Game Design is, hands down, the best course I have ever taken. I don’t mean any disrespect to past professors… lots of classes have been great (especially Cognitive Psych), and my speech professor from freshman year of undergrad was pretty stellar, but they just can’t hold a torch to the subject matter.
The number of ads and other links in my GMail seems to be growing at a daily rate, but occasionally the random articles it pulls out of the ether are pretty entertaining, including this one.
Apparently, someone made an X-Box controller out of chocolate (does it work? Probably not for long-term use, as may be common for first-person shooter games… I know my palms get sweaty, they’d melt the chocolate). Well, this article details the folks at a European branch of Microsoft trying to make an X-Box console out of chocolate. Functional even.
Would you imagine a chocolate X-Box costing more or less than it’s metal counterpart? Chocolate is probably cheaper than standard X-Box parts, but does that much detail work bump up the price? While I think the venture is interesting, I could see myself slowly nibbling away at the X-Box over time (just one more bite… it won’t hurt anything…) until eventually it didn’t work anymore. Then it really would be a doorstop.
If you explore my links in the right column, you may have stumbled upon Vince’s blog that he kept for the first few months he lived in Okinawa. I caught up with him last night, and apparently he’s been pretty busy doing some game design.
I recently wrote about a hopscotch game that I made in one week. In one week, Vince made Anna. I played through it last night, and I think it’s a pretty awesome game (a little short, but did I mention that he did this entire process in one week?).
My favorite part - the Towers of Hanoi puzzle (link requires Java). Back in the days of 220 (that was our room number in Scott Hall), we had a Towers of Hanoi model and we would practice it. So I flew through that puzzle super quick… but… the average gamer is probably not like me.
It’ll be a Before & After puzzle in Wheel of Fortune. Just you wait.
I’m sorry for not posting in a week. I’ve been busy playing hopscotch. In reading that, you probably reacted the same way my friend Sarah did when I asked her to play hopscotch with me. I wasn’t kidding then, and I’m not kidding now. I’ve been playing, musing about, or writing about hopscotch.
Alternate Title: How Everyone in the World is Better Than Me.
We had a lazy day in the Zaiss household on the 24th, and my mom suggested I try one of these sudoku puzzles (the ones where you place 1 - 9 inclusive in each row, column, and square). So I tried them. Addictive, but I got the first one wrong. What a shame.
Well, it turns out that I received a Sudoku calendar for Christmas. And it’s daily. That means a daily sudoku for the next 365 days starting in one week. Thinking I need much practice, I took my friend KC’s advice to explore some sudoku on the web. I did one tonight (easy), and did it casually while talking to friends online. It took me 37 minutes. For fun, I asked “How did I do?” I got this graph back:
with big, red text underneath that said “Below Average: 100% are faster.” Apparently the graph ends at 30 minutes, and NOBODY (except me) takes longer. Ouch. Thanks Web Sudoku, for trampling my aspirations of future Sudoku problem solving.
If you tend to consume Pepsi products, then you’ve probably been playing this Every Ten Minutes promotion that Mountain Dew has been pushing with Microsoft to give away a new XBox 360 every ten minutes (appropriately).
