Kinda forgot this site was here, sorry about that. We’ll have to fix the stream of content.
In the meantime, I might suggest you check out sister site Pro Tip of the day, which features a genuine pro tip from our highly-trained staff… which is really just me, every weekday.
About six years ago I added forums to this site, but killed them off after a while due to lack of demand. Well, demand has skyrocketed and so they’re back, but not here. They’re hosted on one of my sister sites, Push Button B. So feel free to use that site to discuss all your Crummy Socks, Closeout Warrior, and Pro Tip of the Day comments.
January 28, 2009, 2:49 AM saw one of the worst ice storms to come through my area, and it cut power/internet to my house (and well over 75,000 other homes/businesses in the city, and near 1 million in the region), and it wasn’t restored here until about an hour ago.
It might be a couple of days before it’s back to business as normal on the Crummysocks.com Network of Sites.
Just performed my semi-annual bad-user cull/mass banning. Mostly just the people that registered accounts and didn’t do anything with them and the jerks that registered just to promote their genital drugs herbal supplements.
Since I’ve been playing a fair bit of Mega Man 9 lately, I thought it was pretty awesome when my sister surprised me with this:
Yep, she’s pretty awesome.
Some months ago I decided to try out the free-to-play MMO Guild Wars, which fit in pretty well with my new-found casual approach to MMOs. But, I kind of got tired of the base game and decided that I wanted a bit more, so I decided to pick up a copy of one of the additional campaigns for the game, Guild Wars Factions.
I get the box home, tear it open, and go to enter my key, when I notice that something is a little weird. Apparently two keys had gotten glued together at the factory and stuffed in my box.
Since I don’t really have much of a need for two keys, I contacted NCSoft’s support to see what they suggested I do with the other one. After they verified that the keys were legitimate and valid, they gave their blessing to essentially do with it whatever I would like, which I thought was pretty generous of them. (It’s spoken for, sorry).
So, has anything like this ever happened to any of you guys? Leave a comment below if it has.
Saturday’s post about some kind of mysterious message showing up on my instant messenger just kind of weirded me out a little bit, but I thought very little of it and decided to move on. Today, though, I get a different, yet similar message in my IM window:
At this point, I’m getting a little annoyed, so I decide to dig a little bit deeper, and what I found isn’t so much unsettling as it is just plain annoying.
These ‘troutbots’, as it seems, are robots that trawl the Internet looking for screen names. They then act as sort of a middle-man and relay both sides of the conversation to the victims, obscuring their names. So, when I was talking to OrbitingTrout the other day, the poor sap on the other end of the line was also talking to OrbitingTrout.
I can’t actually fathom why such a thing exists other than to momentarily confuse random pairs of people for a few minutes. But now that it’s happened to me twice in two days, it’s having the effect of making me very irritated.
There is more information to be found in the following places:
In short, if you get some message from someone with ‘trout’ or ‘salmon’ in their username, it’s a bot designed to annoy you and someone else for as long as the two of you keep bickering back and forth figuring out who IM’d who first. The best thing to do is to not respond to any of it and close your browser window, or better yet, disallow IMs from folks that aren’t in your buddy list, though that may be infeasible for some.
Oh, and please pass a link around to this page to spread the word to educate people about this completely ridiculous waste of time.
Just spent several minutes with a mysterious caller from the AIM network. The person, one OrbitingTrout, claims that he doesn’t recognize my screen name, didn’t message me, and chooses to believe that he has a virus on his computer that send out messages to people. I’m fully willing to accept that I’ve not seen every virus/spyware out in the wild, but one that sends out the occasional spam comment seems to be the kind of things Ron Paul’s supporters might come up with.
Or the guy’s an attention whore, you decide.
MMOs are a slightly different beast as far as video games go. If you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years, the gist is that the game is more akin to a service that you have to subscribe to. Ideally you and potentially thousands of other players subscribe to the game and your subscription fees pay for stuff like server upkeep, content generation, and stuff like that. There are, of course, exceptions, but we won’t bother with those today.
The thing is, though, that you’re not going to really know if the game’s going to be worth your time unless you play it first. Of course, you could just jump headlong into the game and see if you like it, but then you’ve wasted a month’s worth of subscription fees if the answer’s ‘no’.
The solution is, then, is to offer a token amount of ‘free game time’ for you to decide if you’re going to like the game or not; one month is the norm.
But, here’s the thing. That free month isn’t actually a free month. Who says so? Math says so!
Let’s take the current darling of MMOs, World of Warcraft. As of this writing you can get your very own copy of the base game from Amazon for $20. Now, your ‘free’ month of gameplay is worth $15, so if we subtract that from the cost of purchasing the media, we end up with $5 for your copy of the game and $15 for your ‘free’ month.
Or how about that other MMO that’s making waves right now, Aga of Conan? You can get the for a scant $50(!). Subtracting the $15 worth of fees of the month that you’re being ‘given’ leaves us with paying $35 for the ability to use the trial, which is over twice the value of gametime that you’re using. Suddenly the free month doesn’t really seem so free anymore.
I guess what I’m saying is, if you have to pay something to use it, it’s not really a free trial.
It’s no great secret that I do enjoy a good puzzle game, but some of them just don’t do anything for me. Here’s a few of my peeves in no particular order.
The Sliding Block Puzzle
I’m sure there’s a more proper name for it, but I’m talking about the kind of puzzle where you have some object and some kind of frictionless floor covered with obstacles. You push the object and it slides along until it his something and stops. Your goal is to slide it in such a way that it lands on a particular location on the floor. That explanation probably doesn’t really make a lot of sense, so here’s a little video to illustrate.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that particular type of puzzle… other than the fact that I’m not particularly good at it, so I tend to avoid it whenever possible. Now, I do like a good Role Playing Game, up until they throw a ridiculous sliding block puzzle in it to eat up a few minutes. This is one of the few times that I’ll reach for a walkthrough instead of trying to muddle my way through it. Which, yeah, I know that it sounds like I’m just avoiding using my brain for a few minutes, but those puzzles frustrate me to no end and the game would cease being fun by the time I’d get the puzzle solved.
Puzzle Mode
Most puzzle games will have something called ‘puzzle mode’ which always sounds redundant to me because you’re already playing a puzzle game, the whole thing’s a puzzle mode. What ‘puzzle mode’ actually means is that you take an action puzzle game and turn it into an extremely limited ‘passive puzzle’, I guess.
Typically you get some kind of prefab layout and have an extremely limited amount of whatever that puzzle game’s resource is (pieces, moves, whatever) to solve it. Now, the problem with these puzzles isn’t that I’m awful at them, which I totally am, it’s calling it ‘puzzle mode’ in the first place. It’s just a little bit too redundant to me.
Puzzles solved via trial and error instead of logic and reasoning
Going back to Tales of Symphonia for a moment, I remember a particular puzzle a good way into the game that had five pinwheels arranged kind of like this, where each asterisk represents a pinwheel:
------- |* *| | * | |* *| -------
You have to activate the pinwheels in a particular order to open the locked door. Now, I’ve already suspended enough disbelief to be OK with the fact that the builders of some kind of ancient temple have decided to use ridiculously circuitous locking mechanisms to keep their temple doors sealed. But they also apparently destroyed all their keys and all instructions on how the locks work. But, somehow in this game the old forgotten civilization did just that, and you’re stuck with a puzzle that has 120 possible solutions, and no clues in sight. At least none that I could find. I scoured that dungeon for a couple of hours and couldn’t find anything that resembled a clue anywhere in it, and after a couple dozen attempts at brute-forcing the proper pinwheel sequence, I decided to just go look up the solution. Ridiculous puzzles to eat up a few minutes are fine, but at least give me some clues so I can piece together the solution.
Final Thoughts
Even with all the pet peevery going on, I’m still going to be a sucker for a good puzzle. So long as that puzzle is solvable, and doesn’t make me have to sit there and try every permutation of maneuvers to successfully solve it. Which, I know, sounds like I like puzzles where I don’t have to use my brain a whole lot, and that’s not exactly true. I like puzzles that I can solve quickly, or with lots of action, not puzzles where I have to stare at it until the solution pops into my head, or one that I just have to keep plugging away at to finish. Then it goes from fun brain exercise to boring tedium.
Yawn.