A decade or so ago, a friend of mine and I were living out of hotel rooms in Italy whilst we were waiting to rent a flat and find jobs. We were running low on

A decade or so ago, a friend of mine and I were living out of hotel rooms in Italy whilst we were waiting to rent a flat and find jobs. We were running low on funds and were struggling to find ways to entertain ourselves (and it was January and the weather was terrible - six inches or more of snow on the ground for several weeks). With nothing much else to do, and no wifi in the hotels, we took to a supremely healthy life of smoking Camels, drinking cheap beer, and playing Marble Blast Gold in our hotel room on my G4 iBook. We finished the game pretty quickly and then became hopelessly obsessed with shaving fractions of seconds off our best times on the easier levels; we were both supremely competitive people (and averagely well coordinated, I guess) and this went on for two or maybe three weeks until we found somewhere to live, got Internet access, and had some meaningful form of employment. We hardly played it after that. A few years later, I looked online and found some sites with high-scores; ours were, on certain levels (the ones we'd really cared about), by so far the best in the world it was pretty funny.