Day Twenty-six

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand I'm back. Had some stuff come up that made this endeavor more difficult than I wanted to put up with, so I took a break for a few days. I still played games, but didn't feel much like writing about it afterwards.

I purchased an Xbox 360 controller today with some Best Buy gift cards I had sitting around. I own several games that play well with a controller, but the old Microsoft Sidewinder game pad I own hooks up to a game port. Yes, kids, a game port. Look it up on your fancy digital encyclopedia.

I played Shatter for a bit with the controller and while it was different than playing on the keyboard, I don't think it was necessarily any better. Then I switched over to Beat Hazard. This game takes your music and dynamically generates levels based on it. And by dynamically generates, I mean rapes your eyelids off with a thousand rainbows of pure fusion power. The game starts with a warning for epileptics and it's clear after about .037 seconds why that is. Good times on the Xbox controller though. If you're in the mood for mindless, shoot the living bejesus out of everything on the screen before it kills you sort of arcade action, you should pick it up.

Games Played: 
Shatter
Beat Hazard

Achievements:
Perfect
1st Track Cleared
Tug of War
Boss Dance
Boss Slayer
Brutal Boss Kill.

Day Twenty-five

DID NOT POST

Day Twenty-four

DID NOT POST

Day Twenty-three

DID NOT POST

Day Twenty-two

Another evening spent with SpaceChem, which has now taken second place in my Steam games list for hours played. While I've probably spent more time with Half Life and Half Life 2 than SpaceChem, Steam didn't used to keep track of time played.

I went back and finished an optional level tonight to earn the achievement. This game has an unusual take on bonus levels in that they exist within each of the various larger worlds, but you can skip right past them. The game has no points other than comparing your score to the score of others, so they're really just there as out of sequence harder levels.

I was off the charts slow on this bonus level. Usually I at least fall in withing the graph for cycles, but this one I was way slow. But that was more or less by design since I wanted to keep the logic easy so I could beat it and move on. There are large pauses in the last reactor so I didn't have to deal with keeping track of two bits running around at once. A fun challenge of a level though.

SpaceChem introduced some new controls in the world I'm on now, but interestingly the first two levels don't require that you use them. I was able to easily pass them using older game play elements that have been around for many levels. Maybe they're key to driving better efficiency on those levels, but unlike the bonus level, I was within normal ranges for both symbols and cycles. Oh well, I'm sure I'll be forced into them soon enough and wish I hadn't asked for it.

Games Played: 
SpaceChem

Achievements:
Junior Permutation Technician.

Day Twenty-one

Ahhhh. Then end of the terror that is Ravenholm. Only to be replaced by the terror that is another fucking driving level. A driving level with much more on foot than the airboat driving level, but there's still way too much driving for my taste. At least there's the treasure of the bridge level.

The more I play Half Life 2, the more I'm seeing that I'm only remembering the parts of the game I really like or perhaps only hiding the parts of the game I didn't like. See, had you asked me about Half Life 2 before this replay, I would have fondly recalled playing through the section I'm on now. You're forced out of the damn dune buggy and made to cross a huge railroad bridge on foot. It's a wonderful mix of a little bit of puzzle and a lot of shooting bad guys with the guns you've racked up. Tossing a grenade in, hearing the Combine soldiers react and then ending their lives with two well placed shotgun rounds. A thing of beauty. I would not have recalled the tedium and grind of the airboat and dune buggy levels. Forced to play a shitty driving simulator instead of a shooter. Several years on, Half Life 2 was much more perfect before I was reminded of its flaws.

Perhaps that's just the mark of a good game, convincing the player to delightfully recall the highlights of the game and neglect the defects by virtue of the positive dramatically outweighing the negative. Nah, I think that's just the case for Half Life. I'd much rather just have a great game from stem to stern, without the need to jump into a vehicle.

Games Played: 
Half Life 2

Achievements: 
Hallowed Ground
OSHA Violation
Targetted Advertising
Where Cubbage Fears to Tread

Day Twenty

Tonight brought a return to Fallout: New Vegas. According to Steam, I hadn't played it since May 10th, so it's been a good while. I picked up the Honest Hearts DLC during the Summer Camp Sale because it was so cheap. Based on the reviews I wouldn't have picked it up for $10, but $3 seemed like it would be hard to go wrong.

I'm not sure what went wrong, but once I got into the DLC level, the group I was with was attacked right away. Everyone but me was killed. From there on out, every faction in the level was automatically hostile. This makes for a pretty shitty RPG, since there was no dialog other than to start the mission. I'll probably start the whole damn thing over again, since I'd like to play the story, but tonight it was just a shooting fest with the .50cal sniper rifle and the riot shotgun. By the time I started killing named NPCs I didn't feel like starting it over tonight. I killed the main character within about 20 minutes, but because I couldn't start dialog with anyone, I didn't miss any of the story.

Just did a bit of reading and it turns out I either got trigger happy and shot a Tribal I wasn't supposed to or there was a glitch early on. Apparently if you shoot this guy, everyone in the whole level is hostile for the duration of the DLC. That's a pretty shit piece of game design right there, especially since this friendly guy looks like the dudes that were just attacking you and there's no auto-dialog with him so clarify that he's friendly. There's just so many ways it could have been better handled by the designers. Oh well, for three bucks I guess I'm doing OK.

Games Played: 
Fallout: New Vegas

Achievements: 
When We Remembered Zion

Day Nineteen

As I've mentioned before on this blog, I don't understand why some people criticize Team 17 for putting out new versions of Worms that don't really change the game play all that much. I have no problem having more of something I really enjoy without the need to instill forced novelty upon it, when the novelty of simply having new levels would suffice. I can think of two recent games, Dragon Age 2 and Crysis 2, that felt the need to add crap in that prevented me from buying the games.

Dragon Age was a fantastic game. A lovely RPG that I'll likely play through a second time one day. When I finished it, I was quite excited to learn that Dragon Age 2 was a near certainty in the future. I was dismayed to learn that the second installment was taking a much more Diablo style "action RPG" approach to it. At first I trusted the developer to use this to improve upon the original in small ways. The more I learned the more I felt this was not going to be the case. Then when the demo was released, I confirmed that it wasn't going to be the case. They had monkeyed with the game beyond the point that it felt like the game I had enjoyed in the first installment.

Whether the changes in Dragon Age 2 are an improvement or detriment are clearly up to debate. I did not enjoy them and wished they had stayed true to the original and explored the new game mechanics in another game. Most of the time if I really enjoy a game, when I'm done, I simply want more of the same thing, with new content. A good example of this would be Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. Loved the first one. Loved the second one. While there were changes between the two, Fallout: New Vegas was really not much more than a second helping of Fallout 3. Same game, new content == win.

While some would argue that Fallout 3 is a prime example of what I'm whining about, those people are wrong. Fallout and Fallout 2 were excellent games with Fallout 2 being an excellent follow on to the style and content of the original. Fallout 3 was released 10 years after Fallout 2 and it would have been ridiculous for a major studio to publish a 2D isometric RPG in 2008. Using a great universe to make a new game is awesome. Using a great game to make a crappy game sucks.

Games Played: 
Worms Reloaded

Achievements: 
Not so much

Day Eighteen

It does me precious little good to know that "We don't go to Ravenholm" when that's precisely where I have to go. I'd rather have taken my chances with Dog against the Combine attack, but noooooo. Let's traipse through the place you just got done telling me we don't go anymore. <shudder>

When I first played Half Life 2, this level was the second time I recall feeling genuine terror from a video game. The first was the green tentacle monster in the missile silo from the first Half Life. Ravenholm is much worse. The whole level is designed for terror. It even goes so far as to violate fundamental laws of zombie attacks by including not only your standard shambling, slow, stupid zombies; but also really fucking fast ones that run at you like and animal and devour your face. Not cool. I'm not even to that part of the level yet and they're already scaring me because I know they're coming.

I have been terrorized by other video games since first playing this level, such as while wandering the wasteland at night in Fallout 3, but this one is still the worst (in a good way). I stopped playing 20 minutes ago and I still have the creeps. I know what's going to happen next and it still messes with me. The good news is, I'm not piloting that fucking airboat any more, having passed that stupid level, and good ole Padre Grigori gives me a shotgun in this level. No weapon satisfies me more in an FPS than a shotgun and this one is chocked full of shotgunny goodness.

Games Played: 
Half Life 2

Achievements: 
Revenge!
Blast from the Past
Zero-Point Energy

Day Seventeen

A few weeks ago Valve converted Team Fortress 2 from a $9.99 game to a free to download and play game. Being a cheap bastard, this is right at my price point. I'd considered picking up a copy before, but I haven't played multiplayer FPS since way back in the old days when I was on a Quake 2 CTF clan, so I figured my skills probably weren't up to snuff in a multiplayer only game.

After playing TF2 tonight, that seems to have been an accurate assessment of my skills. I didn't even get into playing against other humans yet, just the tutorial and one round of bot populated "Offline Practice" mode. I set the bots on Normal difficulty and my feeble play was enough to lead my team to a 6 to 1 loss in Dustbowl, a map centered around defending and capturing control points.

To be fair, I spent a good bit of time trying several of the nine classes available, so I didn't expect to come out on top. Sniper was tolerable, but I don't know the maps well enough to find a good camping spot. The Spy was entertaining, but I enjoy shooting people more than that that class is designed for. The Scout class was entirely useless. This might have been that I simply don't know how to play the class, but it seemed I was dying about two seconds after my first glimpse of the enemy. This was mildly disappointing since in Quake 2 CTF I played offense and thought that perhaps my weaselly skills rocket dodging skills would translate. Quake 2 CTF was unclassed though, so I was used to having the same setup and abilities as the other players. Demoman seemed to suit me well since I can't aim for shit and the sticky bombs help make up for that fact.

T'all you fine dandies so proud, so cock-sure. Prancin' aboot with your heads full of eyeballs! Come and get me I say! I'll be waiting on ya with a whiff of the 'ol brimstone. I'm a grim bloody fable....with an unhappy bloody end!     -- Demoman

Games Played: 
Team Fortress 2

Achievements: 
Ready for Duty

Day Sixteen

Half of the point of this blog is to push me into game play that I might not otherwise have taken up. The other half is to force me into writing about it to get in the regular habit of writing something other than email at work. I'm failing at the second half tonight. But tomorrow is a new day. I walked away from SpaceChem a few days ago and came back renewed. I'm imaging writing will be the same story. There's no sense in forcing it.

Games Played: 
SpaceChem

Achievements: 
Nope

Day Fifteen

The good news is that when I came back to SpaceChem today, I beat that level that was killing me yesterday with no problem. Walking away yesterday was really a good call. My SpaceChem-fu was back up to snuff today. Including the aforementioned level, I took down three others in short order.

The bad news is that I've made a horrible discovery. A rediscovery is probably more like it, since I've played though Half-Life 2 before. I knew as much before today, but had forgotten. After the initial city fight levels and some sewer chase, there's a huge level where you forced onto a airboat most of the time. I tore into Crysis on Day Twelve for the tank level and the VTOL level, not recalling that one of my favorite games of all time pulled the old genre switcheroo.

Not only that - and I'd have to do some research (which I'm not going to do), but Half-Life 2 might even be responsible for popularizing the mid-game genre switch. I can't think of another game before it that forced the use of a vehicle to proceed in the game's critical path. This is horrifying. It's like finding out your best friend invented crack cocaine, unleashing its abject horror onto the world.

I'd like to address an open letter to all game developers:

Game developers of the world: 

    Half-Life 2 is a wonderful and wildly successful game. There are many things it does very well that you should emulate. The airboat level, Route Kanal, is NOT one of them. Do not make me switch game styles in the middle of the game.

    Can you include vehicles in your game? Yes! But make them realistically optional. The jungle levels in Crysis did this well. You could jump in a jeep or a boat to gain an advantage, but you were not forced to use them for a specific duration in order to advance the game.

Love:

Danny and all the other games that just want to play FPS games in their FPS games

Below you'll find my two airboat related achievements from today. These will live on for eternity, mocking my hatred of them. Made worse by the fact that they're inevitable game progress achievements, not achievements that show you've done something difficult. Nobody's perfect - not even Half-Life 2.

Games Played: 
SpaceChem
Half-Life 2

Achievements: 

Day Fourteen

I played SpaceChem a good bit this morning, but after two complete resets on a level, I wasn't making any forward progress. I learned long ago in my professional career that if you're not making forward progress on an issue for a while, you need to step away and go do something else. You will not solve thinking tasks by brute force if you can't see the path from where you are now. That just leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I'm hoping the solution is bloody obvious tomorrow, because man, this one is kicking my ass and taunting me along the way.

My mental vacation from the chemical mines of SpaceChem took me to City 17. I fired up a start from the very beginning new game of Half-Life 2. What an absolute treasure this game is. I'm sure it's been written about thousands of times by now, but the attention to detail and the tone that gets set is just so very spot on. They creepiness of the Combine and the crushed spirits of the humans of City 17 is just masterfully done. Anyone who doubts video games as a legitimate art form need only play even a few hours of Half-Life 2.

Games Played: 
SpaceChem
Half-Life 2

Achievements: 
H-L 2 - Submissive "PICK UP THAT CAN!" "Okay. . . :-("
H-L 2 - Malcontent
H-L 2 - Trusty Hardware

Day Thirteen

I've been playing some variation of the Worms series since the 90s. I don't recall exactly when I picked it up the first time, but I was happy when I did. Silly cartoon graphics belie a pretty kick ass turn based strategy game. Strategy and just enough arcade style skill that it goes beyond simply knowing your next move like Chess. You must know your next move and then try not to accidentally send the explosive sheep into your own team instead of that cluster of enemies. It's also a good game for multiplayer even if you only have one computer. Being turn based, you can simply swap out players when their turn is up.

I've heard the criticism a few places that Worms hasn't really done anything new since its original release in 1995. While I have to agree that they haven't added much over the past decade and a half, I can't say I really see it as a problem. The game is fairly simple and pretty well designed to deliver scads of fun. If you own pretty much any of the 2D versions, the game is the same: Kill other worms before they kill you. If Team 17 wants to release a new Worms every month, I say they should go for it. If you own a copy and you're happy with it, KEEP PLAYING IT. Why do you feel obliged to purchase the new version if you don't think it makes sense? I certainly won't be upgrading my copy or buying any of the DLC that's available for the version I own now because I'm completely satisfy with the game as I have it now.

Games Played: 
Worms Reloaded

Achievements: 
Negative, Ghostrider.

Day Twelve

MOAR SpaceChem! Though as I play it, I'm finding I don't like the boss fights very much. A puzzle game with boss fights? Yes. They're not horrible, it's just that they change the game in a way that I find less enjoyable than the other levels. They're the only levels so far that have manual control elements. They don't provide statistics to review or to compare to other users once you beat it. It changes the game play for the (slightly) worse.

That said, it's not nearly as annoying as some games have been in this vein. The one the jumps to mind immediately for me is Crysis. If you're not familiar, Crysis is a first person shooter where you're a bad ass ninja of a soldier with a fantastic suit with super powers and stealth. For the first part of the game, you're running or sneaking through the jungle killing other soldiers. There are some vehicles in the game, but you can certainly play without them quite easily.

Until the god damned tank level. So here's a game where you've been playing for hours as a dude on foot with firearms. Suddenly, you're thrust into a level where you must pilot a tank and kill other tanks with it. So the the controls are different. The enemies are different. The weapons are different. The strategy is different. What on Earth possessed the game designers to make me play a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT GENRE of game in the middle of my rather enjoyable FPS experience. If I wanted to play a tank simulator, I would have purchased a tank simulator. And it would have been better than this stupid fucking level because it would have been designed by a team of tank simulator designers, not a team of FPS designers.

If that wasn't enough, they shit the bed again later in the game and put in a level where you have to pilot an aircraft the whole time. For fuck's sake. I don't want to play helicopter! I want to play run around and shoot people. That's why I bought the run around and shoot people game. You felt the sick need to make me play yet another genre of game with yet another control scheme, strategy and weapons set. Ugh.

I hope one day that the person or people responsible for this type of shit are sitting down to a lovely steak dinner. And I hope that their perfectly cooked, perfectly seasoned filet mignon is giving them great pleasure. And then right in the middle of it, some jerk walks up and shoves a big, sweaty fist full of fruit cake in their mouth.

Assholes.

Games Played: 
SpaceChem
Crysis (in 2008)

Achievements: 
Not tonight but I did eventually beat that stupid VTOL level in Crysis.

Day Eleven

Frozen Synapse has me wondering in that "I shall wonder but put forth no more effort to find out right now" sort of way, if it is the first or even the only game to have implemented turn based strategy with simultaneous execution of the orders. I highly doubt that it is, but it's certainly the first for me and I love it. I've always enjoyed the pace and planning of turn based games but didn't like alternating turns. It always feels so forced to sit back and wait after making your moves while the other half got to do something. This is not how life works. Though I suppose neither does life allow for planning sequential five second busts of actions 10 minutes at a time.

The simultaneous execution aspect makes planning more exciting to me. It's fun to work from the exact same set of information at the same time. My only clue about my opponent's next move is his past moves. But I have to anticipate his next moves as mine will be executed. There's no guaranteed double word score for going first, because we're both going first.

Games Played:
Frozen Synapse

Achievements:
The game has them, I didn't earn any today

Day Ten

Tonight I sat down with an old friend. Not an elderly friend, but a friend I hadn't seen in a bit. World of Goo was my gateway drug to indie gaming. That's probably a bad analogy, since I'm not addicted to indie games. It really just showed me that there was real quality available outside of big, famous studios and publishers. Something I probably should have realized sooner in life, but better late than never.

While I have opened my heart to indie games, I'm certainly not an indie games hipster elitist preaching that indie games are the one true form and that we shall forsake all others. Far from it. I enjoyed the hell out of Fallout: New Vegas and there's simply no way a game like that could come from an independent studio.

I'm sure there's more to this post, but that's all I've got. Today's post will just have to suck. You can't win them all.

Games Played:
World of Goo

Achievements:
WoG has Steam achievements, but I bought it direct from 2D Boy and haven't bothered to register it in Steam yet. Playing the game is reward enough on its own in this case.

Day Nine

I had intended to go back to Magicka today, but got sucked in SpaceChem again. At twenty hours booked so far, I'm about half way through the main game. After that there's a few free levels from a cross promotion with Team Fortress 2, the free DLC pack that I picked up with some Steam Summer Camp tickets and the Research Net levels which I think are user submitted. Not too shabby for $5.09.

SpaceChem does a pretty cool summary of how you did after you complete most of the levels (boss fights aren't graded for some reason). It records three core metrics that basically boil down to either how long your solution took to complete the level (cycles) or how simple or complicated your solution (reactors and symbols). These are presented as bar graphs that compare you to the average completion stats based on user submissions. Improving the score of one metric will usually come at the expense of the other, so the player is free to play the game within the game of optimizing their working submission as they see fit.

I completed three or four levels tonight, which is a bit fast, but the solutions were coming pretty easily to me. One result tonight surprised me a bit in that both my cycles stat and my symbols stat were on the far right-hand side of the stats curve. Usually I'm at or below average on at least one of them. I didn't think the solution I came up with was very complicated or slow, but clearly it was both. This one will be ripe for the pickin' to come back later to see how I can improve it. Not that I'm upset by my slow, inefficient results. There's a truism in computer programming (yes, once again I compare SpaceChem to programming) that goes something like, "It's easier to optimize a working program than it is to debug a broken optimized program."

Games Played: 
SpaceChem

Achievements: 
Not tonight

Day Eight

Ah, achievements - for the most part meaningless, but oh so much fun to obtain. Today's gaming offered an interesting spectrum of achievement philosophy.

SpaceChem takes a pretty hard core, you will earn this approach. SpaceChem has 17 available achievements with the top achievement, which happens to be the one I got today, only has a 27.7% global earn rate.

Shatter takes a mix of difficult achievements and game progress achivements, like the one I got today for simply beating level 8. Shatter has 30 achievements with the soft-toss top achievement for Shatter at whopping 94.5% global earn rate.

While today was my first experience with AI War, I'm would have guessed that a game with 234 achievements hands them out like candy on Halloween. I only got one today, but I only played three training levels. It turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. 192 (82%) of the 234 achievements available have less than a 1% global earn rate and only 10 of them have a global earn rate of greater than 10%.

Perhaps one day I'll do a master's thesis on video game achievement analysis.

Games Played: 
SpaceChem
AI War: Fleet Command
Shatter

Achievements: 

SpaceChem - Moustache Research Assistant

AI War: Fleet Command - Rainy Day Savings: 50,000 Energy

Shatter: Neon Mines

Day Seven

I'll start of today's post with a widely known aphorism in the computer programming world known as the ninety-ninety rule. It is as follows:

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
—Tom Cargill

While I didn't beat the level I was working on during my previous session of SpaceChem, I spent enough time to narrow down the source of the problem and had a pretty good idea of how to fix it the next time we met. That lead to the progression that follows:

This reactor worked well, provided the sodium and hydrogen atoms always perfectly alternated their arrival. Since there was nothing in the previous reactor to guarantee that, this design eventually broke down.

When things aren't working out, sometimes even if they're just a hair off like I was here, this next step is painful, but unavoidable.

The working solution, it turns out, is much more elegant and easy to understand than the gobbledygook I came up with on the first attempt.

The parallels between this game's puzzles and writing actual computer software are many and offer a few lessons (re)learned:

• The failed design was complicated and clever. The working design is simple and straight forward.
• The failed design made assumptions. The working design makes no assumptions.
• The failed design was difficult to debug. The working design is easy to debug.
• The failed design was difficult to modify. The working design is easily modified.
• The failed design was difficult to understand at a glance. The working design is easy to understand.

Games Played: 
SpaceChem

Achievements: 
I still have but one SpaceChem acheivement

Day Six

For those of you haven't played any of the Peggle games, I recommend them. They're easy to understand and control. They're fun to play quickly if you've got  five free minutes or 5 free hours. But perhaps the most important reason to pick them up is that they are programmed by robot space mutants from the future to play on your most basic, Pavlovian responses to stimuli. The game practically injects liters of fresh, hot dopamine directly into your brain through your eyeballs.

Look at that. Unicorns! Rainbows! Huge point values! The game literally plays Ode to Joy after you beat every single level. It doesn't even get old. It's like a host of angels is singing your praises for the perfectly placed shot to snag the last orange peg. You sir, you peg smashing demi-god, have earned this rainbow and this song. Revel in them.





Games Played: 
Peggle Dexlue

Achievements: 
There are no achievements in Peggle games

Day Five

My intent tonight was to fire up Just Cause 2. When I went to launch it, I was instead presented with an error that it required a "newer version of Windows". A quick trip to the Googles and sure enough, Just Cause 2 requires DirectX 10, which requires Vista(shudder) or Windows 7. I guess it's finally time to upgrade my desktop machine from XP to Windows 7. Sigh.

So figuring it was equally light and fun, though a completely different genre altogether, I played Magicka for the first time tonight. It was suggested by r/gaming on the last day of the Steam Summer Camp Sale that this one was worth picking up. I wasn't quite sold until I watched a rather funny video of three video game broadcasters playing it in co-op mode. Heartily entertain and being convinced it not only sounded, but looked like fun, I picked it up.

While the controls are taking a bit of time to get used to for me, the game is indeed a good bit of fun. Instead of a quiver of single click spells, the game offers eight spell ingredients arranged on QWER and ASDF, which you can combine in various ways to often comical effect.

The part of the mechanic that's proving tricky for me is movement. With WASD occupied by spells and with most gamers lacking a third hand, movement is left to left clicking the mouse. But it's not a single left click to a destination, it's click and hold the mouse until you're there. It's a pretty clever control scheme that frees up your left hand for spell combos, but it's unlike any game I've played before so I'm still climbing the learning curve. Despite the controls, I'm enjoying the both the game and the writing thoroughly.

The picture to the left is a spell combination that, from what I can tell, only serves to instantly kill your character. This is right in step with the writing of the game, which is chock full of tongue-firmly-in-cheek pop/geek/gamer culture references. References have so far included Star Wars, D&D, Warhammer 40k, F7U12, RPG tropes and probably a dozen or more that I didn't even catch. The game designers clearly know who their core audience is for a mage combat action click-fest and they're not ashamed to pander directly to them. Not that they should be, I find it quite entertaining.

As you'll see below, they're also not ashamed to pepper you with achievements. I racked up 10 tonight in my first 70 minutes of play and there's still 44 left to be unlocked. I'm particularly proud of the last one, "Oh gravity, thou art a heartless bitch". I have no idea what spell combination I unleashed upon myself, but it sent me flying through the air in flames before coming down for a four digit self inflicted damage total. This was right after a boss fight, but before I got to the next save point. Oops. If only I knew what I did so I could avoid it next time.

Games Played: 
Just Cause 2
Magicka

Achievements:
Cooking by the book
An eye for an eye
No more trolling
Basic Element
Let off some steam
State Alchemist
The Enchanter
Houdini
RPG much?
"Oh gravity, thou art a heartless bitch"

Day Four

I felt up to playing SpaceChem tonight. It's funny to have a game that I genuinely enjoy playing, but that I have to be in the right mood to play. SpaceChem is a puzzle game that basically boils down to solving computer programming problems presented as arranging atoms to form chemical compounds. The game doesn't bill itself as a series of programming problems, but that's essentially what it is.

Since I write and troubleshoot computer programs at work all day, it's not every day that I come home and want to do something of such a similar nature for pleasure. But I've got enough screws loose that it happens fairly often. I've got 14 hours booked in SpaceChem so far, which puts me at about an hour a day on average since I've owned it. Many of those 14 hours came during the long 4th of July weekend, but I've picked it up a few times after a work day as well.

SpaceChem flirts with an interesting level of difficulty for me. At times, I can envision the solution right away and simply have to execute and fine tune it. Other times, I've spent a good amount of time on a certain path, only to completely scrap the design and start over from scratch. It has been occasionally, including the level I'm currently on, quite frustrating.

I put in about 70 minutes tonight and still didn't beat the level. I spent the whole time debugging the solution I came up with during my last play, that is close to correct, but blows up about 3/4 of the way to completion. I think I can at least see a path forward now and I've narrowed down the source of the problem, but the fix isn't going to be easy, so I'll have to come back to it when I'm a little less fuzzy.

But so far, SpaceChem has kept my sense of frustration balanced with a sense of achievement for having completed its difficult puzzles. I was reading a post by Ian Hardingham on the mode7 (FrozenSynapse) blog last night on why they chose to allow uneven sides in parts of the game. I think it explains pretty well how SpaceChem can both frustrate and delight me:

The best game memories are of getting out of a tricky situation when the odds were against you, after all.

Games Played: 
Frozen Synapse

Achievements: 
The game has them, I didn't earn any today

Day Three

After two somewhat disappointing days to start this project off, I wanted to play a game I knew I'd enjoy. I kicked around possibly playing SpaceChem, but that one's a bit taxing on the old noggin and I didn't feel up to it tonight. I considered Peggle, but wanted to think a bit harder than that. Yeah, I play Peggle. All three versions. What of it? There's nothing wrong with an incredibly manly man enjoying a game with rainbows and unicorns all over it. I settled on Frozen Synapse. It's got shotguns and rocket launchers. Probably a hidden level full of naked chicks too. So there.

I fell madly and deeply in love with Frozen Synapse after watching Total Biscuit's WTF is Frozen Synapse. The game instantly reminded me of the original Rainbow Six PC game planning phase and the Shadowrun universe. I played gobs of Shadowrun pen a paper RPG in middle and high school and this is, minus the magic/fantasy elements of Shadowrun, is exactly how I pictured the missions. This game, fifteen years later and completely out of the blue, was giving me flashbacks to games I played with my best friends during my formative years. My wallet didn't stand a chance. The game could have been $60 bucks and I would have paid it with a smile. It was only $24.99, but that's full price and I never pay full price. As a cool bonus/network effect marketing strategy, the game always comes with a free copy to give away to a friend. I sent my best friend and the GM of those Shadowrun sessions the free copy.

Contrary to my experience yesterday with S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Frozen synapse is very well written. It has very little voice acting and therefore you must read the text all by yourself. Despite that, in this case it's not a chore or something I wish to skip past. In between sets of of missions there are even news bits about the impact your actions are having in the game world. Not at all required to play the game, but they add a bit of fun and immersion to it.

The game has another key feature I'm a big fan: moral ambiguity. Clearly the side I'm fighting for thinks they're the good guys, but the writing makes it clear that your side is certainly no white knight. Practical if distasteful alliances are formed. People are blackmailed into cooperation. Civilians are killed. It's very much shades of grey. I love it. It explores all of this grey area through storytelling. There are no Fable or Fallout style ethics you can apply to the game play; it is very much linear. You will fail the missions if you don't meet the predefined objectives. But the story is so well told that I don't really care and I just want to play more to watch it unfold.

I could wax on about this game all night really, but I'll save some things for future posts. I'm heading back to play the game a bit more now.

Below is a short video of one of the levels I played tonight. The game has an easy to use video export feature, so even my lazy ass can post game play without any fancy software to do the capture.

CAUTION: This video may contain spoilers since there are named characters in it. They are not killed (thanks to my undeniably incredible combat planning skill) and just sort of stand there, so there's nothing really spoiled by watching it, but I'd hate to unnecessarily bunch someone's panties over it. Probably best to watch it in 1080 full screen so as not to miss all the detail in the blood splatters.

Games Played:
Frozen Synapse

Achievements:
The game has them, I didn't earn any today

Day Two

Another new game on day two. This time I'll be diving into S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. Another pickup on the Steam Summer Camp Sale on the advice of /r/gaming that it was worth picking up.

Here's what I know, or at least think I know, about this game before having played it. It's an FPS set in the exclusion zone after the Chernobyl accident. A bunch of mutant animals, mutant people and nut jobs have moved in. Being an FPS game, I'm going to venture out on a limb and assume I'm supposed to kill the shit out of them with ever increasingly awesome weapons. Eventually I'll acquire some sort of rapidly firing shotgun, which I will shove in the chest of every enemy at point blank range, because that's usually always a kick ass way to kill mutants.

70 minutes later

Well that was. . . interesting.

After a bit more than an hour, I'm pretty confused about WTF is going on in this game. I'll try to summarize what I know, which I won't count as spoilers since it's in the fist hour. It's not like I'm revealing the whole Luke/Vader thing. So anyway:

I am a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I'm not sure why there are periods between the letters some of the time and at other times there are not. Sometimes I'm simply a stalker - little 's', creepin' in your bushes. I also have no idea what S.T.A.L.K.E.R.stands for or, for that matter, what in the bloody hell the designation means. I even watched the intro video! Maybe this will be explained in the future.

I am also the "Marked One", a moniker I earned by virtue of having a tattoo on my arm. Can you guess what it says? If you guessed S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you win! My being a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. seems to have been set in motion simply by a drunken visit to the tattoo parlor while on spring break in Pripyat. If only I knew what a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was.

I have acquired a breech-loading, double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun. I have used it to kill the following things at very close range:

• Another S.T.A.L.K.E.R. named, and I quote, "bandit, tyro". I almost feel sorry for the bastard's limited career options. Cruel fate.
• A bunch of other bandits that didn't even deserve a name.
• A half dozen horribly ugly wild boar things.
• A blind dog.

Perhaps the biggest ball of what the fuck comes from the game's "anomalies". As you walk around, there are parts where the air gets all bendy like and looks like it's being warped in on itself. I was told over the radio by an NPC that these were anomalies and they can hurt you and that when my PDA starts beeping, I'm too close to the anomalies and the remedy for that is to - get this - throw bolts into them. Just let that simmer for a bit.

Bolts.

This is so very completely out of the blue and not explained anywhere else in the game so far. Why bolts? Who knows! Why is an entire weapon spot, 6 on the keyboard, occupied by bolts? Who knows! Why am I carrying bolts in the first place? Who the fuck knows!

Bolts.

This game is not really what I expected. It's an odd mutant half-breed of FPS with RPGish elements. You run around with guns, but people won't talk to you if your weapon is equipped. Apparently I'm such a bad ass that I don't mind the NPC's assault rifle in my face, but he gets bent about my combat knife. The game suggests that you overcome this problem by hitting good old number 6 and equipping your infinite supply of  anomaly busting bolts. See? There is no bound to their bolty utility.

Talking to people matters because you collect missions by talking to some of the NPCs. Some of them have audio track dialog, but for most of them, you have the luxury of reading skipping over huge blocks of poorly written text. Perhaps, nay certainly, I am spoiled by years of playing games from the likes of Valve and Bethesda and Bioware, but come on. The mission dialogs all go something like this:

Other S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Greetings comrade.
Me: Give me a mission.
Other S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Some convoluted, 90 word way of saying "fetch quest" with a Russian accent.
Me: I only have one dialog option to click here, so I guess I'll pick that.
Other S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Nazdarovya! I shall reward you with stacking dolls and vodka

Games Played:
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

Achievements:
I'm pretty sure S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has no achievements, but if it did, I'd hope it was for judicious use of bolts.

Day One

After taxing my brain with SpaceChem a good bit today (more on that in a future post), I thought I'd give a new game a try. New to me anyway. Tropico 3 came out in October of 2009, so it's not really a new game. I'm cool with not playing new games though, since it allows me to not only allow the veritable cream to float to the top, but I get to skim that cream for 50 - 90% off of the launch day price.

I've not played Tropico 1,  2 or 3 before, so this is a brand new franchise to me. From what I've read, it's SimCity on a tropical island and you're the dictator. As a dictator, my hope is that if the advisers get ornery, you can simply have them shot.

Transit Adviser  "We have too many roads."

Me: "We have too many Transit Advisers."

Other than that, I don't know much about what to expect. I haven't played SimCity or anything like it for probably 10 years, so hopefully it's a fun little flashback with some entertaining updates. Onward to Tropico 3: Absolute Power!

90 minutes later

So, yeah. Pretty much SimCity on an island with some goofy voice acting to go along with it. I ran through the not very well done in-game tutorial and still found myself a bit lost when it was time to actually run my island. Despite my popularity rating falling to Bush 43 levels initially, I eventually poked around enough to figure things out. It was then pretty trivial to keep my popularity at about 61 or 62 percent, but I annoyingly couldn't move it past that, despite the time honored government technique of throwing gobs of money at it.

Probably the most annoying things in the game, after the kludgy camera mechanics, were the two in-game announcers. One is a horribly accented yes man, who babbles on about how everything you do is great. The other is "Betty Boom", the leader of the resistance movement. Her accent seemed much more authentic and her tongue-in-cheek jokes were funny for the first dozen of them. Both characters got old in a hurry and I hope for fans of the game, you can turn them off.

In the end, it's a tolerable enough game, despite the heavy handed use of the Latino themed Caribbean island gimmick. I just don't think I'm a big fan of the city building genre. I might come back to poke around in the game for the sake of this project, but I doubt there will be much more Tropico en mi futuro. Alas.

Games Played:

SpaceChem

Tropico 3

Achievements:

SpaceChem - Science is an Indoor Activity (Steam Summer Camp Ticket)

Tropico 3 - Whatever the one you get for doing the tutorial is (not integrated with Steam achievements)

The first post and why it will not count

"Why won't it count?" asks the reader.

There are rules.

THE RULES

A) I, Daniel Lee Dorsey, AKA Danny, AKA dldorsey must play a game on a PC for at least 60 minutes each day until at least July 10th, 2012. The Wii, the BlackBerry, the iPhone, the dining room table? None of them count. I'm not sure whether to count Flash or other browser based games. Some of them are of an impressive quality and they will be played on a PC. Consider Neptune's Pride before you rush to answer, "No!" Judges?

B) I must write about the aforementioned 60+ minutes of gaming for the post to count. Theretowhenceforth, this post does not count. Posts that don't count will be labeled accordingly for those of you playing along with the home edition.

C) Daily shall be defined by the time between when I get up in the morning to when I go to bed for the night. I frequently stay up past midnight and therefore might skip posting on a certain calendar day, though will have satisfied the requirements of this challenge. If this bothers your OCD in some way, good.

D) Spoiler content will be hidden from view by default. If I can pull off a gaming.reddit.com style mouseover spoiler hider, I'll use that. If not, I may rock it old school and use something like this, that requires you to click-drag-highlight to reveal.

E) Screenshots, videos and achievements are encouraged, but not required of a daily post. Screenshot, video and achievement only posts are doesnotcount however, since they would not satisfy rule B.

F) Other temporary or permanent rule sets may be created to augment this rule set. These additional rule sets may not violate any terms of this'n right here.

END

I'll close with a quote from one of the top video game characters of all time, Minsc. "Fear not! I will inspire you all by charging blindly on!"