Monday, July 16, 2007

A week of gaming

Every now & then I catch myself staring at the game icons festooned over my desktop deciding what I'll play next. I play a lot. A real lot. And not just on one game either. I've had spates of 20+ different games in a week before as well as times when I'm only dragged to one for hours on end.

Typically I'll have a games folder on my desktop where every icon goes once a game is installed. All the most common games I'm playing have additional icons beneath the games folder so I can get to them quickly. When a new game is installed I'l usually toss the least played game icon into the games folder so that there's only ever one row of icons to browse.



Recently though I've had an additional row to the right with alpha and beta testing games + demos that are only there for the short term. It has meant though that more than 30 game icons are littered around the place.

On one such icon-staring occasion I decided that it would be interesting to log the different games I play and how much time I spend playing. This post will hopefully be the first of many weekly updates into what games I play.

I started looking for an automatic application tracker that would monitor how much CPU time a process took up, but it seems that I might have to resort to logging with outlook to get a true indication of time. I had also considered a public calendar to update, but this will do for now. See how the motivation levels hold up after a few weeks ...

So here goes, Week 1. Not the most entertaining week to start on, but you gotta start somewhere.

World of Warcraft (16 hours) - WoW has had somewhat of a resurgance recently as Sandy and I have moved into outlands. Spent a fair bit of time tidying up some loose ends such as 300+ in cooking and first aid, as well as getting exalted with Night Elves for epic mount.

Space Rangers 2 (7 hours) - Probably coming to the end of its hardcore playtime for me; there'll be many more seesions in the future though. I picked up Space Rangers after looking around Total Gaming for other games to buy with tokens (I'd bought into the digital purchasing gimmick to pick up Sins of a Solar Empire on preorder / beta and had loved the no-DRM approach). I hadn't heard anything about SR2 before I saw it there, but for a russian based game to clean up major strategy awards I though it'd be worth a shot. I love it. Best turn based strategy out there!

Bookworm Adventures (5 hours) - Not sure exactly how long Sandy and I played Bookworm Adventures, but it was far more than the 1 hour "demo". Gameplay is more like boggle than the original Bookworm, but there's enough strategy to hold over certain tiles to the bosses to make it entertaining in its own right. Makes me want to play Bookworm tho.

Powder (4 hours) - A brief mention of Roguelikes on GameSetWatch had me itching to get back into it again. The man that does the stats for rec.games.roguelike produces a little game called Powder for GBA. Plays simpler than what I'm used to, but it's compelling non the less.

EDIT: Looks like google calendar has a public side of things. Might try that out for the logging.