AdamStovicek.com

Archive for the ‘Games’ Category

I haven’t investigated the reasoning behind it, but game publishers through Facebook are asking their players to submit email addresses under the premise that Facebook will make it impossible for them to keep players up to date. That must not be eliciting enough of a response because FarmVille seems to be resorting to extortion tactics by offering free stuff in return for email addresses.

"The box is locked! You need the passcode to unlock it! Want us to email you the passcode? Sign up for FarmVille emails!"

I’m not much a fan of online games. This of course is a small lie as I’ve been engrossed with Mob Wars and Street Racing at Facebook for the last month. But in the most part, online games don’t attract my attention, which is normally in short supply.

MyBrute sets you up with your own personal warrior to go at it head-to-head ala Thunderdome style (“Two men enter. One man leaves.”) You type in a name to generate your warrior. You can change its appearance and coloring to suit your own taste. Then the battles begin.

It’s as easy as it’s entertaining. You pick your opponents, then sit back and watch as they take turns punching, kicking, stabbing, hitting until one of them is critically injured. As you gain experience from the matches, you gain extra strength, agility, and speed. You also obtain weaponry and special skills.

You also get your very own unique mybrute.com address in order to access your warrior and gain recruits which help you build stats.

I got home yesterday to the sight of a huge box sitting next to my front door. Inside was my new Trek 820 mountain bike, courtesy of Pepsi Sweepstakes at PepsiStuff.com.

After getting rid of the zip-ties, foam sheets, and cardboard protections, all I had to do was mount the tire, handlebars, pedals and seat. The bike helmet was included in the box as well. It’s been a pleasure being a Pepsi drinker this summer.

Yes, you can win prizes from the PepsiStuff.com sweepstakes. Tuesday, August 26th, I received a package through FedEx from Young America Corporation where a representative was congratulating me on being a potential winner of one of the Trek mountain bikes. Potential, not official, until they receive my signed and notarized release form. Once they receive it, it should take up to 4-6 weeks to actually receive the prize. It almost feels like waiting for a rebate check to arrive.

If you’re not familiar with this, Pepsi and Coca-Cola products have a ten or twelve digit code located somewhere on the packaging. Usually, they can be found on the underside of the bottle caps. If it’s a pack of cans, it’ll appear on the inside of the box somewhere. You take those codes and submit them to each company’s respective website where you earn points for each code. You can use those points to either “buy” goods or products, or use them towards sweepstakes where each entry is worth a certain number of points.

I had been skeptical in the past as to whether or not these prizes that Pepsi and Coca-Cola are giving away were actually awarded to anyone. The goods you can buy are usually pretty cheap looking or require an outrageous amount of points in order to get them. The sweepstakes appeared as black-holes for points. I was quite wrong.

I have no idea what the Trek bike is supposed to look like or even what model it is. There wasn’t much information along those lines. Only the retail price of the prize is given at $330. I’ll have to throw a few more dollars towards my IRA next year to offset the 1099 claim on the taxes.

Some punk in Thailand decided he wanted to a rob a taxi driver. His reasoning was that he wanted to see if it was as easy to do in real life as it is in the Grand Theft Auto IV video game. Eventually, the punk stabbed the taxi driver to death when the driver fought back. Now, stores in Thailand are pulling the game off of the shelves.

Supposedly, this comes as a “wake-up call” to the Thailand government to enforce some regulation on the gaming industry in their country. Proposed solutions include imposing a rating system on games, and implementing a curfew for kids playing these kinds of games in arcades. News agencies are reporting on the crime and making parallel comparisons to issues in other countries. If we were to believe the hype, we would think that kids all over the world are robbing, killing, and raping all because of video games. We would believe that we could live in a calm and serene world were it not for the negative influence of violent video games.

And why should we stop at video games. Music has been blamed for decades of robbing our kids of their innocence, turning them to drugs and sex, and making them kill others or themselves. And then when we finish with music, we can turn our attention back to the horrors of books and set piles of them burning into the night as we send them and their evil messages back to the devil himself. We could fuel the fires with the alcohol we would end up banning. Everyone would be so enlightened by this time that no one would need a drink in order to get through the day. And then all the evil and its murderous ways would disappear from the Earth and we would live in paradise, a heaven on Earth.

The truth of the matter is that humans will kill, maim, and destroy with no outside encouragement from games, videos, music, alcohol, drugs, or otherwise. What was Jack The Ripper’s influence? Did he see the recently published Gray’s Anatomy and wonder if the insides of women were just like they were in the book? It’s a good thing he hadn’t said so in his letter to the London Central News Agency or else our progress in the medical world might have been delayed. Was there a version of Stratego in the 1930s that might have influenced Hitler and his appetite for world domination? If so, it was never mentioned. And thankfully not or else millions all over the world might not enjoy that game today. Did Napoleon see a play? Did Attila listen to a story?

My point, which mirrors that of a large majority, is that you cannot blame things, video games or otherwise for why people do what they do. The kid in Thailand might have found another reason to do what he did. The fact that GTA4 brought out a desire to rob a taxi cab is not the fault of the game, even though it may have influenced him in some way. Millions of kids and adults play GTA4. There aren’t millions of acts of murder taking place at this very moment because of it. I’ve been listening to heavy metal music and playing violent video games for most of my life. If the hype was true, I’d be either chasing crack highs with beer binges, sitting on death row, or dead in a ditch already.

I don’t, and the millions playing GTA4 don’t, because we have a sense of what’s right and wrong. This kid in Thailand should have known that robbing and killing a man is wrong. But humans will do what they do for any reason. Kids have burned themselves from fire because no matter how many times they were told that the fire would do that, they didn’t fully realize it until they got burned. It happens. There is nothing you can do to fully stop it. Ban all the violent video games and someone else will get killed because they saw it happen in a movie. Ban all the violent movies and someone else gets killed because they read it in a book. It isn’t the media that’s provoking people to kill.

And while those in the gaming community are beginning to reel at the knee jerk reaction of New Era Interactive Media to pull the games from store shelves in Thailand, or the news media’s overactive attention to this one event, keep in mind that it will pass. Video games are big business. The fan base is huge. And the gaming industry knows that they don’t turn people into murderers.

I can always grab a racket, or a golf club, or rent a race car at the track. But there are no zombies in real life that need killing. There are no special powers that help me scale tall buildings or fly through the air. And I can’t rightly walk through the streets of any major city and go on a killing spree. For all those reasons, I turn to the joy of video games.

Lately, I’ve been obsessing over the game Mines. Very few people have never heard of the game. Those of us who enjoy Linux and the Gnome desktop environment know it as Mines (or Gnomine). Windows users know it as Minesweeper and KDE users know it as KMines. You get a grid of blocks with a number of mines hidden beneath them. You click on blocks to reveal numbers that give clues to how many mines surround that one numbered block. You then flag surrounding blocks you think may have mines beneath and you keep going until you have successfully flagged all of the mines or inadvertently click on and uncover mine. And no true player ever uses a small (beginner) or medium (intermediate) field. Go large (expert) or don’t play.

The minesweeper game itself has been re-coded and re-worked over the years to include grids of shapes other than square/rectangle. There’s also been a few incarnations of three dimensional cubes such as emMines (pictured next to this paragraph) from Eagle Mode.

My obsession is the result of not having completed a game for longer than I can remember. If I don’t lose because of miscounting proposed mines around a certain number, it’s from coming down to a group of blocks with a known number of mines left but no discernible pattern to the numbers that sufficiently describe where they might be. And I hate guessing wrong. The picture at the top of the page represents my last attempt where the last two mines needed to be guessed. They could have been in either of the two sets diagonal blocks. As usual, I lost.

Aside from trying to win, I’ve found a couple of other goals that makes this simple game a little more complicated. For instance, ones, twos, and threes are found in great quantities. Fours and fives are found sparingly. Sixes are rare and surprising to find. I have yet to see a seven or an eight. As if hoping to capture the sight of an endangered species in the wild, I look forward to the day I can print-screen the sight and share it with the world.

Another interesting aspect I found is at the beginning of each game when you’re forced to click blindly. Lots of times, you uncover just one block with an arbitrary number beneath. Having just the single number surrounded by unknowns doesn’t give you enough information to flag the surrounding mines with any confidence. Your best hope is to uncover the largest non-mined group of blocks as possible in which to start. However, I found that there are some times when you uncover a lot of single non-mined blocks before you get your large grouping or hit on a mine. A small competition of some kind to see who can uncover the most single non-mined blocks could certainly be entertaining.

Aside from my own personal goals, the international community has been watching completion times for some time now. There are such places as The Authoritative Minesweeper and Planet-Minesweeper that keep track of international rankings of the best in that field.