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Four Games
Sep. 2nd, 2012 12:27 amToday I played four games on computers. Two on my Android phone, one in both Linux and Mac OS, and one in Linux and ChromeOS. No, nothing's ever simple around me.
I've been playing Robo Defense on Androids for years now. It's a tower defense game: kill the squishy humans (who eventually get exoskeletons, jeeps, tanks, helicopters, airplanes, and flying saucers) before they cross the screen. If you prevent enough of them from crossing, you win that session of 100 rounds. After you've played a while, success is defined more by how much you win by rather than if you win.
Today's new game is basically a Spiderman-in-NYC exercise in web slinging. Like Space Invaders, you can't win, you can just get further into it. But something about the timing and observation makes me twitch in a pleasant way. The rhythms feel right, as if I had always dreamed of limited flight that way. (The simulation is rather loose. I'm sure a human body would fail spectacularly in the jerky accelerations and decelerations being shown. Also, where does he store all that web?)
I started fooling around with FlightGear a few days ago. It's an open source flight simulator, and the computer geek - aircraft geek correlation is high. There's a UFO model which is more or less like playing a video game, but what made me really happy today was taking a Dragonfly ultralight out, up, around, and nailing a landing perfectly. It was an odd combination of happy floating and intense worry. I get the same sort of happy floating from the Wii Sports Resort Island Flyover game, which is an existence proof that the mapped universe there is only five minutes flight in any direction from the center.
Finally, I played a session of the Dresden Files RPG via Google Hangout. After unexpected problems getting the mic working on my desktop, I pulled open the CR-38 Chromebook (thanks, Google!) and used that as my videoconferencing device. Quite smooth, and then I had my two big screens free for PDFs and dice rollers and such. It was a good game session, and marvellously social yet convenient: we had players from out in Chicago and (I think) Pittsburgh as well as scattered over Boston.
I've been playing Robo Defense on Androids for years now. It's a tower defense game: kill the squishy humans (who eventually get exoskeletons, jeeps, tanks, helicopters, airplanes, and flying saucers) before they cross the screen. If you prevent enough of them from crossing, you win that session of 100 rounds. After you've played a while, success is defined more by how much you win by rather than if you win.
Today's new game is basically a Spiderman-in-NYC exercise in web slinging. Like Space Invaders, you can't win, you can just get further into it. But something about the timing and observation makes me twitch in a pleasant way. The rhythms feel right, as if I had always dreamed of limited flight that way. (The simulation is rather loose. I'm sure a human body would fail spectacularly in the jerky accelerations and decelerations being shown. Also, where does he store all that web?)
I started fooling around with FlightGear a few days ago. It's an open source flight simulator, and the computer geek - aircraft geek correlation is high. There's a UFO model which is more or less like playing a video game, but what made me really happy today was taking a Dragonfly ultralight out, up, around, and nailing a landing perfectly. It was an odd combination of happy floating and intense worry. I get the same sort of happy floating from the Wii Sports Resort Island Flyover game, which is an existence proof that the mapped universe there is only five minutes flight in any direction from the center.
Finally, I played a session of the Dresden Files RPG via Google Hangout. After unexpected problems getting the mic working on my desktop, I pulled open the CR-38 Chromebook (thanks, Google!) and used that as my videoconferencing device. Quite smooth, and then I had my two big screens free for PDFs and dice rollers and such. It was a good game session, and marvellously social yet convenient: we had players from out in Chicago and (I think) Pittsburgh as well as scattered over Boston.
