Articles in “Gaming”

Lego Indiana Jones depends on collecting two types of things: studs (which double as money) and artifacts.

Now I’ve finished all the levels, I’m looking back through the game to find the artifacts that I’m missed, which I assume are hidden in cunning places.

The problem is that I’m not very good at it.

ME: I’m just running around now randomly throwing myself off cliffs, hoping there’s a hidden ledge. I’ve died so often that when I did once land on a hidden ledge with an artifact on it, I nearly fell off the edge from shock.
NICK: But if they want you to throw yourself off a cliff, there’s probably some sort of subtle clue.
ME: Well, they do sometimes have big arrows made up of studs, leading off the edge of the cliff.
NICK: Well, there you are then.
ME: Yes, but when I see those I tend to think, “Ooh, I might just leave those studs where they are. Otherwise, I might fall off the cliff.”

(I only wish we’d had this conversation after I’d taken the cold medication, and not before.)

I would imagine that almost anyone who has tried to evade their taxes or fake their own death has realised this fact. But I’m fairly sure that few of them were creating an identity from a completely different species with proficiencies that an ordinary person can only imagine.

That’s the fun part.

In fact, I suspect that’s the real reason for the addictive nature of MMORPGs.

It’s been a long time since I rolled up an entirely new character for a role-playing session, and the last time I did so it was for a different game, with entirely different rules.

But tonight, Nick and I have been creating, respectively, a human Cleric with a fierce hatred of the undead and an Elven Ranger who wields two swords.

Oh, we can’t wait to come across those kobolds who slaughtered all our characters in the last game.

(My poor dwarf. She tried her best, and yet she ended up crushed by a giant boulder, twice, while glued to the floor in a room swarming with her enemies. It’s an ignominious death, really. Plus, I was the first to die, which is just embarrassing.)

So far, I’ve learnt the following things:

1. I’m allowed two one-handed weapons, instead of being limited to an ordinary weapon and an off-hand weapon (something like a dagger, light and easily carried). These two blades—entirely imaginary and represented solely by the rattle of dice across the table—are now my most cherished possessions.

2. I only have limited money to buy my provisions. That’s fine—except I didn’t realise that that included my primary weapons, which led to the following conversation:

NICK: Of course, you’ve already spent some of that money on your long sword and your short sword.
ME: What? They should have been given to me by my parents at birth. Or at least when I entered Two-Blade Ranger Academy, or wherever I trained.

3. Elves are just cool. And so are Rangers. When we were fighting the kobolds, their native sneakiness allowed them to sneak up and then dash away without allowing us the standard retaliation.

Frankly, I find that both annoying and unsportsmanlike.

But not when my Elven Ranger can do much the same thing.

Then it’s just the natural outcome of long training, and something to be respected.

4. Unfortunately, Elves largely have rubbish names. And I’m completely stymied on creating an entirely new name, so I’ve just had to pick the least offensive of the standard options. It could be worse: one of the recommended names for a female human character is Shawna. Apparently, this fantasy universe intersects with the 1980s at some point.

5. Ultimately, it might be easier and less time intensive to simply find a way to enter a chaotic fantasy universe and slay real enemies than it is to interpret the spreadsheet we’re using to calculate our abilities.

Then again, it’s easier to use the spreadsheet than it is to do this manually, so it’s all relative.

6. I worship a god of storms, strength, and battle. Apparently. I’m sure that will come in handy.

7. My special attacks have exciting names, including “Dire Wolverine Strike” (oooh) and “Jaws of the Wolf.”

There’s no way this character’s going to end up glued to the floor while a boulder bears down on her.

8. But most exciting of all is a potential paragon path (the move towards a specialisation, which requires me to survive to level 10. Still, I’m hopeful).

Stormwarden.

We haven’t even played a single encounter with these characters, yet—and we didn’t cover ourselves with glory during the last encounter. But I’m still eying a paragon path in which I “learn the ancient ways of the stormwardens of the Feywild. These techniques turn your whirling blades into a storm of destruction that rains down punishing blows on your enemies. With each slash of your weapon, the wind howls in anticipation of the coming storm.”

See, that just sounds fun.

If I die before that comes about, I’ll be terribly disappointed in myself.

I keep coming back to this game again and again and again, and every time I mention it, I complain about it.

That doesn’t seem entirely fair, given how much I actually enjoy the game. It’s variable but generally beautiful, and great fun to play, when it’s playable.

But it seems to me at the moment that it’s actually not playable, or not unless you’re prepared to devote an enormous amount of time to it.

Once upon a time, you could flip through your friends’ and the rats’ packs, hoping for a decent card, rummage through the markets to see if a coveted item had appeared, make a couple of low-level items, and still not waste more time than would have been required for a quick round of Freecell.

But that’s not the case now, and it’s all to do with the increasing dependence on pop-up cards.

Take the two new sets, for example: Lucha Libre and Toys, Toys, Toys.

To make the top-level item in Lucha Libre—the Title Belt—you require a Wrestling Ring, Blue Amigo, and Purple Diablo.

The Wrestling Ring is easy enough: it’s expensive, but you can buy it. But those two wrestlers! Both require a mask (in addition to boots, cloaks, or shorts). And masks are pop-up cards.

They’re rare pop-ups, as well: I’ve never seen the Purple Mask in the wild. So I can’t make Purple Diablo.

And I need more than one mask: to complete the set, I need to vault the Purple Mask, the Purple Diablo, the Blue Mask, the Blue Amigo, and the Title Belt. That’s three masks of each colour.

So far, I’ve found two Blue Masks. So my collection has large, frustrating holes in it.

Toys, Toys, Toys is even worse, if possible.

The top-level item there is an Electric Train, made from a Metal Robot, a Model Rocket, and a Hot Rod. The Model Rocket itself is made from three other items, but at least those are all available in the markets, as is the Hot Rod.

But that Metal Robot! He requires (of all things) a Bubble Wand and two Wooden Soldiers. The Wooden Soldiers, I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn, are pop-ups. Once again, I have never seen one in the wild, although I did once gaze longingly at one in a friend’s pack.

And, remember, I need to vault the Metal Robot on his own as well as the Wooden Soldiers card itself.

Five examples of a pop-up that I’ve never even seen? Is it any wonder I’m becoming frustrated?

I’ve heard a friend say that his frustration with the game comes from the fact that the rats have nothing of value in their packs. When you play co-operatively, as we do, you don’t raid your friends’ packs, though they will grab cards that they know you need. So you rely on the rats to offer chances to steal interesting cards—and stealing cards is, after all, the stated aim of the game.

But, honestly, I’d rather buy everything—regardless of how slow and frustrating it is to build up credits—than have this reliance on pop-ups.

Because it’s ruining the flow of the game.

You can no longer just pop in and out of a game, planning on a quick flip through the packs. Chances are, not a single pop-up will appear in that time and, when you’re waiting for pop-ups and desperately reliant on them, the game then becomes an exercise in frustration.

I don’t know if the intention is to induce us to spend more time playing the game, but that’s the outcome of these changes to the game mechanics.

And I may be lazy and prone to procrastination—in fact, I dare say I am.

But I’m not sacrificing my work, my students, and my writing by spending more and more time looking for cards that never appear.

I’m afraid that as more collections come to rely on pop-ups and, consequently, the game shifts to a more time-intensive mode of play, my inclination to finish those Feats of Wonder is going to fall away.

Because I’m a little worried about that.

As I may have mentioned before, I am obsessed right now with Lego Indiana Jones for the Nintendo DS.

Only in my leisure hours, mind.

But obsessed.

It’s enormous fun, especially now I’ve finished it in Story Mode and can play all the episodes in Free Play, which is vastly more fun (and more productive: generally, most of the maps and artifacts you need to collect can only be accessed in Free Play, when you can switch between characters. So you have a small character to climb through hatches, a Knight of the Cruciform Sword to open certain doorways, creepy priests who pull people’s hearts out to allow you into different areas, and so on.)

But what’s bothering me is that there are two characters on each level: one you control and one controlled by the computer.

(When we played Lego Star Wars, it was two player, and both characters were controlled by us. Which led to its own problems, since Nick isn’t used to co-operative play, and kept running off while I was trying to build things.)

But when one character is computer controlled, it gets quite frustrating.

Sometimes they become stuck behind things, and you have to run back half a level to guide them out.

Sometimes they’re unusually dull: I was driven to despair a few nights ago trying to navigate a dinghy. You can only navigate these if there are two people in them. But I got stuck. My computer character—Willie, the irritating night-club singer in Temple of Doom—leapt out of the boat. I couldn’t leap out without falling in the water and dying: trust me, I tried every possible angle. But she, daft cow, wouldn’t get back in the boat! (I always did dislike her.) So there I was, unable to move, all because this silly Lego figurine was posing, in my tuxedo, on the banks of the river with an umbrella!

Hmmm.

Sometimes, the computer characters actually kill you, by blocking the point of access when you’re jumping, so you fall in, say, a pit of lava.

And sometimes the computer characters get in your way. This is unusually annoying when you’re leaping from train carriage to train carriage (Last Crusade) or from truck to truck while having exploding barrels thrown at you by a Nazi (also, oddly, Last Crusade.)

And then there’s nothing for it but to repeatedly punch them in the face until they either move or, as a secondary effect, die and re-materialise somewhere else, somewhere less annoying.

But often my sidekick is Marcus Brody.

And I really liked Marcus. I was devastated when we watched the most recent film (this was a devastation that came on before the fridge was nuked and before the events of the last fifteen minutes) and I realised he was dead.

I really don’t want to punch Marcus in the face.

I want to punch Nazis in the face. Little Lego figurine Nazis. That’s the point of the game. (Although Lego apparently doesn’t call them Nazis. They’re generic villainous Germans. But I call them Nazis, and so does Indy.)

But if Marcus won’t move out of my way, what choice to I have?

None, really.

I just have to punch him in the face and then feel like a cad for the rest of the evening.

I often tell my students (although perhaps I shouldn’t) that the Indiana Jones series made me want to be an academic. (Of course, this was long before critics started saying that the series had nuked the fridge.) Then academia turned out to involve very little in the way of fighting Nazis, which was a slight disappointment.

This introduction, complete with jokes I’ve already told before, is only leading up to the fact that I’m really enjoying Lego Indiana Jones.

(Of course, I’m loving the game less now than when I started the post two hours ago and then decided I really should finish the day’s work before blogging. In the interim, I’ve picked up the game again—after finishing my work, naturally—only to have it crash during a particularly difficult section of the fight scene in Cairo markets, and now I’m going to have to play the whole damn episode over again. But my point remains valid.)

I came across the Lego gaming phenomenon with Lego Star Wars, which was hands down the most fun I’ve ever had with a video game, excluding only some amusingly vicious rounds of Mario Party.

We started with the original trilogy (how I hate having to call them the “original trilogy”) for the Game Cube, but we did get some way through the prequels/sequels (depending on whether you’re using a chronology from inside the movies or outside them) for the X-Box. (And, yes, we do have far too many obsolete gaming systems, including a Playstation One—thankfully, not an original Playstation, but the later re-visioning—and, buried somewhere in the depths of the entertainment unit—a Nintendo 64.)

I’m fairly certain we finished the Game Cube version—at least on Story Mode, in which you’re constrained by the narrative. In Free Play, which you can’t access until you’ve finished Story Mode, you can swap between characters (even if they weren’t in that particular scene/movie) and therefore access more areas: some areas might be droid-only, or only Dark Force accessible, or require a jetpack.

We didn’t finish the X-Box version, and it wasn’t the damn pod race (almost as frustrating and boring as in the movie) that threw us, but a later flying sequence, where we kept exploding. Neither Nick nor I are natural flyers, apparently. We’re also rubbish jumpers, which is something of a problem.

But Lego Indiana Jones I’ve been keeping my eye on. I want it for the Wii, so we can play two player modes: Nick, I suspect, is less keen on this, since I’m a shocking loser (I sulk: although I tried very hard not to sulk when my stupid dwarf was the first to die in the D&D campaign on the weekend) and a shocking winner (I gloat), and tend to get cranky when playing video games, as well (the spatial construction throws me: I want to see further than I can, and get annoyed when my vision is restricted and I therefore fall into a big pit of slime or get electrocuted).

But that’s beside the point. Basically, I’m playing the game at the moment on my DS, greatest of all the handheld gaming systems.

It has the same basic concept as Lego Star Wars in that you play through an episode in Story Mode, constrained to play as the characters who appear in that part of the movie, and then you can unlock Free Play, and roam around a number of different, otherwise inaccessible areas.

So far, I’ve only made it through Raiders of the Lost Ark in Story Mode, and I’m running back through it now in Free Play.

And it’s fun, especially now the burden of actually liberating the Ark of the Covenant has been lifted from my shoulders.

What I’ve always loved about these games is the slightly irreverent and anarchic approach to the source materials. The cut scenes with the little Lego versions of the characters are hilarious—although my favourite is, and always will be, the one on Tatooine where Luke hits a stormtrooper with his speeder and Obiwan gives him an immensely disappointed look.

But I also like the odd capabilities that the characters have.

Fair enough: scholars are needed to open certain doors. I suspect that some of the ones I can’t get through require the Maharajah, but I haven’t played Temple of Doom yet, so he’s not a playable character. And Indy himself can use his whip to draw down bridges or to climb up the side of buildings.

But Marian Ravenswood is a “bottle-throwing character,” which not only makes her a useful ranged fighter, but also enables her to blow stuff up by tossing liquor bottles into flaming barrels.

She’s also a “monkey-carrying character” or at least she is after you pass the Cairo scenes. This, by some strange stretch of the imagination, means that if Marian steps on a red platform, she can transform into a monkey and access out-of-the-way areas.

Now that’s just cool.

Marcus Brody, on the other hand, can slide down wires using his umbrella. (He’s also quite handy at fighting off Nazis, an activity for which he also uses his umbrella.)

What I need to do now is access one of the smaller characters so that I can get through tiny doorways. But that means either the Maharajah or Short Round, and I’m having too much fun with Raiders to move onto Temple just yet.

Oh, and there was an Ewok. I don’t know why: he was in a hidden area that I could only access once I had Professor Belloq as a playable character.

I think I also met Santa Claus at one point. He was another hidden area, in a small hut outside Marian’s tavern in Tibet, dressed all in red and surrounded by elaborately wrapped parcels.

I accidentally hit him with a candy cane.

I hope I don’t end up on his “naughty” list.

I mentioned way back when the frustrations of playing this game when the set you’re trying to build depends on hard-to-find pop-up cards.

Well, it’s getting worse—and it’s almost enough to drive me out of the game.

I thought Rat Pack, with its reliance on the 4000-point Fountain, was bad enough. But it’s nothing—nothing—to the In Bloom set. I’ve completed the set—or I wouldn’t be able to be flippant on the subject—but, oh, it was a soul-destroying process.

(What? I have a life! I’m . . . very busy and important, actually. Shush.)

In Bloom relied heavily on two pop-up cards: Rain and Sunshine. They weren’t as heavy as the Fountain—they were only 2000 points apiece—but they were much harder to find.

And you need many more of them to get a full set.

You need to vault one of each.

Then you need one Sunshine to make a Watermelon, and one Rain to make a Praying Mantis.

Then you need one of each to make a Firewheel—a type of flower, apparently, but I have no idea whether it’s a real one or not.

That’s already six cards: six cards that you cannot get any other way than have them randomly pop up without warning in your pack.

But it was the high-end card that was the destroyer of souls: the Alamofire—another flower, but this time I’m sure it was a fictional flower. It looked like a waratah, or maybe a protea, but was named after the company that designed the game.

The Alamofire was made from two Firewheels and a Praying Mantis: that’s five pop-up cards for the final card alone.

Is it any wonder that we were all secretly composing “Goodbye, cruel game” messages in our heads?

(No, I don’t think I am blowing this out of proportion. Why do you ask?)

And now it’s happening again, with Winston World.

Winston World is a lovely amusement-park-themed set: the game has multiple designers, and some of the cards are a little . . . well, ugly, really. (Yes, Born to Be Wild set with improbable Hells’ Angels rabbits, I am looking at you.) But Winston World is drawn in soft pastels, and the rides all have starscapes behind them, so it seems as though it’s an amusement park on another, distant planet.

It’s beautiful.

But it’s relying on pop-ups, and I’m going spare.

I need a Carousel. That’s all I need.

Okay: I need three Carousels. But that’s not important right now.

If I have a Carousel, I can make a Winston Wheel, which I gather is some sort of Ferris Wheel. Then—once it finishes its four-hour “baking” process and, really, what is the purpose of that?—I can make the top-end card.

But can I find a Carousel?

You know the answer to that, I’m sure.

And for those of you also playing Packrat—I have accumulated four hundred credits while I’ve been looking for that damn Carousel. That’s probably more information than you need on how long I’ve been wasting on this particular ambition.

Actually, I’ve had a good run on Professor Layton and the Curious Village this morning.

I managed to figure out how to cross from island to island while only visiting each one once—they allowed me to build a bridge, but I’m still quite proud of myself for figuring that one out.

(But last night I had to get Nick to help me figure out how many of twenty people trapped on a sinking boat I could save if it took the five-person life-raft nine minutes to make a round trip to a nearby island; it never occurred to me that it would be halfway back to the island when the ship actually sank. Of course, it also didn’t occur to me that one person would have to stay on the raft to pilot it. And, carrying on the tradition of creepy messages that began with the dead-dog puzzle, this one ended with the message “Let’s spare a thought for the two who lost their lives.” This aspect of the game is starting to freak me out.)

I also managed to figure out two of those “If you give me two years, I’ll be twice as old as you” and “My age is your age plus half my age” maths puzzles, which I’m feeling pretty smug about.

I completely failed to figure out how many coins, interspersed among a twisted rope, I would be allowed to keep when the rope was pulled taut, if I were only allowed to keep the ones above the rope. I did try and follow the pattern of the rope, but it was so twisty I became thoroughly confused as to which was top and which was bottom.

But I did manage to complete an eight-piece sliding puzzle to make an apple with a worm in the middle. Of course, according to the ticker at the top, it took me something like six hundred moves.

But it was the mouse puzzle that made me realise that I’m not cut out intellectually for these sorts of puzzles.

The mouse puzzle pointed out that mice reproduce at twelve babies every month, and baby mice can reproduce once they are a month old. So, the puzzle asked, if you buy a mouse the day after it’s born and bring it home, how many mice will you have after a year?

I didn’t try any complicated multiplication, you’ll be happy to hear. I figured there wasn’t any point, since I was never going to work out the correct answer, and it occurred to me that knowing the genders of any subsequent babies would be necessary for correct calculations.

Then I had what I thought was a brainwave.

What, I thought to myself, if my mouse is a boy? Then I won’t have any baby mice at all! And I’ll only have one mouse at the end of the year.

(The mouse clearly wasn’t a boy. In keeping with strict gender roles, it had a pink bow on its head, the poor thing.)

The answer was one, of course.

But I could have saved myself a lot of effort had it only occurred to me that mice—whether male or female—can’t actually reproduce asexually.

In fact, I can’t say that I’ve never passed a maths exam, but it was certainly a rarity. Whenever I have to do any kind of counting, or adding, or figuring out percentages as part of a tutorial, I make sure that I tell my students that I am a walking example of the benefits and disadvantages of specialisation.

That way they’re prepared for the fact that I rarely get the same answer twice when I have to do a maths problem on the fly.

That’s why trying to play Professor Layton and the Curious Village has given me a splitting headache.

In fact, my general attitude towards the game right now can best be summed up, as usual, by this Penny Arcade comic.

I’ve been wanting to play this game for a while, on the grounds that it looked like my sort of thing: no button-mashing combat, no time restrictions, no chance of your avatar suddenly dying and you having to start the game all over again even though you’ve already forgotten which direction to go in.

Instead, Professor Layton is an archaeologist and puzzle expert (nice specialisation, if you can manage it) who ends up in the village of St Mystere after its late squire leaves a mysterious will. Mysteries are, oddly enough, the focus of life in St Mystere, and you can’t do anything—and I mean anything, not even opening most doors or getting instructions—without first being asked to solve a puzzle.

And that’s fine. I’m not great at puzzles, but many of them revolve around lateral thinking, and I’ve made enough futile attempts to complete cryptic crosswords in my life to make a stab at most of them.

So I managed to ferry three wolves and three chickens across a river, two at a time, without allowing the wolves to eat the chickens. (Well, to be honest, without allowing them to eat the chickens too many times. A subtle distinction.)

I managed to spell the word “Food” in matchsticks. (It really was more complicated than it sounds. The puzzle didn’t just say “Take these matchsticks and spell the word “Food.”)

I managed to turn four cubes into three cubes by only moving one matchstick.

I managed to separate seven bloodthirsty prize pigs by partitioning them off using only three ropes. (I failed that one the first time, and had to try again. “Have you ever seen a pig fight?” the game asked me. So, no pressure, then.)

I even managed to solve yet another matchstick puzzle in which I had to move two sticks to turn a picture of a dog into a picture of the same dog after it had been run over by a car. I had to read the instructions twice before I could be sure that that was really what they were asking me, but I finished the puzzle. (Horribly, when you get the puzzle wrong, you get the following message: “Remember the dog has been hit by a car. It’s very sad, but try and think of what the dog will look like after the car has hit it.”)

But what I hadn’t taken into account was the sheer number of mathematical puzzles.

For example, I came across one puzzle that ran along these lines, more or less:

Rodney and Alan have been hired to sow seeds on a 10-acre farm. They divide the farm, and each plow half the land. Alan can plow twice as fast as Rodney but Rodney can sow seeds three times as fast as Alan.

There was more, but I didn’t read on.

There’s something about that kind of puzzle that terrifies me. It can only be, I suppose, the memory of dozens of hours in exams, wondering whether it was worth simply guessing the answer, only I couldn’t, because I had to show how I arrived at the solution, and I didn’t have the faintest idea how to go about it.

I admire people who have good, all-round intellects. I don’t and I never have had.

I’m happy to play around with rearranging matchsticks and trying to spot the logical traps in puzzle questions.

But if the people of St Mystere don’t lighten up on making me solve their maths problems, they might discover that Professor Layton, archaeologist and puzzle expert, also has an unsuspected homicidal streak.

1. “Damn it, stop blocking my spells, you daft Fire Elemental! I’m only trying to relight the Elvish beacons! Don’t you want to help the Elves?”

2. “Why do you get all the skulls, just because you’re the Undead?”

3. “Stop killing me!”

4. “I love you, Patch, you sneaky little rogue Gnoll! Stab more people in the back!”

5. “Hang on, why have I just missed five turns in a row?”

6. “Well, what does that spell do, then?”

7. “No, wait—why are you draining all my mana? I need that to cast spells!”

8. “Stop stealing the gems that I want!”

9. “Why do the Undead get all the cool spells?”

10. “How am I supposed to kill you if you kept attacking me?”

11. “Seriously, stop blocking my spells! I don’t think you realise how annoying that is.”

12. “How can a Wyvern be such a rubbish mount?”

13. “Look, do you want me to win this game, or not? Because it’s very difficult for me to win if you won’t let me have any skulls!”

14. “Why are the Elves angry with me? I was only following the quest! And, anyway, it’s not as though the giant, magical eyeball originally belonged to them.”

15. “You know, I’m getting pretty sick of teaching these Minotaur slavers a lesson.”

16. “Hang on, did I just torture that Harpy? Oh, well.”

Ah, RPG gaming. It’s good for the development of your moral code and for your temper.

You see, my marking is beautifully spaced out this semester, with three weeks between the two main pieces. So I have a little time in the afternoons for some leisure activities.

So I thought I might drag out Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords.

I played it through last year as a Druid, so I thought I’d try another character class, maybe a Knight.

That was yesterday.

I’m Level 17, now, and this time around I defeated the two-headed ogre in significantly less time.

Puzzle Quest has no significant storyline: you’re a knight (or druid, or one of two other character classes that I haven’t played yet, because I can’t bring myself to delete my lovely Level 50 Druid), who’s trying to defeat the incursions of Lord Bane and his army of the Undead into your peaceful kingdom.

Nothing new there.

As you work through individual sets of quests, you move further and further through the map—you don’t need to go back into the early areas unless you have a specific purpose in mind.

(I, for example, am trying to defeat a Griffin three times, because then I can capture the next one and use it as a mount. I currently only have a Giant Rat, which has the power of Rabid Bite, sure, but is also really slow and annoying. The Griffin, on the other hand, has a Power Swoop, which . . . but, you know what? That’s not important right now.)

But the story is not the main point, here.

The point is that for the first time I actually understand why Nick frequently says “I’m just going to game for a little while” and then disappears off the radar for six or seven hours.

I thought, this afternoon, that I’d just try and learn the Charm spell from a captured Harpy. It’s a “very hard” spell to learn—they are ranked from “very easy,” like the Skeleton’s Chill Touch, to “very hard”—but I thought I’d spend a little time on it.

(It occurred to me halfway through that, since I have this Harpy in the Mage Tower in my Citadel and I’m trying to encourage her to reveal her secrets, there’s probably some torture involved. But then I decided to stop thinking about it.)

So, the Charm spell should have given me a short period of relaxation.

Next thing I knew it was 2.30 in the afternoon, and both my legs were asleep.

I think it was about noon when I sat down.

I have no real idea what it is about this game that compells such long periods of focus. It might be the ease of the combat engine—even I can range coloured gems in lines of three or more.

But I do know that now that Bones has finished, I’m going to see about uniting those warring Orc clans.

I’m still thoroughly enjoying this game, as are a number of other people, judging from the people who wander into Circulating Library looking for information on how to complete the fiendish Quest for Montezuma.

Well, it was fiendish when I completed it. As I noted then, we early adopters of the Montezuma quest were struggling to collect Gold Coins, frantically flipping through the packs to which we had access hoping to either steal them from under the rats’ noses or to have them miraculously pop up for us.

But we persevered and we made our Spotted Leopards, our Turquoise Masks, and our 20,000-point Montezuma’s Headdresses.

And then . . . then we noticed that Coins were suddenly available for sale in some of the markets. And, at first, we weren’t certain whether we’d overlooked that option. Had we really spent hours searching the packs when we could have bought Coins for fifty credits each?

But no—this was a new phenomenon. So we grumbled a little along “back in my day” lines, felt smug about completing the set under difficult circumstances, and got on with collecting the next set.

But then it happened again! For the Boy Genius set, you needed a high number of Mindwave Helmets: to make Time Machines and Android Irwin, and then to use those to make Tripod Seeker Drones and rocketships.

And suddenly it was the gold-coin frenzy all over again: we were searching packs and rapidly losing whatever morals we’d developed in the interests of co-operative play. One poor friend—I hope she’ll forgive me eventually, because over a period of a week I must have stolen every Mindwave Helmet she’d managed to collect.

Then, having finally completed the set by grabbing the final, elusive, pop-up card—Baron von Heisenberg—from a rat who wasn’t paying attention, I noticed the Mindwave Helmet had suddenly become available in stores. And once again, I couldn’t help but think that maybe I’d just never noticed this before. Maybe I’d been running the risk of damaging decades-old friendships when I could have been spending eighty credits a pop instead.

No—once again, the card had become readily available after I ceased to need it.

I’m not even going to go into the struggles to obtain Fountains to complete the Rat Pack set.

Yes, I am—because this is one of the frustrations of the game for me. Increasingly, the high-end cards, the ones that you cobble together out of other cards, are coming to rely on extremely rare pop-up cards: cards that you can’t buy from the markets, but have to hope will spontaneously appear for you during game play.

Take Rat Pack, the Vegas-themed set, for example. This was the most extravagant set to date: twenty-eight items, the most valuable of which were worth 50,000 and 25,000 points.

But the key card was something called “The Strip”: worth 15,000 points on its own, you made it out of the Wedding Chapel (itself made from three different cards), the Casino (ditto), and the elusive Fountain, a 4,000-point beauty of a pop-up card.

So far, so good. The chances of a Fountain popping up were fairly remote, but you might find one. Well, two: you had to vault the Fountain individually, as well as The Strip.

But wait: you need to make The Strip a further two times, because The Strip is a key component of the two highest-scoring cards, The Jackpot and Vegas, Baby! And suddenly, things became a little desperate.

Frankly, I suspect the same thing is going to happen with the Beatnik (also a 4,000-point pop-up) that you need for the Dark Roast coffee-themed collection, except that you only need two Beatniks and the highest-scoring card in that set is only 8,000 points.

I’ll commit gaming sins for 50,000 points that I wouldn’t even consider for 8,000.

But this is one of the frustrations of the game, even more irritating to me than the fact that the rat players—previously so passive, and only useful because they held packs full of cards that you could plunder without repercussions—are now able to steal from you in return. So now, half of the available fifteen spaces in your packs have to be saved for Locks, so the rats don’t steal the Codex you spent a week making or the Blender you saved up for.

That’s frustrating enough.

But if the Fountain suddenly becomes available in the markets after I begged, borrowed, and stole the four that I needed, then I’m out of here.

Example 1: “Never mind, honey, you’ll defeat the giant Cthulhu mime next time. After all, remember how long it took me to kill that two-headed ogre?”

I popped in to the study to see how Nick—back On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness after spending the specified forty-five minutes with me—was going with the game.

ME: Hey, honey. Are you killing mimes?
(Note: That’s not a euphemism. It’s an odd game.)
NICK: I’m trying. I’m not doing very well.
ME: You’re doing fine. Oh, you’re dying. But you’re better now. Oh—well, you were. Look, I’m just going to leave.

Sometimes the fatalities aren’t all mimes.

Nick has finally got his hands on On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness—the Penny Arcade game that he has been breathlessly awaiting for months, the first episode of which was released late last night, our time.

This new acquisition first led to a conversation about time management:

NICK: I thought I’d play a bit of the game first, and then we could spend some time together.
(Anyone who has ever found themselves in a relationship with a geek has had this conversation at some point.)
ME: How about we watch something first, then you can play the game until you go to bed?
NICK: Well, it’s being released episodically, so I don’t want to run through it too quickly.
(Brief pause, while I sort this out in my head.)
ME: Hon, it really doesn’t matter whether you watch telly with me now and then play two hours of the game, or play two hours of the game and then watch telly—you’re spending the same amount of time playing.

This argument was not well received, which is why I’m sitting alone in the living room, updating my blog.

He did, I’ll admit, call me into the study to see the avatar he had created; I went slightly reluctantly, muttering “I am a devoted girlfriend,” but the avatar was kind of cute [So cute, in fact, that I’m updating this post with a link to Nick’s blog, where he’s posted his avatar picture].

On the plus side, all I can hear from the study are gales of laughter, shouts of “Oh yeah!” and “Ha ha!”, and what I would swear was “Pwned!”

It also gave me an excuse to go to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable to look up the term “grass widow.”

I knew that in using it to describe a woman temporarily separated from her husband, I was using it accurately (ignoring, for the purposes of this argument, my unmarried state.)

I didn’t know that it originally meant an unmarried woman with a child, “grass” in this context sharing some of the connotations of “a roll in the hay.”

I also didn’t know that it came into its current use in the days of British rule in India, when women would, to quote Brewer’s, be “sent to the hills where the climate was cooler and grass still grew.”

We may only be separated by a couple of rooms, but the point remains valid.

Game One: Smack talk
During Wii Bowling, Nick comments on the fact that I have better bowling stats than he does:

NICK: Treena . . . pro.
ME: Did you just call me what I think you called me?
NICK: It’s a compliment.
ME: Pardon?
NICK: It’s just means you’re good at the game . . . and they pay you money for it.

That comment cost me a spare.

It also prompted my desire to, as Nick puts it, live-blog our Wii Sports competition. It’s not real live-blogging, but I am typing it as it happens.

Of course, the sensor bar has been moved, which is what I blame for my 50-odd point deficit.

I suppose the plus side to that loss is that I lost my “pro” status, so at least there’ll be no more ambiguous compliments.

Game Two:
NICK: That’s some weak sauce, young Nick.

See, everyone talks about themselves in third person. It’s normal. Totally.

Nick claims he’s not doing as well this game, which I blame on his years in Australia; it’s never that the opposition just played better, is it? Nope, he claims he’s “lost his mojo already,” which is strangely sad.

That’s probably why he’s cheating, sitting in my way for my next shot on the grounds that his feet hurt. On the other hand, he is getting a lot of difficult splits, while I’m getting spares and strikes.

COMPUTER (off Nick’s shot): Nice spare!
ME: That wasn’t a nice spare; it was a weak spare.
NICK: Spare me.

Oddly, I beat Nick comprehensively, but still didn’t regain my “pro” status. Still, at least I’m spared old jokes (except the bad puns I make myself).

Game Three:
Nick seems to have got his mojo back, and all I can manage are spares, despite the tried-and-true method of shouting “Fall over!” at the pins. I might have to challenge him to golf.

On the plus side, Nick has the most hilarious bowling action ever. Still, he wins—and I move further from my pro status. Golf it is.

Especially since the computerised bowling spectators boo gutter balls, which is intensely rude and rather off-putting.

Golf:
Hole 1 goes to me, with a rather neat par—if I say so myself—even including the fact that I stuffed a practice swing and cost myself a stroke.

But Nick insists that I mention that he wouldn’t have ended up with a triple bogey if I hadn’t distracted him at a key moment, which meant a 4.6 yard putt ended up sending his ball back onto the fairway.

And all in the comfort of our living room!

The golf crowd are much more polite than the bowling-alley guys.

Hole 2’s a tie, both pars.

But Hole 3’s an awful par 5 dogleg and Nick ends up behind a computer-generated tree, so we’ll see.

ME: I think I’m in the rough.
NICK: You always look good to me.
ME: No, I mean . . . never mind.

He’ll regret that when my birdy assures me victory. Really, once he admits that I’m better at Wii Sports than he is, I can stop boring people with my blog entries on, to paraphrase Dilbert, a computer simulation of a game that’s almost a sport.

But I don’t see him making that concession any time soon.

In fact, he wants to play again tomorrow. If he smacktalks me again—he’s just gone into the Wii newsfeed to gloat “Bowling pro status lost. Oh, dear”—we might just have another blog entry.