GameLog 129 & 130

Football Manager 2010 (25h) - T.Bowes - FM 2010 into April now and we're hovering between 4th / 5th and still in the hunt for the trophy. Playing a pretty good streak at the moment with both strikers on song.

Trine (11h) - Another Steam sale. Great little game that impressed me with the quality and polish for an indie.

Civ IV: Colonization (10h) - Own nearly all of the Americas, but the british invasion aren't attacking the forts, just bombarding them ATM.

Civ IV: BtS (7h) - Not to be outdone by Football Manager's claim to the most time of 2009 , Civ gets another round of play to see if there's any steam achievement unlocks. In a bit of a bad situation theweakest on an island with 2 others, but allying with Egypt through religion has made it possible to be on the attack to wipe out spain.

UnAngband (4h) - Playing through competition 81 in the new patch as a VERY weak mage. Killed myself a couple of times trying to throw arrows, but even shooting arrows caused enough backfires to kill off a couple more 4hp retries. Given up on arrows and sticking to sneaking and chill from afar. Works great on molds, and basically run screaming from everything else until at least level 3.

Team Fortress 2 (1h) - Time for the Rocketboy to get some lovin'

Bejewelled beta - Investing?

I always used to like playing betas. I like seeing through the trappings of the game for the potential and perhaps even make suggestions of where to go next. Bejewelled Blitz has been one one of my go-to games over the past year for unwinding after a busy day, and had enjoyed watching the game evolve through the beta stages. Now it's at it again with another change for the minute mayhem.

In the next evolution they are bringing in coins. They make for a longer term buildup to power a choice of 5 boosts. The boosts give things like an immediats doubler, or a gem that shuffles the board.

From whaat I can gather, coins pop out after a set number of matches (or at least semi-regularly), so you get more coins the faster you match. You also get coins for each multiplier you have acumulated at the end of the game. It seems a little odd that it makes no difference whether you match them or not, so their appearance as part of a yellow gem doesn't really change the gameplay much at all. That's a little dissappointing as it initially seemed like having the coins appear only on yellow meant that the yellow gems were more valuable in matching to coins rather than immediately matching to other yellows. I liked this idea of attributing different values for gems as it made for a more interesting playfield mechanic akin to building toward a T or L shaped star gem.

Thinking about the idea of changing the percieved value of one colour over another, I came up with another idea: What if you get DOUBLE the value of any coins you leave to the end? With this in place you would have an interesting dichotomy of frenzied matching, but avoiding some other matches. Yellow gems would change too into more desirable matches without coins to reduce the possibility of random matches. You could even 'bury' your coins by manipulating gems around them to get them deep into the board, reducing even further their exposure to a random match.

Along the same lines, but a little more dynamic, what if instead of getting 100 gold per coin, you got 50*N where N is the number of coins on the board. You would then still get the most advantage by leaving all coins on the board until the end, but still be rewarded if they all explode to a yellow-matched sphere or a random drop.

As it stands the coin appearance reinforces the same playstyle of Blitz; match fast and multiply faster. I would expect the 'Investment' change would bring it more toward a normal untimed Bejewelled or Bookworm type board manipulation, giving almost an alternate goal to play toward for those intent on only playing for real when they have maximum boosts.

Boosts, that's another topic. Jury is still out on them at the moment. It would seem that there is no point going for a top score while not at maximum boost, so it turns each minute-long frenzy into a 15 minute prelude for 2-3 intense games. It's great if you have the time, but I kinda liked the "just one more go" impact that the minute timer used to instill in me. The next minute could be your lucky one! I used to hate that it was so random what scores you got (and still do), but can appreciate the addictive behaviour that the randomness brings.

2009 Game Time

Continuing on from the 2008 Game Time summary, here is the 2009 summary of games from the GameLogs organised by time played.

2009 has been a bumper year in the amount of games played with 62 games played for and hour or more, greater than one new game a week. Overall the amount of time feels lower mainly due to the pressure of finishing off the teaching degree. 1,462 hours were logged at an average of ~28 hours a week.

Game Time 2009

Football Manager 10	156
Civilization 4	95
Space Rangers 2	92
Civilization 4: FFH	77
Colonization	74
Skate 2	65
Mount & Blade	65
Dominions 3	65
Knights of Honor	55
TrackMania Nations Forever	54
Puzzle Quest: Galactrix	48
Hearts of Iron II	48
Football Maanger 09	40
Elven Legacy	38
Dwarf Fortress	35
UnAngband	30
Bejewelled Blitz	30
King's Bounty	27
Civilization Revolution	26
Zynga Poker	26
Titan Quest	25
Hinterland	24
Tiger Woods 10	19
Dragon Age	18
Majesty 2	17
Baldur's Gate	16
Team Fortress 2	15
Pokemon Platinum	15
Bloodbowl	14
Kongregate *	13
Torchlight	11
Majesty	10
Depths of Peril	10
Quake Live	8
Little Big Planet	7
Pirates!	7
Dawn of War II	7
Free Realms	6
Diplomacy	5
World Series of Poker	5
World of Goo	5
Vector TDx	4
Paper Toss	4
GeoDefense Swarm	4
World of Warcraft	3
Club Penguin	3
PS3 Demos *	3
Osmos	3
iPhone demos *	3
Rollercoaster Tycoon 2	3
Tower Bloxx	3
Wii Fit	3
Guitar Hero III	2
Street Fighter IV	2
Neverwinter Nights 2	2
iGo	2
Flight Control	2
Mafia Wars	2
Company of Heroes	2
Guitar Hero: World Tour	1
Runescape	1

And the winner is Football Manager (again) as the biggest timesponge on my computer. I'd also probably lump Civ4, Civ4:FFH, Colonization and CivRev into one category and contend the title, but FM09 would keep Football Manager in the hunt too.

One thing to note is that the games I made AARs for were all up in the top bracket. Possibly a bit of natural selection; a good game prompted me to write up an AAR, and doing the AARs kept the interest longer.

Honorable mentions to TrackMania as it was played across the most week / fortnightly reports, and Bejewelled Blitz for getting there too for such a simple game. Both offered simple relaxation after work.

GameLog 127 & 128

Civ IV: Colonization (44h) - I'd been eyeing off the Civ IV complete pack for a while, and a 50% discount on Steam was all the help I needed to pick it up. Big big game of Colonization to get some points on the board for tthe steam stats. I have the majority of the map and have just declared independance.

Football Manager 2010 (29h) - T.Bowes - FM 2010 Made it to new year's 2012 and still up in contention. We're out of the FA Cup after a lacklustre home game against a Div 1 side. Hopefully we can get the FA Trophy before going up.

Torchlight (9h) - Another steal at $10 on steam. I'm really liking their agressive discounting strategy, and it's helped me pick up really cheap indie prezzies for my brothers too (World of Goo, Audiosurf, Gratuitous Space Battles). Level 14 or so on hardest.

Titan Quest: Immortal throne (9h) - Made it through to Legendary, so now's the time to start hunting for uniques.

Dominions 3 (5h) - Couple of restarts on smaller maps.

Company of Heroes (2h) - Finally downloaded CoH and its expansions, but it's a little jerky. Not sure why? It killed myy download limit though as Steam continually kept restarting the download and wouldn't stop. I wish steam would play nice and have some sort of throttling available to allow others the use of the net.

Merry Christmas !

Of all the presents received on Christmas day, nothing compares to DIRT!

GameLog 125 & 126

Football Manager 2010 (20h) - T.Bowes - FM 2010 Sitting in 4th after a dozen or so games in Blue Square Premier. Team is looking Ok to make promotion, although I lost one of my star forwards to a broken leg. Trades have dried up now that we have transfer windows, but I have most positions covered well.

Titan Quest: Immortal throne (16h) - Finally downloaded Titan Quest as it and Company of Heroes killed the downloads for the month. It's still surprisingly good. I'd even go so far to say that it's the best diablo clone on the market. Ran a character through with Ben over the weekend and have some nifty items to push through the expansion content.

Dominions 3 (15h) - Playing through one of the set maps. Makes the content a littlee more meaningful than the random maps. I think that's more because of the poor random map generator than anything else.

Colonization (10h) - Watching John Adams on SBS had me hankering for some new world discovery and rebellion.

Civ 4: Fall from Heaven (10h) - Playing through Colonization reminded me of FFH. Tried to make a goer of a different race this time, the Grigori. They play REALLY weell and will probably be my go-to race from now on.

Dawn of War II (7h) - Played some of the Campaign with Ben, and a bit more survival mode. Survival mode looks to be the one for LANs.



Bejewelled Blitz (2h) - Usually keep going until I get past the 250K mark

RPG Card Game v0.8

Finally managed to have a couple of run throughs of my RPG card game with Andrew at lunch and came up with some interesting updates from merely talking about it, but then some greater tweaks after playing through 10 or so games.

1) Simultaneous play: While going through the initial concept I was a little confuzed at whether attack and defense cards are played face down and then flipped for simultaneous play, or whether it was played as a single card and a response. The idea of simultaneous play sounded like what it ended up being, but looking back at the document later I recalled that the defender played first and the attacker had cause to respond. This gave the advantage to the attacker at each turn rather than to the defender, but I liked the idea of simultaneous play even more. After further discussion we fleshed it out to playing BOTH attack and defense cards at the same time face down, and then exposing both for a single round of combat. Sometimes felt a little rushed, but I guess that's a good thing because the game needed a little pepping up. Might have a play through with defender leading like I originally thought just to see if there's anything extra strategically I'm missing out on in going to simultaneous play.

The great thing about simultaneous play is that it enhances the metagame. You may have a good idea on what the opponent has in hand by simply counting cards, but you may not know whether they will play a strong card for you to counter, or a weak card expecting your strong counter. Yomi (knowing the mind of the opponent) at it's finest. Unfortunately out of the 10 or so games I played there wasn't too many times when I needed to think this way as I knew I was behind on most matchups (playing monster) and had a high cycle time for the stronger moves. We'll see what happens tomorrow when we play again with a more limited deck.


2) 7 card attack/defense deck: One of the things noted was that even after stacking 5 treasure cards into his deck, Andrew could still beat a monster deck 1 level below his. it took a long while to gain those 5 cards using the tradeup strategy of the original game, so it certainly wasn't expected that you'd play an hour or so and still be in on the same level. reducing the amount of cards inn your deck to 7 allows treasure cards to carry much more risk per card as it combines and dilutes the player's deck.

Another pondering I had on the original design was that calculating your level (average of your card's face values) was harder at 13 cards than if it were at something like 10 cards. Dropping the attack/defense deck to 7 allows the total cards making up the character (including life) to 10. Nice and simple to find out your level, add the face values and divide by 10.


3) Challenge dungeon has battles on the way out: One of Andrew's ideas as the "Hero" was that it seemed odd being able to skip out of a dungeon once you know you had what you were looking for. To change this the challenge dungeon could be made up of a number of rooms per level, and the further you wen in the more battles you had to face on the way out. This way it made the choice to turn around that much more earlier as you needed to think of getting out with a decent amount of loot.

There was also a distinct advantage of the hero over the monster at a level below (mainly due to 6 life compared to 9), so the monsters could be made up of the integer component of the player's level (New start of player's level gives 2.9, therefore the monsters start at 2, but entering at 3.1 would have level 3 mosters). Hopefully this would give rise to deeper dives to skip past low-rated parts of level advancement.


4) Treasure is back to additive: Once you get back out of a dungeon, you can purchase anything that you have a combination of cards for. Even though this ramps up quite quickly to getting 10's and face cards, the total number of games should be playable in a session of an hour or 2 for a challenge, so at 3 minutes a game, 20 games in total to get someone up to the top tiers. Going 3 deep into a dungeon would be 5 games per run, so ~ 4 runs per hour. First run should nett ~4 treasure cards and ~10 points to gain taking them to level 4, 4 at level 4 would be ~18 points, or nearly level 6, ~24 points to level 8. By this stage they should have a number of custom cards and access to the end-game content. Another dive would take them to ~level 9 because of doubleup and cards not able to be traded in for unique deck cards. maybe there wouldn't need to be much deeper than that to keep the face cards somewhat special.

Treasure also has a new rule in that if you draw a treasure card that you already have, you can combine it and the one you have for a next-higher-ranked treasure card. Eg: You already have a 3 of diamons and you draw another, you can trade them both in for a 4 diamonds, keeping the dilution the same as before, but better value. This also allows higher rated cards to be chosen than what the dungeon monsters provide.


I'm still leaning toward having scenario dungeons, but at the moment there might be a couple more lunchtimes to tweak out the basics before setting up a monster loadout.

GameLog 123 & 124

Football Manager 2010 (37h) - T.Bowes - FM 2010 AAR is still going, despite some extra pressure from more steam buys. Made a big push into the final part of the season to get promoted. Now I need to rebuild the team again for the next push up into professionalism.

Dawn of War II (17h) - Some crazy Steam offerings ove rthe thanksgiving weekend had the whole 17 THQ games on sale for $50. I remember paying that for DoW2 for Matt & Scott ...
Couple of attempts at playing through the campaign, but the last stand mod looks interesting. Laggy with just 3 peple and skype though. Wierd.


GRID (7h) - Would have thought there was more than 7 hours, but I'm happy to trust Steam this time. Another cheapie over the thanksgiving weekend and a decent game for $7. Plays a little bit easier than I had thought, and no way of tuning cars that I can tell. Had some lag issues every now and then, and this combined with lagouts in DoW2 had me go through the Win 7 rebuild I'd been putting off. Seems to be running cleaner now ..

Also found out that my old Logitech wingman yellow wheel is finally cactus. Bit of a sad end to it as it sputtered around the calibrations, but GRID failed to pick it up even after calibration. Oh well, looks like I'll need a PS3 / PC compatible wheel for Gran Turismo anyway..


Dragon Age: Origins (3h) - Alim, 8 Elven Mage - Picking my way through the elven forests. More interesting scenarios followed by some intense battles.

Osmos (2h) - Another cheap thanksgiving buy at $2. Been meaning to pick this one up for ages and even though I've played most of it in 2 hours, it's a great price for a novel, intelligent indie game.

Bejewelled Blitz (2h) - Usually keep going until I get past the 250K mark

Add-ons Gallery

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Rammstein vs Cookie monster

Awesome little vid of Cookie monster vs Rammstein. (embed didn't work?)