(non)Flying Fowl

With a foot of snow on the ground and temperatures at a tail-shriveling -20 degrees Fahrenheit (with windchill), my mind turned to wintery fun. I could build a snowman, or maybe find a nice steep hill and go sledding! Maybe Aaron and I could build snow forts in the back yard and have a snowball fight!

Or we could sit in our nice warm house with a cup of hot coco and play games. Yeah, that sounds good...

Going with the frigid theme of the day, and in compliance with my Free in '14 month I clicked on over to the gaming site Kongregate and picked out a cold one: Learn to Fly.

Penguins have long suffered humiliation for their flightlessness, but no more! With a little boost from gliders, rockets, and some good old fashioned personal recklessness, this little penguin will take to the skies!

It's a dream...Come true...

Learn to Fly follows that penguin on his guest to make aviation history. To play,you chuck a penguin down an icy ramp, controlling his trajectory with the arrow keys, or A and D keys upon launch. Your distance is measured once you land in the water below. Now, I couldn't find a way to measure my actual distance, rather my distance was measured in cash. There are several 'stages', distinguishable only by differing achievements. The achievements range from distance traveled to time spent in the air.

I decided to see how far I could get in 25 flights. The first few went about as well as can be expected. I more or less fell off the ramp into the water, getting about $12 for every belly flop. By my eighth flight I was able to afford a hole-riddled glider, bringing up my average to $37, a number that jumped again to $59 when I bought the rocket.

Flight number 19, I launched as usual, but early in the flight I accidentally hit the 'D' key, sending my penguin rocketing toward the water. I hit 'A' out of desperation, only for it to shoot my avian friend skyward once more. $105. BAM.

By my final run I figured I had the hang of the game, and I felt pretty confident in beating my highest score of $136. I raced down the ramp at a breakneck speed, launched into the air, and immediately dive-bombed into the water. I had about a second to come to terms with my abysmal ending to the game, when from the watery depths my penguin shot back toward the heavens as though propelled by a cannon. I finally landed some distance away, with a score of $171.

Huh. Cool.

Learn to Fly 2 follows the same principle, with various updates. You land in snow instead of water, they're are more upgrades available, and your score is measured in actual feet (I think), calculated along with your speed, altitude, and a few other measurements.

Play It or Pass It: Play it. Both Learn to Fly and Learn to Fly 2 can be a bit tedious starting out. Both games involve alot of face planting in the beginning, and upgrades come slowly. Get past the initial hump and it's smooth sailing, having almost an addictive 'one more round' quality. While I personally thought the first Learn to Fly was more fun, both make excellent time wasters.

Want to play it yourself? Here's the link!

http://www.kongregate.com/games/light_bringer777/learn-to-fly

Go forth and FLY!

I wanna go to DUNGEONLAND!

I have a habit of procrastination.

Go on, get your laughs out now so we can focus.

Anyway, no one is more familiar with my behavior than Aaron, who was kind enough to give me a little boost with my Free in '14 quest by downloading a bunch of free games off Steam for me.

Thaaaaaaaaaaanks baaaaaaaaaaaaabe.

Of the four downloads on my screen one stood out: Dungeonland. Mostly because of the bright colors (I might have a short attention span...maybe), but also because it had the word 'dungeon' in the name. Can't go wrong with vanilla fantasy, right?

Dungeonland is a three-player action/dungeon-crawler with a colorful, cartoonish style and sense of humor. The game takes place in a theme park which is worryingly devoid of tourists, unless you count giant caterpillars and skeletal archers as tourists. As per the requirements, it is free to play, but almost immediately upon loading the main menu screen I'm hit with a mustachioed jester's pitch:

HEY! YOU! FILTHY NERD! HERE! BUY THIS ARMOR SKIN PACK!!! ONLY $2.99!!!

Filthy nerd? Why, I've never been so insulted in my life! Hrumph! HRUMPH I SAY!

Pleasantries aside, The game isn't bad. Dungeonland has a heavy emphasis on teamwork, giving you two AI partners if you can't play online or with friends. Like other fantasy games, you have a choice of classes: Warrior, Mage, or Rogue. Within those classes is a little customization, such as running a fire or lightning based type mage, or an assassin or ranger type rogue.

Predictably I ran a warrior my first time through. Controls were about as basic as one can get: WASD to move, 'space bar' to dodge (or hip thrust, in the case of the mage) and left-clicking to attack. Only two of the six levels are available in free mode: DM Tower and DM Mode. I hit 'DM Tower' and braced for whatever the crap happened next.

What happened next wasn't bad. Not the best game I've ever played, but certainly not the worst.

You just run through the level, wailing on garbage cans for loot and fried chicken while killing anything that moves...and isn't your AI buddies. The enemies attack in mobs at certain points, and a separate mob with a mini-boss attacks at random.

My first opponent was a sheep. A sheep that promptly rolled onto its back when I ran up to it. Do you have any idea how hard it is to slaughter a defenseless, innocent sheep? It's so fluffy, for crying out loud.

Not hard at all, actually. Easier after I learned sheep drop fried chicken and hamburgers upon excruciating murder.

After clearing two levels of their skeletons and chicken you finally reach a boss. You know, like a real dungeon!

Naw, man, I'm good to *hic!* fight...

The big baddy of the DM Tower was nothing less than worthy of the 'Boss' Title. He was the dreaded...The terrifying...

...The Beer-Holder.

The lush proved to be quite a challenge, despite his inebriated and gassy state. My battle strategy consisted of dying a bunch, getting rezzed by my AI team mates, then running like a bitch until I needed rezzing again. 

He never saw it coming.

With the day saved and my interest piqued, I figured I'd see how much the other levels cost to unlock. I like the game enough to drop 2-3 bucks on a little expansion, so I clicked on the 'store' option. 

'All Access Pass'... So... I can't buy just one level? That's cool, I suppose I could swing a few extra bucks if I get all of them...But where's the price? *click*

Clicking on the 'Pass' icon took me completely out of the game and into the Steam store. The Steam store homepage. I had to hunt down Dungeonland to find the pricing, and even then I couldn't find an 'All Access Pass'. Instead I found the option to buy the whole game. 

For $16.99. Nope.

Play It or Pass It: If you have a Steam account absolutely give it a try, a free try. If you don't have a steam account, fix it because clearly you're broken, then give it a go. 

New Year, New Stuff

2014 is here, and with it a slew of resolutions...Ones we'll keep and others we've probably already broken. *cough*

My own resolutions range from dreadfully predictable to completely obvious: I don't have alot of imagination in the self improvement sector. But just like last year and the year(s) before that I will follow through this year!

...Right? Right. So whats this mean for Geeky Cat?

One of the most popular resolutions made by people, other than the obvious 'lose 20 pounds' bit, is saving money. So for the month of January I will be playing games that are 100% free to play. That's not to say these games don't have a micro-transaction model (wherein a player can pay real money for various power ups or costume changes), which they very well may. But both acquiring and playing the game must be free. No purchasing cost. No monthly subscriptions. Nothing.

Sounds tough, right? Actually no. Just in my initial research alone I came across enough games to play a new free game for every post for the rest of the year, without touching the same one twice.
Facebook games have come a long way from the dark days of Farmville, and the gaming messenger Steam has a few hundred to choose from.

On a side note, I do have one resolution that's a bit...Well, different. Teaching my cat to not watch TV.

You see, late last year I noticed my cat Duchess' habit of watching screens. TV's, monitors, the lot of them. She doesn't just sit there, she purposely places herself dead center to the screen, watching and following the action as it plays out, cocking her head to the side when something happens.

It-was-hilarious.

So tickled was I that I began showing her bird videos on Youtube. We'd laugh as Duch would run to the computer at the first chirps of the show, sitting as close as she could to the monitor, occasionally checking behind it to find the blackbird that just flew off screen. Soon her sister Precious joined her, sitting shoulder to shoulder as birds and fish danced across the screen.

I personally don't care to watch the same robin sitting in the same nest for 45 minutes. This machine is made for gaming!

Duchess, move. I'm trying to kill a giant spider queen. Precious! Stop pawing at the screen! Yes Tippy, I'll grab your trea- DAMMIT PRECIOUS STOP!

You can see why this can be a problem. I'm sure cat obedience can't be too hard to teach...

...Right?

Sleepy Clean

So I finally decided to clean my keyboard. Last night shortly before bedtime (while incredibly sleepy, and under the influence of melatonin) I began the process of prying my keys off, one by one. Some of the keys put up a valorous fight, gaining additional strength from the metal wires holding them in place. With a little extra tug they too fell to my hand. But tech trashing can be tiring work, and I soon went to bed, with loose, grimy keys strewn about my desk to be dealt with in the morning and/or eaten by a cat.

The inside of my keyboard was disgusting. Cat fur, crumbs, birdseed, string. You name it, it was probably in there. Festering.

Using q-tips and clean paint brushes I cleared the muck, stopping occasionally to bang the unit upside down on my desk to dislodge the more stubborn bits.

This morning I began the arduous process of cleaning the individual keys and putting the unit back together. Scrubbing the keys was the fast and easy part. Putting the damn thing back together was a different beast all together. A feat I tackled without my reference pictures. Because sometimes I like to live dangerously.

Many of the keys were simple. I know from muscle memory where the 'WASD' keys are, as well as the 'E' and 'F' keys. The number and F(1-12) keys were also a cinch. Most of the time I did a simple test of pressing a key to see what it did, but that method was far from fool-proof.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to place a key when you have exactly zero idea what the key (or corresponding symbol) even does? How about when said key does seemingly nothing when pressed? Why do I have a 'right click' button anyway?

Why? Why are you here?

All was not frustration, as I also had moments of wondrous discovery. I actually have buttons on my keyboard that, get this, brings up my computer's calculator! And yet another that mutes my speakers, others that change the volume of my speakers, another that would probably bring up my email if I actually fiddled with the settings...Pure magic, the lot of them!

Cleaning the keys also gave me a little insight into my own gaming habits. Since 'WASD' are almost universally used in online gaming as the movement buttons, it's only natural that a gamer's keys be somewhat faded, the letters smudged away from the many hundreds of hours of use. Mine too show signs of wear, but not all of them. Only the 'A' and 'S' keys show any distress, indicative of my habit of running like a bitch when a fight goes sideways. Which seems to happen a lot...

So now here I am, the proud owner of a (somewhat) clean keyboard.

Now all the keys feel funny.

*click* *click* COOKEHS! *click* *click* *click*

Video games may not have been around for very long in the grand scheme of human existence, but since its creation it has left an eternal and irreplaceable mark on our species. Gaming has the ability to draw its audience into fantastical worlds in ways movies and books never could, making heroes of men, women, and children alike.

Gaming as a whole is inherently good.

Once in a while, however, a seed of evil is planted. Hiding among the good sprouts until it breaches the soil and blooms into the world, these games are unrepentant in their wickedness, drawing victim after victim down into the abyss.

Now, I'm not talking about bad games, I'm talking about evil games. This brings me...To Cookie Clicker.

Cookie Clicker is exactly what it sounds like: Clicking cookies...To get more cookies.That's it. That's the game play. All of it. You click a cookie to make more cookies.

But you can't get very many cookies simply by clicking! No, you need far more cookies than mere clicking can allow, so the unbreakable chain begins. See, you can spend the cookies you've earned (by clicking the cookie) to buy tools, such as additional cursors to click for you, and grandmas working 'round the clock on production. As your CPS, or cookies-per-second, rises, so does your cookie making empire. You build farms and mines to strip the world of its natural cookie resources. You send ships to the deepest parts of space in search of planets with cookie dough cores to bring back home. You create a time machine so you can reclaim cookies before they were ever eaten.

Well Agnus, if you and the BINGO club hadn't called the Board of Health on me demanding insurance, I would still be paying you...In cookies. 

The game preys on a player's worse levels of OCD. Click the cookie, get a cookie. Click a cookie, get a cookie. Just click the cookie, one more time. Hey, now you get two cookies when you click the cookie. Now three. Now four. Now you get 16 cookies when you click the cookie. Spend a few cookies and buy a couple upgrades so you can now get 1,898 cookies every time you click the cookie. Spend a few more cookies and hire a few more grandmas. What do you do with all the cookies from your grandma army? You fund scientists to open portals to other dimensions so you can get their cookies too. Just a couple more clicks, and you can afford a new antimatter condenser, since all antimatter might as well be cookies.

This is your existence. All of it.

The numbers also skyrocket at a pace I didn't think allowable by physics, rewarding the player's frantic clicking with enough cookies to feed several small countries. Enough cookies to conquer the universe.

How pervasive is this disease? Aaron was the first victim, quickly becoming a sort of Typhoid Mary of cookies. He started playing sometime yesterday evening, and as we speak is thinking up ways to automate the clicking for him...As a click withheld is a cookie wasted. His first convert was our friend over at Kitsune Dream, who when tasked with cookie clicking laughed. Surely a game so ridiculous couldn't be so addictive, so all consuming, as Aaron claimed. A bold statement made while clicking away the entire time...A clicking that was still going strong three hours later.

I became the next sacrifice to Big Cookie. The elation I felt as my CPS rose higher and higher rivals that of my first meeting with Aaron. I wanted, no, needed more cookies. At time of writing my CPS is at a minuscule 879,787.9 cookies, compared to Kitsune's 52 million and Aaron's mind numbing 254,000,000 cookies per second...

Now I'm at 888,267.9 cookies every second, with an additional 17,877 every time I manually click on the cookie. I have 97 grandmas, three farms, a mine, three space ships, four alchemy labs, 16 dimensional portals, and seven time machines, all working to make all the cookies.

All of them.

*click*...*click*...*pause*...*click*...*click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click*

1,013,658.3 cookies per second.

1,388,831.4 cookies per second.

Update!

2,779,009.9 cookies per second.

Caaaaaaaalling Mothership

Wha....Where...Where am...I....

What year is it?

Starbound certainly has that affect on people...Minutes, hours, days go by with little or no recognition of the passage of time. Seriously, what's time when you can be flying around the universe exploring planets? In a space ship?

You start, of course, like many other games: Character creation. There are six races to choose from:

Avian: Zealot Bigbirds
Floran: For you vegetarians out there
Hylotl: Fishy fish...Fish...
Apex: Simian savants
Glitch: Robots who like to get medieval
Human: Booooooooooooriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing

As an old fan of Sesame Street I choose Avians...

...And then I began my career as a professional locust.

I travel from planet to planet, sector to sector, and leech. I mine all surface ore. I raid any and all settlements, because I may not need a giant rabbit statue or 14 refrigerators, but dammit I want it. What the hell is a robot doing with a wooden toilet, anyway?

Hey there big guy, ya mind runnin' this up to my ship? I gotta run back over to that village to the east, I think I might have left a chair or something. Make it fast, Brain Trees leak somethin' fierce this time of year, and I can't have their ooze staining my new curtains.

Starbound, like Terraria before it, brings out my worst hording tendencies. I pocket anything and everything what isn't nailed down, and some things that are. I once partially dismantled a Glitch village because I figured I might use the thatch roofs for something down the road...Maybe.

Starbound is a massive undertaking. There are literally thousands of systems and planets within the game, each with it's own unique flora and fauna. Alien monsters are built using a randomizer, so you can see a myriad of terrifying and adorable creatures, some of which may or may not melt your face off with acid... And or fire. The planets are also randomized, consisting of anything from snow to brains to jungles to grasslands.

The game is currently in beta, so issues and updates are common, but even early on it's proving to be amazing. Even an update-related character wipe a few days ago failed to dampen my enthusiasm, although it is heartbreaking to lose a diamond pickaxe just after acquisition.

Frackin' Fractals

New Fractals have come to Tyria and Guild Wars 2, and with their arrival I decided to finally try them.

They certainly weren't what I expected.

meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow 

I mean, who expects to fight giant cat golems? Who? I didn't. Nor did I expect to bow to a billion story tall man-statue, dance with holograms, or get eaten by swarms of piranha. But by gum those things happened.

Fractals are more or less like the dungeons of the game, but rather than following the story mode followed by three separate explorable paths model, Fractals consist of three individual instances, generally unrelated to each other, and each with a mini-boss and a treasure chest at the end. After completing one you are teleported to the next, and so on. After the third instance you enter a fourth, consisting of a larger boss. 

And what a pain in the tail they are. My first boss was a giant, and I mean freaking huge, tentical...thing. I don't really know what it was, but it was big, covered in tenticals, had one ginormous dripping eye that haunted my nightmares and waking mind for about three days afterward.

I think tonight I might try and...What's this? A gift on Steam? 

STARBOUND!! I GOT STARBOUND!!!! TEARRIA IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!!!

Come, Meatliver, the universe awaits!!

Seriously. Started up character creation, and the game named me Meatliver. Who am I to mess with perfection? 

Thanks John!