Witch Touching

Posted on July 10, 2012 by baudattitude

After recent trysts with the Tower Defense genre, I think I’ve actually gotten to the point where I can consider myself a fan.  It’s a genre that can be very formulaic at times, but I believe the similarities between tower defense games actually serve to accentuate the creative touches that make particular titles stand out.  Of the ones I’ve played and enjoyed – Defense Grid, Plants Vs. Zombies, Fantasy Defense – I can point to something about each one and say “This is fun, and this makes it worth playing this game.”

Then we get to my most recent flirtation with iOS gaming: Defense Witches, which I played because I figured, well, I seem to like these Tower Defense things, and I like me some fantasy, so this really ought to push all the right buttons.

I can save you a lot of reading by saying “It didn’t, and I really can’t recommend this game”, but that would be rather anticlimactic.  So, please forget that I said anything and let’s continue.

The plot of Defense Witches – and it does have a plot, of sorts – is that there’s a magical academy, see, and that it trains witches – oddly enough – but that most of the upperclassmen happen to be away on holiday at just the point where some evil demon god king decides to make YET ANOTHER attempt to break out of his magical prison where he has been sealed away blah blah blah so you’re left to defend the world with, well, the ones that just happen to be left in the building.

Something like that.  The plot is kind of skimpy.

No, seriously.

Surprisingly, “skimpy” is an adjective that applies to the plot but not to the outfits on the witches.  There’s a certain Touhou vibe to the character designs, all frills and lace and generally modest.  It’s almost enough to make me skip my traditional “Oh, JAPAN” moment.

Then I read the character descriptions from the entry in the iTunes store:

Nicola : She pretends to be a calm character but actually tends to follow the surrounding circumstances. She is sensitive about the growth of her breasts. She likes Daisy too.

Oh, JAPAN.  What are we going to do with you?

Admittedly Nicola IS a bit boyish in the girlish department, but STILL…

Anyway, so you have witches instead of traditional towers.  You start off with one witch:

This is Daisy.  She’s your basic short-range rapid-fire witch.  Even though she’s the very first unit you get, she’s really quite useful.

Adding another witch gets you Becky, a long range slow-rate-of-fire witch whose attacks add a damage-over-time component.

Then comes Chloe, who adds a PBAE stun.  Mixing your Chloes and your Daisies is pretty damned lethal.

I just wrote that last sentence with a straight face. I’m still having trouble believing it.

The last character I unlocked was Nicola, and I ground through the levels to unlock her solely so I could see if her character bio screen in the game had the same comments about breast size that the iTunes application description had.

When I say “ground through the levels”, you might imagine that I had to beat quite a few levels to unlock Nicola, and I actually didn’t – that’s part of the problem.  You unlock Nicola after level 10, right when most Tower Defense games are starting to slowly ease back on the training wheels and get interesting, and right at the point where I realized that all I really had to look forward to was tedium, and no amount of cute witches in frilly outfits was going to make up for it.

Now, I have put up with some pretty B-grade games in exchange for cute girls, so that’s saying something.

Unfortunately, Defense Witches drops the ball on being fun in a few crucial ways:

First, the game really doesn’t give you a whole lot of information.  I spent a lot of time upgrading my witches during levels, but I was never sure whether I was making good choices.  I know that Becky does MORE damage than Daisy, for example, but I don’t know if a level 3 Daisy does more damage than a level 1 Becky.

Second, there’s no fast forward button and no way to rewind.  I failed one level at the very end, something like the 25th of 25 waves and had to start over from scratch, watching wave after wave of slow-moving critters tediously drag themselves across the screen to be slaughtered by my Daisy force, not really needing to pay attention until roughly wave 20.  A rewind button would have been nice to give it a go again from roughly wave 24, or a fast forward button would have made sitting through the waves a little less painful. I got neither.

Third, while a free application DOES need to support itself via a cash shop, the one in Defense Witches managed to rub me exactly the wrong way from the get-go.

Most free apps-with-cash-store have some sort of in-game currency.  For Montowers, it was “Tokens”, for Fantasy Defense “Hero Points”, and Defense Witches has “Crystals”.

Most free apps give the player a little chance to earn some of this currency through playing, even if it’s only given at a trickle.  It needs to be just enough to give the player a taste of what he could get in bulk lots for a very small fee.  Defense Witches doesn’t even give you this trickle – if you want some crystals, you’d best be pulling out the old credit card.

This wouldn’t be TOO bad if it weren’t for the next bit:  The stuff you buy with crystals is all temporary.  Want an advanced witch unit on one stage?  Pony up some crystals, she’s yours – but if you want her again next stage you’ll be paying again for the privilege.

I may be just a touch cynical, but it really feels like the developers are hoping that you’ll get frustrated enough at failing a level that you’ll pay a little bit to get the edge you need to get through the level, get to that next level – or maybe the one after – get frustrated again, and, well, you’ve already shoveled some money into the application and it feels stupid to give up now…

In the end, it was three-strikes-and-out for me.  I’ll be keeping it on my iPad so I’m alerted of updates – maybe they’ll tweak it and it will become just a little more player-friendly, after all – but for now there are lots of other games to be playing.

 

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TERA Firma

Posted on June 29, 2012 by baudattitude

Even though i spent a surprising amount of time trying out assorted F2P games earlier this year, it’s been a while since an MMO managed to get its hooks into me past the first four or five hours of play.  Lucent Heart managed it for a while but I took a break that turned into simply deciding to put it behind me, and I’d honestly decided that I was probably over MMOs until EQNext came out, if that ever actually happened. I’ve occasionally logged into EQ2 to pay rent on our guild hall, but that’s been the extent of things.

Even so, after seeing a fair number of screenshots from TERA (and, while it is technically an acronym and ought therefore be capitalized, I will refrain from doing so henceforth) I wound up interested enough that, when I was at our local Walmart shopping for groceries, I somehow wound up tossing a copy into the cart.

I installed it, made a couple of random characters, got to level 20 or so on one of them but just wasn’t feeling it, so I was pretty sure that it was going to wind up a flash in the pan.

Then my wife asked if she could make a character to try it out. This was at 10PM or so, so I walked her through the introductory island, went off to do something else and eventually went to bed.

When I woke up at 7, she was still playing.

Now, I hadn’t really gotten attached to the characters I’d made, and Amazon was having a sale on Tera that dropped the price to $30, so I figured that it might be worth picking up a second copy for myself and giving her the first account.

So, I made a new character on this new account and… got it up to level 20 or so and wasn’t feeling it, at which point I put the game aside for three weeks, until Enmasse emailed me to let me know that my free month was almost up.

I figured that I would log in one last time, get a few screenshots so that I could write a post about trying Tera and it not really pushing my buttons, and then the third time turned out to be the charm. I lost about 16 hours that weekend, and I’ve been spending at least a couple hours a night since grinding in the vague direction of the level cap, which is currently 60.

I hit 36 last night and it has been addictive fun the whole way.

Tera’s big draw is, of course, TRUE ACTION COMBAT its combat system, which is far more action game than traditional MMO fare. Enemies actually dodge, roll away, flank you, give little tells to warn you that they’re about to attack, cast AE spells that have visible areas of effect that you need to avoid… It turns the normal mind-numbing MMO grind into something much quicker and more enjoyable, since you’re actually looking at the center of the screen rather than being focused on four rows of buttons and watching for stuff to come off cooldown.

Like most modern MMOs, there are a dreadful amount of “go kill 10 wolves for me” quests, which were mostly added to the American release of the game to ease the reliance on grinding in the Korean version. These quests are largely optional but help give you a reason to go and kill wolves other than “there are wolves there, and wolves need killing”

There’s also an overall story quest that guides you through the game world. Quest NPCs for this are marked with different color quest indicators, so you can – in theory – ignore all the non-essential quests and just focus on the storyline, which has been pretty fun so far, with lots of angst and epic betrayals and saving the world and so on and so forth.

The game has gotten a little bit of a bad reputation based on one particular race, the Elin, who are all tiny girls with animal ears and tail who tend to rush into battle wearing outfits charitably described as “battle lingerie”, which were even more eye-rollingly-disturbing in the original version but which have been censored somewhat for western audiences. They’re still pretty bad. I tried playing an Elin sorcerer and it pushed my “I’m actually ashamed of this” button, which is pretty hard to push.

If you’re curious, here’s a site which shows the differences.

My Elin berserker, on the other hand, is a melee character instead of a caster, so she tends to rush into battle wearing sensible plate armor and carrying an axe twice her height. No battle lingerie here. Her armor does have a bow on it, yes, and it’s color-coordinated to complement her pink hair, but it’s still fairly practical as fantasy armor goes.

I will be upfront here; a good part of the reason that I’m finding so much enjoyment in this game is that I get to play the World’s Most Pissed Off Bunny Girl, with a facial expression that doesn’t so much say “look at me, I’m so cute” as it says “get out of my way or I’ll cut you off at the ankles”.

You can, as is generally the case in most post-WoW MMOs, cheerfully solo your way to level cap and avoid all that pesky social interaction, but there are lots of opportunities to group up and the grouping community seems quite healthy. The game design actively discourages playing multiple characters at once, and there are as yet no DPS meters around to encourage people to blame you for not pulling what they see as your weight. It does have an enforced item level for joining instances, but that isn’t much of a concession to the min/max crowd and I’ve had no trouble hitting the item level with quested gear.

Groups are five people.  This particular one has me, two other bunny-Elins, one Popori (Elin bioweapons based on cute fuzzy critters), and one weirdo playing a human.

Overall, I think it will easily hold my attention until I hit cap. After that, there are several different activities, mostly revolving around killing harder and harder stuff to get better gear.There aren’t really any raids, per se, though there’s something akin to Rift’s public events that you can take part in at 60, so there’s no real pressure to get into a high-end guild.

I’ll take it as it goes. For now, there are ankles to whack with an axe.

Posted in MMORPG, PC Gaming | Leave a comment

Apologies to Anne McCaffrey

Posted on June 25, 2012 by baudattitude

One of the last Dreamcast games released in the United States was an adventure game, “Dragonriders of Pern”, based on the popular series of books.

It was abysmal.

No, really.  I vaguely remember reading the books as a kid and liking them, and my wife remembers reading the books as a teen and being a big fan, and we got about 15 minutes into this thing before looking at each other and moving on to something more interesting.

My latest iOS diversion is called “Dragon Flight”, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Pern books other than that the name is sorta similar to the title of one of them, but what the hell, I needed a segue.

Dragon Flight is, well, it’s an unabashed attempt to sell in-app purchases, though I really can’t see why you would need to buy them.  More on that in a sec.

Here’s the game:  You’re riding a dragon, and you automatically shoot things in front of you.  When they explode, they drop coins, occasionally gems, which you can spend to upgrade your… laser?  It doesn’t really look like dragon breath, not that I’m an expert on dragon breath or anything.

The point of the game is to travel as far as you can.  There’s no story as far as I can tell and no real reason to keep playing other than that the graphics are kind of pretty and it’s a way to turn off your brain, turn on the reflexes and watch things go boom.  It ends when you fail to dodge something and die.

Eventually you get your dragon powered up to the point where you could, theoretically, just take your finger off the screen and let him fly forward, so they put in a little gotcha:

Occasionally you need to dodge these meteor things.  Sometimes you need to dodge several.  You can’t shoot them, so they serve to keep you from just letting yourself fly forward and rack up the distance.

The in-app purchases buy you the same coins that you get from shooting things, just in large quantity, so they’re only good for upgrading your dragon to make it easier to blow through things so that you can travel further and uh…

Yeah, there’s not a lot to the game.  Still, it has something like 150,000 entries on its Game Center leaderboard, so apparently a lot of people like games with not much to them.

For the record, after about 90 minutes of messing around with it, I made it into the top 1/3rd on the leaderboard, and it didn’t get old.  It’s not exactly the sort of thing I could play for hours, but it’s a good way to keep yourself entertained for 15 minutes.

Posted in iOS, ipad, videogames | Leave a comment

I say, this Need For Speed business is a spot of all right.

Posted on June 22, 2012 by baudattitude

I have a friend who is a big fan of the racing genre and who has made several attempts, over the years, to hook me as well.

He has succeeded only once, thus far, with the absolutely brilliant Flatout: Ultimate Carnage, a game that kept me – to abuse a cliche – glued to a controller for a good couple of weeks.

I suppose that it really wasn’t a proper racing game, however, as the general idea in racing is not hitting other cars and fences and such, while the general idea in Flatout:UC was that driving a car through a shopping mall was a grand idea.

Need For Speed: Carbon, then, to get back to the subject of this post, is something of an oddity in that it represents the first time I’ve gone and sought out a racing game on my own, and also in that it’s more or less a proper racing game in that the goals in it are all organized around beating other cars to a finish line rather than beating them into submission.

There is a certain degree of destructive glee involved in running through bus stops and knocking over traffic signs and the like, I will admit, but it really isn’t the focus of the game.

I will admit that I am rather unqualified to judge it as a racing game. From a brief search around the Internet at large, I am given to understand that it is actually held in a certain distain by fans of the series, often pointed out as the point where the series Went Wrong. I cannot comment on this, nor will I look too critically at the plot, which revolves around your character – a once-infamous street racer, fallen prey to some as-yet-unspecified scandal, seeking to regain his reputation through a series of, uh, it’s a racing game so YOU guess how he needs to regain his reputation.

What I can say, however, is that it is quite pretty, even if somewhat mired in 2006-era graphical shortcomings like a lack of support for widescreen resolutions, and that being able to purchase a virtual version of the car I drive on a daily basis and drive it, again virtually, in ways that would get me arrested or – more likely – killed in real life, is a great deal of fun and well worth the meager price of admission.

In this, too, I suppose it differs somewhat from the traditional racing game career, where you start off with a terrible car and use it to earn as much money as possible so that you can buy a better car and repeat until you are eventually driving the sort of car that graces the bedroom walls of 12-year-old boys worldwide.

With this game, I started with a Mazda RX-8, drove it until I had the $30,000 needed to buy the Mazdaspeed 3, and plan to see how far I can get with it.

Oh, I did put flames on the side. That represents my sole concession, thus far, to the needs of my inner 12-year-old.

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The Legend of Legendary Legends

Posted on June 19, 2012 by baudattitude

I like a little bit of fantasy in my first-person shooter, so I was quite looking forward to Legendary back when the first previews were released, back in 2008.  The idea of breaking open Pandora’s box and accidentally filling with world with monsters of legend, then shooting them, was quite appealing.

What can I say?  I played a lot of D&D when I was a kid.

Then the game actually came out and was roundly panned by reviewers, so I saved myself sixty bucks by not buying it, and then I just sort of forgot about it.

Recently, however, I was reminded of its existence by reading some online posts about the game and how, well, utterly disappointing it had been.

Thus reminded that this game did, in fact, exist, I decided that I would load up Steam and see what it cost.  My logic went as follows:  If it’s 20 bucks at full price, it will probably be discounted by 75% during the summer sale, and if it’s five bucks it will probably be worth trying out.

This happens to me quite often; I’m reading a discussion about games that turns to titles that were quite thoroughly mediocre, and I wind up buying the game in question just to see how mediocre it was.  I think this is probably a character trait that there’s a complex latin name for.

Anyway, it was five bucks at full price.  It will probably be even cheaper during the sale, but since I’d already decided upon five dollars as a fair price, I went ahead and bought it.

Then I took a couple of months getting around to it before finally starting it and finishing it over the course of three evenings.  I could easily have powered through it in a sitting if I’d been doing this on a weekend, the whole thing lasted about six hours start to finish.

I’m not going to lie to you, it lived up to the anti-hype.  I like me a good linear shooting game, but the sheer lack of mobility in this particular one sets new depths.  Your character is rendered utterly unable to move by the lowest of obstructions, you regularly drop down things with no way back up, doors close behind you, new doors open only when scripted to… It’s not Homefront bad, but it’s not great.

Thankfully, the creature design is pretty good and the atmosphere gets genuinely creepy at times, and this makes up for the silly level design.

So over six hours, you walk forward, shooting werewolves and fire lizard things and some annoying little ghost children with wings and claws that the game claims are taken from russian folklore and griffons and minotaurs and uh that is actually about the extent of the things you will be shooting, barring a couple of bosses.

I said that the creature design was good, not especially varied.

Oh, and you also occasionally shoot enemy soldiers.  They aren’t very notable.

From time to time, the walking forward and shooting things schtick is interrupted by one of two things:

1) Sometimes the path is blocked by fire and you need to go find a nearby valve to turn to put out the fire.  Generally this involves turning approximately 45 degrees from looking directly at the fire, noting the valve on the wall, and turning it.

2) Sometimes you will hit an access panel that you need to hold down the E button for like 20 seconds to open.

It’s not quite as bad as Heavenly Sword’s Hat Boxes, but it’s not exactly brain melting puzzle time here is what I’m getting at.

Also you will probably hit a bug just before the final boss where you get into an elevator and fall through the floor.  The game was released in 2008 and the graphics engine has problems when your computer gets too good of a frame rate.  There are a few workarounds for this bug, most of which involve limiting the frame rate in some manner.  I eventually hit upon one that worked, but this particular bug was teeth-grindingly frustrating until I found that.

Wow, I don’t have a lot of good things to say about this, really.  I did finish it, so that’s a mark in its favor, and it has a couple of deeply satisfying moments involving rocket launchers and mythological beasties, and really it deserves some points for just trying to break out of the mold.

I guess I’ll sum up:  It’s worth five bucks and six hours of your life, and what more can you say for some games?

 

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Need for Speed Carbon – Steam Grid View Icon

Posted on June 16, 2012 by baudattitude

I happened to find a copy of Need for Speed Carbon yesterday, a game that is significant to me only because it happens to have the car I actually drive on a daily basis in it.

Well, technically, I have a 2007 Mazda3 hatchback and the one in the game is the 2007 Mazda3 “Mazdaspeed” variant but it’s close enough.

As a bonus, it actually seems like a pretty decent game.  I haven’t played a Need for Speed game since the original, and they seem to have come quite a way since the days of CGA graphics.

Anyway, I couldn’t find a custom icon for Steam’s grid view, so I spent a couple of minutes tracking down a picture and resizing and cropping it appropriately and then I thought I’d put it up here in case someone else happened to have this same very specific need.

 

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | 1 Comment

I may have finally cracked an organizational problem.

Posted on June 10, 2012 by baudattitude

I don’t think much screams “first world problems” quite as much as the horrible problem of not knowing exactly what movies you own and in which formats.  That having been said…

I like my AppleTV a lot.  It’s an unassuming little box that sits near the TV and does its job of playing back all the stuff I’ve bought off the iTunes store and all the other stuff that I’ve wrangled into formats that it will actually play back.  Honestly, it’s kind of a pain how limited the thing is in terms of codecs and the like, but it’s the only game in town for iTunes files so I’m making the best of things.

Anyway, that gives me instant access to SOME of my video collection, which is awfully handy, but I still have a few hundred movies on DVD and Blu-Ray and in video files that it can’t play back, which leads to some issues sometimes trying to figure out where a movie is and of course makes it tricky sometimes to decide what to watch.  Stuff gets forgotten.

I’ve tried various methods of sorting this out, and they’ve never worked very well, but I think I’ve finally hit on a good one.

Basically, I took a small video file which old laserdisc fans may recognize, found some appropriate art to represent a couple different forms of media, tagged the video file with the art, lugged my laptop over to the DVD shelves and started making lots and lots of copies of the video file.

The end result looks like this in iTunes.  It’s slightly less useful on the AppleTV itself as there’s no grid view there but it still works nicely to be able to scroll down the list of movies and go “oh, I have this movie on disc, I should go over to the shelf and grab it” when I see a DVD or BD icon, or know that I can just hit play if I see a poster.  If I see the server-looking icon, it means that I need to boot the XBMC box hooked up to the same TV and play it from there.  Most of those are subtitled movies – I still haven’t gotten the knack of burning .srt files into video to play back on the AppleTV.

Also, since I’ve been ripping DVDs kind of off-and-on over the last couple of years, with no real system for knowing what I have and haven’t ripped, this gives me a convenient visual guide for knowing what kind of progress I’ve made and what I still have to do.

For the record, I have about 600 DVDs left to rip, just in Movies.  If I decide to rip all of the TV box sets, that’s probably twice the number, and anime will count for another thousand DVDs or so.

That may take a little while 🙂

Anyway, time will tell if this method sticks, but for now I’m pretty happy with it.

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iMiku

Posted on June 9, 2012 by baudattitude

During my senior year in college, I spent almost an entire month obsessed with Project Diva on the PSP.  I probably put about 40 hours into it before I’d finally beaten every song on hard difficulty with a high enough ranking to unlock every single unlockable character and costume, and that’s a level of devotion that deserves special recognition, probably in the form of a snug white jacket with long sleeves.

I don’t carry my PSP around any more, and since Sony cracked down on being able to buy PSN points from overseas I’m unlikely to ever buy the sequel anyway.  My Miku obsession was at an ebb.

Then this came along:

Sega, deciding that it needed to cater to the most niche of niche markets, released an English (mostly) version of the formerly Japan-only MikuFlick iOS game on the US App Store, for a mere $13.99.

No, seriously, I’m not kidding there.

Of course, I did buy it, so I guess they didn’t NEED to price it down, but it did sting a little.

Anyway, the idea of MikuFlick is pretty much the same as Project Diva.  Miku sings and dances, you push buttons in time with the music, you ramp up to harder songs and difficulty levels as you get better.  The videos aren’t done in real time like on the PSP game or in PS3 Dreamy Theater – they’re pre-rendered, so you get a set outfit per stage.  It let them use the higher quality models from the Arcade/PS3 versions, I suppose.

There’s just one little thing.  There aren’t buttons on the iPhone, so they had to pick a different input strategy.

That character grid there is a Japanese cell phone keyboard, and this is where I need to take a moment to explain a little bit about that.

Text input on cell phones in Japan works like this:  With button phones, you press, say, the か button once for か, twice for き, three times for くand so on.  With touch screen phones, you press and release か for か, press and flick to the left for き, press and flick up for く and so on for the other vowel sounds.

Get it?  You can produce all 50-odd basic hiragana characters with 10 keys and a little dexterity.

So it’s no big deal to, oh, put out a rhythm game where you are entering song lyrics via the keypad.

On easy levels, it’s not such a difficult thing – you only have to enter one out of maybe every dozen syllables.

On harder levels, it gets to the point where you’re trying to type entire words or phrases in real time, keeping time with the music while doing so, resulting in an overall effect something like the world’s most hyperactive 10-key test.  This is made maybe just a little more difficult if  you’re a westerner who has never really had to type Japanese using a cell phone keyboard.

That said, I did get the hang of it eventually and it has proved to be fun and arguably just a little bit educational.  It also has two modes other than the full-kana mode I’m using above – you can have mixed romanization or full-on romanization if you don’t know kana well or at all, so it’s not completely out of the reach of people who don’t read Japanese or who want a really unusual way to learn the characters.

My one complaint is, well, my two complaints are as follows.  First, it is dreadfully short on songs.  Once you’ve played through the dozen songs on offer, you get ending credits. After the ending credits, you get dropped right into the bonus song, which is of course The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku, on “Hard” difficulty level, which crushed my ego like an eggshell.

After failing that…

…it unlocked for play on Easy and Normal levels.  So, 13 songs in total.

I immediately went back to it on Normal and got through it, which leads to my second complaint:  The achievements have that thing going on where beating all the songs on “Normal” doesn’t give you the achievement for finishing them all on “Easy”, so I have several songs to go back and play on a lower difficulty level.

Oh, wait, I’m complaining about having to spend more time with Miku.  I don’t know what I was thinking.

Posted in iOS, videogames | Leave a comment

Dear PopCap…

Posted on June 7, 2012 by baudattitude

… I recognize that this somewhat falls under the category of personal responsibility and so on and so forth, but if it isn’t too much trouble, would you consider adding a clock to the interface of all your games from this point forwards? I would appreciate it and I’m sure that my boss would as well.

In somewhat related news, after finishing the “adventure” mode of Peggle Deluxe and feeling like I’d kicked that particular monkey, I realized that I’d bought the game as part of a bundle that included the sequel, Peggle Nights.

…

The hook in Peggle Nights is that you’re seeing the secret dreams and aspirations of all the wacky characters from the first game, and it’s a pretty amusing hook. The lobster character, in particular, easily the most annoying and most useless in the first game, has the most entertaining fantasy – destroying Paris as a Godzilla-sized crustacean. It almost makes up for the five levels you have to suffer through with him again.

As for the game, well, nothing much has changed. You’re still bouncing balls off pegs in an effort to clean the board, there’s still an element of randomness that can infuriate at times but means that you pull off some stunningly unlikely shots at others, and it’s still basically a digital sugar rush.

The last level is perhaps just a little TOO dependent on luck; it has a design where almost every peg on the board is deliberately occluded by barriers and actually aiming at anything turns into a matter of needing to make bank shots off said barriers and off the walls.

That said, and coming back to the reason for this post’s introductory paragraph, it kept me plugging away until nearly one in the morning without realizing I was doing so, so I can scarcely complain.

Anyway, with both games triumphed over, I can get back to trying to recover the last shreds of my dignity by playing something with explosions and improbably dressed women, though hopefully not something where the improbably dressed women are what is exploding.

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I May Have A Unicorn Problem

Posted on June 4, 2012 by baudattitude

Let’s roll back the clock about a year, to June 19th of last year.  At that time, I’d just finished playing “Peggle Extreme”, a game featuring unicorns, just after an article about Secret of the Magic Crystals, another game featuring unicorns, and I wanted to make it clear, at the time, that I did NOT have a Unicorn Problem.

Of late, of course, that’s an argument that holds less water.

Let’s move on, shall we?

PopCap has made a lot of people very rich by making games that are shiny, happy, and addictive as all hell, and I am sure that I sacrifice any vestiges of gamer cred I have ever had by admitting that I have a low resistance to the ones I’ve tried so far.  When I played through Peggle Extreme last year, for example, I burned through the 10 levels in about a half hour, then went back and played them a second time, then started working on various challenges before I managed to break myself away, and I lost two days to Plants Vs Zombies.

It was, therefore, probably not a good thing last night when I realized that a) I had a half hour before bedtime with nothing in particular to do and b) had a copy of Peggle Deluxe already installed on my Macbook Pro.

90 minutes later, I staggered to bed.

I was not at my best when I work up at 6 the next morning, and I considered sleeping in for an hour but rejected the concept in favor of playing more Peggle up until basically the last possible moment I could leave for work and still get in roughly on time.

I really have made some very poor life choices, from time to time.

Anyway, I ought to have been a mess at work but I actually arrived in quite a chipper mood and managed to maintain that throughout the day.

Then I came home and played more Peggle.

I am happy to report that I have now finished the – can we really call it a story mode? – story mode and have a logical break point where I can stop playing Peggle and get on with other things in life, as soon as the hallucinations of exploding blue and orange pegs stop.

There are a lot worse ways to follow up a weekend spent playing Amnesia.

 

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