Random musings, and games

[tamakun]

I had a little thought to myself earlier this week that any of these mornings, I could come downstairs to my car in the parking garage and find that someone has broken into it, and I'd be late(r) for work. I mean, I've had my courtesy singular break-ins on my car, one on this one (last year during my Business course) and one on the prior car (also in a downtown parking lot), four years apart.

I figured that it would be nice to be able to wake up, and look out my front window and see my car in the driveway, while having a cup of tea, before actually going outside. But to do that, it would be nice to have a house, first...

Let me be a little thoughtful for a moment and talk about what I was discussing with ravenworks this morning, do you think we're way too inundated with stuff these days? The always-on sensation of the internet, the casual games that fill those small 5-10 minute bites of waiting. When I was cleaning up stuff on the balcony yesterday, I finally just said to myself that I wanted to disassemble the circuit boards so I could clean things up and get them gone, so I found the soldering gun and tried my hand at it, then I went right into assembling a strobe light circuit board (that was given to me as a gift a few years ago ^^;), I was feeling pretty focused and yet, at the same time, really relaxed. I wasn't thinking of anything else other than soldering, which was pretty odd for me, since I've been always either sitting in front of the computer or cleaning the kitchen...

Well, I've been focusing on a bunch of the old games that I've been meaning to play recently. I'll be going to the DS game Again with bridgeportcat at some point in the near future, and I've kinda come across this treasure-trove of old games that I haven't even touched. I know that I even have Edmund McMillen's This Is A Cry For Help CD around here somewhere, and I haven't cracked the plastic on that, either.

I happened across a feature blog called Crapshoot which focuses on some truly horrible games - though, as it is a crapshoot, sometimes they're surprisingly good. I was reminded that davidn has mentioned a couple of these games in the past couple of months and I wouldn't have known anything about them going in - Granny's Garden, The Crystal Maze, specifically - but there's also a horrendous Doctor Who game, a game by the maker of Prince of Persia (the one favorable review, of which I have not yet played), and Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a game I am now admitting that I owned on the C64. I remember reading a review of the sequel which is the focus of that crapshoot, but I had the original text-based adventure.

To me, all the different scents on the scratch-and-sniff card smelled like pickles.

I may try my hand again at playing a couple of text-parser games again. I was thinking a year or two ago that I could gather a bunch of oldschool gamers together and play Suspended together, but that never panned out. I also wanted to play Bureaucracy since it was penned by Douglas Adams, but I never found the game.

Tonight is election night. I don't think I need to tell my friends to vote because a) it's now too late, but b) they all know better than to not vote! In any case, there was plans to go drinking at a bar that was going to watch the election results - and really, though, I don't drink, and I dislike politics, so there's no point in me going out! So I'm staying in and playing catch-up on links and maybe playing some games.

Comments

[davidn]

PC Gamer! I thought that that had folded (like the best one, PC Zone, did a few months ago) - it's nice to see at least one of the magazines I remember still around. I'm happy to see PC Plus is still going as well, on issue 307 and surely now coming up to having been going for 25 years.

I'm enjoying these summaries as well - the experience of Granny's Garden is entirely accurate, and was a mode of gameplay shared by most of 4Mation's games - a series of loosely connected maths and word puzzles, with the occasional guessing game with the only way past being trial and error. In Dragon World, the entire second half of the game was about visiting various places on a map, each of which had ten sublocations (floors of a building, roots of a tree, and so on), which might have contained vital objects, or a white coyote who would suddenly fill your screen with its murderous eyes.

There's something about the unhumanness of the sound and graphics that computer produced that just made everything all the scarier.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I just can't imagine that a game like Granny's Garden would be made - especially with the "Do you want to go in?" "No" "Yes, you do" responses, that hardly sounds educational, especially with the several bad choices the characters make throughout the game (such as entering a stranger's house).

White Coyote, huh? Any scarier than the teal-skinned Witch?

Have I mentioned the start screen for "Gremlins" on the C64 before? Staring at this (http://www.oldgamesclub.com/lang/en-us/2010/12/08/gremlins-the-adventure-title-c64/) for five minutes while the game loaded (coupled with a horrible difficulty level in the game itself) was enough to give me nightmares.

[davidn]

Aaagh. Yes, that's... worse than anything that the BBC Micro managed!

I remember... not liking the Coyote, but the worst of the lot was the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood (another 4Mation title, almost identical to Granny's Garden). I'm sure these days it'll just look laughable, but to my mind at the time, it was the most traumatic thing ever when the Villain Theme played through the BBC Micro's unearthy buzzing speakers, signalling that it was about to appear.

[davidn]

I also meant to say that, though I'm happy to be able to look out of the window at the car in the morning, I was very paranoid for the first few days of just leaving something so expensive outside the house! (I didn't have that problem with the car I drove in Scotland, because it was on loan from my mum and to my recollection was worth about £47). I feel it would be less likely to be broken into if it were inside, somewhere... I have to leave it out of my sight at work, in the car park down the road, but it's right next to a busy road that comes off a motorway so I'm hoping that's a deterrent to people messing with it.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that as long as there's people around, it won't get broken into. And the only chance that would involve problems might be leaving your keys in the locked car.

Have you washed your new car yet? Or is it still a bit too chilly to do so? ^^

[davidn]

I haven't washed it yet - it only occurred to me on Tuesday that I should probably think about filling it up with petrol at some point. Although it's definitely been looking a bit scabbier recently, largely because the tree outside the house sneezed its buds all over it at the start of the week. I don't want to be too vain about it, but I'd like to keep the shine :)