Mischievious Fairies
Evie and my mom have been perfecting a new game they like to call, “Mischievious Fairies”.
The game goes like this: mom and Evie (well, mostly Evie) dress up like fairies, complete with wings, wands, and fancy dresses, and fly about the house causing mischief. Later, when someone discovers some of the mischief, Evie shouts out, “Mischievious Fairies!” For our part, we just have to go around finding mischief and saying things like, “Hmm, I guess some mischievious fairies must have been here!”
Evie is very anxious that we find all of the mischief, checking every few minutes to see if we’ve found everything yet. In fact, this time they left little calling cards that said, “Mischievious Fairies” next to each piece of mischief they were responsible for.
I have to tell you, I love this game. It seems counter-intuitive to enjoy a mischief causing game, but the mischief is surprisingly low-grade stuff like tying shoes together, hiding pajamas, moving the bed out a couple of inches from the wall, putting little toys inside of shoes, putting objects in unexpected places, etc.
In fact, I suspect that is the part of the game that is fun for my mom: how many different little pieces of mischief can they come up with while also not really doing anything that will cause real trouble? I am constantly amazed at the amount of mischief the fairies can get up to in a short time, and how my mom manages to keep Evie from causing any actual mischief. For example, we’ve never had any hidden car keys or damaged items. Every once in a while Evie will tell me, “Oh, I wanted to do X, but grandma wouldn’t let me.”
Let no one think that this is not a game of skill!
Board Game: Ticket to Ride
When you don’t have the time for Axis and Allies, and you don’t feel like exerting the mental stamina it takes to play Acquire, but you still want to play a great game, how about Ticket to Ride?
I should start by saying that the game I actually have is Ticket to Ride: Europe. So when I say Ticket to Ride, I really mean Ticket to Ride: Europe. However, I believe the two games are the same, but just with different maps. So everything I say probably applies to both.
Ticket to Ride is about building trains. You get secret destination cards, and the goal is to try to complete your destinations by connecting the two cities listed with a train line. The farther apart the cities are, the harder it is to connect them, the more points the destination card is worth (higher risk = higher reward). Of course there are wrinkles along the way, like tunnels and ferries across bodies of water.
This game is a *little* complicated, but not too bad. Once you get the hang of it, it’s a breeze. Also, you don’t really compete much against each other. Sure, someone might steal your route now and again, but usually you just build a train station to lease their line and move on. It’s certainly less player-to-player competitive than most games of this caliber. You’re more playing against the clock: seeing if you can complete all of your destinations before the game ends.
It’s hard to explain why this is fun exactly, but everybody we’ve introduce it to has enjoyed it. There’s a little bit of stress and worry over completing your destinations, there’s a little bit of strategy over choosing your routes, and there’s a little bit of friendly competition (especially when you get to flip up the cards on someone who’s trying to build a tunnel!). But there’s not *too much* of those things, so it keeps it fun.
So come on over and give it a try! You’ll definitely have a good time. Games take about an hour and a half.
Missilebreak Outvaders
Friday is as good of a day as any for a time wasting flash game. In case you couldn’t tell by the name, Missilebreak Outvaders is like an ’80′s greatest hits mash-up of all the best video games: a combination of Missile Command, Space Invaders, and Breakout.
It’s kind of weird, since the games seem like they’re nothing like each other, and yet the combination works surprisingly well. Very enjoyable.
My high score is 150300. Can you beat it?
A game for font nerds
Alright all you font nerds out there, this game is for you. What do you do in the game? You practice your kerning.
Wikipedia defines kerning as “ the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result.”
In other words, act like a typesetter and properly adjust the spacing of each letter in a word. The closer your letters are to the correct spacing, the higher your score. That sounds kind of dumb, doesn’t it? But it’s surprisingly interesting.
I got an 83, but I choked on the last one (an 8!?!), so I think that threw my average off a little bit. How did you do? Leave your score in the comments.
Link courtesy @LittleBiv
Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure
I used to feature games on here from time to time, but it’s been awhile. Maybe I was just waiting for the right game. I give you Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure.
The game was designed by Cassie, age 5, including the pictures and voices. That much is pretty obvious as soon as you see the game (although I swear she must have been fed some of the lines by somebody).
This game is adorable and takes about 10 minutes, max, to beat, so go check it out. The cuteness factor is off the charts. If you enjoy it, you can also donate to Cassie’s college fund.
You know, it kind of makes me think…I happen to know of a very imaginative girl who likes to draw pictures…
When it rains, it pours…Zombies
For some reason things come together in a perfect storm such that I get a bunch of links pertaining to the same subject all at the same time. And in this case, the subject is zombies.
First things first, I we have a possible zombie attack on our hands, and thanks to technology we have been given advance warning. In this case it is the twitter account of the Boston PD:
INJURED OFFICER: Officer from district 4 transported to Beth Israel Hospital, human bite to arm, suspect in custody.
Twitter user willcady used the opportunity to ask the police a burning question:
@Boston_Police if that was a zombie bite, would you tell us?
The police, setting the gold standard for government transparency, answered him:
@willcady Yes, absolutely
Suuuuuure they will. Be aware! Link courtesy NBH.
Second off was the zombie movie news that was all over the place last week. Apparently someone threw together a zombie movie for $70 and it is getting rave reviews. Now, to be fair, the $70 thing is kind of a white lie. Sure, maybe he only spent $70, but (for example) they had special effects leftovers from the set of Wolverine donated. It’s not like I could go out and make the same movie with only $70. Nevertheless, it was a very, very cheap movie. What did they spend the $70 on?
“We bought a crowbar and a couple of tapes, and I think we got some tea and coffee as well — not the expensive stuff either, the very basic kind,” Price told CNN. “Just to keep the zombies happy.”
Always a good idea.
Finally, I will leave you with two zombie related games.
The first, Plants vs. Zombies, combines two of my favorite things, zombies and tower defense. I saw a review of this pop up in several places, so it seems to be somewhat popular. The only problem is, it costs $20. But they do have a free trial you can download and install that lets you play the regular game for 60 minutes. And it was a lot of fun! I was extremely disappointed when my trial was up.
If you don’t feel like actually playing the game, you can watch a preview instead:
Finally, I leave you with a free game, Zombie Hooker Nightmare. The title should give you a clue about this one. Basically, you play a ::ahem:: lady of the night who is just trying to make an honest living if only these dang zombies would leave her alone! I find it kind of ironic, since she doesn’t seem to have a lot of brains to tempt them.
Link courtesy Tony Vegas.
How good are you at eyeballing things?
This isn’t really a game per say, but more like a test to see how good you are at eyeballing things. But it was still a lot of fun and as soon as I got done with it I wanted to try again. My score was 5.22 but I definitely think I could improve because I had like 2 that were way off for some reason and the messed up my average.
Ice Breaker, part II
Thanks to a commenter on the first Ice Breaker post, we have a new Ice Breaker game to play!
To be honest with you, this one seemed a lot harder than the first one and I didn’t actually finish it. It picks up where the other one left off, so there aren’t really any easy levels at the beginning to get you in the swing of things. Also, there are new kinds of crazy ice in this one right off the bat.
But, if you enjoyed the first one, there’s no reason you won’t enjoy the second one!
Ice Breaker
I know I say this every single time but, it has been too long since we’ve had a game on here! Ice Breaker is a fun and very addictive puzzle game. There are poor vikings frozen in the ice and it is up to you to save them. Cut them down using the mouse and get them onto the viking ship where the captain can break them free. I thought levels 38 and 16 were the hardest.
At first I felt bad for those poor trapped vikings and did my best to free them as fast as possible, but after awhile I started to question things. How did those vikings get there in the first place? I mean, sure a viking could fall down and get frozen in ice, but how does a viking get rolled up in an ice ball suspended by roped down birds with magical rune ice around them? Come on!
Gnomes and their hats
Here is a riddle for you. I will post the answer in the comments. For the record, I didn’t get it but a co-worker of mine did.
Link via PlanetDan. (where else these days?)
Image Quiz
It has been too long since I posted a game. This is a little bit of a departure from my usual type. Basically it does a google image search on a word and displays the results. Then, you try to guess what the search term was. You get three guesses and every time you are wrong they show you another set of results for the same search to help jog your memory. Then your score is based on how many you get right and how many guesses it takes for you to get it.
Link courtesy PlanetDan.
This blog used to be fun
So how about a flash game? It’s been a while.
Here is a surprisingly challenging game that involves a rag doll spiderman webbing his way across an endless pit using geometric shapes. And, as the link submitter promised, the best part of the game is watching the way spiderman’s arms almost get ripped out of their sockets when his web catches.
You may not enjoy the game, but I garuntee you’ll be singing “Oooh black betty, dang a dang” for a day or two.
Guess the Accent
Okay, this is a fun game courtesy MegDesk. Basically you watch a video of people speaking English and then you have to guess which country you think they are from. You need to have sound (obviously) and it takes a little while to complete because there are 16 of them.
I got 7 correct and a total of 29 points. Like Meg, I will post a comment with spoilers, so don’t read that until you’ve taken the test!
Haven’t had a game in a while
How about Totem Destroyer? Click on blocks to blow them up and if you blow up as many as it says you have to and your totem still hasn’t hit the ground, you’re golden (pardon the pun). It starts to get harder than it sounds though…
Fun enough and I beat it at one sitting.
Happy Father’s Day
In honor of my very first Father’s Day ever, Sara was gracious enough to sleep in and let me spend some very early quality time with my daughter!
Evie got me a frame and some paper and some special non-toxic baby finger paints to make me a picture to hang in the dining room. We haven’t made it yet, I’m not sure when we’re going to. Sara bought me a wall clock. I’m not quite sure where to hang it yet since it is too nice to go in any of the rooms that currently don’t have clocks. A clock might seem like a strange present, but you have to understand that I love clocks. I couldn’t even tell you why. Big huge wall clocks, like this:
I don’t know what it is about clocks exactly, but I just like them and I always look at them at Target or where ever (for some reason Target has good clocks) and it was a good present. One time we wnt in a clock store and Sara practically had to drag me out.
Anyway, since it’s Father’s Day and all, here is a really good game to waste some time on. It is a 2D / Flash version of the console game Portal. I know Meg was the first person to tell me that I personally would really like Portal, but I have since heard from many sources that it is a really good game. Since I don’t have an XBox 360, I guess I will have to settle for the Flash version. I haven’t beaten it yet, but I’m somewhere in the 30s.
Milestones
Today is Evie’s 9 month “birthday” which I think is a significant milestone because it means she has now been out as long as she was in! Speaking of milestones, our realtor called yesteday to remind us it was the 1 year anniversary of our closing on our condo. I can’t believe that was a year ago, but on the other hand, it seems like it was a lot longer than that! So much has happened since then.
Tomorrow we are planning to get our garden into shape, assuming the weather holds. It is covered with grass and weeds, so we need to rip all of that up and loosen up all the dirt, and then plant some seeds. We will buy some of the other things that require plants (tomatoes, green peppers) later.
Here is a physics based puzzle type game. You have to draw shapes and stuff that are then affected by physics to move a ball to a flag. It can get complicated where you make fixed mounting points and then hinges, etc. It was interesting for a while but I didn’t get very far before I gave up. Physics is hard! 
Finally, I will leave you with this. You know how with Snakes on a Plane you knew everything there was to know about the movie based on he title? Well, there is a movie scheduled to be released this year named Zombie Strippers! (the exclamation point is part of the title) What more could you possibly need to know?
Incomunicado
I will be gone to a conference next week, so I won’t be able to update anything. It will be interesting because this will be the longest I’ve been away from Evie and the longest Sara will be alone with her. I know she is nervous about being able to get everything done and get to work on time, etc. To all you single mothers out there (Hi mom!) I don’t know how you do it, because I can’t imagine not being able to hand her off for a second when you need to make dinner or uh…use the facilities.
Anyway, to hold you over I will leave you with this game. It is the perfect balance between being slightly challenging so you feel accomplished, but not so challenging that I couldn’t beat it in one day. Just make a path to get the ball to the box…simple! All you do is draw lines and let gravity and physics do the rest. So you’re like learning and stuff while you play!
If you get bored with that one, you can move on to this one. It is a simple turn based RPG (remember how popular those used to be?) I haven’t beat it yet, I’m on the one with the submarines. And if you beat THAT one, you can hit up parts 2, 3, 4, and 5.
P.S. The Office was off for so long, I almost fell out of love with Jenna Fischer
Dart Throwing Monkeys
I’m sure lots of exciting stuff happened since the last time I posted but I’m too tired to think about it. Halloween was pretty uneventful since we got no trick or treaters and Evie was a little too young to appreciate the holiday. I’ll put some spooky ghost pictures up on myspace sometime.
I haven’t posted any games on here in a long time. You know I like Tower Defense games because I post them all the time, so here is the latest take on that. It is called Bloons and instead of the standard Warcraft/Starcraft ripoff this one involves dart throwing monkeys that pop balloons. I appreciate the new take on the old concept. Also I like how you always know how much “power” something has by the color of the balloon. Anyway, I think I actually like Bloons 2 a little better. I haven’t beaten any of them yet, but I can get into the 40s.
So, enjoy!
Last post
How about a puzzle game called Rings and Sticks? Click on the branch types at the bottom to make the trees grow through the rings. I am currently stuck on the 3rd to last one (I think it is like level 14).
P.S. I made a cake and it is delicious!
Oregon Trail
Now, I could have swore I posted this link before, but then I was trying to find it today and couldn’t. How about some old school Oregon Trail?
I like how it even makes you insert the second disk! But lets be honest, you’re just going to endlessly hunt for food anyway.
But that site is really cool, you can play all the old classics, such as Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? But they didn’t seem to have Facemaker? What’s up with that?
Stressin
So we put the offer on the condo in on Saturday. Here it is Tuesday night and we still don’t know!! From everybody that I’ve talked to, they said it usually only takes a couple of hours until you hear back! I’ll give the the benefit of the doubt over the weekend since they probably weren’t in the office, but they promised on Monday that we would know by today. And to top it off, the seller’s lawyer/realtor is sort of rude.
In the meantime, you can occupy yourself with this submarine game. You have to time your depth charges so they hit the subs and avoid their torpedo things. My high score is 13,800 on level 12.
Endangered Ugly Things is another good time waster. Basically it is a blog about all the endangered species that are too ugly to be the front-men for conservation efforts. Take, for example, the long nosed Saiga Antelope:
Not exactly pulling in the big donations!
Interesting
Another interesting puzzle game (link courtesy aforementioned MegDesk). This is in honor of Dark Chocolate M&Ms and tests your knowledge of “dark” movies (mostly horror). Find movie titles depicted in picture form. At the time of this posting Sara and I have 29/50 in 23 minutes.
If you prefer more traditional shane’s blog fare, defend this dead tree. It’s fun while it lasts, but it’s pretty short and easy to beat.
Long time no post
As usual, this time of year is kind of hectic, so there aren’t many updates. Well, due to some people demanding an update, here you go!
Three weeks ago my mom came to visit. I forget what we did other than play Acquire all weekend. I think we each won once too.
Two weeks ago we went to have Christmas with my Dad. Relatively uneventful I think. Sara had this idea to take all of my dad’s hundreds of pictures off of his old computer for him and put them on CDs. Nathan decided to do that for him for Christmas. So we tried to sneak down during the party and do it, but it turns out he had one of those old Compaqs that are impossible to do anything with!! So we had to remove like every component of the computer in order to get the hard drive out. I think we busted it beyond working condition. Oh well. Anyway, by the time we got the hard drive out, my dad was on to us so it wasn’t a secret anymore.
It was a good time. That was actually the first time either my dad or I had been to a game at Lambeau. If you have a snapfish account, you can see the pictures here. We had a good time, but there was one near disaster. So we wanted to go to the hall of fame first because it opened at 8 and the special tailgate that we had tickets for at the Brett Favre Steakhouse didn’t start until 9. So we went to the hall of fame, but it’s inside the new Lambeau Atrium which means they had to tare our tickets to get into it. I asked them if we would be able to leave and then get back in and they were like, “Oh yeah, no problem.” So we went to the hall of fame (which was awesome, but I’ve been there before) and got done with that at 9:30. So we were going to walk out of the stadium and I was like, “Wait, I just gotta ask…” So I asked a guy, “Now, they tore our tickets when we came in, but we’re going to be able to leave and then come back, right?” And he was like, “Nope. That only works if you leave before 9:30 and seeing as it’s 9:30 right now, you have to stay in the stadium until the game starts at noon.” I was pretty upset because I bought the tickets to that tailgate like a looong time ago and we were going to miss it. But my dad was like, “No, there has to be someone we can talk to.” So we talked to someone else who directed us to someone else who directed us to someone else who took us over to talk to someone else. So this guy is aparently like the head of all the ticket takers, and he says, “Oh, no problem. We’re done stamping hands for the day, but you can just give me your tickets and I’ll hold on to them and then when you want to come back in come and find me and I’ll let you in.” We were like, “Okaaaay…” because it seemed kind of shady, but he was like the official guy that the official lady took us over to. So we ended up giving him our tickets and we left and I thought, “We are never getting back into the game.” But when we came back we found him right away and he gave us our tickets and let us in and everything was good to go!
So the tailgate was pretty cool. I had 2 brats with sourkraut, a burger, some pasta salad and 2 cookies! They had all you could drink of pop, beer, bloody marys and screwdrivers. There was a DJ playing pro-Packer songs and they were throwing out tee-shirts and stuff. We didn’t get any, although my dad did get some beads. We also got to meet and get our picture taken with ex-Packer Gilbert Brown!!
The game was a good time too, although the offense was playing terribly. Also there was some drunk guy a couple of rows up from us who wouldn’t shut up the whole time It was a close one (10-9 at the end of the 3rd quarter) but the Packers ultimately won 17-9. I know my dad had a good time too.
In other, more typically blog related news, here is a tower defense flash game. It’s kind of slow at the begining but gets tough at the end.
On the other hand, here is a much more addicting time waster! Basically you draw lines for your little sledder to ride on and make him do loops and stuff. Check out the videos of other crazy ones that people have made! They’re nuts!
Finally, you should really check out the Keith and the Girl podcast. I’ve been listening to it quite a bit lately and I really like it, and I can’t get the opening song out of my head! (“Hey all you assholes, come and listen to us. It’s the Keith and The Girl show!”) Remember that this is a podcast only, it’s not broadcast anywhere, so there are no FCC regulations. Consequently, the language/content can be pretty bad! Consider yourself warned!
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