Games

Came across this game called the "Munsell Hue Test." It tests your colour perception. You're given a a bunch of shades of colour, and you have to arrange them in order of its hue. It'll rate which colours you're good at perceiving, and which colours you're weak on.

One thing that could affect your score is how good your computer monitor is.

Check it out!

During my time in academia, there was an astronomical rise in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs); the king of them being World of Warcraft (WoW). It was always tempting to play, but there was no way I could maintain my grades if I got sucked into one of these games, because they're massive time sinks. Part of it was also that everyone I knew was playing WoW, and I hate jumping onto bandwagons as I like going against the mainstream.

Even though I had a self-imposed embargo on not playing MMOGs, I actually did a lot of research into them. I was fascinated by the economies that developed in the games, and how sophisticatedly groups could organize complex strategies, etc. One game that stood out for me was Eve Online; a space game where you fly a ship. It was refreshing to find this game because it wasn't yet another World of Warcraft clone.

There were a few intriguing features in this game.

• One Server - The game has about 200,000 players, and everyone plays in the same universe. Games like WoW has about ~5,000 players per server. In WoW, if your friends played on a different server, you couldn't play with them.
• Death Has A Price - When you destroy an enemy's ship, they lose that ship, for good. In terms of PvP, that's quite something because you can cause serious economic damage to your enemy. In other MMOGs, death doesn't really have huge consequences.
• Player Driven Economy - Everything in the game has to be manufactured by players. This gives rise to a very interesting economic system. Goods don't magically appear in space stations, they have to be transported there and supplied. So, in a war for example, you could squeeze your enemy by cutting off their supplies, by depriving them of resupply ships. Yes, waging economic war is interesting to me.
• Level In Real-time - Normally in games like WoW, if you kill x number of bunnies, you'll level up. Eve takes a different approach. Your character advances by training different skills. Training takes place in real-time, even if you're not logged into the game. So for example, if a skill takes 2 hours to train, then 2 hours later, you'll have that skill.

Fast-forward to now. With a rapidly crumbling social circle, I decided to take the dive and try out Eve Online because I had some time and they offer a 14-day free trial.

With work being fairly busy, I don't really have much time to do hardcore gaming these days. If I did, I'd probably always show up at work tired, and gaming would eat up massive amounts of time which I don't have. So, naturally I've been gravitating towards casual games, games that I can play briefly, and be entertained.

One of my favourites currently is Desktop Tower Defense, a free flash game. Basically, you have bad guys start on one side of the screen, and they're trying to make it to the other side of the screen. Your goal is to setup turrets to shoot them down before they make it to the other end. Simple premise, but highly addictive. The enemies get harder and faster, so you must upgrade your turrets, and try to make it more difficult for them to make it through your maze of death.

I can usually make it to level 32 with no problem. Time well wasted . Enjoy!

This one is for all the casual gamers out there that enjoy flash games. Myron pointed me to a game called Pandemic 2. The objective of the game is to basically wipe out humanity through a pandemic. You get to custom tailor your disease. The game is pretty simple, yet it requires some interesting strategy. The disease has three main attributes that need to be balanced: lethality, visibility, and infectivity.

To eliminate humanity, you obviously need a disease that's going to be lethal. However, if you kill people too quickly, it's not going to help increase the number of people who are infected. If you're too infectious or visible (ie your disease has obvious symptoms), then humanity is going to react by developing a vaccine and eliminate your disease all together. Interesting balancing act.

Anyway, it took me about five tries before I destroyed all humans. The first three tries, I thought Madagascar was impossible for my disease to reach because it's fairly isolated, but there is a way to get there. In event of global pandemic, I'm fleeing to Madagascar.

P.S. Make sure you run through the tutorial real quick.

How do you fight a war elephant? Why pose such a question? Am I using the war elephant as a deep metaphor for problems in our complicated lives? Nope, this has to do with a video game I picked up this last weekend, Rome: Total War. It's a strategy game where you fight historical battles during Roman times. It's so realistic that the History Channel actually used the game to illustrate how famous historical battles were fought and won. I absolutely love the game as it's both very enjoyable to play, and you get to learn about history. Bonus points: The game works on even older computers, which I have.

In either case, so I'm playing as a Roman faction, and I'm doing war with the Carthaginian armies in North Africa. I finally arrived at their capital city, and I'm about to wipe them out. When I finally attack the city, an unexpected foe stands before me and my prize. The Carthaginians are marching war elephants towards my army.

I quickly tried to recall a situation where someone had to fight a war elephant. I suddenly thought, oh yeah, Lord of the Rings: The Return of The King. In that movie, the humans take out war elephants by charging their calvary at it. I'll do the same thing, brilliant!

So I rally all of my calvary to the front lines, and order them to attack the elephants. They start charging, but when they get near the elephants, the horses start freaking out, and refuse to move forward. This is not what I had expected; apparently horses are afraid of elephants, go figure. The elephants then proceed to charge forward, stomping and goring my calvary. Wow, that was a spectacularly failed attack. It worked in the movies! After many more pointless deaths due to elephants, I withdrew my forces, and had to rethink a strategy.

This is an example of what went down, it was horrible:

I came across this really neat flash game called Ayiti: The Cost of Life. It's a game where you take control of a rural family of five living in Haiti. The object of the game is to acquire education, health, money, and happiness.

It's kind of an eye opener of how difficult life is for the poor, as every move you make is a huge tradeoff. For example, sending kids to school is quite the trade-off. They could have helped work to bring in cash, but instead they're off to school. Sure, they'll get a better career in the future and bring in more money; however, that's a long-term investment, and very tough to do if you don't have a lot of money. So, maybe we could send the whole family to work. Well, with not a lot of education, that means working at risky jobs where people can get hurt. An injury or sickness means a trip to the hospital which can be quite expensive.

The game's also kind of neat, in that you can buy different things for your house to improve the quality of life of your family. Running water is quite the luxury that I haven't managed to get yet.

Nature also plays a very expensive role. Every year, there's hurricane season, and if you don't spend money preparing for the hurricane, nature can destroy your house and throw you into huge debt.

Life kind of sucks eh?

In either case, my high score has been, all 5 members of the family surviving, with 5 diplomas, and a chicken on the farm. I'm not exactly sure how anyone can afford a computer in the game.

Anyway, very educational game, and pretty fun. I've wasted 1.5 hours on this game so far. Maybe next time I should try sacrificing the kids... they cost too much money to maintain j/k.

One of this Christmas season's most sought after videogames is Rock Band which is a competitor to Guitar Hero. It's a four player game where you can choose to play guitar, bass guitar, drums, and vocals. It has been described as the ultimate party game. In either case, demand has been off the charts because of all the hype surrounding this game.

The game was released in the US on November 20th, and there's a chronic shortage of the game. Even worse, the Canadian release of the game was delayed until today, and shortages are expected to be worse in Canada. The CBC covers this in an article entitled, "Rock Band shortages sure to anger gamers."


My friend Adam wanted this game, but knew that the release in Canada was going to be delayed until December 20th. So how could he somehow get a copy earlier than that? It would have to come from someone who was living in the US.... hmmm.... who would fit that criteria?