There’s nothing quite like the sensation of laying down to sleep and finding yourself unable to breathe. This happened a few nights ago when my über-cold left my nose completely stuffed up. I had to breathe through my mouth, which made me dizzy. I eventually fell asleep probably due to exhaustion. When I awoke in the middle of the night one of my nostrils had kindly opened up enough to permit semi-normal breathing.
Worst cold ever.
Also the last post I’m making about it. Colds are pretty boring to read about and if I could capture the misery of the past week in a way that was truly entertaining, I’d be rich. Hmm. I may have to think about this.
Onward to the rest of what should hopefully be a healthy remainder of 2013:
Valentine’s Day is coming up. My favorite manufactured holiday when I was a kid because of the candy. I was especially fond of chocolate-covered marshmallow hearts. Mmm. Now I prefer the day after when all the candy gets marked down 50%. I usually treat myself to something small that I can work off without too much guilt/effort.
Running: This is probably still about three weeks off. I’m going to start stretching exercises to make sure my tendon is ready. The first run will be a short test that will also serve to calibrate my new iPod nano. The best thing about it, apart from the electric green case…
…is that it incorporates the Nike+ sensor/receiver so I don’t need to attach any extra hardware to my shoe (or the iPod). An added bonus is no more infernal clickwheel to deal with, especially one that refuses to function in the slightest bit of rain, making the end of a jog unusually difficult to, well, end. The test run will be done at a track to ensure maximum accuracy for the calibration. In the meantime I’ll try to return to the pool/gym at least a few times each week until the runs resume. Excelsior!
Diet: My weight has steadied out around 156-157 but should start going back down soon as I start packing a modest lunch to work and resist the siren song of the donut. My goal is to be back to my usual weight by my next physical, probably a few months from now.
This site: I have found a few themes I may be able to hammer into something serviceable for my needs. This is a long term project so I’ll probably work away at it a little at a time. I am planning on having a revamped site up before the end of the year.
Back when I was unable to gamble legally I accompanied my parents on summer vacation to, among others places, Reno, Nevada. As Mom and Dad were not heartless monsters, they found fun things for us underage types to do or better yet, activities we could all indulge in that didn’t involve one-armed bandits, roulette tables and such.
One of those activities was mini-golf at a stupendously elaborate mini-golf course outside the city. In retrospect it may have been outside of Las Vegas but I remember it definitely being in Nevada. Each hole was elaborately dressed with windmills and tunnels, hills, chutes, all the zany obstacles you expect at a deluxe mini-golf course. I’d always wanted to play again and finally, over 30 years later, I did just that today with Jeff.
The course we played on is far more modest than that Nevada wonderland — the 18 holes at Eaglequest Coquitlam (by coincidence we did indeed see an eagle up high in the sky overhead) are all rated at par 2 and while they feature a variety of layouts, slopes and obstacles (rocks or pilings) they’re pretty basic as mini-golf goes. But while the presentation wasn’t quite up there (including a mostly non-functional stream that was barely filled with some stagnant water) the holes were still zany good fun.
Neither of us managed a hole-in-one though we both had our moments. Neither of us managed par very often, either. 😛 I scored a solid par 5 on four holes, while Jeff took 6 shots on a pair. In the end we finished a mere point apart, with Jeff edging me for the victory 62-61.
Here’s the scorecard to make it official. I have added the date using advanced computer technology:
Mini-golf, maxi-scores
The weather was downright balmy, with temperatures in the low 20s, quite unusual for the first half of May. It felt as if we had been transported two months ahead and landed directly in summer. The best part of the game is neither of us landed balls in the stagnant water or on someone’s head.
We shall do this again. And then for a real good laugh, we may try real golf. I can already smell the sand traps.
Inspired by a thread on Broken Forum (and an idea I had for a post ages ago) here is a nearly complete list of every video game console and computer system I have owned, with dates (where I can remember).
The Computers
1982: Atari 400. With membrane keyboard! This was really just a video game machine for me but it was awesome. It came with four (!) joystick ports, took cartridges and provided far better sound and graphics than any comparable video game system back in the day. I almost considered buying the kit that replaced the membrane keyboard with actual keys. Instead I held out until I got my next system.
Open the hatch, insert Star Raiders cartridge, lose rest of day.
1984: Commodore 64. The C64 shipped in 1982 but it cost $600 then and I couldn’t afford it. By 1984 it was selling in huge numbers and had been reduced to a mere $200. The one I got in the early part of 1984 was one of a notoriously unreliable batch (I recall about a 25% or so failure rate) and had a bad keyboard. The replacement worked fine, though and having a keyboard you could touch-type on was neat. This marked the first time I bought productivity software for a computer, a $130 word processor that I’ve long forgotten the name of. On the C64 you could create files about 2.5 pages long before you had to use dot commands to chain the files together for printing. It taught me brevity. I still have some of the data disks. I wonder if they would still be readable? In addition to being my first computer used for non-gaming stuff, it was also the first that I got peripherals for, namely an Epson dot matrix printer (designed to misfeed paper as soon as you turned your back on it), the 1084S color monitor and the infamous 1541 floppy drive. The first game I bought on floppy disk was Lode Runner. I actually picked it up before I even had the C64 and marveled over its floppy diskness. This was also a game machine, of course, with most games running from floppy and the best ones making use of Epyx’s Fast Load cartridge.
I still recall playing Infocom games and knowing I’d successfully figured out a puzzle because the 1541 drive would start clattering away (the game apparently kept the YOU HAVE DIED moves stored in memory).
Not shown: 1541 floppy drive a.k.a. Is It Supposed to Make That Noise?
1987: Atari 520ST. I had it with the monochrome monitor, so it was for Serious Business. I had WordPerfect 4.1 and WordWriter ST. I still played Phantasie on it, though. I eventually got the color monitor and tried and disliked King’s Quest III. I still remember where this computer sat in my apartment on Nelson Street in Vancouver and even recall writing specific stories with it. This was the first computer where I had dual floppy drives. I was clearly moving up.
A built-in floppy drive, a 2-button mouse and numeric keypad. Future: now!
1989: Amiga 500. Ah, the Amiga. I loved this computer. It felt sexy and modern and had tons of games and lots of other interesting and useful software for it. I had ProWrite, excellence and I think maybe one other word processor. Some people collected games, I collected word processors. I stuck mainly to ProWrite. I eventually upgraded the Amiga (my first computer upgrades ever) to AmigaDOS 2.1, 3 MB of ram and a 52 MB hard drive. This let me call up ProWrite nigh-instantly. Black Crypt also installed to the HD, which was nice. I kept the Amiga until I finally made the jump to PC and to this day regret selling it. Although pictured below, I did not have an external floppy drive for it.
Like the Atari ST but better.
1994: PC with Athlon 486-40Mhz CPU and 4 MB of ram. I eventually added a 2x CD-ROM drive to it so I could play Myst.
It starts blurring after this but along the way I had:
– Pentium II 120Mhz. I mostly remember playing Quake II on this with a Diamond Monster 3D video card (Voodoo 1 add-on card).
– Celeron 500 (for about two weeks before it got stolen from my apartment — three days before Christmas, ho ho ho)
– Athlon XP 1800. This was clearly a better system over equivalent Pentiums at the time.
– Athlon 64 (first 64-bit system, though it only ran 32-bit Windows XP)
– Intel Core 2 Duo 6850 with Nvidia GTX 8800. Back to Intel. I still have this system, though it is just parts at the moment.
– Intel Core i5 2500K (quad core). This is my current rig and it dates back to January 2011. 8 GB ram, Nvidia GTX 580, Windows 7. Pretty standard now but still runs everything nicely.
Video game systems
Atari 2600. It was still called the VCS when I got it in 1980. I probably had 30+ games on the system (I had a list somewhere at some point) and favorites would include: Adventure (duck dragons!), Superman, Video Pinball, Canyon Bomber, Circus Atari, Night Driver, Demon Attack (which I thought looked amazing for a 2600 game), Kaboom!, Asteroids (a surprisingly decent port) and a bunch of others I’m forgetting. For its primitive hardware, the system had some fairly captivating, if obviously simple, games.
And it came with two joysticks and two paddle controllers. That’d be $150-180 extra these days!
Intellivision. I didn’t know who George Plimpton was but I knew I had to have the Intellivision. I got it on cheap thanks to my brother’s wife’s employee discount at Woolworth’s. I never had as many games with it as I did with the 2600 but some were classics, even if that thumbwheel proved to be less than optimal. The Intellivision is also where I (more or less) learned the rules of American football. Favorites include Microsurgeon, Skiing (falling was especially painful), Armor Battle, Sea Battle, Astrosmash (this was almost zen-like in the way you could keep racking up a score as the shapes tumbled down from the top of the screen) and Major League Baseball (Yer Out!)
From the era when fake woodgrain was on everything.
Atari 5200. I had this around the same timeframe as the Atari 400, which was appropriate, because the 5200 was pretty much a 400 re-purposed as a game console. The joysticks were wacky non-centering analog things that worked great for games like Missile Command and not so great for games that required precise changes in direction, like Ms Pacman. One of the neat things was how the system would switch to a blank screen when you turned it off to switch cartridges, instead of blasting you with the sound of a static-filled TV display. I never had many games for this, mostly some arcade ports, but it was a decent machine. The cartridges were massive.
This sleek design still holds up 30 years later. That joystick…not so much.
ColecoVision. This had the potential to be the ultimate console, but it came out just before the whole market crashed in 1983. I still enjoyed it for what it was: a machine that consciously improved in many ways over its predecessors. The joysticks were better than the 5200’s, the keypad and buttons better than Intellivision. Graphically, it offered the closest to arcade-style graphics at the time. It also had an awesome pack-in game: Donkey Kong (this was before Nintendo locked it up forever). Most of the well-known arcade hits were already licensed to other companies so Coleco had to go with more of a B-list but there were some excellent games among them, if less known: Venture, Looping, a Smurf game that featured so-so gameplay but astonishing graphics for 1982, Carnival, Lady Bug and Mr. Do! The load screen was annoyingly long — apparently in an attempt to get the ColecoVision name permanently embedded in young and impressionable minds.
Kind of cheap-looking but the games were good!
After the ColecoVision I turned to computers for the next 20 years. It wouldn’t be until 2003 that I would pick up an Xbox. Three years later I got an Xbox 360 but found I used it so little I ended up selling it off. Today the Xbox is still hooked up to the TV and dusted off occasionally. I have a Nintendo DS, but it has largely sat idle since I got an iPhone last year. It’s so much easier to not have to switch cartridges around. The DS is a better platform for crossword puzzle games, though.
In 1973 the population of Duncan, British Columbia was about 5000. Today, nearly 40 years later, it is still around 5000. Duncan is a small town, but it struggles to maintain that small town feel with outlying municipalities springing up subdivisions like mushrooms after a heavy rain. The tiny footprint of the city — all of two traffic lights on the Island Highway as you pass through — is being stamped with every kind of franchise imaginable, from Burger King to Home Depot to casinos and multiple McDonald’s.
But it wasn’t always like this. In the early 1970s the outlying area around the city was largely undeveloped. You could ride your bike (with banana seat, of course) on trails that ran for miles along the Cowichan River. The annual exhibition took place on agricultural land that existed within the city limits. When that first McDonald’s opened in 1978 it signaled the end of an era.
In 1973 one of the popular local eateries was an Italian restaurant called Romeo’s. To my young eyes it was a place of mystery and intrigue, an ‘adult’ restaurant with subdued lighting that made me think of a coal mine (the aesthetics were more appreciated when I got a bit older). The small lobby area, like the rest of the place, was dimly lit and had everything you’d expect — a coat rack, some seats, the stand where the hostess would greet you and take you in. But one day we went in and something new was there. It was a machine unlike any I’d seen before.
I’d heard of Pong and now I was staring directly at it: a cocktail table-style cabinet housing a TV screen, with controls on two sides that consisted of simple knobs. The surface of the table was glass. I watched the strange phosphorous glow of the display, simple lines and a small square of light gently arcing back and forth between two rectangular blocks or ‘paddles’. This was like something from Star Trek. I had to try it!
25 cents for one play. In 1973 and to someone who had yet to hit double digits, 25 cents was a lot of money — more than the cost of a whole candy bar! I rarely had any money on me. My older brother did, though. He regarded me as his personal slave, so it seemed unlikely he’d give or loan me the money to try it out. To my good fortune it turned out that Pong required two players. My brother would pay then ‘force’ me to play against him, keeping the hierarchy of owner/slave intact. Win-win, as far as I was concerned.
I don’t remember how that first game went. I’m going to say I won due to that intuitive little kid video game sense that so many little kids seem to have. What I do remember is how the simple act of turning that knob, seeing the paddle on the TV move in reaction and then hit that little square of light was magic. Magic.
A few years later we got a home Pong unit. My brother, who liked to tinker with electronics, managed to take the controls that were hardwired to the console and break them out into handheld units, allowing us to play without being three feet in front of the TV. We still played sitting three feet in front of the TV because that’s what you did but we had the freedom to move if we wanted to.
Pong led to the first video game system I owned myself — no negotiating with the big brother required! — the Atari VCS (later renamed the 2600). It didn’t come with Pong. The new world of video games moved quickly and already Pong was passé. It didn’t matter. Those early days of ‘electronic tennis’ had already confirmed that I had a new lifelong hobby, one I didn’t even know existed until I saw that glowing screen in Romeo’s when I was nine years old.
In my continuing ‘How Not to’ gaming series, here’s how not to do DLC (Downloadable Content) for a game:
Stamp it out so frequently that you overwhelm and confuse the casual player and create resentment in the hardcore players who feel compelled to purchase all of it to have a ‘complete’ experience.
I would not be surprised if Dungeon Defenders is one of the games that prompted Valve to offer a ‘SHOW DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT’ checkbox for its list of new releases. Released on October 18, 2011 the game has 20 DLC items available (two of which are free). Purchasing them all will set you back $45.82. The game itself costs $14.99. Of course, all of the DLC is optional — the game works just fine without it and some of it is pure fluff, things like costume packs and the like. But that’s still equivalent to new content every 10 days and while the inclination may be to think more is better, it’s often not, especially in a game that offers a solid co-op experience where not having the right DLC can lock other players out.
This seems to be the future for at least some games, though. Whether it’s a free iOS game with In App Purchase (IAP) to flesh out/further the experience, Facebook games that require you to pony up real money to make real ‘progress’ (the classic example being Farmville) or games like Dungeon Defenders with a relatively low price buttressed by a ton of DLC, more developers and publishers are opting for a model where you get some of the game up front for little or no money and have to pay to get the rest — with the final price often ending up higher than the old-fashioned retail box that gave you the whole thing at time of purchase.
It makes the days of Epic giving away gobs of free content for its Unreal Tournament games seem positively quaint. I’m not ready to cry doom or shake my cane at these young whippersnappers just yet, though, but it’s a trend that definitely bears watching.
A week or so ago I decided to actually start playing one of those single player computer games. You know, like they used to make back in the old days before the Internet and MMOs and Farmville. For this bold adventure I chose Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, a slightly older title I had picked up for a pittance ($2.49) during last winter’s Steam sale.
I set all the controls to my personal and wacky preferences, then dove in. The opening level serves as a tutorial, instructing you on the basics of fighting (tip: kick, a lot), climbing ropes, mantling, using your handy night vision and so on. At the end I am treated to a cutscene in which the wizard Phenrig (who narrates your journey through the tutorial area) instructs you on your task, which is to journey to the city of Stonehelm and deliver a magic crystal because Plot Device {magic crystal}. Accompanying the protagonist will be a slinky spirit named Xana because this is a video game and the designers are obligated to include a ‘sexy babe’. As long as she doesn’t get in my way, I’m good.
I have not saved at this point because it’s just the tutorial. I expect the game to auto-save after the cutscene, when the story begins proper.
Instead the game crashes.
I have not tried playing since.
This is one of the reasons my backlog of single player games is immense.
Way back when I started what I didn’t know at the time was called a ‘Let’s Play’ I blogged about my first experience with The Sims 3 and the sim I had created, Ferris Wheele. After three posts I got sidetracked by work and a billion other things. I recently (and finally) completed the LP on Broken Forum, which is hosted by Scott ‘Lum the Mad’ Jennings. BF was revived in January 2012 as a refugee camp of sorts for people who had been banned from Quarter to Three or disagreed with the way the admin ran things there. One of the things Lum did differently on BF was to break up the games discussion more discretely. There are dedicated subforums for PC/console games, MMOs (understandable given Lum’s work in that particular area), traditional (board) gaming and the most recent addition was a Let’s Play section after several requests went out to have the few LPs gathered in one place.
The LPs took off, in no small part to Angie Gallant’s pigeon dating sim LP. This has brought out a veritable flood of people posting their experiences, largely in Japanese dating sims — but you can find everything from Master of Orion 2 to Minecraft, X-Com, Morrowind and even big rig and train simulators (with zombies!) It’s really quite neat and has given BF a distinct flavor to set it apart from Qt3.
I revived my Sims 3 experience and carried it through Ferris Wheele’s entire life. You can read the thread here. I’ll eventually bring it back over here. I’m planning another LP soon and it will also go to Broken Forum first then make its way back here. Have a look in on Ferris’s wacky life.
Here are a few more shots of some of my many City of Heroes characters.
Katanatron is a Katana/Ninjitsu stalker and has had many previous incarnations using different secondaries as a scrapper. Even though I have remade this character more often than most would change their socks, I’m confident this version is the one that will endure.
For now.
The previously linked Mint Laser, a Beam Rifle/Electric Manipulation blaster, now has a second more minty costume. Compare below!
And here’s an example of how ragdoll really isn’t working right in the game at the moment. That is one twisty torso.
GoG is not the only site having a sale as Steam rolled out its annual holiday offering yesterday. The sale runs until January 1st. Either my tastes have become more picky or I’ve already bought every damn game I want because two days into the sale and I have purchased nothing save for the DLC for Dungeons of Dredmor. It was on sale for 75% off, resulting in a price of 74 cents. Yes, 74 cents, less than the price of a cup of coffee (the go-to item for comparing how cheap something is).
There are a couple of titles I have my eye on that I will consider if the price is right but I’ve already passed on a lot of bargains. Who knew that Duke Nukem Forever would actually be released in 2011? Who knew that it would be such a crappy game that even a price of $4.99 isn’t low enough for me to check it out? Well, it’s possible some of the more honest developers who worked on the game had an inkling as to its relative value. I might bite at $2.49 (probably next summer’s sale price).
Other notable bargains I’ve passed on include Amnesia: The Dark Descent (by all accounts an excellent adventure game but also scary as all get-out and I play games to relax, not wind myself up), Quake 4 (wouldn’t mind having this on Steam but not for $9.99), The Witcher (already own it), various Half-Life 2 titles (own all of ’em, still haven’t finished Episode 1) and as they say, many more.
It’s clear people like their bargains, though, as the Steam store is still having intermittent issues and was mostly down over four hours after the sale started. Peak users was over 4.4 million. That’s a lot of people mulling over whether or not to buy Duke Nukem Forever at $4.99 (apparently quite a few did as it’s listed at #6 in today’s top 20 bestsellers).
Good Old Games is in the midst of its 50% holiday sale and I took the opportunity to pick up a game I had on my first PC back in the olden days of 1994 when PCs still came with floppy drives and monitors were massive 14 inch wonders.
That game is Lands of Lore: Throne of Chaos and when I first had it I made it all the way to the climactic battle against the evil Scotia but never quite finished the game. I’m not sure why. It may have been that I ended up getting a new PC and moving saved game files was sometimes a tricky thing back then. Or it could have been an obscure, game-stopping bug that was never patched (that was also a tricky thing back then. I still recall 1998’s Baldur’s Gate as being the only computer game I owned that truly and utterly defeated me. It would consistently crash 10-15 minutes in no matter what I did. I eventually gave up and shipped it off to a friend who, of course, played it without issue). Whatever the reason, I didn’t complete the game and used this as a handy excuse to justify the nostalgia in picking it up, knowing full well the chances of me completing it now were pretty darn slim.
Much to my surprise, once I set the game to windowed mode and shrank it down to 800×600 it ended up not looking too bad. The pixelated graphics are quite acceptable when shrunk down appropriately. Even better, the actual game is is easy to pick up. The interface is clean and straightforward and the copious voice work helps to compensate where the graphics falter. For example, most signs are just a bunch of VGA scribbles (unreadable) but clicking on one results in your party leader reading it aloud in a crisp tone. Handy!
I still don’t know how far I’ll get. As you can see in the shot below I am just starting out and only have one of the eventual three party members. At this point I’ve solved one simple puzzle, beat up an attempted thief, beat up a mean boar and had the castle guards tell me to get lost. Not bad but not exactly saving the world — yet!
I’ll follow up within a month’s time to report on whether the purchase (a whopping $2.99) boiled down to an hour or so of play or whether I’ve actually made real progress. Odds are it will be the former but every once in a while you can go back.
Combined, these threads add up to somewhere around 10,000 or more posts. That is a lot of words for one game. It currently rates 94 out of 100 for the PC version on Metacritic (96 and 92 for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions, respectively) and has spawned no less than two annoying memes, making it the Portal of 2011 (even moreso than Portal 2, which also came out this year):
Do searches on these phrases, if you dare. The Internet will obligingly turn up many examples for you to enjoy(?).
The game is still listed at $59.99 which is way beyond my current gaming budget, plus I know that I wouldn’t do more than piddle about with it if I got it now, anyway, as I have a gaming backlog that stretches nigh unto infinity as is. Still, as a pop culture event, there is no denying Skyrim has left an impression. And made moneyhats for Bethesda.
I recently jumped back into City of Heroes as it’s gone free-to-play and my vet status meant most of the game’s features were unlocked right up front. CoH is an MMORPG that launched in April 2004 and as anyone who has played one of these games will tell you, MMOs are designed to be massive time sinks. It gets even worse because the typical $15 monthly fee makes you feel obligated to login and do something even if you don’t particularly feel like it because, dammit, you’re going to get your money’s worth! That’s what’s nice about free-to-play (F2P) — you can play as little or as much as you like and saunter along at your own pace. There are usually some things you can’t do without paying (obviously the publisher needs to generate revenue somehow) but it’s easier to fork over $5-10 whenever you feel like it instead of being on the hook for $15 every month or no super hero (or villain) for you!
The best part of the game is probably still the character creator. Here are a few I’ve made recently, as making endless alts is pretty much a required part of the CoH experience. I’ll elaborate a bit on the game’s current incarnation in another post.
Punch Bull
Punch Bull continues the fine tradition of names based on terrible puns. He’s a level 20 super strength/willpower brute. His specialty is punching things really hard. As you can see, his main costume is a boxing outfit, a raging bull, if you will. His tail wags.
Mint Laser
My latest in a series of robot-like characters, Mint Laser is a level 20 beam rifle/electric manipulation blaster. His specialty is shooting things with extremely loud beams of energy. If those things get up in his grill he can switch to punching them with glowing fists of electricity.
His second costume will be something delightfully retro (and extra minty).
Frank Lee Feathered
Finally (for the moment) there is Frank Lee Feathered, a level 14 plant control/earth assault dominator. I originally had given him wings but I found them a bit distracting, so while he looks like an eagle he acts more like an ostrich. Further underlining that is the fact that most of the earth powers require him to be on the ground to work. His second costume will probably have wings.
More on how these kooky characters play and what the game is like with the hybrid F2P/subscription model soon™.
![[IMG]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Atari-400-Comp.png/800px-Atari-400-Comp.png)
![[IMG]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Atari_1040STf.jpg/800px-Atari_1040STf.jpg)
![[IMG]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Amiga500_system.jpg/772px-Amiga500_system.jpg)
