Showing posts with label video games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video games. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 03, 2013

rock the sweeper


A rare challenge that I took up. 500 bucks.
It all started with a "It is impossible to do this inside 50," that bro remarked when toying with Minesweeper on the PC. At that same time I was busy with the same on my Tab, consistently maintaining a sub-60 average, and breaking my day's personal bests on successive tries. So I took it up as a challenge.

Laboring, almost 3 hours into it, but finally got there. Carpal tunnel and 19/20 eyesight could be the side effects. Problem with playing Minesweeper on the PC is
1) Microsoft has, again, as to its reputation, ruined a cool game. It was all good with the simple graphics. Now we get flashing stuff and distracting gradients on everything.
2) There's apparently an option to replay each level. So it was that the first 15 minutes I was basically trying at the same grid, and wondering how it could match all the previous grids, and yet not be so, as the generation rules dictate.
3) Minesweeper on the PC v Minesweeper on an touch interface is multitudes of difference. I love the latter now. It is hard to point-and-click at such speed (anymore). I have a 35 second best on the Tab.
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Friday, February 15, 2013

A Toast, to C&D


Ich habe assembled a new gaming system, recently. First game the usuals - Civlization V, Far Cry 2, Portal 2, Mass Effect, NFS Shift 2, and some that didn't work (subtext: piracy!). Somebody could be shouting "Dude, those are, like so 2010". But then I went much further back in time, to the "good 'ol days" as I remember - the arcade days, and downloaded Kawaks, an emulator (it has come a long way) for CPS1/2 and NeoGeo, and my <3 game, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. Now I have a dedicated 2.15 billion transistors pushing out 1.792 teraflops for a game of 25 years in the past. So 1980s, and I know it. Feels like revisiting my life.

Curious to learn that the game spawned from a comic series, Xenozoic Tales, and saw moderate success in its translation into a CBS cartoon series, a Capcom arcade game, action figures, trading cards, and other assorted merchandise. Even the dinos we were fending off had names - Shivat, Mack, Cutter, Krenkel, Wahonchuck, Zake, Sambuck...

Besides the ones we could claim familiarity to (through the game), this scrip summarises other characters: "...various criminals, politicians, scientists, and inventors who populate the dystopian world of tomorrow. There is also a race of reptilian humanoids who cannot speak in a human language but instead communicate by spelling words with Scrabble tiles."

Alongside this trivia, I also had an iota-upgrade on dinosaurs. For example, I had no idea that those ferocious little 'uns in all the movies are Allosaurus, and that the Brontosaurus is not called that anymore, it's Apatosaurus, and that it wasn't the biggest thing out there (note: see Sauropods, and esp see this). Oh, and now Opiliones give me a hard-on.

And I think I'm gonna print and hang this on my wall

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