The Smartful Gamer

Another slog in the bucket, so to speak. I put together 29 wins yesterday to finish off my rogue run. Done with rogue forever. No more pirates. No more murlocs. No more Leeeeroy mmJenkiiiins…

Yeah, right, who am I kidding, I'll probably start playing pirate Warrior now.

Well, not for a bit, anyway. You know what kept me going, through the grind? The thought of playing Astral Communion Druid. Ain't that a hoot? It's kind of the exact opposite of an aggro deck. I don't mean it's a control deck, I mean, it's big minions and it has no chance of winning and it's unpredictable because it doesn't feature any jade.

But back to the rogue thing. Yeah, it was a slog, but there were fun moments. I have to say I enjoyed calculating the combos, doing the math, the come-from-behind bursts. In wild, I enjoyed the bananas that was Ship's Cannon and Gang Up, with some Knife Jugglers in there and the Finja package. It was goofy and silly but what am I, a pro gamer?

Heck no. This is only my third golden hero. I got a looooong mmWays to go...

Last week I "reviewed" some games that featured a frog with rocket boots, a kung-fu fighting rabbit, a space shooter that will give you epilepsy, crocodiles, sex, and robots. I said they were all "meh." And today I'm going to tell you how much I enjoyed a subway simulator rendered in less than ten colors and few simple geometric shapes.

I mean, if someone asked you to back one of two games, a subway sim or a frog with rocket boots, where would you send your money?

But what can I say. I'm a simple little man. And Mini-Metro is an excellent little puzzler. You draw a line between a square and a circle, and then a little car starts to shuttle people between the two. Then a triangle appears, and you draw another line. An hour later, you've redrawn the spaghetti that is the London Underground, and you've got a new respect for mass transit planning committees.

There's different modes, different cities to try, a daily challenge. I got the whole thing vie the Humble Freedom Bundle, meaning I paid less than 50 cents for it. Worth 20 times that, easy.

Ha! I bet I'm the only one who thought of that joke!

Steep was free to try this last weekend on the ye old Xbox One. When it it launched, this AAA title was 60 bucks, and deluxe editions were a heck of a lot more. Now they're offering for 40 or so, in places.

I have to admit, I was intrigued when I first saw the game. Back in my N64 days, I used to play 1080 Snowboarding a lot. Like all the darn time. But I waited, and then price came down, and I kept waiting, and now this free trial, and I'm glad I waited.

Don't get me wrong, the game is gorgeous, and enormous, and I had fun even when I wasn't pulling off sick jumps, just swooshing down the slopes. Maybe my "complaint" is a selling point: there was way too much to do. I can see myself getting lost in this game, and playing it a lot a lot, like I did with 1080.

What I mean is, I don't think I'd be able to get my money's worth with this game unless I played it all the time. As it is, playing for free this weekend, I did get my money's worth.

Which sounds like a jerk thing to say, but I only mean that I did enjoy my time in there.

I've been "struggling" on the ladder, in Hearthstone on my main account. The one I pay to play. I've been playing water Rogue (pirates and murlocs) a deck I call "Private Eyes" because that's a song by Hall and Oats and you can abbreviate their name as H20.

Get it?

Look, I need to have SOME fun.

Anyhoo. I freely admit I'm not the best player in the world. But rank 15 should not be this difficult to get to. And yet. I'm getting my butt handed to me. I just wanna get my golden Rogue (you know, so I don't have to play her anymore).

But then, over there on my free-to-play account, the one that has only the "free" cards I got from Gadgetzan launch and WotG, the adventures bought with earned gold, and whatever the brawl packs have given me-- THAT account just cruised to 16 today, easy peasy. WITH C'THUN PRIEST.

Granted, I got a few lucky draws. Managed to get out a Lightspawn and pump him twice with Divine Spirit. Did the same thing in another game with a Northshire Cleric and Inner Fire. A few timely Entombs left my opponent wide open to ol' C'thun himself.

But still. That sort of thing NEVER happens with my pay2win account.

I know what it is, it's that I play my pay account all the time, and in all of those games, I only notice the slog, and if I were to play the other account more, the experience would feel the same, eventually.

But the conspiracy theorist in me wants it to be that my free2play MMR is really low, and Blizzard weights it by total-owned-card-value. I mean, know they don't, but I WANT to believe.

I mean, come on. C'THUN PRIEST!?

Been working my way through the humble freedom bundle I bought last month. Downloading and playing and deleting. I don't know that there's any point to reviewing every single title, as my experience is often over almost before it begins. I'm not opposed to spending more time reviewing than playing, if there's a good joke in my head. But, today, I got nothing. Like I said, lots of meh.

So here we go.

2064 Read Only Memories: an 8-bit point-and-click adventure, combining two ideas that I am not into.

7 Grand Steps: A board game with coins and set in ancient times, with sex and crocodiles.

AI Fleet Command: here's one of those deep-RTS space games, like Eve online without the history or depth.

Ballistick: a shooter/fighter/side-scroller--with stick figures and minimalism, you know, to differentiate from every other game you've played exactly like it.

Beat Hazard: a space shooter that uses your own music and should NOT be played by anyone with epilepsy (seriously, they always put that warning at the front of video games, but this time they really, really mean it).

Chromasquad: another 8 bit-styled tactics fighter themed on the Power Rangers and lots and lots of "cut-scenes."

Dusty Revenge: another side-scroller/shooter/fighter with a rabbit in the wild west,

Ellipses: a mouse dragger in neon lights and micro-levels.

Girls Like Robots: a puzzle game, placing tiles according to associative rules to maximize scores.

And my "review" for all of them: PASS.

Sounds harsh. And maybe people like these sort of things. But I'm starting to realize that maybe I'm a spoiled brat, a AAA-title junkie. Maybe I'm one of those idiots who has pay a lot of money for a game so he feels like he HAS to play it for more than two minutes and in that way discovers what's good about the game.

But here's one more: Timeframe. An FPP walk-around where, every ten minutes (which is ten seconds in game time) you start over. All you do is look for things to click on, and when you've clicked on all of them, you're done. Apparently Timeframe is based on a game that was built in 72 hours. I kind of liked it. I mean, I feel like, having played through it and finished it and deleted it, I got my time's worth.

Which is what it all comes down to, really. If I download a game, play it for three minutes, then quit and delete it, I guess I got my time's worth. I was curious, I satiated my curiosity, I moved on.

That's not so bad, is it?

Free for the last half of last month and the first half of this month: Project Cars. If you have an Xbox One. And a Games with Gold account. And time to download it. In other words: "free." In other other words: not free.

Which is why I feel justified, being a little irked at this crappy game. Maybe I was in a bad mood anyway because my Xbox and my PC weren't getting along. But when I finally got a chance to race, I found myself in a freakin go-cart. And a go-cart with sloppy controls that I ran off the road almost immediately.

Maybe the game gets better, maybe people like this kind of hyper-realism (that's a nice way of saying "tedium," by the way) maybe I need to take my time and let myself fully immerse.

Or maybe not. Maybe it's perfectly rationale for me to expect a game to pay a little something back for the time invested in just getting it to start, damn it. Whatever. I deleted the darn thing, got some gigs back. Moving on with my life.

Freakin go-carts!

I stream games from my Xbox to my PC so I can take screenshots so I can add dumb captions so I can post them on my blog so I can feel like I have more of a life than just reading reddit all day and complaining to my wife about how terrible our president is.

But the other day, for some reason, the streaming wouldn't work. I dutifully went to the Microsoft help pages to see what I was doing wrong. Short answer? Nothing. Not a darn thing. Which I discovered after changing all of my settings and configurations several times until they were back to where they started from.

Turns out some stupid update had turned off media streaming on my PC. For no reason. Nor did I found out how to fix this from Microsoft themselves. I found out from a three-year-old forum post. I mean come on.

Anyway, all of that just to screenshot this month's free Borderlands 2 (a really great game, if you don't know), which I already own on my PC, and played to my heart's content.

Yeah, a life. I sure have one, don't I.

Look, if you're not playing wild Rogue at rank 13 with pirates, Patches, Ship's Cannon, Knife Juggler, Skycap'n Kragg, and Gang-Up, I don't know what to tell you. Are you living the life you were meant to live? Are you even alive?

These combos, they're bananas. They are out of control. I'm barfing out Patcheses all over place, pumping them up, getting the knife juggles, the ship's cannonballs. There's Cold Bloods, and a Leeroy for good measure, and Shadowsteps, and room for other nonsense. Want to throw in Beneath the Grounds? Go ahead. Go nuts, ya paper slapper, you.

I mean, this deck is not going to take you to Legend. You're going to lose some games. You're going to go up against dragon Priest and your backside is going to be handed to you. And sometimes you're going to get a bad draw and pirate warrior is going to eat you for lunch and burp you up between whistled verses of Yo Ho Ho. That's how it works.

But other games, you're going to be sitting there. You're going to play Southsea Captain. Three Patcheseses are going to hit the board. You're going to play Skycap'n. You're going to slap a Cold Blood on him. You're going to do 17 damage. You're going to get a friend request from a Shaman and be called bad names.

Use their salt on your fries.

I love these "programming" games. And I don't even know why. From browser-based games where you stack up commands so your robot can negotiate a maze and turn on a light bulb, all the way up to complicated games that employ object-oriented programming and recursion. I could play them all day. And when I get a new one, I do.

That's what happened with Human Resource Machine. I got it via the Humble Freedom Bundle- it had been on my Steam wishlist, although I forgot what it was called and didn't know what it was when I installed it Friday. And now it's Monday and I've "finished" the game and I want more, damn it, more!

I took a programming course back in college, and our term-project was to write a sorting programming. Given a bunch of numbers, but them in order. And that's the last task given in this game as well. I recall our TA telling us that there's all kinds of theories on the most efficient way to write such a program, that one can get a PhD in explaining what a theoretical most-efficient program would do.

MY theory is that this problem is given to new undergrads around the world, and put into these games, because someday some young genius is going to accidentally discover a most-efficient algorithm, and everyone will have to throw out their old computers for these new, faster ones.

So go, pay for and download Human Resource Machine right now, help the the world become a better place.

...cause I ate a lot of cookies while playing the game.

Welcome to the "extremely lame" edition of Smartful Gamer's Review and Bubble-Captioned Screen-Shot Blog, brought to you by fatigue, malaise, ennui, being old, being fat, being injured and unable to go for runs, and it's also cold outside, and I've only been eating cookies and taking green-tea pills so my endocrine systems is seriously #$%^&*ed-up.

(Yes, yes, in my delusion, and I AM asserting that my posts are NOT usually lame. If you think they ARE lame, then why the #$%^& do you keep reading them? Ya flipping train-wreck rubber-necker, you.)

Sorry, I'm in a mood. And it's not because of Hand of Fate. But Hand of Fate suffers, at least in so far as I don't have much nice to say about it. I got it for free on XBox a millions years ago and I thought I reviewed it then, but I can't find that review. So here I am reviewing it now, having gotten it via the Humble Freedom Bundle.

Has all the boring parts of card game mixed with the boring parts of a hack-and-slash game. Card-reading and button-mashing. Yawn. Pass.

But maybe you'll like it. I dunno. I like Spam sandwiches. Some people like anchovies. This is a crazy weird world we live in.

I got all excited to fire up another random offering from the recent acquisition of the Humble Freedom Bundle. Had no idea what I was getting into when I unlocked Overgrowth. Apparently what I was getting into was my ass kicked, alot.

This game is still in a very crude beta, complete with command line screens flowing through loading alerts and blocky graphics and noclip glitching. (Given what "beta" means to some other companies, I'd call all of the above "alpha" problems, but let's not get bogged down in semantics).

And that's fine, and some people are, indeed, willing to pay to get in early to a game like this. Maybe I would too if it was my kind of game. But complicated hand-to-hand fighting games are not my thing. After I learned how to kick a guy in the face, I had to learn how to get kicked in the face, and that was pretty much it for me.

I do see the appeal, though, and I'm not knocking what Overgrowth is heading towards. A kind of roaming Mortal Kombat thing, with rabbits and wolves and lots of blood. Lots and lots of blood.

But it all still too crude to pull me in. I'm an old man. I like my rabbits in stews. Or chasing Raymans.

I know I've only played a tiny fraction of a percent of all the video games in the world, but it's still funny to me how often I keep coming across the same ones. I played a demo version of World of Goo way back in, I don't know, 2008? I keep thinking I even played in a web browser.

Probably not. I probably played some other engineering-style game. You know, where you build structures on the fly and learn, real fast, the power of the triangle. That's what's going on here, except instead of sticking girders together, you float out little blobs of good, and they stretch arms to hold onto each other.

The levels are challenging and replayable, and engaging enough that whenever I screw up, muscle memory automatically hits all of the buttons for me to start over. There's some kind of story going on, with hints provided by little signs, themselves signed by "the sign painter." Back in 2008, this kind of self-referential humor was avant garde, trust me.

Nowadays, of course, it's the kind of clichéd nonsense you see all the time in blog posts.

Where was I? Oh yeah. World of Goo, which I got via the Humble Freedom Bundle. So far, so fun. Worth much more than the 4 bits I shelled out for it. More like 80 bits.

Boring blog post title, boring game. Yeah, they say there are no boring games, just boring gamers. I've now used the word "boring" so many times I don't even know what it means anymore.

I don't have a problem with point-and-click "adventure" games per se, nor do I have a problem with games in the vein of "The key for room A is in room B, and the key for room B is in room C, and the key for room C…" etc. But usually, they're not my cup of tea. Not when I'm in the mood for violent coffee with lots of shooting sugar and some blood n guts milk.

Okay, so I'm bad with the metaphors today. Sorry.

I was bored with Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble, so I went to the top of my Humble Freedom Bundle and grabbed the first game on the list. Day of the Tentacle (Remastered). And waited through the cut-scenes. And the clicked, maybe, four things. Ah, another cut scene.

Pass. When I want to watch a movie, I'll go watch a movie.

Another one off the Humble Freedom Bundle. I think I played this one before, about a hundred years ago, maybe just a demo. I don't recall getting very far or finding it very interesting. So why fire it up now? To get it out of the way, I guess.

Dangerous High Schools Girls in Trouble, it's called. I guess it's supposed to look like a board game? You click on tokens and play card-based mini games (kinda) that involve a version of liar's poker, some kind of word-guessing thing, or finding the right "retort" to a "taunt." There's gossip and flirting with boys and all of it couched in some kind of 1920's context. Sort of. I think.

Complicated rules, barely explained, arbitrarily enforced. Just like real high school. And not very much fun, frankly. I found the clicking to be kind of tedious and, in the end I'm not sure if there's any point- the school is nurse is evil, or something, and you're supposed to find out why… but who cares?

Not worth the 4 bits I paid for it. Maybe worth one bit.

I've been in the comedy business a long time. And by comedy I mean "lame jokes only a dad would love" and by business I mean "what you call it when you give your kid a loan so he can go learn about bankruptcy in his own."

And I've found that sometimes you have to explain your jokes. That makes them "not funny" but if they weren't funny to begin with then nothing's really lost.

The captioned screenshot below is supposed to be a kind of retro thing, a call back to the days when social media wasn't called social media yet.

The game, A Virus Named Tom, you see, is presented in a future-retro style (or is it called retro-future) where everything is "futuristic" the way they imagined it back in the 60s, which makes it feel old, not new. But "old" in a new shiny linoleum-and-chrome kitchen kind of way.

My own personal experience with future-retro is what MySpace was in advance of Facebook. Get it now? The joke? No? Well, fine. Go play the game instead then. It's fun. You move your little guy around a grid, rotating squares so the green light can flow all over the place. Not unlike any of a dozen "pipe" games that have come and gone over the years.

Bought it via the Humble Freedom Bundle, and worth well more than the 4 bits I paid for it. I’d have paid 20 times that, easy.

Back in 2015 the wife and I had a kid. Soon after we joined a support group for other idiots who thought they knew what the hell they were doing and had also realized they were not fit for the job. Note: no one is fit for the job.

All of the parents are nice people and the kids are damned cute. We've made friends. One of them is a guy who, at a meeting a few months ago, mentioned to me that game Inside (which I played and enjoyed and “reviewed”). Then at the next meeting, he mentioned a language learning app called Duolingo (e ora ho practica quotidiana italiana). So I put him on the spot at our most recent meeting and he said, "I bought the Humble Freedom Bundle because it included The Witness which YOU talked up, Smartful Gamer!"

Well, I was thinking of getting the bundle myself, and that was all the excuse I need. So I paid my ducets and got my Steam keys and decided to start with Super Meat Boy and… nope. Error message. No SMB for you, sir.

#$%^&*.

But I'm only barely mad. I tried another game and it worked (see next review) and the 30 bucks went to charity anyway. My goal, I guess, is to try and write a little more often, so I suppose if I'm willing to even write about a game failing, then, mission accomplished.

I got 64 games in all, which, divided by 30 bucks, is close enough to 50 cents per game that I'll use 4-bits to rate each one. Was Super Meat Boy worth 4 bits?  I dunno, you tell me: didja get a half-buck's worth of value from reading this mess?

I'm guessing: nope.

I've played versions of Gems of War before, back when, I think it was called Puzzle Quest or something. They've trimmed it down a bit here and made it a little more social, I think, added on ye olde microtransaction shoppe.

But some of the music is the same.

Not sure why I downloaded this or why I bothered playing. I mean, it's a fine game if you like that sort of thing, lots of content for free, immersive, challenging, and even fun. But it's not like I'm starving for games here. I got plenty.

I don't even know why I'm "reviewing" it. Or why I'm going to play it as soon as I'm done posting this. Or what I'm going to tell my wife when she comes home in five hours and I haven't done jack squat around the house today.