Back breaking and computer games
Apr. 29th, 2008 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chrisvenusThose who know ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mi_guida will probably also know of her back and the sorry state it is in. She asked me for some help in fixing this last night which involved her lying on the floor and me standing on her where she told me to. Feeling bcks clicking under your feet is a weird experience. In a good way I shall hasten to add (or so she tells me).
She then returned the favour. Hearing and feeling my back doing that didn't sound like a good thing but she assures me it was. And for some reason having somebody standing on you is very funny. I had a good deal of difficulty keeping my laughter to the level it was at. Oh, and difficulty breathing of course. Having somebody stand on your back will do that though.
After that we finished playing a computer game that I feel deserves some comments (many of which are spoierific so stop now if you want to avoid spoilers). The game is called "The Omega Stone". Its one of these puzzle type games in the style of Myst, Riven and so on. The plot starts off with a promise of ancient mysteries as you start in egypt inside the sphinx (or was it just outside?) where the Ark of the Covenant is still lying where you recently found it (this game is a sequel).
These sorts of games are known for the immense amount of information that you might need to take note of for later reference. Random scribblings on a wall? Yeah, jot them down in case they are the code for a door later or something. This game made that easier by having a camera that you could use to take pictures of things. It just dumped them as images on your hard disk and let you refer to them whenever you wanted [1]. This struck me as a really good idea. It was only when I realised that the fact that you could only use the camera at certain times wasn't because that was the only time you had really relevant info in front of you, it was because... Nope. I got nothing. The game arbitrarily lets you take photos of some stuff and not others.
And the puzzles... These games often have puzzles with thousands of solutions that means that trial and error shouldn't get you through necessarily (it might in some cases I guess). However, I think they went over the top from making sure you couldn't guess and went into slightly tedious... The first puzzle gives you a scroll with hieroglyph like things on and a little picture of four switches each of which has a hieroglyph. There are about 200 symbols on the scroll, some of which are on the scroll. The solution is to go through the scroll and every time you get to a symbol that corresponds to a switch you hit that switch. For a grnad total of 34 switch clicks. And I should add that you can't actually have the scroll and the switches on screen at the same time so it is constant switching views. And I worked it oout and for that many symbols there are nearly 20 billion combinations of switch presses. Is that really necessary?
There were two other puzzles that annoyed me. One involved exploring some ruins and finding skulls that could be used as "keys". You had to find six to go in the locks. There were about 15 lying around I think. Trouble is they were lying around in really annoying places. Dark corners on a dark screen where upping the gamma just wasn't an option. They'd put them in places where you could barely detect them apart from by sweeping your mouse over the area whcih when you have a 360 panoramic screen (with updown tilt too) can get tedious. So six of the fifteen odd were needed but it was hard to tell when you had them all because if you'd missed two of the key ones for exampel then did your solution mean finding more skulls (I'd estimate at least 100 locations that you'd go through finding these skulls) or just that your solution was wrong?
Luckily the walkthrough told us where to find the right skulls. One of them was in a thingy room. Where all the bones are. So there was shelf upon shelf of skulls with about 6 distinct locations to stand and sweep your mouse over the shelves... *yawn*.
And the last puzzle that annoyed me (though was quite cool) was the alchemy puzzle. You had followed a series of improbably complicated clues to work out the right portions of six ingredients that you needed to blend together to make some whizzy item to compelte the game. You had the random skulls (different ones) with the hatches in the top that contained the stuff. One was empty though. Oh no! but wait... The other side of the zone, a mere thirty or fourty clicks away was a supply of the vital ingredient. But being evil b******* they don't just make you do the trip there and back once... No, you've got to do it twice because you need two ounces of this stuff, not just one and your measuring tools only come in one ounce, not two. So bloody infuriating. Not to mention how silly some of the other quantities you needed were. I had to put 14 ounces of one item in whcih just got boring. It was a puzzle designed purely and simply to make sure that you could keep count...
But none of this compares to the ending and the core plot... The plot is that Gil, your enigmatic mentor, had discovered and translated a scroll. Leading you to some omega stone or something... No real hints of what it is. Though as you get to the game you realise it is more than just archaeological interest...
Throughout the game Gil had been encouraging you to hurry up but despite this he would be making really obscure comments to give you clues. He would hint that when you got to stonehenge you should go take a shower (by saying something like "You can get really dirty up there but the campervan has good facilities). In the shower when you turn the hot water on the steam reveals a message saying "The Stones Multiplied". This is the kind of thing Gil does. He apparently thinks its a good idea to be cryptic and annoying. Bear this in mind that Gil wants you to be fast but doesn't actually really help.
So, what is the plot? Well, long ago the templars (yes, its the templars again) had the ark of the convenant and, I dunno, stuff happened and they ended up hiding it tin the sphinx (the cynic in me wonders how much of this is explaining why the ark ended up inside the far older sphinx). They also set up a secret society that survives to this day and Gil is part of it and so are a few other people. And they have enemimes who are vaguely alluded to but really seem totally superfluous apart from the slight amusement of some referenced character going insane and breaking into a dudes office dressed as a druid and trying to stab him up.
so, what is this secrete society up to? That's easy. They are trying to find the omega stone in atlantis so they can use it to blow up the asteroid that is going to crash into the earth and destroy it and that the mayans, egyptians, the builders of stone henge and all sorts predicted would hit in 2012 (the year the game is set in) over 3,000 years ago.
Yeah, that's right. The game ends with you plugging the omega stone into some random undersea (well it is now anyway) pyramid that creates a huge frickin laser beam that blasts this asteroid out of the sky. I kid you not. Oh, wait, I lied. That's not really how it happened. Waht actually happens is that you plug the omega stone into some random undersea pyramid whose crystalline thing glows briefly and then goes out. Luckily at this point in true Han Solo style Gil comes flying in to save the day with words along the lines of "I thought this might happen." and then declared that he bought with him "The Ultimate power source - The ark of the covenant!!" (that is a direcct quote). So yeah, the ark of the covenant is a really big battery. So *then* the laser beam shoots into the sky and disintegrates the metoer on a collision course with other. Apparently the omega stone was the smaller meteorite that hit thousadns of years ago, scoring a direct hit on some atlantean city which was destroyed (and of course became the bermuda triangle) and this is why... No, I'm not sure of why this made it possible to destroy the other asteroid but it did.
And then the game was over in what seemed like quite an abrupt anticlimax. You spend all game collecting 6 magical keys and I have to admit I didn't then expect to unlock a new location (atlantis), solve a trivial puzzle and then have game over pretty much.
What was absolutely hilarious is how clever the developers apparently thought they were since after this was done they hint at a sequel (whcih is fair enough) and then have gil monologue for about 5 minutes telling you how the whole lot tied together. The various civilisations whose ruins you explored were all tribes of atlantis and yawn ywan... hall of records yawn.... He seriosuly went on for five minutes explaining the plot of the game that had, I will agree, seemed a little vague all the way through. This more than anything made me want to e-mail the development team and say "If it was a good game you wouldn't be having to explain what the **** was going on throughout it in the last five mintues of the game."
And it seriously went on. I didn't time it but I know the pair of us listened for a bit. Then chatted a bit, then realised he was still talking and listened a bit more. Then chatted. Then he was *still* talking. He seriously did go on for ages and it wasn't even interesting. To the extent that I can barely remember what he said except that I couldn't stop laughing (and wanting to punch him in the face) for the majority of it.
Yeah, punch him in the face. This character had a vastly inflated opinion of himself. This is somebody who realises that the earth could be destroyed if this metoer is hit so doesn't do everythign he can to help you, he instead gives hints of where to go and leaves cryptic puzzles all over the place making it harder for you to save the world. Who goes out of his way to make it hard to save the world? One of the other memebers of this secret society even insisted I broke into his house before he'd let me in (luckily there was the easy way of navigating the maze, finding the sundial at the center, removing it (to save to use as a key later - wtf?) to find a tap of some sort to turn so that the snake "statue" in his conservatory would open its mouth revealing the key to the hatch down into the basement.
These people are all seriosuly messed up people...
It was fun playing the game co-operatively but I am so glad we were able to find a walkthrough so that when we got stuck on the stupid puzzles we could just look it up.
Oh, and don't get me started on the driver "hump". He said stupid things but when he refuses to take you from Mansion X to Giza without going to stonehenge first I just don't get it. There were clearly off screen vehicle changes since you'd leave one place in one and turn up in a different vehicle in your next location so why you couldn't just go from A to B I just didn't get...
So... that's my ranting done. Would I reccomend it? Maybe if you can get it for free and dont' have anything better to do. Or you are a real fan of these sorts of games and really enjoy the complex information gathering exercises. It didn't seem anywhere near as good as Myst/Riven and that ilk which I have never played but watched ex-housemates playing for long periods of time.
And that's me done. Thanks for sitting through that. It was good to get it off my chest. :)
Edit: Oh, and I forgot to add that I was most amused that at one point I managed to pick up a piece of wood, light it in the fire and then not have a use for it. I tried to work out how to put it down and eventually resorted to putting it in my pack. So I was travelling the world by car, helicopter, plane and boat and all the time had a flaming piece of wood in my backpack. With the scrolls. It amused me and I went from trying to crowbar everything to trying to set light to everything. :)
[1] Childish amusement occurs to me. I must go and put random other images in there to see if I can get "holiday snaps" or other random images to appear in game. :)
mi_guida will probably also know of her back and the sorry state it is in. She asked me for some help in fixing this last night which involved her lying on the floor and me standing on her where she told me to. Feeling bcks clicking under your feet is a weird experience. In a good way I shall hasten to add (or so she tells me).She then returned the favour. Hearing and feeling my back doing that didn't sound like a good thing but she assures me it was. And for some reason having somebody standing on you is very funny. I had a good deal of difficulty keeping my laughter to the level it was at. Oh, and difficulty breathing of course. Having somebody stand on your back will do that though.
After that we finished playing a computer game that I feel deserves some comments (many of which are spoierific so stop now if you want to avoid spoilers). The game is called "The Omega Stone". Its one of these puzzle type games in the style of Myst, Riven and so on. The plot starts off with a promise of ancient mysteries as you start in egypt inside the sphinx (or was it just outside?) where the Ark of the Covenant is still lying where you recently found it (this game is a sequel).
These sorts of games are known for the immense amount of information that you might need to take note of for later reference. Random scribblings on a wall? Yeah, jot them down in case they are the code for a door later or something. This game made that easier by having a camera that you could use to take pictures of things. It just dumped them as images on your hard disk and let you refer to them whenever you wanted [1]. This struck me as a really good idea. It was only when I realised that the fact that you could only use the camera at certain times wasn't because that was the only time you had really relevant info in front of you, it was because... Nope. I got nothing. The game arbitrarily lets you take photos of some stuff and not others.
And the puzzles... These games often have puzzles with thousands of solutions that means that trial and error shouldn't get you through necessarily (it might in some cases I guess). However, I think they went over the top from making sure you couldn't guess and went into slightly tedious... The first puzzle gives you a scroll with hieroglyph like things on and a little picture of four switches each of which has a hieroglyph. There are about 200 symbols on the scroll, some of which are on the scroll. The solution is to go through the scroll and every time you get to a symbol that corresponds to a switch you hit that switch. For a grnad total of 34 switch clicks. And I should add that you can't actually have the scroll and the switches on screen at the same time so it is constant switching views. And I worked it oout and for that many symbols there are nearly 20 billion combinations of switch presses. Is that really necessary?
There were two other puzzles that annoyed me. One involved exploring some ruins and finding skulls that could be used as "keys". You had to find six to go in the locks. There were about 15 lying around I think. Trouble is they were lying around in really annoying places. Dark corners on a dark screen where upping the gamma just wasn't an option. They'd put them in places where you could barely detect them apart from by sweeping your mouse over the area whcih when you have a 360 panoramic screen (with updown tilt too) can get tedious. So six of the fifteen odd were needed but it was hard to tell when you had them all because if you'd missed two of the key ones for exampel then did your solution mean finding more skulls (I'd estimate at least 100 locations that you'd go through finding these skulls) or just that your solution was wrong?
Luckily the walkthrough told us where to find the right skulls. One of them was in a thingy room. Where all the bones are. So there was shelf upon shelf of skulls with about 6 distinct locations to stand and sweep your mouse over the shelves... *yawn*.
And the last puzzle that annoyed me (though was quite cool) was the alchemy puzzle. You had followed a series of improbably complicated clues to work out the right portions of six ingredients that you needed to blend together to make some whizzy item to compelte the game. You had the random skulls (different ones) with the hatches in the top that contained the stuff. One was empty though. Oh no! but wait... The other side of the zone, a mere thirty or fourty clicks away was a supply of the vital ingredient. But being evil b******* they don't just make you do the trip there and back once... No, you've got to do it twice because you need two ounces of this stuff, not just one and your measuring tools only come in one ounce, not two. So bloody infuriating. Not to mention how silly some of the other quantities you needed were. I had to put 14 ounces of one item in whcih just got boring. It was a puzzle designed purely and simply to make sure that you could keep count...
But none of this compares to the ending and the core plot... The plot is that Gil, your enigmatic mentor, had discovered and translated a scroll. Leading you to some omega stone or something... No real hints of what it is. Though as you get to the game you realise it is more than just archaeological interest...
Throughout the game Gil had been encouraging you to hurry up but despite this he would be making really obscure comments to give you clues. He would hint that when you got to stonehenge you should go take a shower (by saying something like "You can get really dirty up there but the campervan has good facilities). In the shower when you turn the hot water on the steam reveals a message saying "The Stones Multiplied". This is the kind of thing Gil does. He apparently thinks its a good idea to be cryptic and annoying. Bear this in mind that Gil wants you to be fast but doesn't actually really help.
So, what is the plot? Well, long ago the templars (yes, its the templars again) had the ark of the convenant and, I dunno, stuff happened and they ended up hiding it tin the sphinx (the cynic in me wonders how much of this is explaining why the ark ended up inside the far older sphinx). They also set up a secret society that survives to this day and Gil is part of it and so are a few other people. And they have enemimes who are vaguely alluded to but really seem totally superfluous apart from the slight amusement of some referenced character going insane and breaking into a dudes office dressed as a druid and trying to stab him up.
so, what is this secrete society up to? That's easy. They are trying to find the omega stone in atlantis so they can use it to blow up the asteroid that is going to crash into the earth and destroy it and that the mayans, egyptians, the builders of stone henge and all sorts predicted would hit in 2012 (the year the game is set in) over 3,000 years ago.
Yeah, that's right. The game ends with you plugging the omega stone into some random undersea (well it is now anyway) pyramid that creates a huge frickin laser beam that blasts this asteroid out of the sky. I kid you not. Oh, wait, I lied. That's not really how it happened. Waht actually happens is that you plug the omega stone into some random undersea pyramid whose crystalline thing glows briefly and then goes out. Luckily at this point in true Han Solo style Gil comes flying in to save the day with words along the lines of "I thought this might happen." and then declared that he bought with him "The Ultimate power source - The ark of the covenant!!" (that is a direcct quote). So yeah, the ark of the covenant is a really big battery. So *then* the laser beam shoots into the sky and disintegrates the metoer on a collision course with other. Apparently the omega stone was the smaller meteorite that hit thousadns of years ago, scoring a direct hit on some atlantean city which was destroyed (and of course became the bermuda triangle) and this is why... No, I'm not sure of why this made it possible to destroy the other asteroid but it did.
And then the game was over in what seemed like quite an abrupt anticlimax. You spend all game collecting 6 magical keys and I have to admit I didn't then expect to unlock a new location (atlantis), solve a trivial puzzle and then have game over pretty much.
What was absolutely hilarious is how clever the developers apparently thought they were since after this was done they hint at a sequel (whcih is fair enough) and then have gil monologue for about 5 minutes telling you how the whole lot tied together. The various civilisations whose ruins you explored were all tribes of atlantis and yawn ywan... hall of records yawn.... He seriosuly went on for five minutes explaining the plot of the game that had, I will agree, seemed a little vague all the way through. This more than anything made me want to e-mail the development team and say "If it was a good game you wouldn't be having to explain what the **** was going on throughout it in the last five mintues of the game."
And it seriously went on. I didn't time it but I know the pair of us listened for a bit. Then chatted a bit, then realised he was still talking and listened a bit more. Then chatted. Then he was *still* talking. He seriously did go on for ages and it wasn't even interesting. To the extent that I can barely remember what he said except that I couldn't stop laughing (and wanting to punch him in the face) for the majority of it.
Yeah, punch him in the face. This character had a vastly inflated opinion of himself. This is somebody who realises that the earth could be destroyed if this metoer is hit so doesn't do everythign he can to help you, he instead gives hints of where to go and leaves cryptic puzzles all over the place making it harder for you to save the world. Who goes out of his way to make it hard to save the world? One of the other memebers of this secret society even insisted I broke into his house before he'd let me in (luckily there was the easy way of navigating the maze, finding the sundial at the center, removing it (to save to use as a key later - wtf?) to find a tap of some sort to turn so that the snake "statue" in his conservatory would open its mouth revealing the key to the hatch down into the basement.
These people are all seriosuly messed up people...
It was fun playing the game co-operatively but I am so glad we were able to find a walkthrough so that when we got stuck on the stupid puzzles we could just look it up.
Oh, and don't get me started on the driver "hump". He said stupid things but when he refuses to take you from Mansion X to Giza without going to stonehenge first I just don't get it. There were clearly off screen vehicle changes since you'd leave one place in one and turn up in a different vehicle in your next location so why you couldn't just go from A to B I just didn't get...
So... that's my ranting done. Would I reccomend it? Maybe if you can get it for free and dont' have anything better to do. Or you are a real fan of these sorts of games and really enjoy the complex information gathering exercises. It didn't seem anywhere near as good as Myst/Riven and that ilk which I have never played but watched ex-housemates playing for long periods of time.
And that's me done. Thanks for sitting through that. It was good to get it off my chest. :)
Edit: Oh, and I forgot to add that I was most amused that at one point I managed to pick up a piece of wood, light it in the fire and then not have a use for it. I tried to work out how to put it down and eventually resorted to putting it in my pack. So I was travelling the world by car, helicopter, plane and boat and all the time had a flaming piece of wood in my backpack. With the scrolls. It amused me and I went from trying to crowbar everything to trying to set light to everything. :)
[1] Childish amusement occurs to me. I must go and put random other images in there to see if I can get "holiday snaps" or other random images to appear in game. :)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-29 10:29 am (UTC)I recently came across 'TV Tropes' which is an addictive website listing clichés in television and other genres. Most of what you describes appears to come under the topic of Fake Difficulty, and is very annoying.
[Health Warning: TV Tropes is highly addictive. The first time I came across that site I spent about 4 hours reading it ;). ]
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-29 10:48 am (UTC)Oops - clicked the link and started reading before I read the rest of your comment. Fortunately I managed to stop after a mere 20 minutes!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-29 11:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-29 05:51 pm (UTC)If so, I'll read it after I've played it. If not I'll read it now!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 09:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-29 09:37 pm (UTC)The Curse of the Mummy is a bit silly - you're wandering around a house with Egyptian artifacts and a killer Mummy in it, solving clues and opening secret doors and things, and in the end it's all a bit of a hand-wavy explanation (well, this guy got mad y'see, and paranoid, and built all these traps, then he thought he was a Mumm, and it was really his daughter that killed him at the end for that stone thing, yes, that one that nearly got you killed when the room collapsed and killer snakes and things appeared). The Curse of the Silver Earring was really very good, and I'd prefer not to give away the plot as it was actually cool and stuff. You get to question suspects and note down clues and experiment on pieces of evidence and stuff. You also get to swithc between Holmes and Watson, and I like the way that as Holmes you usually pick up more clues, but as Watson people usually talk to you more. I also liked figuring out bits of the storyline from the clues. I'm currently playing one called 'The Awakening', which works in a similar way to Curse of the Silver Earring, with extra bis like being able to wander streets and call for cabs, and the storyline also seems to involve Cthulhu. I've juast found an underground room with a statue and a sacrfice on the altar, after working out how to open the big heavy trapdoor using a pulley and some wire.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 09:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 11:16 pm (UTC)here they are.
There appears to be a new one called 'Nemesis'.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 08:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 09:05 am (UTC)Firstly it wasn't all of my weight I put on
And I think the theory is it helps get the spine back into alignment. mi_guida knows all about it because she has a really messed up back so goes to a chiropractor regaularly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractice has info on the general stuff as well as links to "spinal adjustment" though it doesn't seem to be a greatly detailed article.