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.

WoW test warrior build

Wacky warrior build to try out. Should play like stunlok, but be a little more agressive.

Edit: wasn't agressive enough and I rarely used devastate, so I'm going to try going even deeper into frenzy. At 61 this means I get both concussion blow and bloodthirst, although it won't change too much by the time I'm 70. Might have to respec by then anyway.

Heirarchical Temporal Memory

Jeff and the team at numenta have released a free platform for developing applications with Heirarchical Temporal Memory. Going to have to look closely at it to se if it fits in with temporal ROAM.

Feelings in games?

After reading a great article about the feeling of achievement in Eve Online, the original GameSetWatch question that started it all up made me reminisce about the time I saw a big 'D' that scared the pants off me.

I'd been playing Roguelike games almost since their inception and had picked up a new variant of Moria that had colour! (most of us poo poo'd the idea as it felt all too graphicky, but we played it anyway because it actually did have better gameplay).

I'm down at ~level 20, when I turn the corner to see an out-of-depth 'D' only a couple of paces away. OMG. 'D's are ancient dragons, one of the more tougher critters in the game and usually down near the level 50 mark.

I turned to Andrew playing next to me and we both freak out a little before looking at all the options and strategizing how to run away without getting eaten or dare we attack?

After 15 minutes we've come up with a semi-decent strategy to take him on (there's no going back) so we take another step and the 'D' changes to red.
"O.M.G"!
Ancient multi-hued dragon! Biggest, baddest dragon around and NO chance of escaping now. We're both screaming at the screen and then, catching ourselves, laughing at each other getting so worked up about one little ASCII character ...

Imagination, the best graphics card bar none.

This individual has been taken for repairs

Bret headed off on his Tassie holiday yesterday and Iain marked his absence by placing a sign on his desk.

e65

My phone contract has finally run its course and it's time to get a new one. I've been without my k750i for almost 2 years after it was pinched on my way over to San Fransisco, and my old t610 is great, but the charger doesn't fit well anymore and 1Mb onboard just doesn't cut it nowadays.

The N95 is certainly drawing the plaudits at the moment, but including a GPS that I won't use and a 5megapixel camera that stil doesn't beat our current digital, it's looking like overkill. I like the fact that it has a 3.5mm headphone jack, as there's lots of different things I could do with that (earbuds for on the move, headphone/mic for talking here at home, and output tospeakers for music).

I've settled on an e65 with a $49 cap plan at Optus and I must say. B. E. A.utiful!
Just about all the features I was after came a neat little package. Actually, the size wasn't an issue to start with as I've used the K-JAM at work and it seemed an Ok form factor, but taking the e65 out of the box I was surprised how thin it was for what it could do. Fits in the hand well and even with a somewhat bulky hard case protector it's still thinner than I was expecting.

WiFi is awesome. Never going back. My mobo had wifi built in, but there was no real reason to install it as the system was flaky enough without running stuff I didn' need. It took 5 mins to get it up an running as an access point, most of the time finding the antenna and downloading the latest driver. With it up and running it was a cinch to start browsing straight from the phone. At work it was a tad bit harder to get past the proxy server, and entering the authentication each time I need to get out is painful and certainly going to make it all but a novelty. Connectivity brings all sorts of goodness though. I'm still getting the exchange setup at work to transfer over wifi, but once that's in it'll mean I can receive emails anywhere in the school.

Wifi also brings fring. When I was looking at whether skype could be put onto the e65, I stumbled upon fring as a solution for all voip apps that I use! amazing! Can't wait to test it out. In essence that could mean virtually $0 spent on calls as 95% of them will be within wifi zones. I'm going to be pushing it to get close to the $300 cap anyway, so it's probably a moot point. Hopefully wifi will help me out in Seattle too.

Setting ringtones was pissing me off, but Sandy finally found it hidden in profiles. Makes sense once you find it, but it seemed strange not being able to do a simple mobile task. Sandy was claiming that not understanding how a mobile works is a sign of old age. Pffft.

Contacts needed a bit of a shuffle as the t610 just brought them all over as individual numbers. I brought them into Outlook where it was a bit easier to organise them. You can't seem to set contacts in groups that translate from outlook into the phone though. I later found out that my St Luke's Outlook also had my contacts from a previous sync with the t610, so now I have doubleups too :/

I'm an Expert!

It's official, Experts Exchange have marked me as an expert after a couple of days answering questions. Now I'm able to ask the
hard questions that I've been trying to solve here at St Luke's.

I recall having an EE account earlier in their incarnation as a free service, but they must have shut down old accounts once the paid service came in. Not entirely sure whether it's a workable model with paid membership as it is competing with many other free sites, but the quality of answers is certainly there.

World Builder Projects

Another good link for lots of world builer projects

Andrew's YouTUBE

Andrew (Bitshuffler) on YouTUBE.

Just passing by ...

Last Friday was Music Trivia and Karaoke night for youth. Joseph made up some questions for the trivia which included some Rolf Harris songs, so now I have bits of Rolf popping into my head. All I have to say that the boys who put the powder on the noses of the faces of the ladies of the court of King Caractacus were just passing by ...