I’ve found myself listening to the local ‘modern music’ station more and more lately. Perhaps I’ve gotten bored of the same-old-same-old I’ve been listening to for so long, or maybe pop music is just getting better again.
Anyway, I realize this tune came out a couple of years ago, but I heard it on the radio twice today, and now it’s stuck in my head. So now, it’ll be stuck in yours too! Aren’t I such generous person?
In part 1 of this series, I covered games I played on a Commodore 64, Amiga and at the arcade. Part 2 is devoted to those games I have played on the PC.
By and large, the games I have played the most on the PC have been strategy games, but there is one, huge exception—the final entry in my list below:
Outpost – This game involved loading a spaceship, picking a star system to which to flee, and building a colony on a planet there. You gathered resources, did scientific research, and hoped you didn’t run out of resources before reaching the ability to travel to another planet to start all over. Sure the game had some bugs, but it was still fun to play, and I’m always looking for another game just like it.
Master of Orion – A turn based strategy game with space ships and building colonies, taking over worlds and fighting aliens. I don’t remember which version of this I used to play, but it was a great game for chewing up a Saturday afternoon.
Command and Conquer – This game introduced me to the concept of real-time strategy games. I probably bought the first five versions of it (I see there are now 17 (Wow!)). Again, you gathered resources and built bases, but this time, you had to worry about getting attacked from up to 7 different directions and things were always moving. I never got into playing this game on-line, but I do miss playing it from time to time. I noticed that they are offering the complete 17 game series for $49 on line now, and now they’re all Windows 7 compatible. I’m very tempted.
Medieval Total War – This turn based strategy game is my current fall back when I want to play a strategy game. I have both version 1 and version 2, but I prefer version 1. I also prefer staying in the strategic view, and almost never play the individual battles. Probably because I prefer strategy over tactics, and got tired of the computer always kicking my ass in the battles.
Civ 3 – This turn based-strategy game is the game both I and my wife would fall into for days when we played it, and would actually elbow each other off the computer so we could have our turns. I can’t get Civ 3 to install on Windows 7, and I’ve tried Civ 4, but it just isn’t as good as Civ 3. It is one I truly miss.
World of WarCraft – For 21 months, from Christmas 2004 until October 2006, I was obsessed with World of WarCraft. I played it a ridiculous number of hours. I ran 9 separate characters up to level 60 (which was the top level at the time): 8 Ally and 1 Horde. For a while, I led a guild with 200+ members. I mapped my character progress on a spreadsheet so I could track what day I leveled each one up, and knew exactly how much rest each one had at any given time, so I could level more quickly. Only when I got all my characters to 60 did I try to run bigger dungeons. It turned out that I was a pretty horrible player in the dungeons. I rarely knew my characters well enough to use their skill properly, and I pulled aggro when I shouldn’t. I had crappy gear, and people got really pissed at me every time I said ‘Need’ on a roll because I wasn’t serious about getting better. In the end, I gave this up because my wife was pregnant with the twins, and I just didn’t enjoy getting yelled at all the time on-line. There are definitely times I miss it, but I do not have near enough time or energy to get back into it, and I’m afraid if I did, I’d lose focus on my writing.
In the next part, I’ll talk about the console games I’ve played, and what I think I’ll be playing in the future.
Last week, after a long day of writing and reading, I settled in on the couch to veg. I didn’t really have anything I felt like watching on TV, and my eyes just couldn’t handle the strain of further reading. So I opened up one of the cabinets under my TV, and I started rummaging through my video game collection to see if I had anything sedate enough not to scorch my eyes, but interesting enough to keep my mind occupied for the half hour or so before I could justify going to bed.
I picked up an old fishing game for the XBox 360 that I had tried once or twice when I had bought it (used), but never got into. I thought, Well, I’ll give it one more try just to see if I missed something the first time. As it turns out, I really hadn’t missed anything. After about 20 minutes, I turned the game off and went to bed. Fishing on a computer is as boring as it sounds.
But that got me thinking about all the games I have played in my life, and just how many hours I’ve spent playing video games (way too many to count). I decided to come up with a list of my favorite games, and organize them by the type of computer or console I played them on when I was playing them.
Just to forewarn you, most of the stuff I like is old—the stuff I played when I was a kid, or at least before I got married. My video game playing now is limited to what I can play when my kids are doing other things. I’m what gamers today would call an antique.
Nevertheless, here, in a kind of chronological order by technology, are some of my favorites from the past 30 years. Yes, 30 years. 30 Years? Wow.
Commodore 64
My very first computer was a Commodore 64. I credit that computer with getting me started in both programming and in playing video games (though my friend’s Atari 2600 probably had a bit to do with that too.) There are so many games that I played for the Commodore 64, that I couldn’t possibly list them all. Here are just a few that influenced me the most.
Gateway to Apshai – This dungeon adventure game had me hooked from the beginning. I also blame it for my arachnophobia.
Project Space Station – Manage project budgets, payloads and astronauts. Perform EVA tasks without running out of fuel. This was like to old Lemonade Stand games serving rocket fuel instead. What better training for a wannabe-astronaut?
California Games – How many joysticks did my friends and I wear out playing games that required you to move them back and forth as fast as you could to build up speed on these sporting related games? Must have been a dozen at least. I’d never been on a skateboard or a surfboard, but these games were just like the real thing. I swear!
Amiga
I’ve had two Amiga computers in my life: an Amiga 500 which replaced my Commodore 64, and an Amiga 2000, which replaced the 500. I loved the Amiga, and it was way ahead of PC’s back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s when it came to graphics. I eventually had to get rid of it when I went to college as it was incompatible with everything I needed in order to do my homework. But as a game machine, it was awesome.
Faery Tale Adventure – this was probably the first true RPG I ever played, and I loved just wandering around, trying to figure out the puzzles. My heart always started beating faster when the foreboding music started,
Falcon – I learned to fly jets with Falcon, and eventually Falcon 3.0. Okay, I never really learned how to fly a real jet, but tooling around in an F-16 Fighting Falcon with an Amiga was a mind blowing experience back in 1990.
Doom – How many hours of my youth did I misspend wandering the hallways of Doom? Too many. Beating the fireball-tossing bad-asses at the end of the game always seemed like quite an accomplishment.
Test Drive – This is one of those games that probably wasn’t as good as I remember, but I loved all the different cars, and just going as fast as you could. When the cops pulled up on your bumper, and you left them in the dust, that was awesome. Of course, I’d never do that in real life. Right?
GFL Championship Football – It doesn’t compare to Madden today, but back in the day, it was just like being in the pocket.
Arcade
I never had a lot of money to spend at arcades, but for a while, in college, I plunked quite a few quarters into the little arcade called “The Cage” next to the coffee shop on campus where I got my daily cup of Joe. There were only two games in there (plus foosball), but I wore out my wrists and fingers playing them. I don’t think my aging joints would last twenty minutes in The Cage these days.
Raiden – I loved that I could work the pattern, and always get a little better. It was probably the only game I was better at than anyone else I knew, solely out of of sheer repetition.
Street Fighter – I routinely got beat by other people, but I was a good match against the computer, at least for the first few rounds.
This post is getting a lot longer than I initially planned, so I’m going to split it here. In the next post, I’ll cover my favorite PC Games, and then in the future, I’ll cover console games. Of course, as soon as I publish this list, I’ll think of a dozen more that I left off. I’ll compile that list down the road a bit.
What were your pre-1995 favorites?
What happens when you die? In Neal Shusterman’s Everlost, if you’re an adult, and you know where you are going, you get there. If you’re a child, and either don’t know where you are going, or somehow get bumped off track on the way there, you end up in Everlost—a place where the souls of children children drift and slowly forget who they were.
Everlost is the first book in the Skinjacker Trilogy, followed by Everwild and Everfound. In book one, Allie and Nick are two teenagers involved in a head-on crash in Upstate New York. They collide on their way into the next world, and end up in Everlost, where they must first come to terms with this new situation, and then figure out what to do next.
Everlost is a young YA book, for 11-14 year olds, though it does deal with the topic of death and the afterlife. The plot moves quickly, is very well written, and enjoyable, even for adult readers. I read the book over the course of about a day, and I took plenty of breaks. The characters are well done, and the plot imaginative and well thought out, with plenty of historical tie-ins which serve to increase the interest levels for the reader.
The only issue I found with the book itself has to do with the character Nick. At the time of the accident, Nick is apparently eating a chocolate bar, and ends up with chocolate smeared on his face. Children in Everlost are stuck wearing for eternity what they were wearing when they died. This means that Nick forever has chocolate on his face. I understand why, but this chocolate on his face makes me think he is seven at the start of the story, not in his teens. It took a while for me to shake that interpretation. It’s a small point, but it did distract me later in the book, when I had to alter my vision of how old he really was.
The other issue I ran into, could be attributed to my Kindle. I found numerous copy-edit mistakes in the book; everything from misspelling a character’s name, to missing words, to formatting problems. I’m not sure if this is a frequent problem for e-readers, or just an issue with the electronic version of this book on Amazon. I suspect the latter. I don’t have a lot of experience in reading on an e-Reader yet (less than a dozen books thus far), but I’ve never seen quite so many errors on a professionally edited and popular book.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, and look forward to reading the next two in the coming weeks. Both are already downloaded to my Kindle, and ready to go.
My wife’s grandmother sent my wife this book a couple of weeks ago. My wife read it in a day, and then passed it to me and said “You should read this book.” See, my wife’s grandmother is also grandmother to writer Carley Moore, who is thanked in the acknowledgements of The Difference Between You and Me by Madeleine George, who is Carley’s very good friend. And grandmothers, you know, will pass along to the rest of the family, anything where their grandchildren are mentioned. That’s what they do. My wife passed this to me because it’s a Young Adult book, with strong female characters. I write a lot of YA, and I’m always ruminating that I have a hard time writing teenage female characters because a) I never was one, and b) I never understood them in real life when I was a teenage boy.
In The Difference Between You and Me, Jesse is a rebellious, misfit, lesbian, high-school sophomore, who cuts her hair with a Swiss Army knife, and wears fishing boots to school every day. Emily is the student council vice-president, a true believer in school spirit and in her ability to please just about everyone, all the time. In public, Jesse and Emily are oil and water, but in private, they are more oil and flame. This can’t last. The reader knows it, and the characters know it. Something has to change.
I couldn’t help, as I read this book, to picture some of the cast from the TV show Glee as the characters in the book. Skip past the rest of this paragraph if you don’t like to have set ideas of who the characters are like when you start a book…. I saw Diana Agron as Emily. Chris Colfer as Jesse’s flamboyant gay friend, Wyatt. Cory Monteith as Emily’s boyfriend, Mike. I couldn’t picture Jesse though, except maybe as someone I knew from high school. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character like her on TV or film. I’m always interested in hearing who the authors thought the characters were like. I wonder how close I am in my guess.
This isn’t the typical book I read (I seem to be saying this a lot lately), but I read it in a single day. It’s a quick read, even as a 350+ page hardback. The writing speeds you along from scene to scene, back and forth between the two main characters, and one other, Esther, a peacenik outcast who loves the story of Joan of Arc. The book is unusual, in that Jesse’s story is told in third-person present tense, and Emily and Esther’s stories are told in first-person present tense. It takes a bit of getting used to, especially since Jesse is more of a main character that the other two. I’ve never seen this technique used before, except in prologues or epilogues. But it does work. It actually made me wonder if there wasn’t a hidden intent by the author to show that these three girls were actually just one girl, trying to reconcile two aspects of her life she kept hidden from the public.
If you like YA, or want to see an example of an unusual narration style, I’d definitely recommend The Difference Between You and Me. It’s definitely on the YA Chick-lit side of the spectrum, but I liked it. It’s worth checking out.
In a year where a lot has gone wrong, I am still thankful for what I have: a fantastic family, great friends, few financial worries, and a little success in my writing. 2012 has been a year of disaster and triumph for me personally, and I am not kidding when I say I have spent time just being glad I am still here to be thankful for anything.
But I thought I’d point out a few other things I’m thankful for:
– that medicine has come so far as to be able to help people with rare diseases now more often than not, and that the doctors and nurses are able to diagnose these diseases more quickly than ever. So Thank You to the doctors and nurses (especially at Puyallup’s Good Samaritan Hospital), to the researchers who work for years to find the treatment, to the people in the pharmaceutical companies who produce the medicine, and to the pharmacists who dispense it
– that my family and I are safe walking down the streets of my hometown. So Thank You to the local police, and to my neighbors, for keeping this a safe and welcoming community
– that there is food in the stores every day we want or need it; so Thank You to the clerks and cashiers in the grocery stores, to the truckers who spend their nights on the road away from their families, to the farm workers who break their backs picking it, and to the farmers who grow it
– that the streets I drive on aren’t flooded strips of mud every time it rains. So Thank You to the engineers who designed them, to the construction workers who built them, and to the maintenance crews who risk life and limb fixing them while traffic roars by at a bazillion miles per hour (Slow down folks)
– that the internet works, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day so I can do the work that I do. So Thank You to the engineers who invented the technology, to the line workers who laid the cable, and to the developers who often worked thousands of hours on their own time to make it what it is today
– that the air where I live is clean, and I don’t fear that when my kids play in the dirt, that they are handling toxic sludge. So Thank You to the environmentalists who push for tougher regulations on polluters, to the scientists who do the research to prove that these chemicals are bad for the planet and its people, and to the people in the various levels of government who have stood up when they needed to stand up to protect us all
– that there continues to be a segment of society willing to push boundaries to expand our presence in space, whether it be to launch the satellites we need to predict hurricanes like Sandy, or to begin the process of making launching of cargo and people into space more cheaply. So Thank You to the people of NASA for their courage, to people like Elon Musk and Richard Branson for always dreaming big, and to the people who make science fiction a reality
Take a moment today to recognize the people who handle the ordinary (and extraordinary) things we depend on for our way of life here in America. Perhaps you fit into one of the above categories. If so, then I Thank You for your service.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
So I’ve been doing a little research about Facebook Pages, and I’ve figured out that only about 16% of the people who have ‘Liked’ my page actually see the updates when I post them. As I understand it, Facebook filters the broadcast of my updates to only those people who have ever clicked on a previous entry, and then occasionally to other people who ‘Like’ the page. To me, that kind of defeats the purpose. I don’t spam entries all day long maybe twice a day at most), but I’d like people to know when something is going on.
So I’m going to open up Subscriptions to my personal Facebook profile, and move the feed from my blog over to that in the hopes that subscriptions are a little more efficient. You’ll only see posts I tag as public, but it should be easier for me to manage.
For those people who are already my ‘friends’ on Facebook, you don’t have to do anything.
For those people who are fans, but not personal friends, you can go to http://www.facebook.com/joe.beernink and click the Subscribe button in the top right corner under the banner photo.
My Facebook author page will stay active for the time being, and I may occasionally post really big news there. We’ll see if this plan works out. I’m not a big Facebook user, but it does have it’s purpose.
As always, you can go directly to the source of my posts at http://www.joebeernink.com and bypass Facebook all together. Rarely will I ever post something exclusively to Facebook. My blog / website will always be the source for all the important content.
Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns regarding this move, or if you have any personal experiences that would help to improve the experience for all my readers.
About five weeks ago, I tripped and hurt my right foot. I had x-rays done the next day, and nothing really showed up. We thought it might be a sprain. Last week, with the pain still bad enough that I couldn’t walk barefoot across a wood floor, or walk to the mailbox with a shoe on, we did another set of x-rays. Those were also inconclusive.
Fearing I had torn the flexor tendon in my big toe, my podiatrist recommended that I have an MRI done, which I had last Thursday. This led to a weekend of concern that I might be in need of ‘another’ surgery, which my wife deemed unacceptable. See, I had two surgeries on my feet in 2011, GBS this year, and a minor foot surgery at the beginning of October this year. That’s enough. She’s tired of me being hurt. I don’t blame her. I’m tired of it, too. I don’t want to be anywhere near another hospital for a very long time.
Well, the results of the MRI came back today. Thankfully, no torn tendon. What I do have, is two fractures in my big toe—one in the first knuckle, and the second a green-stick fracture between the first and second knuckle.
Prognosis? 6-10 more weeks of hobbling around with a post-op shoe on my foot, and my big toe splinted to the second toe. Not ideal, but at least there’s no surgery involved, and I can do what I can do now, except the less I do, the sooner it will heal.
So you won’t see me out dancing or running the Seattle Marathon this weekend (or ever on the latter). I’m just going to sit here and write, and read, and watch movies. Which is pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last 10 months anyway.
So yes, I’ve gone three whole days without a blog post. But I’ve been busy.
First, I’ve been cruising along in my latest book, passing the 32000 word mark this morning. On Friday, I wrote nearly 3900, and I was completely blitzed after that. That exhaustion, combined with a couple of bad nights of sleep in a row, led to me not writing anything yesterday. The story is going well, and I’m aiming for around 75000 words total, which means I’m not quite at the halfway mark. But even at a very reasonable pace, with a few distractions tossed in, I should be there by the end of the year.
Second, with the election behind us, and my pledge not to get overly political for a while, I’m just not so riled up about anything where I feel the need to get up on my soapbox. That’s a good thing. Calm Joe is much easier for my family to talk to.
I’m also working on a couple of other little side writing projects which I’ll get into at a later date.
So while I have not been here for a few days, there is no need to send out the search and rescue parties. I’m deep in a sea of words for other things, but safe and sound, nonetheless.
Every Christmas, we get a family photo done for a holiday card. I know it’s a cheesy, typical thing that everyone does. A few years ago, we started having our pictures taken by local photographer, Darel Roa and his wife, Linda. We love the results.
This year, Darel’s Christmas Promo has a familiar family in the advertisement. Check it out below. If you are looking for a good, photographer in the South-Puget Sound area, I suggest you check him out.
Joe Beernink 