Now I feel bad for slowing up my current pet project by getting bogged down writing polygon collision detection when axis aligned bounding boxes would have done for prototyping. (I'm not as quick as Notch!)
In defence of the technique, the command table is quite succinct and arguably more readable at a glance than if there were a bunch of constants |ed together. I have no idea whether this was the original motivation though.
Terrible name I know. Platformer built in Javascript. No frameworks or libraries other than a sprinkling of jquery. SunVox for music, sound in bfxr, graphics in Inkscape.