Pokemon GO

I am so incredibly amused by this game. Not necessarily the gameplay itself but the fervor in which I see people playing it. It's unlike anything I've really seen. The office is abuzz, the majority of people playing the game and talking about what they caught and things they learned the night before. That type of communication is fostered 1. Just because people are enjoying themselves, and 2. Because this game doesn't have any sort of tutorial system. You're thrown into the world, pointed at 3 starter Pokemon, and once you've caught your first one, you're cast off into the world.

Much like Ingress, Niantic's last app, Pokemon GO is location-based, meaning you gotta get off your ass to go play. As you walk around, recognizable locations around you are designated as Pokestops or Pokemon Gyms. If you're out in the middle of nowhere, you're going to have a harder time finding locations than if you're downtown in a large city, where Pokestops are plentiful. Pokestops are places were you can get random items given to you every 5 minutes. Things like Pokeballs, Potions, Pokemon eggs, etc. are found here free of charge.

My first two days of playing Pokemon was pretty sparse with regard to resources as my neighborhood didn't have but one Pokestop a couple minutes from my house, and downtown where I work was oddly bare considering Ingress is flush with locations downtown, and Pokemon GO uses that data. Downtown was fixed three days after launch, and I went from having to ration about 6 Pokeballs a day to having about 60 at my disposal at any given time.

Anyway, on one of the sad time, drought days, I was out of Pokeballs for most of the day. My only hope was to level up by hatching a Pokemon egg I had incubating. Eggs hatch by walking around. Each egg takes either 2km, 5km, or 10km to hatch, and no, driving doesn't contribute to your walking total (unless you're driving less than 15mph, so hope for traffic. lol). On this Pokeball-less day, my co-worker wanted to take a break and go walk down to the lake to see if he could catch some water Pokemon. We could see the leaves being flicked up, indicating that there were plenty of Pokemon down there. I was all for a walk as it served my egg hatching purposes, so away we went.

This is an interesting thing about this game, it's absolutely making people get up and get active. A lot of these people aren't necessarily people who are excited about such things, BUT they'll do it for Pokemon. I saw so many people walking around my neighborhood. I'm walking the dog more. I work at a very sedentary job where I stare at a computer screen all day. That whole get up and move every hour thing doesn't normally happen, but it has been the last few days.

Yesterday, someone in another department found a Haunter while she was just sitting at her desk. The word spread and everybody started looking by her desk, Design talking to Dev talking to QA talking to Project Management. A lot of times we're very insular in our departments but not so when we're all trying to find Pokemon. It's become a sort of group activity. It's a fun thing that connects us, and I've talked to people at the office that I hadn't really interacted with much prior. One of the rather quiet devs has been talking a whole lot more as we all try to figure out all the mechanics of the game. People have been going with each other to lunch and interacting with each other a lot more as result of this game.

However, some of that daily chatter involves the common question about if the servers took a shit or exclamations that one lost a [insert Pokemon name here] because the app crashed. Pokemon GO has been fraught with trouble from day one. I had to log in dozens of time as the app crashed and kicked me out. I'll lose at least 10 Pokemon a day because the app decides to shit the bed at the exact moment of capture. I'm fairly certain that if it weren't for this being a Pokemon game and everyone being so stoked on the mere idea of it, people wouldn't stand for an app that has this many problems. I'm sure things will improve, and this fervor for it can't last, but while we're in the thick of it, I'm enjoying the hell out of Pokemon GO.

Every time you see a Pokemon nearby that you haven't caught yet is exciting. Every time I get enough resources to evolve one of my Pokemon is exciting. Every time I walk far enough to trigger a Pokemon egg to hatch is exciting. I'm going to keep playing as long as I'm finding joy in playing it. See ya out there.

Day of the Tentacle: Remastered

Day of the Tentacle has long been one of my favorite adventure games, and when the remastered edition came to Steam, I had to have it. Well...I had to have it once it went on sale...

It's odd to review something you've played through dozens and dozens of times. From the opening sequence, I started quoting all the dialogue. Did I mention I've played this a lot? It had been about a decade since I played it last though, so I was kind of surprised by my recollection of everything. It's ingrained.

One of the nice things about the remastered version is that it has a creator commentary track that's available on many of the screens that give you an insight into the creation process. It was really interesting to hear things like the composers were often told their music files were too massive at 32k or the fact that CD-ROMs becoming prevalent right at that time made them decide to do complete voice over for the entire game in the last month of development when the original plan was that all dialogue would appear as text.

I played the new version of this game through twice, once using the Remastered art and without commentary and once with the classic art and creator commentary overtop. I was kind of shocked because as I played the remastered version, in my mind's eye, that's what it looked like all along. That is how I remembered this game. The only kind of weirdness I noticed was when the location required the the camera to truck left or right, it seemed too smooth. It didn't seem as natural.

During my second playthrough, I turned on classic art mode, and I had to pause a moment because it was far more pixelated than I remembered. When I played the remastered Monkey Island, the opposite had happened. I turned on the remastered mode at first, and my brain absolutely rejected it, thinking, "This wasn't what this game looked like at all!" I turned on classic mode and never looked back in that case. I played Day of the Tentacle fully in classic and fully in remastered mode, and both look great, once my brain kind of acclimated to my 1993 eyeballs.

I loved this game then. I love this game now, and if you love adventure games, you should love it too. Go forth and Steam.

Organ Trail

"Organ Trail", it's like Oregon Trail but with zombies. That pretty much sums it up. You pick a character to be your main, and you name 4 companions to travel with you in a beat up ol' station wagon. The world has gone to shit, and you need to make it across the country from east coast to west coast without getting bitten, shot, starving to death, or dying of cholera, measles, or a mean case of the shits.

You start out allocating a finite amount of points into food, money, ammo, fuel, scrap to fix your car, or various car parts that will undoubtedly blow up in your face along the road. You start out at an encampment, and it is from there you can buy, sell, or trade supplies, scavenge for food, rest your party, or perform odd jobs for people, risking life and limb for most likely very little reward. When you're ready to leave the safety of the encampment and take on the open road, there's no going back, only forward onto the next encampment.

The road is a terrible place with biker gangs that try to run you off the road, bandits that steal your shit or want to kidnap your people. Simply driving is apparently taxing as every bit of progress you make in miles or hours translates into wear on your companions. You'll need to manage when to stop and rest, when you need to scavenge for food, and when there's just too many zombies out and about and you just need crawl up into a ball and sob.

I played the game on Normal. My first time through, I made it to about St. Louis. I had a friend get bitten while taking a piss and subsequently, I had to put her down, another friend just wandered off and we had to leave her behind, another friend kept getting all the diseases but somehow pulled through each time only to die of exhaustion, and a fourth broke about every bone in her body, slowly dying as we drove, the medkits being long gone. The car is dangerous. I continued on alone, cut down by a horde of zombies while trying to find something to shove in my face hole. It did not go well.

My second playthrough was much more cautious and measured. I didn't get stuck out in the middle of nowhere looking for someone to trade me for gas. I paid the outrageous price for guzzleine every chance I got. I scavenged whenever my food was less than a shit ton. I didn't leave safe places when the horde was indicated as being ravenous. I didn't let my car reach the abhorrent levels of disrepair that my actual real-life car is in, and for the most part, it worked out. I still lost one to a bandit. I had the chance to save them, but I shot high, and then the bandit shot them. I'm not proud, but I am alive, and so are my 3 other dysentery-stricken friends.

Organ Trail was a relatively short game, but with the harder levels of difficulty available, you'll probably be glad that it's no longer. It was a good time, and if you played Oregon Trail as a kid, you'll probably get a kick out of it.