Fallout

Apparently Fallout (the original) was free on Steam today, so Birk downloaded it. We weren't sure if it would stick around after today, so I played it as my game of the day.

I haven't played a lot of games that have looooooong opening cut scenes (or long cut scenes... or really cut scenes at all) so that was new to me. I am, however, familiar with the story of Fallout, so there wasn't any new information, really. I know, I know... war never changes.

It's turn-based, there are a billion cave rats right outside the exit from the vault (and they all want a piece of me), the machete only has a 55% hit chance but the pistol takes five action points... it's just a really slow start without incorporating tutorials. (Luckily, Birk pointed out that F1 gives me a list of key bindings, so I could figure out what I needed to.)

I died shortly after finding the desert entrance, because four scorpions were there waiting for me and it didn't occur to me to heal fully before going to a new area. The death cut scene helpfully informed me that "even the carrion eaters aren't interested in your irradiated corpse." Thanks, Fallout narrator.

Yellow

If I've learned one thing from September's games, it's that I really like games where every level/stage has its own logic: I Don't Even Know, What's in the Box, Red Remover, plus The Idiot Test from August!

The goal in this game is to make the whole screen yellow in each stage.

In this one, you can start at any spot (I think; I started in the top left corner) and follow the arrows to click the next box to turn it yellow. So since I did the top left corner first, then I did the bottom left corner because that's three arrows down. Then I did the one two to the right of that because it has two right arrows on it. And so on and so forth. Get it?

This one was tricky but shouldn't have been. I clicked (tapped) everywhere, dragged things, tried all sorts of stuff... then I got stuck and sat there for a second, and the pupil started to grow, eventually engulfing the whole screen in yellow. The solution was: do nothing!!!

This one is staying on my phone for a while, like Little Alchemy and Aqueducts. I like this one.

Chinese Checkers

Birk has been home almost a week, and I still haven't taken advantage of having a second person around to play a board game with me! Well, until now.

If you aren't familiar with Chinese Checkers, here's how it works: your marbles start out in one of the triangles, and you want to get them into the triangle directly opposite yours. (In a two-player game, you start in triangles directly opposite your opponent.) On your turn, you can move one marble, and it can either go one spot (along the black lines on the board) or it can hop over single marbles (like hopping checkers) as many times as it can. Sometimes you get a neat ladder going, and your marble can hop a dozen spots in one turn!

He won, of course, because he's good at games like this. (He played white marbles, I played black marbles.)

I Don't Even Know

I realize that the title of this post makes it sound like I gave up on this challenge, but it's actually the name of the game I played today. It's a very silly flash game from Addicting Games made with drawings like the one you see above. Each level has its own logic, but they're definitely all very silly.

I got so wrapped up in it, I forgot to take photos during the game, but for example, there's a drawing of a clown surrounded by kids and holding balloons, and it says something like "defeat the clown!" and you're supposed to pop his balloons in order, and you move on to the next level.

I win!

It's VERY popular on Addicting Games, and I can see why. It's funny and quick and entertaining but also has a tiny bit of challenge to it to make it "hard" enough to keep my attention. Fun!

Music Crossword

This one's a little different! I saw the above posted to a Facebook friend's wall, and thought that would be fun. If it's hard to see, it's a crossword where each clue is written in music notes.

It was pretty easy, when you consider (1) I took piano lessons for ten years and was in marching band for four years, and (2) all the clues were in treble clef, so I didn't even have to switch back and forth to bass clef.

What's in the Box?

We may never know the answer to the name of this game: What's in the Box? Every level is a different puzzle with its own logic that you have to unlock to get to the next "lid" to the box. On the one in the picture above, the little shapes in the top right corner are the hint to what numbers you need to put in the dial (the number of sides on each shape).

In this one, you have to click one of the middle buttons to light up the top green light, then the other middle button to move it clockwise around the circle until it's in the last blank spot, then light it up again and move it again, etc. etc. until they're all lit up.

Empty Room Escape

Remember when I escaped the car? Now I've also escaped an empty room. (Which is technically not true, since the room has not only the theoretical me in it, but also a chair and some vaults and stuff.)

See? Chair.

Just like with escaping the car, I have to click around and find objects and solve clues to figure out how to get out of the room. In this one, you have to find four keys, and each one has a letter on it, and they spell "EXIT" (which is your clue that the four keys belong to the door, I guess).

I'm free!

Red Remover

This is a cute, fun puzzle game from Addicting Games. You have to remove all the red blocks from the screen, leave all the green blocks on the screen, and blue blocks are neutral: remove them or leave them, it doesn't matter. Some stages have different gravity logic.

And all the blocks are so HAPPY to be where they're supposed to be! Red blocks are grumpy until they start to fall, then they're as happy as the green ones are to be on-screen.

Yaaaay!

Questions

Have you ever heard of the game Questions? Have you seen it played on Whose Line Is It Anyway? Are you telling me that you've never tried responding only in questions?

Would you believe that it was Garrison who suggested we play it today? Are you at all surprised that he won?

ABC Path

I discovered a site called Brain Bashers that has lots of different types of puzzles like sudoku, and this is one of them.

It gives you the "A" and you have to put in the rest of the letters. The sequential letters have to touch (so B has to share a side or corner with A and also with C, C has to share with both B and D, and so on) and there are letters around the edges telling you what row/column/diagonal they have to be in.

In the photo above, I actually have some of it wrong. You can see the finished puzzle below:

Einstein Riddle

It's apparently a Google Play Store kind of week for my games. I had such success with finding a great game when I chose Aqueducts, I thought I'd try again... This one was not nearly so great, but it did remind me that logic puzzle should be added to my list of games, because I love them!

These, however... these are not good logic puzzles. Want to know why? Of course you do. Here's why:

First, they aren't multidirectional. I don't know if that changes in the harder levels (I played Easy because it was almost bedtime).

Then, the clues are written poorly. Again, I know I was in Easy mode, but there were too many redundant clues. When you have a clue like "the person with a baseball hat doesn't play basketball," there are a lot of useful clues you could follow up with, but "the basketball player doesn't have a baseball hat" is not one of them.

And finally, they don't have any story behind them. Maybe I was spoiled as a kid, but my logic puzzles at least tried to make a little sense. Like, you might be combining breeds of dog, types of dog treat, and leash colors, and you're a dog-sitter who's watching all these dogs and trying to remember which one likes which type of treat. The ones in this app are literally just combinations of objects. The second one I did had vehicles (submarine, ambulance, helicopter, and zeppelin) and types of money (20 pound note, 10 pound note, 5p coin, and 1p coin) and two other elements, I think hats was one of them? But the clues referred to the elements like, "The one that has a 20-note owns a zeppelin." What? Under what circumstances are we trying to sort these things out? You're telling me that someone who owns a submarine only has a penny? What's happening here?

Aqueducts

I didn't really know what I wanted to play today, so I poked around the Google Play store for a minute and saw this. It was categorized under puzzle games, and looked pretty (and was free) so I went for it, and was pleasantly surprised.

There's quiet, pleasant music, the art is lovely, and the whole thing is just very peaceful.

You're given a mess of an aqueduct (like above, partially completed) and you turn the individual sections to get the water from left to right. In more advanced levels, there are extra pieces that won't be used, to throw you off the trail.

That's the map between levels. Even that is pretty!

Draw Something

I definitely preferred playing this with people I actually know, but it's been several years since I did that, so I played with strangers this time.

I had people leave the game before I even opened it, I had people who just disappeared during the first drawing, and I had someone who only guessed absolute gibberish. (It was "RAINMAN"... I drew a cloud with rain, and a stick figure. She guess "RAIN" and then couldn't sort out the last three letters... even after using a bomb to remove most of what remained. Seriously? Should I have drawn the masculine symbol instead? The world will never know.)

Actually, I quite like drawing-based games, like Pictionary and Scrawl, so I think if I went back to playing with friends, I'd still enjoy this game.

In case you're wondering, the drawings above are BIRTHDAY and CHALK.

Farmville 2

I actually really liked the original Farmville. It killed a few minutes here and there; it was a nice little escape throughout the day. But then it started to rely too heavily on me needing to annoy my Facebook friends (the vast majority of whom did not play) in order for me to progress through the game, and it started to have too many elements (collect coins and stars and ovals and vertically-aligned ovals and whatever other BS we throw your way!) and I quit.

But I've been curious, on and off over the past several years, about what Farmville looks like now. I went to Zynga's website and found that I can't play Farmville without going through Facebook, which I'm not really willing to do right now, so I went with Farmville 2.

It took probably half an hour for me to actually get to the game, between allowing Flash to run and checking things like my adblock, and then finally just loading the darn thing. My DVD/Blu-Ray/etc. player was running Hulu and it froze up for a few minutes, which I don't think was a coincidence. I think this was a serious burden on our Wi-Fi. (To be fair, my phone was also simultaneously handling my fantasy hockey draft, so that probably didn't help.)

I planted some seeds, watered some crops, harvested some tomatoes, fed a chicken and a goat, turned tomatoes into feed, picked some lemons, sold some eggs and milk, turned down half a dozen prompts to invite friends to play, and finally got frustrated with the terrible load quality (jumpy graphics and that giant yellow arrow up there was leftover from the tutorial and never went away) so I quit.

Overall? I still kind of miss the original, but I have no desire to return to this game. Ever.

Super Spike V'Ball (NES)

This cartridge has two games on it: Super Spike Volleyball (tonight's game) and Nintendo World Cup soccer. I am terrible at both.

You get to pick your player, but they all look the same. Except their Speedo colors, of course.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about this game (other than the weirdly loud sand sound you make when you dive for the ball and miss) is that sometimes it switches you to controlling the other player on your team. By this, I mean, in the photo above, I'm serving, but once the other team returned the ball, my little [1] was over top of the other player, because he was closer to the ball. I can only assume it's a lack of good AI from 1988, because he was only good for setting the ball up for me, he never actually returned it over the net.

It also took me way longer than I'm comfortable admitting to figure out how to spike the stupid ball. The A button is a regular set, and the B button gets you up in the air, but the timing of hitting B to jump up and A to actually HIT the ball to spike it, was... well, there was a learning curve.

Womp womp. Look at my team hanging their heads in shame at the score of 2-15. Ouch.

Bowman 2

Back to Addicting Games for, this time, a shooting game. I didn't even look for Bowman 1... Bowman 2 was just fine. (I don't think I missed any major plot points.)

It may look like I'm suffering some pretty damaging blood loss in the photo, but trust me... you should see the other guy.

Wheel of Fortune (NES)

WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE! [8-bit version of theme music]

I've loved Wheel and Jeopardy since I was a little kid and didn't understand half the puzzles/questions. So naturally, I had (and still have) the NES versions of both games. I also have them both for Nintendo DS, but those are for another day. I also had the board game of Wheel a long time ago. It was actually really cleverly designed... I think I'll try to track one down so I can own it again. (In retrospect, actually, I should have saved all the versions of Wheel of Fortune to do a themed week, but I guess it's too late for that!)

I played against the computer... spoiler alert, "Leslie" won. (I played on Medium because I always played Easy as a kid and figured I could probably do better now?)

I have such a thing about 8-bit sound effects, as I'm remembering while I play all these old NES games. The best sounds from this game are the wheel's fast spin (sometimes it goes fast, sometimes it goes slow, I dunno) and the little alert sound for when there are only vowels left on the board, and the little "byoo" sound it makes when you choose a letter. Also, they actually recorded Vanna congratulating you at the end, because that's definitely her voice. (Check out the awful frilly pink ridiculousness she's wearing in the final round photo up there.)

Magic Darts (NES)

This game and I have had quite a back-and-forth. When I was little, I didn't like it because it was kind of boring. I would play it with my parents every once in a while, though, and I soon discovered that if I played as the alien (as I always did after this point), (1) it throws the dart by wiggling its finger instead of an actual throwing motion, and (2) sometimes the dart randomly flies around all over the place instead of going where you threw it, and that can be annoying or fun, depending on how important that throw was. Then I grew bored with it again, and now, as an adult, it's actually pretty fun.

It really helps to actually know darts terminology (of which I never realized there was so much, until I revisited this game). There are a handful of types of games, but the only ones I ever play are the 301, 501, and 701 (where you try to get exactly that number of points without going over).

You line up your shot with three different aspects. In the photo above: (1) the dart at the bottom of the dartboard has a ticker underneath it that goes left/right; (2) then an aiming cone thing is in front of your face and goes up/down; (3) then the red bar at the far right is up/down too.

It didn't happen in this game, but sometimes a fly appears on the board and if you hit it... I don't remember what happens. Something.

MarioKart 64

First things first... happy video games day! I noticed earlier this week that I've done nothing but video games (including phone/Flash/browser games) this month and maybe I should branch out a little... but not today!

If that sight doesn't just warm my heart. I love this game. I love the tracks, I love the items, I love the sound effects, I love drifting in the corners... I just love it.

It was getting late by the time I finally got around to picking a game for the day, so I just did one grand prix (Mushroom Cup, to test my muscle memory and see how I did... first place, natch) and then a time trial on Rainbow Road...

...in which I might have had my worst lap time ever. Well, maybe not counting the first couple of times we ever played the game, but that was ages ago.

Little Alchemy

Omg what a cute, fun game! I'm actually a little addicted to it and will likely keep playing for at least a few more days.

You start with four elements: air, earth, fire, and water. In the screenshot above, you can see the counter in the bottom left corner: 4/580. So you combine the elements to create as many things as you can. For example, when you combine fire and water, you make steam, or when you combine water and earth, you make mud. Then you can combine the things you've made, like how combining mud and fire makes a brick, combining multiple bricks makes a wall, etc.

These were some of my favorites... I made "day" by combining sun and sky, and "fireworks" by combining sky and explosion. (Explosion was gunpowder and fire.)

One that I forgot to take a screenshot of was paint... rainbow plus water. Yup, apparently that's how you make paint... combining rainbows with water. (I thought it was cute, anyway.)

Big City Adventure

I've never played one of these hidden object games, but they're actually pretty addictive! I get it.

There's only one free episode in this one, so I did that one: London.

It shows you an image like a page from I Spy, and you find the objects listed at the bottom. There are cheats that you can earn by doing well, which I leaned on pretty hard in the first one but after that I only used them twice (in something like 5 or 6 other images).

Word Whomp

Word Whomp (from Pogo) is a lot like a game Cassy and I used to play through Facebook... but I can't remember the name of it. Word... something. Word Twist, maybe? Except this one has gophers... and a chat window on the far right that nobody used.

I actually went looking for Psychobabble, which I've done several times in the past... decade? But it is long gone, and I found this instead.

The picture above was from my best round, where I actually figured out all the words. In all the other rounds I played, I missed a couple words.

Mah Jongg Candy

I love Mah Jongg solitaire! This is a cutesy version of it where all the symbols on the tiles are replaced by different images of types of candy.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think I first played Mah Jongg on a promotional website for some candy company. It clearly didn't work too well, since I don't remember the brand, but I distinctly remember playing games on that website daily for months, at least. I'm leaning toward Hershey, because I think I remember there being a game centered around Reese's? But I don't know. It might have been soda instead of candy? Anywho.

I found this version by using the search in Windows 10 (is it Cortana if you didn't use the voice feature?) which was weirdly disappointing, since it was searching online for browser-based games.

If you're interested in this specific version, it's the one from Wild Tangent. There are score multipliers (the first time you match a pair, it's x2, then they turn into x4, and when you match a pair of those, the last pair turns into x6). It's timed (5 minutes) and if you shuffle (which you can do as many times as you want) there's a 20 second penalty.

Robot Unicorn Attack

The song's already stuck in your head, isn't it?

If you don't remember this glorious artifact of early-to-mid 2000s Cartoon Network, allow me to explain:

The commercial for this free online game (yeah I'm not sure I get that part either) ran approximately once every commercial break on Cartoon Network for some period of time during my time at college. They licensed the song "Always" by Erasure, which is amazingly and in equal parts heartfelt, ridiculous, and catchy. (You know, the perfect storm of songs.) Allow me to put it two different ways for you... (1) the opening lines are "Open your eyes / I see / Your eyes are open" and (2) the chorus is "Always / I wanna be with you / And make believe with you / And live in harmony, harmony." It will also be stuck in my head for approximately the next three years.

The game itself is an infinite-run high-speed platform. You control a robot unicorn (of course you do) and all you can do is jump, double-jump, and dash. If you run into a wall/obstacle, you explode in a fiery blaze and start again. The song "Always" by Erasure plays on an infinite loop. It's really terrific.

Empathy Simulator

Ok, this one is silly and fun. Birk sent it to me today because he thought I would enjoy it, and I did, very much.

This is a joke game (but really well made for a joke game) that plays on the idea of how med students are taught how to express empathy with their patients.

The concept of the game is really simple: you use the arrow keys to move your "doctor" head around the room, and you need to get within range of your patient (or patients) and hit the space bar to empathize. (When you do, it uses a robot voice to say randomized phrases like "that must be difficult for you" and "how does that make you feel.")

Each room is a little bit harder. The second one is actually very difficult. It's a mom and a small child who runs around the room like a lunatic, and you have to empathize with both of them in ten seconds.

I finally gave up on the round with the patient who has a 7+ murmur... he has a giant heart animation that pulses every two seconds, and when it does, it throws you back in the opposite direction, so you have to time your approach and your empathy very carefully to make sure you don't go flying. (Also you need to get between him and the nearer wall so the return to him doesn't waste valuable seconds.)