Blog: Entries Tagged With 'gaming'

For the past few years, I've periodically been playing browser-based idle games. Cookie Clicker and AdVenture Capitalist were probably the first ones I tried. For me, the main appeal of idle games is that they more or less play themselves; grinding resources/power (arguably the most tedious part of games) happens automatically with little input from the user. It's gaming for busy people! Since I have my computer running most of the day, it's no real overhead to have an idle game running in a browser tab.

But the drawback of most idle games is that they never end. Events may continue to happen, but there's no overarching cohesive plot. It's just an auto-grind for eternity. After a while, the game feels monotonous and static. Numbers going up and up for their own sake.

But two idle games in particular stand out as being well-designed, fun to play, and having a definite end. Having a defined objective, for me, makes the game more enjoyable. Those games are Candy Box 2 and A Dark Room. I find myself replaying them every couple years; they have a lot of replay value. It's especially great how both games start with a minimal premise but gradually open up into an expanding world, often in ways that are unexpected. Nonetheless, both games feel a bit too short, especially Candy Box 2. But maybe that's the counter-idea to this whole genre. An idle game doesn't need to go on forever in order to be fun. Or maybe, more precisely, it can't.

Another year has unceremoniously come and gone, and while 2016 was a prodigious year for us in terms of activity, the same cannot be said of my blogging habits.

So for the benefit of posterity (or, more likely, my future self), here are the highlights from 2016.

At the end of April, Priscilla and I went up to SF to celebrate our anniversary. We got free entry to the California Academy of Sciences, de Young and the Exploratorium, courtesy of our friends' Chase Private Client card. We stayed a night at the Grand Hyatt for free, courtesy of Priscilla's credit card rewards. And we rode Uber and Lyft for free due to a signup promotion. Not a bad deal for an anniversary weekend!

At the beginning of June, we went to Carmel to celebrate our birthdays. We hiked Point Lobos and stayed a night at the Hyatt Carmel Highlands, again for free. We spent some time exploring Fisherman's Wharf the next day before returning home.

In mid-June, Sarah got married, so we drove down to LA and got to spend some time with family. Sarah got married at Bel Air Presbyterian Church, which has a really beautiful building and campus. I got carpal tunnel that weekend, presumably triggered by the driving, but that cleared up after a couple weeks of wearing a brace and trying to not type much. The joys of getting old.

Our all-church retreat was at Redwood Christian Park in August. It was about the same as the last time we were there, except Priscilla and I were in a family cabin this time instead of in a suite. We hiked to the cross in the nearby hills, and even got to do rock climbing this time around. The rock climbing was difficult and I didn't see anybody make it to the top of the "medium" difficulty route. Our retreat speaker was Pastor Alton from Berean Mission Church, and his messages encouraged us to live as a steward, a disciple-maker, a child of God, and a pursuer of Christ.

After the retreat, when trying to look for productive things to fill my time with, I came across a fitness mobile game called "Zombies, Run!". Definitely more productive than sinking all my time into an MMORPG. I played it for a month and ultimately quit due to the game always restarting when being run in the background, but during that time I bought some gear for running including bluetooth headphones for listening to music. In October, I bought a heart rate monitor to use with Strava, as well as a yearly subscription of Strava Premium. I really like Strava's Beacon feature, which allows me to share my real-time location data with Priscilla, and the Heatmap, which shows my running and cycling activity as a colored heatmap. I've also been more motivated to rack up running badges on Strava, which are admittedly easier to get than cycling badges. Apparently, badges and points, even if they are virtual, are the key to my heart.

So in trying to maximize my Strava achievements, I've been trying to do more runs and hikes. In 2016, I went on a total of 29 hikes; Priscilla a couple times fewer. My favorite hike this year was Mount Diablo in September. The panoramic views from the top were amazing. I went with Priscilla and Tracy and we did a 15-mile hike, and they were pretty tired most of the way up, but we slogged through it and I later designed die-cast medals for them for making it to the top.

We drove down to LA for both the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Both were a good time of getting together with family and friends. We hiked with Victor and Sally during the Thanksgiving break, and ate with my Van Nuys friends and hung out with Raymond during the Christmas break.

During the Thanksgiving weekend, I bought new phones for myself and Priscilla. I got us both the ZTE Axon 7 Mini which, despite the name, is quite a large phone. This phone is better than our old ones in nearly every way, and we've enjoyed no longer having to deal with the frustrations of having a cheap smartphone.

During the rest of the holiday leading up to and following New Year's, I took the time to get housework done and look for contractors to help overhaul our front yard. I'd like to rip out the neglected plants we have and put in drip irrigation so that I can plant something that will be low-maintenance. With any luck, and a bit of money, we will have a nice looking front yard yet.

I have no doubt that the new year will be exciting and productive in its own capacity, but I'm hoping that it will be equally as restful. There is a saying that in the beginning of your life when you are young, you have energy and time, but no money. Then in the middle of your life, you have money and energy, but no time. Finally, towards the end of your life when you are old, you have time and money, but no energy. Well I'm clearly in the middle of my (anticipated) life, as I wish there were more hours in the day to do everything that needs to be done. I guess what I need is more downtime!

I realized I'd never written about the computer I built last year. In late August and early September, I began amassing components when they were on sale. I got the following from Newegg:

• Intel Core i5 3570K processor, 3.4GHz
• ASRock Z77 Pro3 motherboard
• Corsair Vengeance 2x4GB DDR3-1600 RAM
• Corsair TX650 650W power supply
• Antec DF-35 black case
• LG DVD burner
• Windows 7 Home Premium

I assembled the computer in September, and I was running with an old, cheap GeForce card until December, when I scored a sweet deal on a GeForce GTX 650 Ti from Amazon.

Since then, I've played through several games: Torchlight II, Portal, Portal 2, and Faster Than Light. None of those games are extremely graphics intensive, so my rig can run them at max settings.

Two months ago, Alex from church introduced me to a mobile augmented reality game called Ingress, made by a startup within Google. Ingress is a cross between capture the flag and Foursquare, fought between two factions: the Enlighted (green) and the Resistance (blue). Exotic Matter, or XM, is a new type of energy discovered that emanates from portals in the game which are located at landmarks such as public art, fountains, post offices, churches and historical buildings in the real world. The two factions are embroiled in an ongoing fight for control of these portals in order to achieve global dominance.

Portals can be interacted with only by being at their location in the real world, hence the challenge. And since the game does not always work well when commuting by automobile (there seems to be a 25% chance of requests failing at normal road speeds, and nothing works at freeway speeds), the preferred methods of commute are biking and walking. Through this gamification, Google gets a ton of user-submitted data about landmarks, and pedestrian mapping data for areas inaccessible by car. Once again, Google proves its brilliance.

The gameplay is simple: "hack" portals to acquire items like resonators and bursters, destroy enemy portals using bursters, and build friendly portals using resonators. Hacking a portal has the chance of yielding a portal key, which is used to create energy links between portals. Linking three portals creates a control field, which yields a number of mind units calculated based on the size of the field and the real-life population density within. The real-time total mind unit counts for each faction is shown in the game client and on the Ingress Intel webpage, and maximizing one's faction's mind unit count is seen by some as the ultimate goal of the game. Some people come up with impressive operations to create links thousands of kilometers long and fields of millions of mind units, which is especially a challenge because no two links can cross. Huge fields have been created covering all of the Bay Area, all of the west coast, a good portion of the continental U.S., and New Zealand, to name a few.

So back to my own Ingress-ventures. Alex plays Enlightened, but I found that my beliefs aligned more with the Resistance, people distrustful of XM and their alleged source, the Shapers, so I joined the blues to Alex's good-humored chagrin. I quickly joined the South Bay Area Resistance Google+ group and have met two Resistance agents in person while out playing the game; I also found out that a co-worker at Pure is also a blue player. I was hooked nearly instantly, and achieved Level 8, the highest level possible, in seven weeks.

Since reaching this personal end goal, I haven't been playing as much. I'll still run the client when in a car (or have Priscilla do it when I'm driving) to drive-by hack portals, but I don't go out as much as before to play. The game is a bit pointless entertainment, but it's something fun that can be enjoyed responsibly. It's made me exercise more- the game says I've walked 210km, and that's not including distance covered by bike. Plus I've gotten to know where many landmarks are in my area, which can't be a bad thing!

There's a lot that goes into making a good platform game, and most of the Flash-based ones I've played I haven't found to be great, owing to a lack of time, ability and/or imagination on the part of the creators. Of course, no disrespect is meant to those people, since most creators of Flash games provide them free of charge and get compensated very little, if at all.

(Un)fortunately, when I do find one that I really like, I'm hooked. Currently, the three Flash-based platformers that top my list are, in no particular order: Portal: The Flash Version, The Company of Myself, and Level Up!.

Portal: The Flash Version
This fan-made game is based on the successful first-person action/puzzle game by Valve Corporation called, you might've guessed, Portal. The premise is simple: as a test subject in an advanced research facility, your only option is to find a way to the other side of the room in a series of tests (levels). But you'll need to go through walls, scale ledges too tall for you to leap, and avoid laser-shooting robots, death spikes and electrified floors. Your only friend is the portal-creating and anti-gravity gun you've been equipped with.

The Company of Myself
In this puzzle game, you play the role of a hermit who is accustomed to, but slightly discontent with, being in the sole company of himself. The goal is to reach a mysterious green square at the end of each level, which requires ascending ledges that are too high and crossing over pits that are too wide by employing the help of, effectively, yourself. The puzzle dynamics are relatively original, and the graphics are minimalistic and serve their intended purpose. But what really makes you want to play through all the levels is the unfolding storyline- throughout each level, you discover more about what's going on in the protagonist's head, and his mysterious past and lost love.

Level Up!
This game fuses RPG and platformer elements and removes the repetition aspect from the concept of leveling up. In this game you play an amnesiac who has a house in the woods, in search of magical gems and clues to her lost memory. What sets this game apart from other platformers is that abilities that are leveled up directly affect interaction with the game world- for instance, leveling up the jumping ability (which passively gets leveled up as you jump around) allows the character to jump to higher ledges (and thus access different parts of the game world) that were previously unreachable. There are no useless quests or side jobs to complete, but instead all emphasis is on exploration, with the storyline unfolding as the character explores the beautifully-animated 8-bit style world around her. My only gripe about this game is that it's too short!

My favorite letter in Scrabble is by far the X. Worth an entire 8 points, the X is one of the highest scoring tiles in the game (the others being J for 8 points, and Q and Z both worth 10 points -- all having an occurrence of 1). I've found that more often than not, a well-placed X can change or seal the outcome of a game for the lucky player who gets it.

Despite its high point value, the X can be combined with any vowel to form a two-letter word (AX, EX, OX, XI, and XU). It's therefore possible to lay an X to form words in two directions. Put the X on a triple-letter space and it gets scored as 24 points in each direction, for a total of 48 points for this one letter alone. Not too shabby, methinks.

I just stumbled upon a logic game that's really fun, and it seems like it can be made infinitely challenging. It's (loosely) kind of like Sudoku, but may very well hold its own against the more popular game.

The game is nonograms, and the Flash game that introduced me to them is called Armor Picross 2. I'm sure there are tons of nonogram-based games out there, but this is the first one I found, and the music is soothing. :)

Anyway, back to schoolwork! Two papers and two finals remaining until I am done at UCLA!

Recently a friend introduced me to Stepmania, a DDR clone, and now I am entirely hooked. I've been playing this thing all day for the past few days...

Not good considering school started yesterday, but meh... it still feels like vacation time. =/

Oh MAN. I never knew that old Final Fantasy VII PC game I have was worth so much. FF7 being arguably the best RPG ever made, and my copy being the original edition, not one of the re-released versions, put it in high demand.

I just wanted to tidy up and get rid of old junk. I never thought my FF7 would sell for more than $20, but apparently I was wrong... =0

Woo!! Check out my new experimental Flash Games section for your time and boredom killing pleasure. More games and perhaps a layout revamp to come!

I never thought Final Fantasy 7 would be so easy to beat. A long while ago I got up to the second stage of the final boss (Sephiroth) and he annihilated me, so I had to train my characters more. All in all I raised their levels by like 20 or 30. I also got them 9999 Hit Points, 999 Mana Points, and got them doing 9999 damage. Then I left the game alone because I got too busy with school or whatnot.

Well today I loaded the save file and resolved to finally beat the game. I start going down into the crater and face monsters. 1 slash and they are dead. I get to pre-Sephiroth. 1 round of slashing and it's dead. Sephiroth stage one. A couple rounds of slashing and he's dead. Sepiroth stage two. This one takes several rounds, but I pull it off without too much trouble. Sephiroth final stage. 1 round of slashing and he dies....

I could have beat this game a long time ago after I had trained, rather than shelving it for a year. So the question is... why didn't I??