Thinkin’ Things
So I have NO IDEA what triggered my memory of this, but back when I was in elementary school, my dad had gotten me the Thinkin’ Things collection (original, Collection 2, and Collection 3). These were three computer games that consisted of sets of puzzles, interactive playthings, and things that made a lot of music/sound.
I LOVED them. I have so many memories of playing through them for HOURS at my dad’s condo on that old Mac computer that he had.
Here’s a place where you can play the first one.
My favorite was the shapes that all made different sounds (the icon with the white dot grid and the geometric shapes on it)
And the second one.
I think my favorite game in the second collection was the one where you could draw a path and have a set of shapes follow it (the one with the window/circles icon).
I can’t find an interactive version of the third collection, but here’s a YouTube vid:
The one with the balls and the sand (7:34), OH MY GOD I LOVED IT. I remember all of these sounds, man. And the half time one (25:01) EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Yay nostalgia.
Did anyone else have these games?
Pantsylvania
Have I mentioned this game on here before? I’m not sure and I’m too lazy to check (pro blogging, yo), so I’mma mention it now.
Among the funky computer games I played as a kid was this one called Pantsylvania. I remember playing this with my friend GE in Troy a lot. It was basically this game where you could explore the town of Pantsylvania through several different buildings and with the guidance of different characters that had you do different things in the buildings. It was super point-and-click fun for young kids and I remember really enjoying it.
The frog gets a lot of hate, apparently. He was my fave.
Edit: here it is if you want to play it yourself!
COME ON, IDAHO TRUCKIN’
Ever since SCS Software announced that Idaho was the next state to be added to American Truck Simulator, I’ve had the expansion at the top of my wishlist on Steam.
I have never been so excited for a game expansion in my life.
They’re even putting in those little historical marker signs. I recognize those little buggers!
ALSKJFLSFJSALFKAJSFAKSLJF I don’t know if you’ll be able to drive through Moscow, but there’s no way they’re not putting Lewiston and the Lewiston grade in there.
EEEEEEEEE EXCITED
BALLS TO THE W A L L
YESSSSSSSS Idaho is coming!
I seriously hope they’ll have Lewiston/the Lewiston grade in there. It’ll be so weird to be playing this game in a region that I know in person.
*excited screeching*
UTAHHHH
It sounds like the next state being added to American Truck Simulator is Utah.
That’s got to mean they’ll do Idaho at some point. I bet they’ll do Colorado too pretty soon. I’m not sure which one they’ll do first (or if they’ll do something like Texas instead), but I think it’s a good sign that Idaho will happen.
THAT WOULD BE SO COOL
Hahaha, oh dear
This game makes me appreciate the relative realism built into ETS and ATS.
Maddie, does watching this guy’s mad pro bus skillz give you heart palpitations?
WASHINGTON, YO
AWWWWWW YEEEEEAHHHHH!
Gonna play this bad boy right now.
Edit: crap, I started my dude in Tucson, so it’s going to take me a while to get jobs that’ll take me to Washington. Darn, I guess I’ll have to truck more.
‘Murica Truckin’
OH SHIT
American Truck Simulator is getting a Washington state expansion!
That means Seattle, Spokane, and…maybe Pullman??
SUPER COOL I NEED IT
Edit:
It looks so freaking pretty, holy crap.
Next they need Idaho. I bet a lot of people would be like “lawl, why the potato state, there’s nothing there!”
Um.
- Yellowstone
- Craters of the Moon
- Rocky Mountains
- Shoshone Falls
- Hells Canyon
- The Lewiston grade (super cool for truckers?!?)
I think all of those things would be cool.
Anyway.
DUSK
Zomg, do you like FPSs? Are you stuck in the early 90s? Do you think Quake is still one of the best games ever made?
THEN YOU NEED TO TRY DUSK
It’s so good.
I’m not very far in, but—let me say it again—it’s so good. Most video games don’t hold my attention for very long for some reason. It takes a really special game to keep me actually engaged for any stretch of time. This list of games includes:
- Quake
- Half-Life
- Fallout 3
- Rock Band
- Euro Truck Simulator 2
- The Sims*
I can now add Dusk to that list. I could play this for hours at a time.
GET IT.
*The Sims is…special. I will spend three hours making a family, but as soon as I’m tasked with building them a house, I “nope” outta there to go make a new family. I’m one of those Sims players.
Oh, The Sims…
HAHAHA, oh my god.
“Put ‘em in the Fun Pit.”
“Go back to Thanos. See what he’s up to. Oh, he’s playin’ football!”
I like to think this is how they storyboarded Infinity War.
Euro Truck Simulator 2, aka The Best Game Ever
Read the title.
You: “A trucking simulator? Really?”
Me: “Really.”
You: “But that sounds boring.”
Me: “SORRY, I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER MY SCANIA”
It’s very fun. Very relaxing. I delivered beets to Kiel. I only crashed into a few cars. Europe has too many roundabouts.
Have a video! Not mine, obviously.
Super fun, seriously.
Edit: SCREW YOU AND YOUR BACKWARDS WAYS, ENGLAND! SCREW YOU SCREW YOU SCREW YOU
BLACK MESA: The Update
THIS FREAKING GAME IS FANTASTIC.
I’ll post more about this when I don’t feel like crap (I’ve got a really bad headache right now), but here are some of the things that are great:
- Better graphics. WAY better graphics. Like, holy crapples.
- More diverse set of scientists. It’s not just the same three guys and a gaggle of their clones.
- The scientists/security guards are hysterically snarky towards Gordon. It’s fantastic.
- While most of the game is the same, there ARE some new/different parts, which is great because I’d basically memorized the original and could go through it quite easily.
- Gordon Freeman is still very much Gordon Freeman.
WOO!
BLACK MESA
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS
WHY THE HELL HAD I NEVER HEARD OF THIS BEFORE?
Half Life is my favorite game, dudes. I want this.
Edit: Nate bought this for me. Nate makes bad life decisions.
Construction Complete
I am DONE with grandma’s house in The Sims! Finally!
The outside/front yard:
The dining room/kitchen:
Another shot of the kitchen:
The living room (and the other dining room past it):
The living room as viewed from the dining room:
The bottom floor:
Another shot of the bottom floor:
The backyard/pool:
The master bedroom:
Another shot of the master bedroom:
And the bird’s-eye shots from above for each of the three floors, because getting good/close screenshots of every room in this house is impossible:
I miss you, grandma!
I’m ignoring yesterday’s events by playing The Sims
I HAVE AN IDEA!
Since both my grandpa and grandma on my dad’s side have passed away, my dad and my aunt/uncles have decided to put their California house up for sale.
This makes me super sad; I always liked grandma’s house—it’s huge and weird and has a pool—and given how often I’ve moved houses in my life, it was nice to know that that house would always be the same. But now it will soon belong to someone else.
SO, what I’ve decided to do is build the house as accurately as I can in The Sims, including accurate (well, as accurate as possible) furniture and décor and all that fun stuff. It’s going to take a while ‘cause that house is huge, but I’m going to do it! I’ll post screenshots here when I’m done (as if anyone cares).
FALLOUT 4!
FALLOUT4FALLOUT4FALLOUT4!!
The good: Fallout 4.
The bad: There’s no official release date yet, but once it’s announced, it’ll mean that I’ll have to get a new PC (desktop, not laptop). Which is good in and of itself, but it’s also expensive.
But…
FALLOUT 4!
CELESTIAL GOAT
It’s 4 in the morning and I’m like negative amounts of tired, so rather than sleeping I decided I wanted to play some sort of video game. I was originally going to play some Half Life, but as I was going to click on the desktop icon, I caught a glimpse of The Neverhood icon and decided to play that instead.
I’d forgotten how fun this game is!
Since I seriously doubt any of my readers ever played this late ‘90s claymation game, have a 10 minute review and then a play-through if you’re interested.
It is a super hard game to find (and it’s not cheap when you do find it), but I still have my original CD!
(Also, Hoborg rules.)
The Cosmic Osmo Appreciation Post
So today I’m going to talk about this game:
This is the opening screen from Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel. It’s almost as old as I am (published in 1989) and is pretty much the only non-shooter game I grew up with (unless you count Spin Doctor as well).
Says Wiki: “There is no goal, no system of scoring points, and nothing that the player can keep in an inventory. A player can be said to have “finished” the game if they’ve explored every area and found every secret, but the game gives no feedback to indicate whether this has happened. Although this is unconventional, it allows finding new secrets to be a genuine surprise, while avoiding the frustration of endlessly searching the game for the last secret to achieve 100% completion.”
And it’s a big game, especially for 1989. And look at these awesome black and white screenshots:
You can buy Cosmic Osmo on Steam (for pretty cheap, I think). I totally recommend it.
And happy birthday, Matt!
Things that rule:
Muse. This video is surreal.
Half-Life. Even when condensed to 60 seconds.
Fallout 3. Because you should have just given him the sweet roll (probably only funny ‘cause I played it, but whatev).
Sorry. Not feeling very well and am also in a gaming mood.
Today’s song: My Humps by The Black Eyed Peas (shut up.)
I downloaded Steam and it downloaded my soul
So for all the PC gamers out there, I totally recommend downloading Steam. Sean was trying to get me to do so for the longest time and I never did, but for whatever reason, today I decided I *needed* to play around with Garry’s Mod, so I downloaded Steam and verified my old Half-Life CDs.
It’s pretty rad.
ALSO I can now play Deathmatch Classic, which is like my favorite thing ever. I also totally own at it, too.
Today’s song: End Love by OK Go
Shall I compare thee to a bed of nails?
OH GOD IT’S ANOTHER LIST WHO WOULD HAVE EVER GUESSED
Hi people. Today I shall provide you with (gasp!) a list of my favorite games of all time. I’ve been gaming a lot lately, due to the fact that school has yet to begin up here.
Quake
I grew up on this game, so it has become part of my soul. This is one of those retro early ‘90s FPSs with no story and horrible (read: awesome) graphics. I was so damn good at this game when I was a kid.
Rock Band/Rock Band II
This game is for crazy people like Sean and myself who take it way too seriously. This game is for all college students who, despite having way too much to study for, are able to somehow play in a fake band for 4 hours straight every Monday-Saturday. In other words, this game is awesome.
Fallout 3
The most recent addition to this list, Fallout 3 is half FPS, half RPG, and it is for those reasons that I love it. It’s also got a lot of humor (threesome offers from soda enthusiasts and love letters from people who want to blow up your city, anyone?) and there are a lot of different ways to “make” your character. Awesome.
Oh, and Button.
Button rocks.
Cosmic Osmo
OH GOD RETRO! Another of those early ‘90s/late ‘80s games, Cosmic Osmo is a Mac (Macintosh, back then, I guess, eh?) game that’s entirely in black and white, which allowed for the world to be HUGE, especially for back in those days. Totally a kid’s game, totally awesome. It’s really hard to find now; apparently eBay copies are selling for like $300. It also can’t be played on Macs nowadays, which blows.
The Sims 1 and 2
The Sims is great. I always made my Sims as replicates of people I knew in real life, then I married people that I thought would go well together, and sometimes I would kill my enemies. Then I got a metric ton of mods and my Sims became orange, giant babies, 500-pound fat guys, skeletons, floating torsos, and were able to have ridiculous amounts of children (FOUR HUNDRED BABIES!). Fun times.
Half-Life
Gordon Freeman is like the Chuck Norris of video games. Alternate univerise alien creatures show up, Gordon’s all, “not in MY research facility, bitches!” Then he whips out his crowbar and weilds it in a way only an MIT graduate could. I wonder how bad his PTSD was after this incident? Like, every time someone mentioned the word “rotors,” did he start spazzing and chucking crowbars at fellow scientists?
That would be a great alternate sequel. “Half-Life 2: Mental Breakdown.”
The Neverhood
So have you ever seen a game made entirely out of clay? Well then you’ve obviously never played this. It’s sort of a puzzle game, in which you play Klayman, a clay dude (durh) who has to somehow get the true king Hoborg’s crown back from the evil Klogg. The music is rad, and the little touches this game has make it awesome.
Gears of War
Because “I ON DA COLE TRAIN!” is the best thing to shout in any situation. And because I like shooters.
“Dude…Mr. Turtle is my FATHER.”
So I finished Fallout 3 today. I must say, it really surpassed my expectations. I thought I’d get bored scavenging through stuff, but I really didn’t. I would strongly recommend this to everyone. It’s technically a FPS, but there’s so much more to it than that, so I hesitate to call it that.
I’m definitely going to play this again. Next run through will be my evil character, than following that I’ll go through as if it were me (which will be interesting—I don’t know if a character with my stats can survive in the Wasteland).
And don’t forget Button! Button owns.
I am Andrew the Zeppelin Master…and this is my story.
So I found this game the other day on Abandonia called Zeppelin: Giants of the Sky. You play a young and dapper (or old and slightly menacing-looking, it depends on the picture you choose) entrepreneur of the early 1900s who, for some reason or another, has acquired a sum of $1 million and has decided to start a zeppelin company. From here the story develops. I will describe the gist of it to you.
You start in the year 1900 with one zeppelin. One. And it will crash. Probably on its way to Venice or something. Or, it will survive sixty some-odd flights and as you’re bringing it home to Berlin (because that’s apparently the Zeppelin Depot of the world and it’s the only city in which your zeppelins can be repaired) it will be on that journey that it will crash. When your zeppelin crashes you’re basically screwed, unless you’ve managed to preserve it until you’ve acquired enough money to buy—gasp!—a second zeppelin!! Now you’re in control of two Hindenburg-esque air mobiles…that will both crash as soon as you think your dreams of being a zeppelin tycoon are within reach.
Now, I never got to this stage, but rumor and the number of zeppelin slots on the top of the screen indicate that you can also by a THIRD zeppelin. Hell, just one more and you could have control of all the cardinal directions!! But good luck getting there. I played this for like five hours today and restarted no less than 20 times, mostly due to bankruptcy and the fact that no one in 1900 would pay more than $1,000 to go across the Atlantic Ocean in a zeppelin (could you blame them, though?).
I’m not kidding. Watch your money or you’re screwed. Make sure every other trip is a trip to Berlin’s Zeppelin Les Schwab to get that hydrogen-filled giant of the sky repaired, before it’s a burning pile of ash on somebody’s front lawn. And good luck delivering cargo successfully. If your zeppelin can’t handle a passenger load of five people (hint: it can’t), it sure as hell can’t handle an extra ton of stuff you need to deliver to Cairo within the next 24 hours.
Yeah. Suffice it to say, this is the hardest game in the solar system*. Other fun activities include watching, buying, and selling stocks (I never made it past 1902, so I didn’t know what happened when you reached 1929), getting loans every five minutes due to the fact that it’s virtually impossible to not go bankrupt, and chasing some chick named Roseanne around the globe (the single greatest cause of my zeppelin disasters—how she can motor from London to San Francisco in less time than I can get my battered airship to Berlin from Venice is beyond me).
*I can’t really claim the difficulty level past this reach of space. Perhaps some earth twin planet somewhere in another star system has developed a similar game (“Zarpoons: Xnoblins of the Sceelia Spherion” or some such) that is substantially more difficult than Z: GotS, how should I know?
I don’t even know what a Zarpoon is.
Eigenblogger 