Category Archives: games

Jump. Crouch. Touch. Toggle Maps.

Posted by on January 9, 2011 No comments

Warning for people at work and people with kids hanging around. There are some swears in this video.

Thanksgaming

Posted by on October 27, 2010 No comments

I’m really really looking forward to Thanksgaming this year. I look forward to it every year but this year has been kind of rough and I’m ready to just relax.

If you’re not familiar with Thanksgaming, that’s because it’s a personal holiday for me. I take Thanksgiving week off of work. I have few responsibilities except to take care of my dad’s cows while they’re out of town. I buy a couple of new games and pretty much live in front of the computer or xbox. The controller and mouse start to merge with my flesh.

Two years ago I spent the entire week playing Fallout 3. Last year I played Fable 2 all week. This year both Fable 3 and Fallout New Vegas are out. I guess I’m going to buy both of them. Maybe I can try to play them both at the same time.

I kind of started Thanksgaming a little early this year because Brian convinced me to buy Civilization V, two weeks ago. I use Steam Games on my computer at home and it keeps stats on how many hours I play each game. I have already played Civ 5 for a ridiculous amount of hours. I’m not going to say how much here. It’s more embarrassing than admitting my weight.

They did fix some things that I didn’t like in Civ 4. It’s easier to get across oceans now. I enjoy war a bit more now. The hexagonal tiles are a million times better than squares. But after a while it’s still a hell of a long campaign. One game took more than 10 hours and once you have a certain large amount of cities, playing the game becomes an administrative headache. But the empire building is apparently tapped right into my serotonin levels and I CAN NOT stop playing it… Even when I’m completely tired of it. So Civ 5 is beautiful and better than Civ 4 but Civilization Revolution has really good pacing and you can play through one game in less than 3 hours. Civ 5 is great but possibly targeted at the unemployed and bed ridden. People who have nothing else to do, or maybe just for people who don’t have a extremely addictive relationship with empire building games.

Anyway I’m pretty excited spending a week accomplishing nothing of value and feeling guilt free about it all.

(I do think I will still get out for a daily hike or bike and I’m hoping to clear up the remaining issues with this blog transition but I still hope to be at least 95% useless.)

almost went back to sleep

Posted by on May 8, 2008 No comments

Brian picked up an awesome new Wii game called ‘Boom Blocks’ yesterday. I was tired when I got home. I had a few drinks. We played ‘Boom Blocks’ fairly late into the evening so I never got around to doing my usual prep for the bike commute. Usually I have been going out to make sure there is plenty of air in the tires, scrounge up bus fare, pick out my work clothes for the next day, get a lunch & breakfast made and all packed in the panniers so I can just get up and go in the morning.

Around 10:30 last night when I still hadn’t done any of that, I thought… “oh well, I can skip one day.”

When the alarm went off at 5am I turned it off, turned on the 6am alarm, and rolled over to go back to sleep. I was laying there for a second listening to the Carolina Wren outside tweeting into a megaphone. I had a sudden thought… “If I don’t get up and ride to work now… I won’t get a chance to ride today.”

I’ve been trying to talk myself into bike commuting seriously for years. I reasoned that it would save me money. I reasoned that it was better for the environment. I reasoned that it would help me lose weight & be healthy. Money, health, & environmental conscience are all things I value but they feel like duty & responsible behavior. They never managed to be effective motivating factors in the face of convenience or getting up at 5am.

In the end, I have started doing it because I was having a hard time figuring out how to fit a bike ride into my regular work day. Now I have this sense that I’m getting away with something. While everybody else is driving to or from work, I’m actually having fun. I suppose I’m doing all those ‘responsible’ things too. Let’s not dwell on them though.

TF2

Posted by on November 23, 2007 No comments

Ok…. confessional time. I have been playing waaaay too much Team Fortress 2. It is a truly awesome game that I never imagined I would get obsessed with. I would write more about it but I’d rather go play the game.

That is all.

Portal

Posted by on November 6, 2007 1 comment

So last night when I got home Team Fortress 2 was downloaded. I didn’t end up playing it for a couple reasons.

  1. They were doing maintenance or something on the server
  2. I wanted to practice playing against Brian on a lan connection before joining some online game & spending the entire game running against a walls while I tried to learn how the movement works & shooting my own team while I figure out how the weapons work. Brian was studying and was unavailable.
  3. I haven’t thought up a cool name yet.

I got a package with a couple other games so I played one of those instead. Brian suggested that I could get the hang of the movement with Portal because that works roughly the same as in Team Fortress 2. Portal is great. It’s a puzzle game. You shoot portals into walls and try to figure out how to use those to navigate through the levels. It’s hard to describe, but beyond just having clever & challenging puzzles the “computer” that talks to you during the game is hilarious.

Anyway, I love Portal. I hope I will love Team Fortress 2 too.

Lazy Lazy Weekend

Posted by on November 5, 2007 No comments

I was sooo lazy this weekend. I didn’t get much done at all. I spent an hour or two trying to organize my part of the studio so that I can use it when the mood strikes me. I would really like to separate my tools from my materials and make it easy to see all the things/options I have when I’ve got some crazy project idea.

Other than that I pretty much lounged around, watched Deadwood, played Pirates, and other similarly exciting things. Brian has convinced me that I need to start playing this game called Team Fortress 2 which is kind of like an online capture the flag game (with lots of shooting & explosions & whatnot.) So I downloaded Steam, which is kind of like the iTunes of video games. When I get home tonight I’ll give it a try. If I like it, I will have to start recruiting everyone I know to play with us… just because I always think those online games are more fun with people you know.

Exquisite Corpse

Posted by on February 12, 2007 No comments

For some reason, I’m getting back into playing exquisite corpse [http://www.cadavre-exquis.net/eng/Jeu/pagejeu.php]. I guess I’m just amused by unexpected word combinations. Also it’s a great 3 minute diversion when I’m frustrated. I go enter some random adjectives, nouns, and verbs or read the crazy corpses that have been produced in the last day or two. Some of my favorites from the last day or so…

  • Some faux player haters kickbox a mellow cocker-spaniel
  • The steam powered pyromaniac frosts the cake with one short sighted pomegranate
  • The cookielicious Pillsbury dough boy showers with you and the thirsty gnomes
  • Bye syphilitic world, I gawk at my pretty fingertips
  • The tutti frutti trailer park returns and does powerful flip-flops all over town
  • The remote doctors look at the chest hair on Our abject ears

If you don’t know what an exquisite corpse is, there’s a pretty good definition here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse

I do like the sentence exquisite corpses because they’re easy and quick. I wonder if it would be very hard to put together a kind of “blog” exquisite corpse, with multiple contributers somehow, on the honor system to not read the previous entries… maybe that wouldn’t work.

Wii!!

Posted by on December 4, 2006 No comments

We got our very own Nintendo Wii on Sunday. Brian was watching online for rumors about when and where the next Wii’s would be available. We heard they were going to have them at Target and Circuit City Sunday morning so we got up at 6 and got to Target by 7:20. Some people had been been in line since 5:30 a.m. We waited around until about 7:45 and the Target folks came out and told us they had 41 Wii’s and they handed out tickets to everyone in line… we were number 29.

We didn’t actually get to play it until we got home around 3:30. It is really the most super fun gamestation ever (so far). We played boxing and tennis and then my whole family played Wii bowling for a while. I even won at bowling. Zelda looks really cool (Brian was playing.) Dragon Ball Z was lots of fun. Red Steel was tooo hard. Maybe I’ll do ok with practice or after reading the instructions. I just kept spinning in circles and Brian killed me repeatedly while my parents watched and laughed at me.

The way the controllers work is really different from all the old controllers. I think it’s really going to open up the possibilities for future games.

Video Game Productivity

Posted by on October 13, 2006 No comments

I am looking for new ways to increase my productivity at home and at work. I have been messing around with a really cool to do list called hiveminder. I bought the book “Getting Things Done” because a mess of people swear by it. It is currently sitting unopened under a stack of playstation & xbox games. I have heard of a cool to do list called voo2doo which I haven’t tried but supposedly you can separate your to-do’s in to groups by project.

What I think I really need is a video game based productivity plan. My job is a lot like tetris really… a bunch of tiny task filtering down into my office where I rotate and stack them and then hopefully can clear them fast enough to keep from getting fired. I think I need to score myself on a daily basis…

  • +10 points for every small task I complete
  • +500 tasks for every complete group of connected tasks cleared
  • +50 points for every client I can teach to fish
  • -50 points for every an angry client that I can’t calm down
  • -500 points for an e-mailed suggestion from the pres.

I also need a large shiny score board in my office that shows me how well I’m doing with lots of beeping and music that gets more intense when my task list is really long. A special playstation “Office Job” controller will be required as well.

Off to Toronto

Posted by on September 22, 2006 No comments

I’m off to Toronto with Brian and our friend Craig this weekend. We’re going to stay in a too-expensive downtown hotel and see NoMeansNo.

Hopefully it’ll be a good time and I’ll get all relaxed because I need some relaxin’. My mind is quite tangled as this week has been a complete mess from hell. I think last week was too. Next week I’m sure will be better (ha ha) & the week after that I’ll be on vacation in Vermont & I may not come back.

I wonder what the current job market for hermits & recluses is like. I could live on rainwater and leaves in a cave somewhere–as long as I can bring guitar hero with me.