Pandora's Box

Now I want to talk about a game that I thoroughly enjoyed for days on end. The PC puzzler Pandora's Box, a Microsoft game from the creator of Tetris. The premise of the game is that Pandora's Box holds the seven worst tricksters of the world, and they've gotten out! It's your job to follow them around the world and solve puzzles based on artwork from many major cities around the globe. With over 400 puzzles, a compelling storyline, and unique music that matched with each location, this game made my top ten list easy. It took me at least half a year to beat the game, mainly because when I had the game, my family only had one computer in the entire household, and I had to share it with four other people, so it took longer than average.

I had gotten the game as a Christmas present one year and I spent as much time as I could working on it. It was hard to work on it because my brother had received a copy of Age of Empires and my sister got the Secret Agent Barbie game at the same time, so we had to share the computer, but I still got a lot done on my turns. My favorite puzzles were the ones involving sculptures, one type involved taking a piece of art, like a vase or a musical instrument, and placing squares on them, each square having the colored part of the sculpture on them. The other type involved taking statues that had been broken into pieces and putting the pieces back together like a 3D jigsaw puzzle.

After finally beating the game, I thought to myself, "what now?". After all that work, after solving all those puzzles, I decided to start another save file and do it all over again. Unfortunately, I never got to finish that second time around, but then about a year ago, while cleaning out some old CDs, I found the game, with a layer of dust over it. So I installed it onto my PC and I've been working on it little bit by little bit whenever I have the time ever since.

Stupid Spotter!

The one series of games that has proven to disappoint me has been the Marine Sharpshooter series. Now, I like sniper games, Team Fortress 2 and Sniper: Art of Victory being two examples, but Marine Sharpshooter was a severe disappointment. The games are set in, big shock, areas like Vietnam or the Congo, with enemies that seem to have no trouble seeing in pitch black night while you struggle with night vision goggles. For some reason, along with the ability to see at night, they are able to score perfect hits with low accuracy weapons like shotguns and AK-47s. As if that weren't bad enough, you're paired with a spotter, an attempt to make the game more realistic. If the spotter is played by a second player, then it's alright, but when playing solo, the spotter has the most inept, ineffective, and annoying AI since the Star Fox team. Apparently, the programmers decided that the spotter is supposed to go ahead of the sniper and open fire the moment he comes within a hundred meters of a single enemy, and misses 9.99 times out of 10. Sure, you can switch between the sniper and the spotter, but then the idiot AI transfer to the sniper, where the process repeats. Unfortunately, I didn't learn of these points until after I bought and installed the games, which are being sold at Wal-Mart as a three-pack. Worst $10 I ever spent, hands down.

Dungeons and Darn it Leroy!

Last Friday I played my very first game of Dungeons and Dragons, woo! My sister wondered why it took me so long to start playing. I couldn't really answer that... Anyway, it was with a group from my Video Game Design class, organized by Professor Tarr, and it was so fun. We were mainly doing it for those of us who haven't played before, myself included, so we used pre-rolled character sheets chosen at random. Mine was a female Elven rogue, which was a bit awkward, but fun nevertheless. While I was picking a lock in the first room, all the doors fell off the hinges and we were attacked by a dozen rats. Three turns in a row I rolled a 5 from a twenty-sided die, missing a rat each time, while the healer's first attack hit a rat. He then rolled two sixes from a pair of six-sided die, decimating the rat. The DM described it as "a fine red mist burst from where the rat used to be". I finally killed a rat after the sorcerer froze one with an ice spell. After our first battle, the sorcerer decided to try hitting on my character whenever he got the chance, which made for a good laugh. After the first battle, I'm checking out another room with the Dwarven fighter, both of us being very cautious, when the sorcerer jumps ahead of us and accidentally starts a fight with a floating stone head. I couldn't help but say "Darn it, Leroy!". Meanwhile our healer was in a separate room, by himself, when he started a fight with a pair of hobgoblins, but after the head was killed, the bard lead us over to the hobgoblins, where we ganged up on the monsters and destroyed them.

This part is a little late, but I'm now 23 years old! W00t!!!!!!

That Computer Store

My first blog entry...

I paid a visit to That Computer Store in Irmo today. It's a store that caters mainly to PC gamers by providing hardware, software, and PC repair. They also have computers set up with over 70 different games installed for customers to play for a small hourly fee. I learned of this place after meeting with one of the employees earlier this week during a job interview at IT-oLogy in Columbia. He works with their Portal group helping set up a program for elementary, middle, and high school students and teachers to use video games in an educational environment.

While I was there, some guys were in there working on a gaming pc, installing a new heatsink in it. There was a problem when they were testing it, the computer would crash from the overclocking.

Eventually we watched Minecraft videos while discussing the game.

Unfortunately business was slow here so not much else happened today.