Miscellany

Jul. 18th, 2005 12:07 pm
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[personal profile] lederhosen
Ganked from [livejournal.com profile] lonecat: Philip K. Dick shows up at a con and does a pretty good imitation of a sci-fi author, despite being dead.

Also, a flash game for geeks. So far, I haven't got past level 5, but I may come back to it...

New computer is working again - looks like the keyboard, mouse, and speakers' power adaptor *all* managed to die in the move. So, [livejournal.com profile] da_norvegicus has been playing the Lego Star Wars game, which as far as I can see mostly involves stabbing your buddies in the back and running around Lego-built scenes from Episodes 1-3 smashing everything in sight to get at the money (round Lego) hidden inside, which you can then use to buy things like fake mustaches - "I have come to clean ze pool" standard - for your guys. Jar Jar manages to be annoying even when he's nowhere to be seen, because of the number of specials only accessible by his super-jump special ability.

Just like every other Lego computer game, it lacks any sort of mid-level save option. At least it's not quite as bad as Rock Raiders, possibly the most hateful RTS game ever.

For those who didn't have kids of the right age and thus avoided the wonder that was Rock Raiders... the back-story, as illustrated through cutscenes, involves a space ship crewed by Lego people who are only capable of saying things like 'uh'. I guess the idea is that this works equally well in any language (i.e. badly), and thus saves the money and trouble involved in dealing with more than one language.

Said spaceship has some sort of mishap and crashes on a planet. The crew seem to be OK for food & air, but need green crystals to fix the drive. Or something. Gosh, THERE'S an original story hook! Anyway, the interior of the planet has quite a few of these things, but it also has rather a lot of Rock Monsters, who depend on them as a food source and so are rather unhappy about the Lego miners who've come to take them away. You get to fight them off (I think you blast them with lasers or something) while your miners strip the planet of its crystals, presumably dooming the rock monsters to a slow and miserable death by starvation. I'm vaguely surprised the Lego guys don't just hand out smallpox-infected blankets or whatever the rock-monster equivalent is, but I guess that wouldn't make for much of a game.

Speaking of gameplay, it's vaguely ominous that one of the first monsters you encounter is a species of snail. IIRC, they make the path slippery so your guys are in danger of falling over or something, but it also foreshadows the general pace of the game. AFAICT, the first half-dozen levels or so worked something like this: spend five minutes setting up a base and building the necessary workers & facilities, then twiddle thumbs for ninety minutes while your guys harvest the umpty-dozen energy crystals required to satisfy mission objectives. Every ten or fifteen minutes, something might actually happen that you need to respond to, but don't bet on it. I'm not sure how this is meant to appeal to the attention spans of today's youth, but it certainly made it difficult for us to enforce any sort of "you get one hour at a time on the computer, and then you have to let somebody else have a go" system. Hate hate hate. The later levels might've been less dull, but I don't think Ratboy got that far before losing interest, and it takes a *lot* for him to lose interest in anything Lego-related.

Meanwhile, have been playing 'Battle for Middle-Earth', which is rather fun. Lurtz kicks ass, and the Uruk-hai have a command that lets them kill and eat other Uruk-hai on their own side for experience... or you can send them off to the slaughterhouse to be converted into 'resources' :-)

*Certain people, not naming any names, being prone to picking stuff up and wandering around and putting it down again somewhere random when something else catches their eye.
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