Exposing my socks to the world

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.

Sometime in early 2004 I had an idea: I seek out and play cheapo games anyway, so why not make a site where I review them? It’ll be my niche.

So I registered the domain name closeoutwarrior.com and decided to get to work. I kind of hemmed and hawed around a bit, trying out different styles, and didn’t really get into the swing of things until 2005. Once I got into my groove, I actually got a few reviews under my belt, but then ran into a dilemma: I was trying to hold down two near-part-time jobs while trying to play games, capture screen shots, and write reviews while simultaneously playing ‘good stuff’ to keep my sanity in check. After I got a few reviews under my belt, I just kind of petered out some time in 2005, and by 2006 I took the site down and didn’t really know what to do with the thing.

Then, in 2007, I had another idea: I could just kind of sit down and discuss a game that I’ve played some time in my life. Kind of like I’m telling a friend who’s never played it before what it’s about and what I thought of it. That’ll be fun for a little while, and I’ll challenge myself to keep it updated every day. My immediate goal was a month, then 100 days, then 200, then a year, and before I knew it today’s entry marks 500 days in a row.

It’s a heck of a milestone, so I hope you’ll forgive the momentary self-indulgent navel-gazing.

How in the world did I miss these? I went to one of my local movie theaters and found one brimming with Animal Crossing charms, presumably for your DS, Cell Phone, or whatever you like. At a buck a piece, they’re a little on the steep side, but that didn’t stop my sister and me from nearly cleaning out the machine. After trading amongst ourselves to eliminate most of the duplicates, here’s what I ended up with:

These are part of ‘series 2′, which means that I managed to completely miss out on series 1. Which, I guess, means I need to go to the movies more often.

Sometime in May a game came out with very little fanfare. It was some generic point-and-click adventure game that had been in development for a long while, and finally surfaced. But, about a week ago some folks noticed that the game had images that looked like they were lifted directly from other games, a blatant case of ‘asset theft’ it would seem. The publisher even went so far as to remove the game from shelves to investigate the issue.

This led some folks to initially postulate that the game didn’t even exist since they had never seen it on store shelves. But, I have essentially irrefutable, kind of grainy, cell-phone-taken evidence that the game does, in fact, exist. My copy arrived in the mail today. Behold!

Now I just need to decide if it’s worth it to crack open the seal or if I need to save it to sell on eBay in twenty years.

And I should probably get batteries for my actual camera.

While screwing around with my Wii last night (har har!) I apparently went brain-dead and forgot that I don’t actually own an EDTV, I have a mere widescreen standard definition unit. So I clicked on the option to jack up the picture output to 480p which my television doesn’t support. I had somehow thought that I’d either get a confirmation screen before the Wii made the change or that it would have asked me to confirm the resolution actually worked and then kicked me back down to what it was before if I didn’t respond. I waited about two or three minutes and the picture stayed blank.

Not good.

Not only was the Wii outputting a signal that my television couldn’t use, but I couldn’t see it to change it back. Doing a quick Google search didn’t turn up much in the way of helpful advice, but I was able to get it back to normal, and here’s how I did it.

Step 1: Unplug your A/V cables from the back of the Wii.
Step 2: Turn on the Wii
Step 3: After a few seconds push any button on your Wii remote to connect it to the Wii and start up the Wii menu
Step 4: Plug the A/V cables back in
Step 5: Without having your cables plugged in, your Wii will have booted into 480i mode, immediately go into the options menu and change it to the correct option

You could also replace the component cables with the composite cables that came with the Wii, start it up, change the settings, and then swap the cables back again, but that’s a whole lot of unnecessary work for the same result.

It’s been a while since it happened last, but the Crummysocks.com family of sites was down for about half an hour this evening. Everything seems back up now, but if you see anything out of place, drop me a line.