Stuck

I'm still struggling with the cold I caught, so just a few updates today.

This week's cartoon concerns priorities. Gotta have 'em, right?

There comes a time in many games where I hit a wall - I get stuck and have to decide how many times I'm going to put my head down and run full speed at that wall before giving up. In Star Trek Legacies, it happens with a mission full of asteroids and the assistance of three computer controlled ships that can't be trusted to blow their nose, much less guard a point and destroy oncoming targets. After much struggles, I have put that one away - maybe I'll take it up again later and wonder what all the fuss was about - but I doubt it.

Another game is Zoo Tycoon DS - in it you have a limited amount of time to breed two specific animals. However, (and the game itself admits this) there is nothing you can do to make sure the animals breed before time runs out. So time after time I would complete all of the other mission requirements, get one of the animals to breed, and wait for the other to do absolutely nothing!! Completing the mission depended entirely on luck - not the sort of thing you want in such an involved scenario. So thanks for nothing, Zoo Tycoon DS.

I have hit a couple of walls in Advance Wars Days of Ruin, but have managed to get past them after a few tries and searching the message boards on the internet. In at least one case, when I found the solution, I was surprised at how easily the computer opponent rolled over for me. To put it mildly, I crushed them after countless exasperating times when I was the one being crushed. So I technically haven't hit the wall on this one yet, but I've come close a couple of times.

So that's the news for today. Stay tuned for more.

A minor milestone

Yep, this week marks the 100th Gamecreature cartoon. It's only fitting that I use the opportunity to take a trip down memory lane. Actually, the bigger milestone occurs in 4 weeks when I hit my 2nd anniversary of drawing Gamecreature. How time flies!

Speaking of milestones, I've graduated from Captain Archer's Enterprise to Captain Kirk's starship. And the ship not only has shields and more fire power, but it's more maneuverable, too. The enemy ships (Klingons, this time) are more formidable as well, but another added benefit of the jump in technology is that it's easier to lock onto specific systems on an enemy ship, allowing me to disable an enemy's weapons or engines to make combat easier.

The user manual is not very easy to use. I had to do a mission to use a cloaked ship, and no where was I told how to do this. Hello, trial and error! Speaking of controls, can you imagine a starship where you have a control for repairing damaged systems, one for long-range scan, and a single button that will instantly blow up your ship all in the same place? I've lost count of how many times I've had to restart a mission because I initiated self-destruct when I was trying to get repair teams to fix the weapons systems. Evidently, there is a way to cancel self destruct, but that is not nearly as easy as starting it - like the cloak, I couldn't find it in the user manual. If anyone does have a copy of the game and can find these useful tidbits, let me know.

Even so, now that I have a ship that can move and really kick some Klingon butt, I'm finally getting into the swim of things in this game. I'll keep you posted.

Tired

Hard to believe, but spending all day on the computer takes a lot out of you.

When I took computer math in High School, the hot game was Star Trek, a text-based game that used math and vectors to wage starship battles across imagined star systems. In it you went from sector to sector, finding Klingons and blasting them to atoms. The game became quite challenging as the Klingons ganged up on you and your own resources dwindled. A few years later, Sega created the Star Trek arcade game to coincide with the release of the Star Trek movie. When I played it, I was suprised (and a little pleased) to find out that the Sega game had little to do with the film and was really just an updated version of the classic Star Trek game that we played on my school's teletype. It's great fun, but the wheel control takes a bit of getting used to. 25 years later and I have laid my hands on Star Trek Legacy. So far, I'm still in the early days of the Federation, commanding Captain Archer's Enterprise. The thing maneuvers like a brick and there are no shields. Hopefully the ship's performance will improve in the later years of the Federation. Like the earlier Star Trek games, this game is all about finding the enemy ships and blowing them out of space. Only time will tell if it'll take me back to those early days of the first Star Trek game. But I'm willing to take the ride. If you're a true Star Trek geek like me, you'll get a kick out of this game.



Next week is the 100th Gamecreature comic. Does anybody care?