pellets, and when Pacman came into contact with one of these pellets, he would eat it. The game level would be completed when Pacman had gobbled up all the pellets in the maze. (This ensured that Pacman had been virtually everywhere in the maze at least once.)

The four ghosts would pursue Pacman through the maze. And if they caught him, he would die. When Pacman had died three times, the game would be over. (The player could earn extra lives by reaching certain scores during the game.) So the player would have to direct Pacman through the maze, avoiding the ghosts, and eating up all the pellets.

To help the player out, each maze featured four "power pellets". When Pacman ate one of these, he would gain the ability to eat the ghosts. This power only lasted for a brief time. But this added a wonderful element of strategy to the game.

Another nice feature was the presence of "side exits". These were openings on the side of each maze. When Pacman went out through one of these exits, he would reenter the maze through its corresponding exit on the other side of the screen. In other words, if Pacman went out one of the side exits on the left, he would reappear on the right side of the screen.

This often helped Pacman to avoid the ghosts. But the ghosts could also use the side exits. However, it seemed that the ghosts traveled through the side exits more slowly than Pacman did.

Pacman also featured very nice artificial intelligence programming. Each of the four ghosts actually followed a different strategy when pursuing Pacman. One followed him, one attempted to head him off by taking alternate routes through the maze, one stayed toward the center of the maze, and the fourth, who was a nice fellow (ut-bay ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray,) just sort of wandered about.

One of the advantages of source code is that it is easy for a person to read and understand. A computer needs its information in the form of numbers. But 0068 3A6C doesn't make much sense to most people!

So when creating a program, the programmer uses instructions such as "currentHitPoints -= damageAmount;". This is much easier to understand than 06FF 3D4A! A compiler later converts these instructions into a form which a computer can understand.

Tetris was a 2D puzzle game. The play area was an empty box. A number of different shaped, randomly selected pieces would fall one at a time from the top of the screen. The player would be able to rotate these blocks, and move then toward the left or right as they fell. Once the current block came to rest at the bottom of the screen or on another block, its place would be fixed, and another block would enter the playing field.

The blocks would continue to fall until they were piled to the top of the screen, at which point the game would end. But a player would put this off as long as possible by carefully stacking the blocks in a compact manner.

Whenever the blocks were stacked in such a way that an entire horizontal row of the play area was completely filled with blocks, that row would disappear, and the blocks above would fall down to take their place. Every time the player completed a row, he would be awarded points.

Through careful planning, is was also possible to complete several rows at once. When this happened. the player would be awarded more points in proportion to the number of rows completed simultaneously.

The game mechanics of Tetris were uncomplicated, and it was easy for people to learn to play in just a few moments. Yet the gameplay was addictive, and Tetris became very popular.

A whole host of Tetris clones have been created. And because this type of Puzzle game is relatively easy to program, it is common for new programmers to learn by creating their own versions of Tetris.

Whereas the ASCII standard uses single bytes, and is therefore limited to 256 characters, Unicode uses two bytes to represent each character. This allows Unicode to represent up to 65,536 characters.

At present, Unicode only contains about 30,000 meaningful characters. But that is enough to represent virtually every major written language in the world. Unicode includes, for example, the entire character sets for Chinese and Japanese.

Because Unicode can easily represent characters from so many languages, its use is standard to the Java programming language. This is yet another feature which helps to make Java such a portable language.