As a part time programmer, that is quite brilliant. Why throw an unhandled exception when you can just have your exception handler do something interesting in-game?
My 8-year old and I were at Half Price Books today, checking out used video games. In a locked case there were 9 Atari 2600 games, but the price tags were on the underside of the cartridges, so I couldn't see them.
I asked an employee if he could tell/show me the prices and he did - $3 each. As we went through them, he asked me which ones I wanted. I paused to take a mental inventory and then waved my hand, replying, "All of them."
My son almost **** his pants. He thought his father was such a baller at that moment. I walked to the cash register with the games, he bounced the whole way.
Ha! What was funny about the situation to me was that I wasn't trying to impress him. I simply answered the employee's question about which games I wanted (and realized right after that I did a little hand flourish when I said it). It wasn't until I looked at my son and saw that he was looking at me like I was a boss that I laughed.
His reaction to something so low budget and simple was just so cute.
And when we got home, we watched Impractical Jokers and had an Atari 2600 session, which was great. He loved the game Kaboom!
Oh, we have Stampede. The two games I really want (I'm sure I could find them on eBay, but I just haven't looked) are Pinball and Laser Blast. Those were my favorites.
My brother is really the true baller. He gave me the Atari 2600 and about a dozen games for Hanukkah last year. Everything was in original boxes with all accessories and documentation. His girlfriend's parents are apparently hoarders in a good sense in that they keep the packaging of everything. They were going to sell the Atari, but when he saw it, he said hold up and bought it from them himself.
The only thing I had to do to get it to work was buy a new $5 coax adapter, as the original was just way too old and had a **** signal.
The games I got this weekend were just the cartridges and a couple didn't have the end labels.
It makes me feel really old to think that this was the video game system I played when I was little, compared to the magnificence my kids play now.