Tuesday, January 24, 2012

GameLog 232-235

Doh, missed another bi-weekly update. Going to have to dig back into the memory banks to remember all the steam sale constituents and surrounding holiday period goodness. for now, here the steam list:

Total War: Shogun 2 (60h) - Still trying to win the legendary campaign. Got very close with one Shimazu game, but am now finding it hard to even conquer Kyushu.

Grepolis (50h) - Couple of coordinated assaults. Looks like I might have to give this one away when school starts back up though

Might & Magic: Heroes VI (30h) - Kinda got into this after remembering about the Kingdoms online game. Campaign is still somewhat enjoyable as an optimised exprience, but has still lost something.

OpenTTD (20h) - Went hunting for Railroad Tycoon and ended up finding OpenTTD. Plays pretty well multiplayer, but is a little obtuse to get into.

Dungeons (5h) - A little more through it. Campaign has some quirky triggers that have detracted, but it's still a good baseline for comparing Notorious to.

EYE (5h) - LAN fun with guns

Demigod (5h) - On ultrafast setting it's more action oriented, but misses some of the subtler elements of the game. Still, as a multiplayer it gets the game over quickly.

The Ship (1h) - LAN fun with paddles & knitting needles.

TF2 (3h)
LoL (3h)
Blight of the Immortals (5h)
Kingdoms (2h)


Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Wooden Starburst Puzzle

First attempt at solving a wooden puzzle I got for Christmas. Spent about 1/2 hr previously pulling it apart and sorting it, but that's about it. In the end the middle concourse was the hardest to figure out. I'd solved it another way, but found out the whole concourse slides off when I was pulling it apart to record. Maybe an hour all up.

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

No more coal ..

It's a somewhat sad day. The Steam winter sales have all dried up and there's no more coal in my gift pile. Unfortunately it didn't turn into one of the mega prizes either, but I'd guess there would have been over 10 million chunks of peaty potential out there to compete with my remaining 4.

This holiday sale has reached a significant milestone in my love / hate relationship with Steam. I KNOW that the achievements are made to get me to buy new games (even old games with achievements are there purely as a reminder that the game was good, and you might want some DLC or new version before you're done), but I just don't care. It's fun. The first day had Dungeons of Dredmor and Orcs Must Die on sale along with snowy achievements. Both of those games I'd looked at in the past, but the achievements and cheap price were enough to get me to buy and play both of these. And it was fun. The next day the same. Wake up and load up steam, what will I be playing today? I trusted Steam to look after my holiday entertainment and it duly delivered.

Toward the end of the sale my interest had waned a little from that initial excitement, but looking back over the whole 12 days I've probably played 75% of my games directed by the achievement list. I was a little disappointed that there wasn't a list of things that you could win, or what you might be able to craft coal into, but rumours of winning all valve games was enough to keep converting the coal into something.

There has also been 2 significant advancements in the steam interface; you can store gifts instead of immediately passing them on, and you can now open gifts yourself. I know you used to be able to wangle both of these previously, but the recognition that people want to do this is what I'm happy about.This leads to a new purchasing method for me, especially in sales. If I like the game, but am not going to play it immediately, I can now buy it as a gift for myself, then only open it when I want to play it. This way if I haven't gotten around to opening it and someone else wants it, I can pass it on or trade it rather than having it sit uninstalled and locked into my steam account. I know it means that I'm probably going to buy even more 75% sales as speculators, but it's purely because it's making it easier for me. Convenience = win!

Steam is doing more and more things right. And best of all, it's getting out of the way for me to just play the games I want to play. I haven't had too many intallation or game issues recently, and my gripe list is getting smaller.

Speaking of the gripe list:
 - Please default games to NOT automatically update. I'm sick and tired of firing up the PC in the morning and having TF2 download another 2Gb.  There has got to others that are conscious about their bandwidth usage.
 - "Do not automatically download this game" means DON'T DOWNLOAD!! There's been a couple of games that keep updating regardless of the setting. The only fix seems to be to pause it during an upgrade and never unpause.
 - "This game is currently unavailable" meand that the game wants to be patched before you can play. Don't know why because most were single player games. It's getting in the way of me playing the game. Remove it or at least make the message a little more informative.
 - DX11 / .NET framework checks. Why does every single game want to install one or both of these common components? Can't steam detect that they are installed and skip this step? I know that they are probably embedded within the actual game installs, but I'd like Steam to be at least be able to provide games an idea of what's currently installed. Actually if this causes more games to not run on load, it can stay as it is, but I'd see this as the way of the future.
  - Allow an option to be less viscious with the SteamGuard checks. It feels like every month I've had to verify myself again, even though I have Steam open almost constantly. Yes, it's me. I'm still here. Considering turning it off, but I do like the idea and I do have almost $2000 to protect.






Monday, January 02, 2012

Creative 15

New year's resolution: spend the first 15 minutes of every day doing something creative.

While teaching I noticed that I was needing to go to bed earlier and earlier each day; an odd occurrence as I'm usually craving for more night time and can usually get by with 4-5 hours sleep. By the end I was taking a power nap straight after work before tea to keep some sort of regular pattern in my day.

There have been other times when I've used power naps to solve problems. If I'm stuck on a difficult Programming problem, I'd take a 15 minute nap and almost always wake up with the correct solution.

While writing assignments for Uni it felt like what I need to start writing is a good sleep. I had put this down to my finely honed procrastination skills, but maybe there's more to it?

Teaching has been far more creative than I'd expected. Even fully prepared lessons seem to go awry and require to to think on your feet to get the topic covered another way, and most of my lessons weren't as prepared as I'd have liked. It seems that I can easily function in a logical and analytical manner on hardly any sleep, but to be creative I need a good sleep.

To test this theory, I'm planning on spending the first 15 minutes of each day on something creative. Drawing, building, writing, blogging, coding, designing, singing, playing. Something. Hopefully 15 minutes at the start of the day won't take out too much from the craving to catch up with what's going on in the world, and maybe even make enough time to get some ideas down.

First creative15 was to get the blogger app for the iPad so that I could quickly write if that's what I wanted to do. Turns out 15 minutes is out to about 45 by now, but I'm Ok with that too.

Here's a picture done on the iPad in procreate when testing the concept. It's not finished, but I'm happy with the result and it felt good to draw again.

Hmmm, colours on the iPad screen seem different. Oh well ..