Archive for April 2006

Our Game Design professor is gone for class on Wednesday, so we have a guest lecturer: The lead designer for A Tale in the Desert. As homework, we were supposed to play the game for at least 20 minutes so we could get an idea of the game for a discussion on Wednesday.

It took me less than 20 minutes to become utterly frustrated with the game. All sorts of messages were referring to actions to do in “the menu” - but I couldn’t find the menu! The natural choice would be to ask other players for help (since it is a MMO, or Massively Multi-player Online, game), but as you can see in this image, the “Island Chat” (your only means of talking to people without having to track them down) is something that you can close (note the big X on the Island Chat tab).

So I closed it. And I was cut off. How do you get it back? Upon finding a “mentor,” I learned that I had to return to the top of the mountain to get it. It took me 30 minutes to find my way off the mountain in the first place. Go back? Sure thing.

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If you scoped out the comments on a recent post, you might have noticed that Vince said he solved the Ishihara puzzle offered up in my blog a week ago. Here it is again to remind you:

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Lisa was in town this weekend for her birthday! A group of us went to get massages on Saturday (I skipped out, and my reward was a non-swollen back the next day). We wandered around the area in East Shadyside and found ourselves in the Tokyo food market. Lisa bought some Pocky - and I started eyeing the items near it. I saw beef jerky… and was it… squid jerky?!

I couldn’t resist to try. It has less protein than turkey jerky and more sodium, but you really can’t beat the gross out factor that you get carrying that around as a snack. It’s almost as much fun as eating it.

I was talking to my good buddy Jason last night, and he passed along a website with a a few interesting games. If anyone can tell me how to play the Dodgeball game, I’d appreciate it! I end up just standing there while getting beat up with the bouncey balls. Sad.

I started a short course on Service Design a couple weeks ago, and we are working with The Mattress Factory. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say on this topic in the coming weeks, but it was definitely a fun time. We even lived it up in the gift shop.

I was especially drawn to some cool bracelets. There were many colors and each had a different word on them. Here are the two that I got:

You can check out all of them (and buy them) at merch-bot.com. The bracelet that I link to is one that Cole got. We both wore our bracelts to PuzzleStorm, and a good laugh was had by all.

Speaking of, has anyone solved the PuzzleStorm puzzle yet?

Jenn rounded up a handful of people for Sunday brunch, and after tossing out a few ideas, we settled on The Gypsy Cafe. Aside from some tasty Mediterranean cuisines, Gypsy Cafe is noted for its nerd-themed brunches. Past themes have included Video Games, Adult Swim, Lord of the Rings, and (Star) Wars. This week’s theme was Anime, and I was there with all my nerd pride:

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I was watching a cool performance by Wyclef Jean and Shakira on the Ellen show, when the news station interrupted it to notify about a Tornado Watch in the area. Now, admittedly, I’m from Nebraska, where tornadoes are somewhat more common - but for a Tornado Watch, displaying a graphic in the corner of the screen will suffice. Why? Because a Tornado Watch means that the weather conditions are ideal for a tornado, not that one is impending. In my experience, there are many more Tornado Watches than actual Tornado Warnings.

This is part of a cycle that I’ve noticed lately of severe weather being sensationalized. Make a big deal about a storm, and if it becomes a big deal, then you get to say that you made the biggest deal about it. But is anyone listening anymore?

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I’ve tried my hand at a few April Fools Day pranks, but in all they weren’t very exciting. It’s tough to live up to Vince’s closing journal entry from last year, which left everyone guessing if the news he’d been hyping for a month was true. (It turned out to be).

I decided to resign myself to working on puzzles for the day. Today happened to be the 2006 CMU Puzzlestorm, a Microsoft-sponsored events where students in groups solve puzzles for prizes. Check out the scores if you want - we were 8th in the middle of the day, and decided to quit early when we were 13th (these puzzles were tricky). We ended up dropping to 21st because we stopped solving puzzles, but in all, it was fun.

I’ll leave readers with our group’s favorite puzzle from the event, called Ishihara:

Anyone want to take a try solving it? No fair asking people who participated since they already know. Fewer than half of the teams got this one right, but give it a shot!

Anyone who’s played the original Kingdom Hearts game knows about the sequel, and I know that videos about it have been around for a long time, but I hadn’t seen any English commercials until tonight on Cartoon Network.

I’m very excited - it seems like the Disney worlds & characters from the first one are coming back (Aladdin, Beast, Neverland, Halloween Town) with some awesome new characters like Stitch, Mulan, Chicken Little, Simba, and did I see… Captain Jack Sparrow? Plus we get what looks like a sweet appearance from Auron, one of my favorite Final Fantasy characters.

I couldn’t find the new commercial that I saw on Cartoon Network, but the Japanese Commercial is on Google video. Also, if you’re a hardcore video gamer, check out this video with previews for Kingdom Hearts II, the new Legend of Zelda game, and Final Fantasy VII, Advent Children. Sweet.