Too Lazy to Fail

I’ve spent about half an hour on missions, and about two and a half hours doing freeplay with old college buddies on Xbox Live.

The missions in Vice City drove me crazy. They were cludgy and it seemed way too easy to fail them for silly reasons. Also, many of them counted on getting out of your car and engaging enemies on foot. With the cludgy combat system, the missions drove me batty. GTA IV seems to have improved, and I think I’ll have a much better time in single player.

Multiplayer is absolutely fantastic, especially if you have friends to play with. The only thing I miss about World of Warcraft is the ability to play with friends while talking to them in realtime. When your avatars on the screen are “together” in a virtual world, and you’ve got voice comms, it’s just about as close as you can get to being in the same room.

What do you do when you’re running Karazhan and you have to wait for someone to go do something?

You have someone play an MP3 into Teamspeak and play musical chairs.

Warning: There’s some language in the video. Not cool for work or kids.

(Exchange initiated by a level 8 gnome rogue.)

From Brave Space Design:

A key detail of both the original 2D game and our 3D shelves is that front and back edges of each piece are beveled away from the interior surfaces. This bevel provides for an eleven-inch shelf depth while giving the piece an unreal optical quality when viewed from an angle. Reversible and interchangeable, these sturdy blocks will provide for endless stacking configurations and a lifetime of enjoyment.

These seem like a fantastic idea for a game room or dorm, but at $600 per piece, I think I would rather just invest a few hundred bucks into the proper carpentry equipment and spend a weekend making my own. Heck, I could find a buddy with the tools and expertise needed to do it quickly, hand him a couple hundred bucks, and get the equivalent to the $6,000 10-piece combo in an afternoon.

For the past week, I’ve been playing Onslaught far more than is healthy. Curse you for linking to it, pdb.

Now I link it, hoping that once I’ve lured someone else into the snare, the game may be distracted enough to release me from its clutches. Seriously, give it a try. It’s apparently a newly created game, and is still under active development.

Hint: Read the how to play screen, play a few games, and then go read the hints forum. The first few levels are very, very easy, and you’ll be tempted to abandon it. Humor me by sticking with it until you lose. If you want to speed things up at the beginning, there is a button in the lower right corner that will send the next wave early.

Tracie and I were introduced a couple years back to Settlers of Catan by another couple. We’ve met dozens of times since then to play the resource gathering and building board game. It’s a game that typically frightens new players, who find by the end of their first game that the movements are very simple, though the strategy can get fairly deep. Certainly not Risk deep, but as deep as a game can be and still be playable in an hour or so.

The board game costs under $30, but the difficulty is often in finding people to play. It can be played with three players, but isn’t really enjoyable unless four are participating. MSN games carries a version of the game online, but it requires a monthly fee to play.

A slightly more simplistic, and free, java implementation of the game can be found at JSettlers. I’m not sure how the original creators feel about this derived work, but it’s remained online and popular for some time now. Note that if you go type jsettlers.com into your web browser, by default you are taken to the Ladder Game area, where login is required and you are forced to play against human beings for rank. Click Host 1 or Host 2 at the top if you want to play casually or by yourself.

There are limitations to the online version. Though the bots excersize mostly sound strategy, they don’t tend to be amicable to trades. After my first rejected trade offer, I can’t convince them to make a trade with me, no matter how sweet I make the deal. “How about I give you three wood and two clay, for your one sheep. No?” I imagine that this is put in place to prevent players from taking advantage of a lack of bot intelligence, slowly ramping up the trade so that they can find the exact point at which a bot will make a trade.

Another limitation of JSettlers is being locked into the traditional rule set. It’s a good set of rules, but I had gotten used to some house rules when playing with Robert and Mel, so I had to adjust to playing the game the way it was intended to be played. Those whose companions usually play by insane house rules (I’m looking at you, Cal) may enjoy a break from the absurd.

I haven’t played any face-to-face settlers games since I started playing JSettlers, but I’m hoping that it’s doing a little to sharpen me for actual play. Regardless, it’s an enjoyable diversion that can be completed in about 20 minutes when challenging the fast-playing computer opponents.

In high school, I worked at a used video game store. We, as employees, would often find ourselves gifted with store credit. I used this to expand my hoard of Nintendo Entertainment System games, and eventually gathered up over 200 of them.

After I started working real jobs, started going to school full-time, and got married, I found that the NES with accompanying boxes of games sat in the closet, becoming less and less valuable as long-lived game makers re-released their old games on new systems.

So Tracie and I made a difficult decision, and I started listing the more valuable games on eBay. Being left with some very good but not very valuable games, I got in touch with PDB about the possibility of selling my entire setup to him in one lot.

Negotiations continue, but in the mean time I’ve been packing it all up and preparing it for transport. Then came the admission from my dear wife: “Oh, is that the gun thingie? I never got to play Duck Hunt as a kid…”

Well, you know I couldn’t just let that one slide.

She got some of them…

But some of them were lucky. Oh so very lucky.

When things looked desperate, I picked up the Zapper and got down to the terrible business at hand. Many ducks were slain.

Then Tracie played some Tetris.

The cats were not amused, choosing instead to play in the boxes.

Farewell, dear Nintendo.