Madness In My Method

BIOSHOCK!!


:D

I finally started playing Windowsill through Steam (although you can play the first half of the game for free through that link).

I <3 this game.

It totally deserved all the awards that it won.

( I won a lifetime game license )

Too bad it's for a game that I finished in a few hours and then deleted from my system. It's not a bad game, but it really needed some polishing up compared to a lot of the big-name hidden object games that are out there. I'm still blushing a bit from the recognition, at least. I'll have to tell them thank you.

Holy crap!

Nonogram + Minesweeper

I managed to halt my addiction to Minesweeper years ago after OMG hand cramps from hell playing the expert level for a couple hours straight. (I went from Minesweeper to Starcraft to Star Wars Battlefront, and now time management games and hidden objects, but I've never been able to shake the mouse-induced hand cramp.)

This just might do me in.

The SUV in front of me while I was getting lunch today had an, "I brought id to Dallas" sticker on his back windshield along with a couple of other gaming stickers.

id Software is located in the building directly behind my class.

Also, the older I get, the further down I have to scroll on "Enter Your Date of Birth" entries.

Speaking of class, it's raining out today. I'm going to try to leave work at 4pm instead of 4:30pm and hope I don't run into 5 traffic accidents between here and there (which is actually more probable than NOT running into that many accidents).

This sounds both kind of interesting and kind of depressing all at once.

I had started playing Braid and found it pretty thoughtful and amazing. I broke down and bought Super Meat Boy during the winter sale, but I haven't cracked it open yet.

Speaking of Indie games:
I rolled my eyes reading the name of this game. Then I watched the trailer. I have to get this game now. It's imperative. PIANO!

That was my birthday, back in 2007.

That's also the date on my last NVIDIA GeForce driver update.

I'm a bad gamer. Either that, or I'm such an awesome gamer I bought graphics cards that didn't need to be updated for 4.5 years, which was actually the 5-year goal when I built this computer.

Alice, you beautiful bitch.

Stop lagging and not loading and forcing me to restart my computer. Otherwise, you and I will get along fancifully.

Concerned denizen,
Me

---

At 28.2 hours, I'm just getting into Chapter 3, out of 6 total chapters. I like exploring, touring, and admiring the artwork. I am also an OCD completionist (as I have heard it described), so while one person on the forums announced he finished the game in ~17 hours, I'm barely half way through, and this pleases me to no end. I still love this game, but the apparent scene loading lag is starting to unnerve me.

Still, highly recommended.

PS - It's on Special Sale for $7.50 today on Steam. It's worth the full price, let alone the discounted one.

Today's Game Giveaway of the Day is a logic puzzle game that I'm particularly fond of. It's just like my Paint-Doku I picked up a few years back and still bring out every so often to play. In Paint-Doku, the ON boxes create a picture. I use two map pencils to denote ON and OFF boxes, which means I'm essentially coloring in the picture one box at a time. Today's game makes patterns rather than images, but as far as logic puzzles go, that's not a game killer.

EDIT: They start making images in the higher levels, but they go so quickly after finishing the puzzles it's difficult to see what they are.

It's a purely logical If-Then grid game similar to, but much more complex than, Mine Sweeper. The numbers across the side and top of the grid tell you how many congruent sets of boxes there are in each row and column, how many boxes are in each set, and the order (either from left to right or from top to bottom) of those sets. There's only a couple of If-Then rules to follow in order to implement the solving algorithm, but just like with the more difficult Sudoku puzzles, these can get pretty damned tedious.

Here's a simple example from the game link above. You can see that the bottom row has 0 sets, meaning that all of those boxes are going to be OFF, and the second column has one set of 4 congruent boxes. Since the bottom box in the second column can't be ON, then that means the top 4 boxes make up that set, and therefore can be turned ON. If the grid had started off completely blank, that top row would have said 5, and I would have filled in that row as my very first action. (Since this is only a 5x5 grid, I would have known that the entire top row should be ON.)

EDIT: They are apparently called Nonograms, Hanjie, Paint by Numbers, or Griddlers. Interesting names.