Minor gaming

A couple of days ago I was poking around the Portable Apps website for any useful utilities. Particularly, since I have to deal with Centrelink for unemployment frequently and that means mandated password changes, with a focus on password management if it gets to the point I can't remember them without writing down. I didn't settle on password management, but I did find an interesting looking game called Mines-Perfect[link] and last night I installed it to play around a bit. Years ago I used to play a lot of Minesweeper as mindless diversion. I wasn't so expert at the game that I was winning all the time, or even nearly all the time probably, but I did get enough practice to make it a fairly thoughtless, systematic thing to do. I assume that was no great accomplishment. So far, with only about an hour's play, I found Mines-Perfect a fun extension on Minesweeper for extra challenge. It has the same difficulty settings, a bunch of extra board styles, and some extra settings I haven't touched yet (by default 'lucky' and 'Murphyslaw' are turned on... I'm not sure what those do since I haven't found any documentation yet). I only played the easiest difficulty so far. The other board styles increase difficulty by increasing the number of adjacent spaces mines available for hiding mines in. I suspect that is less fair than the original game but so far it hasn't bothered me as much as learning how to see those additional connections. The triangle board gave me a lot of trouble, so I moved on to the 3D board... took a look at how the spaces related to each other and quit that right away. It turned out not to be that hard when I came back with a bit more thought. I suspect though most of my victories on the different boards came down to lucky breaks, but unless there is something I am missing that is frequently the way minesweeper goes. At least in the original Minesweeper I am pretty sure there is nothing guaranteeing every game is winnable without without gambling after the first click. Probably I will go back to it on occasions when I am feeling bored or frustrated about something else, but hopefully not for long stretches of time. In other, also gaming news, I finally gave in to myself and reinstalled Doom 3 on the desktop computer. The computer's old and only runs the game well enough to look amazing, but not well enough that I could reasonably complete the game without resorting to cheats (so when I get a computer that can run the game smooth in combat I look forward to beating it fair). My old saves were all still there, so I can confidently say I haven't played this game since the evening of September 30, 2007. Not so long after I bought it, then. Anyway, I've been saying to people that I think Doom 3 was underrated. As I see it, Doom 3's main sins were not being Half Life 2 and the way enemies knock your screen around when you get hit. There are other issues too, like not being able to use your flashlight at the same time as a weapon, etc., but I like the game. I like its atmosphere, the story, the immersive presentation (different style to HL2, but fitting this game's horror aesthetic), most of the enemies... I might be missing context for what constitutes good first-person-shooter these days. The newest games I've played in that genre are Doom 3, Half Life 2 and Quake 4. Quake, I didn't like so much (but weirdly, that was playable and winnable without cheats where Doom 3 was too stuttery for good response); my favourite part of that game was the first-person-perspective stroggification[1] scene and the rest was more interesting ideas than exciting presentation. Maybe time has dulled my favourable impressions away. The other two, I don't feel inclined to compare. But my point is, I could well be missing some context or wider experience to conclude I shouldn't enjoy Doom 3 as much as I do. Starting the game over from the beginning today I had some thoughts about the story and perspective. I have decided I like viewing Swann and Campbell as the main heroes of the story while the player-character is a random background character who just happens to be alive long enough and in the right place to take over the story from the leads when they can't go any further. I'm not sure I can do justice in words to this personal conceptual reshaping and I don't want to babble repetitively trying to if I haven't managed it with the paragraph so far, but this story flipping and imagining how it plays out in that frame does rather thrill me. [1] Now why would I expect Firefox's spellcheck to tell me if I got 'stroggification' correct or not?