Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Sometimes I have to sit on my nerdy instincts. A couple of days ago a memory stick I use in work to carry files between computers failed. After buying a new memory stick my inner nerd quickly got carried away with the possibilities. - Some of the material is sensitive so it needs to be encrypted lest the memory stick gets lost or stolen. - Some of the computers I use lack the appropriate software for decryption and restrictive user rights can make it difficult to install. - For convenience and security reasons wouldn't it be better to have a bootable operating system on the memory stick that had all my software pre-installed? So it was that I set about trying to build and install a custom version of Puppy Linux on my memory stick so that I could have a portable self contained working environment. Puppy Linux is one of the coolest pieces of software on the planet. A self contained operating system that will boot from CD or memory stick and runs on just about any computer ...

1. DXHR really feels like true successor to the 2000 classic. All of the freedom of choice is in there. You really are presented with big open world levels and left to figure things out for yourself. The augments feel powerful and for the most part offer useful alternative ways of completing objectives. 2. This freedom of choice is not as surprising in 2011 as it was in the year 2000 but it is nevertheless refreshing. 3. I like the story. I found it sucked me in sufficiently to encourage me to "role play" my character. Not as good perhaps as the Mafia games but nevertheless still far better than most. 4. Getting into my character's role was absolutely the right way to play the game for me. On a normal difficulty I found the game play quite easy for the most part so if I had fallen into the trap of min maxing my character I am sure it would quickly have become trivial to the point of tedium. 5. Although I was role playing a basically moral character I found that h...

The last game from the Indie Bundle I got around to playing was Trine. This is a platformer with a twist in that you can swicth between three different characters each with different abilities in order to overcome the various challenges that the games levels throw up. This is a style of game play made famous by 1992 game called the "Lost Vikings" from a little known company called Silicon and Synapse who soon after changed their name to Blizzard entertainment. I have very fond memories of the lost Vikings and it is generally acknowledged as a classic so it is surprising that the format has rarely been copied. "Project Eden" was one such attempt set in a 3-D world but that game failed to grab me. Trine is more faithful to Viking's platformer heritage and proved good enough to keep my interest to the end. The good bits: 1. The graphics are drop dead gorgeous. The loving attention to detail really makes the game a joy to behold. 2. Controls are tight and re...

"Did you know" my wife asked out of the blue "that the average gamer is a 43 year old woman?" Somewhat surprised at my lovely lady's new found knowledge I mumbled "Um... are you sure they aren't talking about Facebook games" "Perhaps. I read it in the newspaper. Also did you know that there are four kinds of gamers: achievers, socialisers, killers and something else.  I am an achiever". She is too. My wife holds every achievement possible in Plants versus Zombies and now she is in the process of repeating the feat with Bejewelled 3. I am delighted that the mainstream media has not forgotten Richard Bartle's seminal piece of gaming research although I am somewhat surprised to see it being used in relation to Facebook games. Modern them park mmorpgs have diverged very far from the open world MUDs that spawned Bartle's research and sometimes it feels like his work has been forgotten. By the way I would watch out for that ...

Despite the name of this blog I am not really a puzzle aficionado but I do enjoy the occasional intellectual challenge. I have been playing SpaceChem on my PC for a couple of weeks now and I would certainly classify it as a challenging puzzle. On my phone I have a tile shifting game called Red Stone which looks simple but is also in fact extremely challenging. Although both these games have a high level of difficulty the consequence of that difficulty is very different. On the more challenging levels of Red Stone I quickly run out of moves and I have spent literally hours shuffling tiles around in circles without making any progress towards a solution. SpaceChem however is a building game at heart and regardless of how unreachable a solution appears at first it is always possible to make incremental progress towards the final goal. Every failed attempt teaches you something that brings you closer to a solution. In Red Stone I am well and truly stuck on the ninth level and I have...

Logging in to check my Lotro account (in response to yet another security breach warning) I was dismayed to see a big red "Pending Cancellation" notice bannered across my subscription details. Squinting down through the fine print I saw that yes indeed my LIFETIME membership  was due to expire on June 1 2061. Think about it. I will be 97. Not a bad age but with medical advances and such I was hoping to hit the hundred. Ah well. 

I noticed a subtle change when I logged in to Memoir 44 last night. The first two scenarios are now completely free. This brings the game more into line with other free to play games where you can play a cut down version of the game for free forever but have to pay to get the full flavour. The first two scenarios are going to hold anyone's attention for very long but at least they are there.

Look what happened on my very first attempt at Challenge Going Green: This is the first time I have ever gotten to the left hand edge of the of the cycles chart so I am pleased with myself. Mind you it was a pretty straightforward challenge - no fancy insights involved just applied lessons learned from previous levels.

Logging into Steam yesterday I spied an advertisement for a free to play game called Memoir:44. I hadn't heard about this one before so I decided to check it out. To be honest I haven't got beyond the tutorial yet but I have already discovered quite few things that are different from other free to play games. The first point is that the game itself is a faithful online implementation of a successful and well reviewed board game that has an enthusiastic community of both online and offline players. The second point is that rather than the usual f2p model of letting you play a version of the game for free and then charging for an enhanced experience Days of Wonder have settled on the far more straightforward approach of simply charging you in "gold coins" for every match you play. You can buy batches of gold coins for between €0.03 to €0.04 each depending on quantity and battles cost 2 or three gold coins depending on the scenario you pick. Battles seem to last a...

Leisure suit Larry is being re-released . I owe a lot to that game. Nearly a quarter of a century ago it was the first "real" PC game that I ever finished and I was blown away by how much more sophisticated this was that  the blocky Space Invaders and Pong games I remembered from arcades. (Of course no one could ever accuse Larry's humour of being sophisticated but the gameplay was head and shoulders above anything I had ever seen). That one game led me to Lucas Arts Adventures and from then to Doom and from then to the enduring gaming hobby that remains with me today. Thats not the confession. The thing is I didn't own a PC at that stage (late 1980's) few people did. Instead I pulled an all nighter in work to play a bootlegged copy someone had smuggled in to the office. I finished it in the small hours of the morning and I can still remember the feeling of euphoria. I knew this was the start of something big and important. That isn't the confession thou...

At the end of every level in SpaceChem the game taunts you with histograms showing how well your design fares against the rest of the community. Having just arrived at an inspired solution to a tricky problem it is always somewhat sobering to realise that your  "brilliant" solution is solidly stuck in the Average section of the graphs. Some herculean corner cutting efforts later later and you can maybe shift your design to the lower slopes of the main sequence but there are always better solutions to the left of yours and indeed there is often a whole new peak far to the left (left being fewer cycles or fewer components). No amount of tweaking will shift your creation to this new lower peak so clearly an entirely new and better concept is required. Anyway having endured this process multiple times I am firmly convinced that a given solution can be fast or it can be thrifty but it is very difficult to be fast and thrifty at the same time. Speed seems a more laudable goal to ...

My excursion into the world of "pay what you want" is turning out to be far more rewarding that I expected. The lynchpin game of the bundle is the very popular Frozen Synapse and although I was keen to see it for myself I didn't expect it to hold my attention for long. It's too early for me to give a definitive verdict but after playing a few levels of the single player campaign it hasn't grabbed me yet. I do see the quality of the game and I suspect that if I was more into multi-player I would get more out of it. What I didn't expect was how much entertainment I would get out of the "extras". I really enjoyed Shadowgrounds and its sequel Shadowgrounds Survivor, two old school top down shooters. I should warn you that the original Shadowgrounds has extremely long levels (up to two hours) with no checkpoints. A respawn system gives you some relief if you die half way through a level but if you quit it is back to the start of the level so forget abo...

I have never owned an Apple product and yet Steve Jobs has changed the world I live in at least four times. Jobs and Wozniak's Apple II made the computer personal and in doing so it made the information technology revolution something that everyone of us could share in. Prior to the Apple II only geeks and hobbyists with their own soldering irons need apply. Later the original Macintosh transformed our expectations of how humans should interact with these strange new thinking machines. It matters little that the the Mac never competed with the more generic PC in terms of sales. It also matters little that few of the ideas in the mac were entirely new. It was Jobs and the Macintosh that showed all of us what was possible. In more recent times the Ipod and Itunes revolutionised the business of not just music but creative content generally. Again it matter little that the ideas were not particularly new. This time Apple's vision of a product with superior design that was si...

This story of a rural pensioner (apparently) running an unlicensed pub in the remote mountains of Donegal  made me chuckle. It is like a tale from a bygone age. The garda (policeman) who visited the premises consumed approximately FIVE alcoholic drinks before deciding the venue needed to be shut down. Definitely going above and beyond the call of duty there. The pensioner is appealing the case proclaiming that: "I have sold no beer to nobody"

A couple of posts back I mentioned that I was hugely impressed by the design of the Humble Bundle website . Well it turns out I didn't know half the story. Azuriel decided to test the system by making an offer of $0.01 and was good enough to post the results on his blog "In an Age". You should go and read it . Hats of to the Bundler's for a really really great piece of website design.

 The first game from the latest humble bundle that I tried out is Shadowgrounds Survivor. There are a lot of similarities between Survivor and Torchlight, a game I finished just a couple of weeks ago . Both games are essentially linear crawls through dungeons infested with assorted creepy crawlies. Both games use third person perspective and have very simple click to interact controls. Both games have level up mechanics and rpg elements.  Of course Torchlight has a fantasy setting while Shadowgrounds has a Sci Fi setting but that isn't the real difference between the games. The first real difference is that Torchlight has "strong" level up mechanics where your character's strength and abilities get increased many fold as they gain levels while Survivor has weak leveling up with characters getting a few new weapons  and some useful skills but never doubling in power or strength. Bizarrely it is Torchlight that feels to me like the more repetitive game. Torchligh...