Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Games
In honor of my upcoming 30th reunion,
. . . which I have no intention of attending. Voila, BULLY, soon to be released for the PC:
I wanna play the guy who gets the girl!
D.
Ack! No one told me . . .
that Fallout 3 has been released!
Jewel of the Wastes. For 200 years, Vault 101 has faithfully served the surviving residents of Washington DC and its environs, now known as the Capital Wasteland. Though the global atomic war of 2077 left the US all but destroyed, the residents of Vault 101 enjoy a life free from the constant stress of the outside world. Giant Insects, Raiders, Slavers, and yes, even Super Mutants are all no match for superior Vault-Tec engineering. Yet one fateful morning, you awake to find that your father has defied the Overseer and left the comfort and security afforded by Vault 101 for reasons unknown. Leaving the only home you’ve ever known, you emerge from the Vault into the harsh Wasteland sun to search for your father, and the truth.
You know what I’m going to be doing this weekend . . .
D.
Alt gaming
If you think gaming is nothing but shooters, sims, and fantasy RPGs, you’ve had your head in the sand. Turns out there’s a wealth of little games (most of them free) that defy categorization. Take Gravity Head, for example. Your head has a powerful gravitational field which you can reverse at will. You use this power to spray seeds with water, thus growing flowers; that’s the easy part. The tough part is delivering those flowers to your girl.
Some of these games are pointless. In the all black-and-white “game” The Graveyard, you guide an old lady through a graveyard. Take her to the bench, let her sit down, then guide her out again. That’s the whole thing. Oh — for $5.00, they’ll unlock the full game for you. In that version, the old lady has a chance of dying in the graveyard every time you play.
Remember Kafkamesto? I wrote about it ages ago, so perhaps this one’s new to you. If you like Franz Kafka and if you’re familiar with his work, you’ll dig this game. Just be sure you check your desire to win at the door.
And then there’s Rod Humble’s The Marriage. I’ve played it, I’ve read his explanation, and I’m still scratching my head. This is what happens when artists learn to program, I guess (or when programmers fancy themselves artists?)
Ah, well. Sometimes it’s fun to play a head-scratcher, sometimes it’s better to play a game with hobos and fruit-f*ckers. Should I feel guilty that I’m assaulting street people with a rake? I would so not do well with Grand Theft Auto III.
D.
Dig the frog
Sighted this morning, perched atop our algae-overgrown tub “pond”:
My best guess, this is Rana aurora, the Northern Red-legged Frog, indigenous to Del Norte and Curry Counties. I saw two of them this morning, but the smaller of the two was camera shy. Nothing could perturb this big fellow.
The call doesn’t sound familiar, though . . . and that means we have another species lurking about. Probably several.
***
We are NOT in transit to Seattle. Karen had some severe abdominal pain last night, so we spent the evening at our friendly neighborhood ER. Nothing serious, she’s fine, but we decided to scrub our Saturday departure date until she felt better. Current plan is to depart Monday morning. Since my first interview is Wednesday, we still have some wiggle room.
***
Coasting on 2.5 hours of sleep, I have this overwhelming desire to do nothing but veg out playing some old computer game — Civilization III, perhaps, or Diablo III. Both of those games are mindless and endlessly replayable. I never could get my head around Civ IV; Leonard Nimoy’s voice-overs were fun, but the slow, tedious, and bloodless gameplay made Civ IV a yawn-fest. Someone decided to make military conquest nearly impossible in that game. Not my idea of escapist fun.
***
A patient’s husband picked up my tab for breakfast this morning. That’s never happened to me before.
I liked it.
Live blogging tonight? Maybe, if I’m not too sleepy.
D.
Kid, meet candy store
Necessity is the mother of invention . . . which at Chez Walnut means, if Jake hogs the gaming computer, I have to look for older games to download for this one.
That brought me to Game Downloads, where for nine bucks I can download freeware, shareware, and abandonware for a full month, no limits. I’m downloading Neverhood right now. It’s a claymation game for PC (and that’s unique thing, all by itself) released by Dreamworks back in 1996. Meanwhile, I’m also working my way through GD’s abandonware list, which includes such remarkable finds as all three Discworld games, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, and the original text-based Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!
Sad thing is, by the time I finish downloading Neverhood, it’ll be time to make dinner. And the whole point of this exercise was to find a game I could play to kill time until it was time to make dinner.
Live blogging tonight . . . unless Neverhood totally rocks.
D.
Playing too much Bioshock
I really, really want to write a post raving about Bioshock, but the words aren’t flowing tonight. They’re not flowing because I played too much Bioshock last night and had bad dreams and slept crappily*. Like:
Karen and I are trapped at one end of our house. Downstairs, there are zombies. [No zombies in Bioshock; just little girls who harvest precious Adam from fallen corpses, that’s all.] At the other end of the house are our eight-year-old daughter and our new baby girl. [No, we don’t have two daughters. It’s a DREAM.]
Harvest or rescue the Little Sister? Choices, choices . . .
I make my way through the attic until I am over the girls’ bedroom. I lower myself through the attic door, grab the baby, and pull her to safety. Then I hear the vanishing scream of my older daughter as she is dragged away by zombies.
The baby, I tuck between sheets of fiberglass insulation, where she will be safe. Safe from zombies, anyway. She’ll probably die from a horrible lung disease at age 35 from fiberglass and rat shit in her lungs, but at least she’ll live to age 35. I have another goal now: I have to find the older girl.
Creeping through the house, armed only with a wrench, I enter a darkened bedroom. Two women are asleep in the same bed. Twins. Zombie twins. But are they zombies, or are they victims of zombies? There’s only one way to find out. I stroke one woman’s cheek. It’s cold, and she does not react. I stroke the other woman’s cheek. Also cold.
Her eyes open. So do her sister’s.
“Pearl wants to meet you.”
They grab my wrists; my wrench is useless. One of them pats my stomach.
“You will make tasty carnitas. We must take you to Pearl!”
The dream ends with the knowledge that, without me to defend them, my wife and daughters are toast. And I?
I am a soft taco.
D.
*Like happily, only crappier.
Thirteen PC Games
Hey, Sis. Do you think the folks would pop the $$ so that my ferret can get a tummy tuck? Cuz he’s getting FAT.
The average man spends 23 years of his life (or more) asleep, but the average PC gamer spends only 12 years of his life asleep. He spends 42 years of his life playing PC games, and yeah, sorry, I’m making shit up again.
Below the fold: 12 PC games I dearly loved at one time or another, plus one my son and I await with exceptional impatience. How many of these have you played?
And after the spanking, the oral sex
But first, I have to distract my son. Look, Jake!
An interview with the creators of HomeStarRunner.
HomeStarRunner live at the Cork Opera House.
A special tribute to HomeStarRunner.
World of Warcraft meets The Simpsons.
World of Warcraft level 70 warlock action — with Nine Inch Nails background music.
World of Warcraft music video for Nine Inch Nails “Hurt”.
That’ll keep you busy. Nothing below the fold. Nothing at all.
Life, meet Art. Art, Life.
Live blogging tonight!
Jake and I have been sharing yucks and generally having fun with the Sam and Max games. These retro mysteries are all about the wisecracks; the puzzles are usually trivial.
In the first game, Culture Shock, Sam and Max contend with a trio of former child stars who are roaming our protagonists’ neighborhood, promoting the mesmerizing video of cult-leader-wannabe Brady Culture. The video promises to teach viewers “Eye-Bo fitness,” eye exercises guaranteed to get you the girl/boy/job/foot massage of your dreams.
As if anyone would believe eye exercises could improve your life. Crazy, huh?
Meanwhile, purely in the interests of research (natch!), this afternoon I googled “psychology adults abused as children.” This search led me to this Amazon page for EMDR in the Treatment of Adults Abused as Children.
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — Eye-Bo by any other name. What’s the big idea? One reviewer writes,
EMDR helps you to integrate the two halves of your brain and to heal from trauma that is trapped in your nervous system. EMDR is a very effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It isn’t quite as spectacular as the books make it seem, but it really can work.
Hmm. How does that work, again?
EMDR helps you to recognize that the abuse happened in the past, and is not happening in the present. Therefore it is easier for you to process your traumatic experiences because you don’t have to live as if the abuse is still happening.
I see. It’s that old right-brain/left-brain thingamobob. But are there any peer reviewed reports to support EMDR? After all, these are vulnerable patients who come to their therapist following a childhood of victimization. No one would take advantage of such folks by taking their money in exchange for unproven methods . . . would they?
As usual, Quackwatch has the dope:
Only one published study has directly compared EMDR with a no-treatment control group. Jensen (1994) randomly assigned Vietnam veterans with PTSD to either an EMDR group or a control group that was promised delayed treatment. EMDR produced lower within-session SUDs [Subjective Units of Distress] ratings compared with the control condition, but did not differ from the control session in its effect on PTSD symptoms. In fact, the level of interviewer-rated PTSD symptoms increased in the EMDR group following treatment.
The author concludes,
The proponents of EMDR have yet to demonstrate that EMDR represents a new advance in the treatment of anxiety disorders, or that the eye movements purportedly critical to this technique constitute anything more than pseudoscientific window dressing . . . .
Because of the limited number of controlled studies on EMDR, both practitioners and scientists should remain open to the possibility of its effectiveness. Nevertheless, the standard of proof required to use a new procedure clinically should be considerably higher than the standard of proof required to conduct research on its efficacy. This is particularly true in the case of such conditions as PTSD, for which existing treatments have already been shown to be effective. The continued widespread use of EMDR for therapeutic purposes in the absence of adequate evidence can be seen as only another example of the human mind’s willingness to sacrifice critical thinking for wishful thinking.
And now I get to kick back and watch. Will any EMDR fanatics come out of the woodwork to tear me a new one? Folks are always rarin’ to testify, it seems.
D.
Conversation on WoW
Slow lazy day today. And hot, too, hotter than a typical Southern Oregon summer day. We all vegged at the computer today, Jake spending hours on Wikipedia, Karen and I taking turns playing World of Warcraft.
A guy who goes by the name Theprofessor came through Felwood and gave me a couple of Druidic buffs. I thanked him, he np’d me back and moved on, like Clint Eastwood drifting through the High Plains. An hour later he reappeared and buffed me again. My character, Shewitch, whispered to him, “Thanks.”
Theprofessor: np
Shewitch: Are you a professor in real life?
Theprofessor: lol no. Are you a Shewitch in real life?
Shewitch: No, but I married one.
Theprofessor: Hah!
Shewitch: But I used to be a prof.
Theprofessor: Really? What did u teach?
Shewitch: med school. I’m an ear, nose, throat surgeon.
Theprofessor: ur doing this to relax
Shewitch: Yup. I write stories and I play WoW.
Theprofessor: cool
Shewitch: but I’m too tired to write. Rather kill stuff. Sometimes as a doc it’s fun to kill stuff for a change.
Lest you feel like reporting me to my State Medical Board, I hasten to add I’ve been killing beasts, furbolgs, and naga. No humans.
Here’s a furbolg. Wouldn’t you want to kill it?
I felt it would be worthwhile to post this so that the less technical of you would realize, not all instant messaging consists of have u stroked it 2nite?
D.