I got a chance today to play a 2nd game of Ark Nova's Marine Worlds expansion - here's a recap of my experience. My opponent was playing his first game of Ark Nova altogether - I gave him Map 0 and took two random maps for myself, happily picking up Silver Lake. The variant actions I saw were unexciting - I ended up taking a "Build +1" variant that helped a small amount, and a Cards variant with a Clever kicker that I never paid for. My initial draw was the Reef Dweller dream: A Shark I could play as my first Reef Dweller, along with two other solid Reef animals. I played an Expert on Asia as my first Sponsors and snapped up a 4th Reef animal, planning to go all in for the Sea Animals conservation project. The Caribbean Reef Shark was not as incredible as I had hoped - while strong, the ability is limited to animal cards in reputation range , which heavily limited what I could eat from the display. Despite grabbing a 2 Reputation University, I could only only eat a 6-...
Warning: This post has virtually nothing to do with video games. Some time around the age of 10, it was decided for me that I had to wear glasses. Between that time and today, I decided getting my eyes fixed via laser was a good idea. I finally went through with it and I figured it would make an interesting blog post. Glasses are a mild annoyance; they're fairly un-invasive, but they start getting in the way as soon as you start doing anything physical, anything involving water or anything that can end with you getting punched in the face. The idea of contacts never appealed to me; something about sticking a piece of plastic onto your eyeball freaked me out. Getting bits of your eye burned off by a laser seemed like a much more palatable solution. I liked that it was a permanent solution; glasses break, contacts get lost, but it's very hard to undo laser surgery. I also liked that it removed a material dependancy; suddenly I didn't rely on a tiny piece of plastic t...
I'd heard lots of good things about the Bit Trip series from multiple sources, and the trailers always seemed neat and interesting. Then I read a forum post on the series, and I figured I'd give one game a shot - the trailer for Runner seemed most interesting, it had good music, it showed Canabalt style gameplay (which I love) and I do like Anamanaguchi. So one Wii system update and 800 wii points later, there I was. I have to say - I have never before seen a game come so close to perfection and fail so violently. The game is absurdly hard and absurdly punishing. The game has a number of other flaws, but they could be forgiven if the game wasn't so goddamned difficult and unforgiving. This is ostensibly a game about flow and visual spectacle, so why the hell does the game make me start over the same three minutes of gameplay every single time I make a mistake? Humans make mistake - why the hell do I stop having fun every time I make one? Now - let me make something clear. I...
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