HabitRPG

As I have mentioned, I am a procrastinator by nature. That was part of the reason I started this blog. It was going to force me to regularly update it by its mere existence. And thus far, it has succeeded in that. Since I started this little experiment back in 2012, I have completed 43 games. Not too shabby.

When I have things I want to do, I either have to trick myself into doing them or they have to be written down somewhere to remind me constantly, or they'll just get stashed away somewhere in the recesses of my brain, along with my 4 years of German, to become dusty and forgotten. To keep this from happening, I'm always making To-Do lists. I'm a To-Do list junkie. It started with Sticky Notes. A bunch of things are scribbled on a Sticky Note, complete it, cross it off, and if I cross em all off, I get to experience the joy of throwing the note away. Problem is, if you don't keep on top of it, the Sticky Notes just keep piling up, and once they reach critical mass, I can ignore them as well as anything else.

Enter the app "Errands". It's kind of amazing. You can split everything up by project. I can set To-Do items to repeat daily, weekly, or monthly. I started off strong, and probably used this app hardcore for a solid year. Problem is, the digital version of the Sticky Note problem happened. I made too many projects and had too many things to do, and I included too many long range To-Dos that couldn't be dealt with quickly. These needed to be broken down into smaller bitesize chunks, but it's trading one variety of brain overload for another.

Recently, Todoist entered the picture. Really, it's pretty much the same app only it looks more minimalist, and it tracks how many tasks you complete in a day and charts it. This is mildly interesting from a worthless statistics point of view. The more tasks you complete, the more points you get and the higher level you become as well. I'm at the level of Professional as of this writing, with 314 tasks completed, and 6582 points...or karma levels, or whatever the hell they call it. What does this mean? Nothing. What does this get me? Nothing. It's trying to make a game out of it, and it works slightly, but if I'm not careful, it's gonna look like my Errands app that has 147 tasks sitting and waiting for me to do while I hide it under the couch and pretend it's not there.

Now there's this thing called HabitRPG. I just started using it this week, so it will be a bit of an experiment. It's just another To-Do list really, but it takes that gaming element further. You have a little pixel avatar that represents you. You can equip various armor, weapons, add pets, etc. by buying them with gold. You earn gold by completing real world tasks. There are three varieties of tasks: Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos.

Habits are things you want to do regularly. Some of the things I have here are Take the Stairs, Fix Supper at Home, Get 8 Hours of Sleep, and Make the Bed. I'm trying my damnedest to not eat out so much, so I can save money, and I never get enough sleep. These are definitely habits that I want to build. Taking the stairs is just an easy points type thing, and making the bed is something I would NEVER do otherwise, but it's easy and I'm glad when it's done, so it forces me to do it. Habits will stay there until you actively delete them. Pressing the + button when you do the task will give you some gold and XP, and pressing - when you fail to do that task will cause your HP to take a hit. You can also set up purely negative habits to dissuade you from doing them. (They have Eating Junk Food on there as an example.)

Dailies are things that you plan on doing every single day. The things I have here involve exercise, reading, and working on personal projects. If I fail to complete my dailies, I'll take a shot to my Health Points at the end of the day, but each completion nets me some XP and cash. These will reset each day.

To-Dos are your standard one-off things that you'd write on a Sticky Note. Add it, when you complete it, check it off, and it goes away, giving you get XP and monies. One thing I really like about these is the ability to add a checklist to a To-Do. If I need to do this one overarching thing, but it has multiple steps, I can add each step in the checklist and keep them together as one To-Do, but I'll be rewarded for each step I complete.

Why the hell do I want money and XP anyway? Well, you can get quests and fight monsters, and you want to be a high level and have better gear in order to fight said monsters. You'll attack them by completing Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos while you're in the midst of a battle. You can do this solo or with a party of your friends. If you, or someone in your party, doesn't complete their dailies, the monster will have a chance to attack. This makes you want to complete your dailies as to not fuck over your friends, and if you do complete them, your attacks will help take down the beastie and get your group some fat stacks and XP. This has, thus far, been a compelling reason to get stuff done.

Another added incentive is that when you haven't done a task in a while, it will go from green to yellow and to red if you slack off on it for several days. I like the psychology of this because I feel compelled to get rid of anything red. Red means I'm failing. I've only been using this website/app for a short while, but I've surprisingly gotten a shit ton done. Easy things that I'd usually put off until the next day, I'm doing immediately. Things that I hate to do and NEVER do, like making the bed, I'll complete just because it's easy. And hopefully this will get me used to doing these various things each day, that it will become less and less of a struggle to decide to do them.

I think HabitRPG will only work for a particular brand of crazy person. This person must have the desire to accomplish things, and they must also be opposed to cheating in the very depths of their soul. It would be incredibly easy to cheat at this game, but if your role-playing style is more toward Lawful than Chaotic, you may have a brand of To-Do list that will keep you in line.

Only the days to come will prove if I can keep up this up or if it will become another one of my failed productivity experiments.

Torchlight

If I had to use one word to describe Torchlight, it would be "unsatisfying". I have never played Diablo, but this clicky click game sounds a lot like it, and what I learned is that I don't care for it as a genre.

You're in this town of Torchlight. There's some crazy dude down in some caves causing a bunch of hooplah because of some ember that makes him tetched in the head, and you gotta go down 35 levels of caves to get to the motherfucker because some lady said so. There's beasties on every floor. Mostly the same beasties...over and over and over in levels that all look pretty much the same. Click until stuff is dead and find the stairs to the next level down. Do this 35 times and you'll reach said motherfucker.

I tired so quickly of this game. It was way too grindy. Same shit over and over. Kill a bunch of shit, loot, kill more shit, loot, have too much loot, go to town and sell it, kill a bunch of shit, loot...until you reach the end of the game or you give up. I wanted to beat it, but it was like homework. There are some quests that I suppose are intended to add some variety but no... It's along the lines of go get this whosawhatsit ember, it's crazy rare. Then you bring it back, and they're like that was awesome, but what I'd really like is the whatsadingus ember, and so forth and so on until you find like 47 embers. It's very much the same with the kill quests. Hey, you should kill this one dude, he's totally the worst, and once you do, they're like, that was good, but this other guy...is even worster. It's dumb, and it's boring.

I'm bored.

When I finally got to the final guy, I was relieved because this hell was almost over. The last guy is quite a large beastie, and he summons other beasties, which are ridiculously numerous. I tried to be all tactical at first, but the longer you're around the guy, the more enemies he spawns. They despawn every once in a while to heal him a bit, which just drags everything out more. It felt like how arcade games ramp up the difficulty at the end by just adding more and more bosses so you'll continue to pump in quarters. While you're not trying to steal my money, Torchlight, you did successfully steal my joy. This was a ridiculous boss fight that I refused to participate in legitimately after a while. When you die, you have the option to pay part of the money you have in your inventory to return to the entrance of the level without losing any experience. I just pulled beastie over to the door and shot at him until I died, respawned, and repeated. No, it wasn't a very impressive win, but what's important was that this awful experience of a game ended.

Only it didn't end. The guy is dead, but embers are still fucking up things that I'm supposed to care about, and so if you want, you can continue to travel down further into the caves and Groundhog Day this stupid game as long as you please because the levels are procedurally generated.

No thank you. I'm going to go find something actually fun to do.

I Am Bread

"I Am Bread" isn't so much a game as it is a form of torture. It's from the same guys that brought you Surgeon Simulator, which, if you remember, I bizarrely enjoyed actually. You can tell it's from the same guys because the whole shitty controls as a game concept is in full force here as well.

The goal is to move a piece of bread across the game world over to something that will toast it, be it a toaster, TV, flat iron, blow drier, etc. As your bread traverses the world, you'll learn that the world is disgusting and dirty and touching the floor will turn you into a petri dish of inedible filth. Mmm... Luckily for you, this slice of bread is an indomitable and tenacious sort. It can grab onto things with it's corners, so you can latch onto objects and walls to find a path across whatever clean surfaces you find on the way to your beloved heat source. The guy who owns the house you're in is a slob, so good luck with that.

Someone bought this game for me for the sole purpose of seeing me rage at it, and rage I did. This game is currently in Alpha, so there are only 4 levels available as I write this. I completed them all and am not totally sure I'll return when the full game is released. It's interesting in a what the fuck kind of way, but I think my friend had it right. You'll get more joy out of watching people hate their lives while playing it than from actually playing it yourself.

The Long Dark

The Long Dark is a survival simulation game where you find yourself in the Canadian wilderness. There's plenty of snow and wolves to gnaw off your face but little else.

The game is still in Alpha, so the Sandbox mode is all that's available at the moment. In Sandbox, your goal is to survive as long as possible. In order to survive, you have to have a handle on your fatigue, hunger, thirst, and level of warmth. These all have to be kept at acceptable levels or your body starts taking damage. In the world you'll find canned goods, beef jerky, and whatnot to stave off hunger. If you kill an animal or find a harvestable pre-dead animal, you can cook the meat and have good eatin for a while. There are bottles of water and sodas sprinkled throughout to quench your thirst, and you'll soon learn that toilet water is the nectar of life. The cold will plague you as well, requiring you to build a fire, find a warmer place out of the wind, or to find less crappy winter clothes. I played on the most punishing mode, so the amount of food, drink, and implements to build a fire were pretty sparse.

You never have all that much in the way of supplies, so you are required to constantly trek out to search abandoned homes for more. On the way, you'll come across plenty of those face-gnawing wolves that I talked about, and if you haven't found a weapon of some kind, you're probably in trouble.

This is one of those perma-death games, so if you die, you have to start over fresh. It was interesting each playthrough though because it was a different experience each time. Once I happened upon enough food to turtle for days. Another time I couldn't find any fire making materials and just traipsed around until I froze to death. And another time, I trekked forever to find water. I finally came upon a watch tower with a single bottle of water in its first aid kit, but I was so exhausted and battered by dehydration by that point that I needed to sleep to get rid of my fatigue and to heal. When I awoke, I was thirsty again, and it was pitch black in the middle of the night. So screwed... Nothing good happens at nighttime. Nighttime should be reserved for sleepin. There's nothing but surprise death out in the night.



I'm probably done with this game for now until they officially release, and I can play the story mode. Before that happens, there's a couple things I hope to see out of an update just to improve the experience (You'll notice some of these confusions/complaints come into play in the above video):

1. I really wish I could jump. Getting stuck by a 5 inch rise in terrain is maddening.

2. When I have a weapon on me, I'd like to see it...in my hand...while I attempt to beat the hell out of a wolf. (When you're being attacked, you'll use it if you have something available, but not seeing it is weird. It's probably so they didn't have to bother making an attack animation.)

3. CROWBARS SHOULD BE ABLE TO BREAK ICE!

4. Some tooltips, tutorials, or just clearer text regarding the use of some items would be nice. I ran around thinking it was a bug that I couldn't burn newspaper when starting a fire. I didn't realize you had to harvest it first to make tinder plugs, and it was those that could be used.

5. The UI for my health or strength or whatever the hell it is when I'm being attacked by a wolf is not clear. I can't tell if I'm doing well or should fear for my life.

Still, overall an enjoyable experience. I'll be looking forward to their official release.

BIT.TRIP BEAT

BIT.TRIP BEAT is like Pong on acid. Except instead of the sparse black background and one block you're knocking about, you have rainbow colored pixel imagery of brains and bushes and trains and whatever the fuck dancing around in the background, distracting you from the dozen blocks hurling toward your paddle at any given moment. The goal is to block all those blocks. You have to be Neo to accomplish such a thing, and I was far from it.

The first time I played this game, I thought it was fun but categorized it as something that I would probably never beat. I was fine with that, but in an attempt to get silly Steam trading cards, I started playing it again. After swallowing my pride and turning it down to Easy, I started having slightly more success. That is, until the third level, Growth. That level is evil, and the final boss is back to basics with a simple Pong game to 15 which made me feel incredibly bad about myself.

This section was surprisingly hard. If the bossman gets to 15 before you do, you have to start the level over. The trick is to hit the ball on the very edge of the paddle to get it going fast and at a sharp angle, but actively trying to do that led to more failure. The music on the boss level is also pulsing, kind of like a heart pumping, which makes everything more stressful, and also led to more failure.

So so many failures...



It wasn't until I played music over top the game that I relaxed enough to beat the damn thing. (Thanks Gwen Stefani's "Baby Don't Lie".) I wouldn't say I'm good at this game now, but I can confidently say that I don't altogether suck, and that's more than I could have hoped for with this ridiculous game.

Dragon Age Inquisition: PS3 Edition May Have Been a Mistake...

Today I was happy. I got Dragon Age: Inquisition in the mail, and I was ready to sink serious hours into a franchise that I love. Unfortunately, right when I was ready to play, the Playstation Network took a shit. I couldn't log in and import my Dragon Age Keep saved world state. I refused to start the game using the default game state, so I wait. After waiting for a couple hours for PSN to come back up, I finally get into the game. After spending about 15 minutes in the game after character creation, I think I may have made a mistake getting the PS3 version. I heard people complain about the graphics, but I dismissed them because I'm no graphics whore. However, there are visual problems that are distracting me from the game, and it sucks. Some points of suck:

• It takes forever to load. It takes so long to switch scenes to the point where I think it may have froze when it hasn't.
• All the people's clothes seem to have a low res texture on them. They all kind of look blurry.
• The draw distance is really close. I'll be walking and objects on the ground will pop into existence once I got close enough to them. It's distracting.
• It seems like there's no lighting effects on, so everything looks a little too bright and because things are not getting environmental light, it's just a certain brightness level always. This is especially noticeable with people's clothes, and it just calls attention to the crap texturing I mentioned earlier.
• The particle effects look really crummy.
• I saw clipping during the initial cut scene.

I didn't think it would look bad at all. Dragon Age: Origin looked a lot better. Skyrim and Uncharted both look amazing on PS3, so I didn't think it would make a difference. The PS3 seems like a strong enough workhorse to show awesomeness. I know it's capable. I think the problem is that those titles were developed for the PS3 and optimized for that system. They got all they could out of it. However, with Inquisition, I'm sure they worked to get all they could out of the next gen system, and the PS3 version had to have the settings turned down significantly just to make it work.

I'm bummed now.

I'll probably try to trade this in for the PS4 version, and it'll just sit around til I actually get a PS4. *sigh*

SteamWorld Dig

"SteamWorld Dig": It's...fine. That's as glowing as my review's going to get. You are Rusty, a steam-powered robot who shows up at a mining town after your uncle gave you the deed to the place.

As you go down into the mine, you can mine for various ores and sell them to upgrade your gear, including your pickaxe, lantern, drill, and other various mining implements you unlock as you go deeper into the depths.

This got very tedious to me because I was mining without a real purpose. Why do I even need this shit? Why should I keep making trips above ground to sell this junk? And the act of mining alone was not fun to me.

My goal then became to go as deep in the mine as possible. I'll just dig up ore on the way as it's convenient. And so I did, and I reached the bottom. Now what? In my haste, I apparently missed a door that was blocked by lasers and would trigger a new objective to, you know...unblock it.

It wasn't until my shitty robot existence was given this purpose that I didn't feel like the game was a chore. I mined more by choice to upgrade my gear and worked to turn off the lasers by destroying hidden generators. And once that was taken care of, I got to fight a mean mad boss man.

Because I hadn't leveled up much during my non-fun having, my health bar wasn't maxed out, and this fight was more difficult than it should have been. I'm glad I beat it and it can be checked off my backlog list, but SteamWorld Dig is not something I would necessarily recommend.