Three Months on One Blog Post
I’ve been working on one blog post for three months now and I am only halfway done. I suppose I could say it is taking so long because of all the research involved but that would make it sound like I was on some purposeful or industrious endeavor. Hardly.
Instead, I have undertaken the task of cataloging and reviewing every game that can be installed with a single command in the Mandriva Linux operating system. There are hundreds of them.
These are games that are either bundled with the distribution software or in the online update repositories. Mostly, these are simple games such as MineSweeper that are downloaded and installed by typing urpmi game-name in a terminal. urpmi is the Mandriva software package manager application. Each game in my blog is a link to a wiki page with a description of the game and my thoughts on them.
Some days I can get through several games pretty quickly. “Doesn’t work” “crashes” “segfaults”. Other days? Not so much. I don’t consider myself a gamer. The computer IS the game. Once in a while however, I can waste three days playing one of those stupid little games. A week and a half on jools (a bejeweled clone) alone.
I also try to be fair when reviewing a game if I can. This means trying to figure out what the point of a game is with less than helpful documentation. kiki ‘the nanobot’ has been the worst at that so far. Other games are also very slow to play. Dangerdeep for instance is an almost real time submarine battle game. Learning the controls takes time and you have to travel great distances to get into a battle. Flightgear, a flight simulator, takes so much learning that you feel you could land a Cessna in real life after a while.
Most of the time I spend on that blog post is the dreading. The “I Can’t stand the thought of playing one more crappy Tetris clone” syndrome. There are some really lousy games out there. Games in two inch squares that you can barely see. Games in eight inch screens that require quick mouse movement but the game window doesn’t capture the mouse. That’s fun. Playing another breakout clone and your paddle stops because your cursor is hovering on the other side of the screen.
Don’t get me wrong. There are many really fun games out there but going through the junk to get to them is a bit of a drag sometimes.
I’ll keep at it though. No point in stopping now I guess. Besides, the next game I’ll be reviewing is called monkey-bubble. I just have to know.