Game review: Lex Venture: A Crossword Caper Game

Every once in awhile, I get the urge to try a different genre of game. The hidden object and time management games get boring after playing them for too long. So I decided to give the childish-looking Lex Venture: A Crossword Caper Game a go. I do my best to not judge a game by its graphics. There are a few 'childish' looking games that I enjoy playing. However, this game was terrible. It's not really a 'crossword' game in that you aren't trying to solve a puzzle with clues. It's a 'crossword' game in the sense that the words literally cross each other.

Bullies have stolen pieces of a machine and it is your job to retrieve the pieces. You start on a square in the corner of the board. Using 3 or more letter words, you need to get your character to the other side of the board while picking up objects on the way. You can create any words you want to as long as you have the letters available and you need to use a letter from the previous word. Kinda like Scrabble.

This game was so annoying to play. Mostly because it was fairly difficult to get the words to line up with the objects you need to pick up so you spend a lot of time roaming around the board. In the higher levels, there are dogs that move those objects making it even more difficult. I'd rather just play Scrabble or a good crossword puzzle. Leave out the objects, they are unnecessary. The childish graphics would have been fine if the game itself was enjoyable. Sadly, that is where it is lacking.

Flash Drives For Backup?

I'm thinking about buying a usb flash drive in order to back up the family pictures. Though I'm not sure if that would be a good idea. Supposedly flash drives last longer than hard drives since there aren't any moving parts inside them. I don't know. I'm don't have a lot of faith in something so tiny and portable. It seems like they'd be easy to lose or step on or something. Has anyone ever had any experience with flash drives beyond an mp3 player?

Music review: Live - Pillar of Davidson

Artist: Live Members: Ed Kowalczyk (lead vocals and guitar), Chad Taylor (lead guitar), Patrick Dahlheimer (bass guitar) and Chad Gracey (drums) Album: Throwing Copper Release date: 4/26/94 Video link

Lyrics: Warm bodies, I sense Are not machines that can only make money Past, perfect, tense Words for a feeling and all I've discovered I'll be along son With medicine supposed to, designed to Make you high I'll be along son With words for a feeling and all I've discovered

Old, bad eyes Old, bad eyes Old, bad eyes

On loneliness comes Go see the foreman, go see the profiteer On loneliness drives We're takin' our time movin' shit for this holy slime

Old, bad eyes Old, bad eyes Old, bad eyes, almighty fear

The shepherd won't leave me alone He's in my face and I The shepherd of my days And I want you here by my heart And my head, I can't start 'til I'm dead About the song: Live comes from a fairly small town not too far from my house. Like many small towns, York, Pennsylvania is a blue-collar town. This song is about the people working hard in a crappy job to support their family. It's a pretty powerful song with a hard drum beat and a steady bass line that give the song a dark feeling. You're left feeling sorry for the people forced to live these sorts of backbreaking jobs just so they can put food on the table.

I need a bigger house

I really want to lose some weight. Doesn't everyone? I would like to get some sort of strength equipment set up in my house so I could work out whenever I want to. Unfortunately, I don't have anywhere to put it. What I need is something that I can fold up and stick under the couch yet isn't too difficult or heavy for me to set up and move around. That doesn't leave me a whole lot of choices. These are the times I think exercising sucks. I want to do it but I have nowhere to put any equipment TO work out. Bah!

Game review: Megastore Madness

There are a ton of time management games out there but I've never seen anything like Megastore Madness. Your parents have left for a couple of months so it is up to you to run the family store. In the beginning, there are three workers to help you. One restocks shelves, one helps customers and one is a cashier. Juggle the three of them to keep your shelves fully stocked and your customers happy. I went into this thinking that it could be a lot of fun. Instead, it's annoying. In a normal time management game, you only have one player to pay attention to in order to help customers or stock shelves or whatever. However, in this game, you have three that you have to control. It's not particularly easy to keep up with the items flying off the shelves, the little kids tossing toys all over the place (which the stockboy cleans up), helping customers find what they want and still cashing them out before they get angry. As a result, I ended up focusing mostly on the stockboy and customer-helping girl and completely forgetting about the cashier. Then the customers would get mad. To make matters worse, the game adds workers as the customers get more difficult.

This would have been a good game if there were fewer people for you to control. A person's attention can only be focused in so many places at once. Having to focus on up to 6 people is rather difficult. If you want to have that many helpers, then there should be some non-controllable characters in there. There is no reason for us to control the stockboys. They should be able to see what needs to be restocked or what needs to be cleaned up automatically. That would leave us, the player, to deal with just the customers' needs. It would still give us up to 4 characters to control but then our attention isn't focused absolutely everywhere and we can get things accomplished in a timely manner. As it stands, the game is just too chaotic to play properly.

Cruisin'?

I've always wanted to go on some cruises. Well, kind of anyway. See, I have a problem. I don't like deep water. Water that I can stand up in that is below my head is fine. Water that is over my head is not cool. Sadly, cruises don't occur in my bathtub. I suppose I could go on a cruise and just lock myself in my cabin or stay in all of the indoor areas but I don't know how much fun that would be. It seems like a waste of money to do things that I can do cheaper on shore.

Game review: Can You See What I See?

As geeky parents, our kids often see us doing geeky things like playing video games. Many times, the kids want to play too but, a lot of the time, the games are just too difficult to the child to do anything besides watch. Can You See What I See? is different. The premise of the game is that you are helping run a collectible store. It is your job to fill each customer's order. Each location is broken into four areas. You click between the four corners in order to find all of the objects on the list. While the areas are generally pretty cluttered, the list of objects is fairly easy to read. So, at worst, the child can pick which area to look in and probably read the list to you. And, chances are, they can probably find the objects faster than you can!

My daughter absolutely loves this game. I think that she kind of likes being able to find the objects faster than I can. She still needs my help once in awhile but, for the most part, I'm just there to tell her that she's doing well. That's OK. There are still a lot of games where I can find things faster than she can. Can You See is still a nice game that we can play "together."

TV review: The Sarah Jane Adventures

For those Doctor Who fans in the United States, last night was the premiere of The Sarah Jane Adventures on the SciFi channel. People who have watched the original series of Doctor Who know Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) as the companion for the Third and Fourth incarnations of The Doctor. After she left The Doctor, Sarah Jane was back to everyday normal life. Can a companion go back to "normal" life? Sarah Jane decided that she would help aliens who have crash landed on Earth instead. The first episode of the series ran for an hour and a half. Supposedly, people say that the show is "kiddified." However, I didn't find that to be true. Yes, the show is not as dark as Doctor Who but then again Sarah Jane isn't a TimeLord nor is she the last of her race. It's not as sexually charged as Torchwood but then again Sarah Jane said she couldn't find a man who was better than The Doctor. There are still aliens and gadgets and fighting. They are all just done in Sarah Jane's way. (I thought the Sonic Lipstick was cute!) I'm looking forward to future episodes and I hope that the show doesn't get written off as "childish" or something.

A new newsletter for TGW

The Geek Within has a newsletter over at Yahoo Groups but I am terrible at updating it. I was thinking about giving Zookoda a try. Supposedly they are aimed directly at bloggers, unlike Yahoo Groups which is better for discussion groups. However, my problem is that I just forget to write a news letter and I'm not particularly sure what I want to say when I do sit down to write it. I mean, all my content is on the website so I don't want to just copy/paste what I write here. That would be detrimental to the whole idea of driving traffic to the website. I suppose I don't really have anything to lose by giving Zookoda a try, right? At best, I love the service and everyone will know when to come back to the website to read new content. At worst, I hate it and delete my account. It does look like Zookoda is a part of PayPerPost, which is a service I like even though I haven't used it in a long time. From what I could tell, PPP had a good idea of what would help bloggers become successful businesspeople.

Here is the sign-up form for my subscription, though it will take me a little while to figure out how to put any content into the subscription. Be the first to sign-up and....see if I can figure this out....

Hopefully this will be a lot better than the Yahoo Groups. I think I can customize it to update by itself, which will be a LOT easier for me. I know I'll forget to do it if I have to manually update it. Cross your fingers for me!

Game review: Escape The Museum

While it may not seem like it, I did stop playing casual video games for a couple of days. That meant that I had a lot to catch up on. I decided to start with Escape The Museum, a hidden object game. This was probably the most interesting hidden object games I have played in a long time. Instead of just being a straight-forward game requiring you to find a list of objects in a location, there are different levels to each location. Your character has been trapped in a museum by an earthquake and she is trying to get to her daughter, located in a different area of the museum. Unfortunately, parts of the museum have been badly damaged by the quake and, therefore, you need to figure out a way to get to the next room. This is the part that makes the game interesting. You do get a 'shadow list' - where your list is just shadows of the objects you need - of objects that you need to open the door. In some cases, it's the key to the room; in others, the objects work together to lift a heavy object out of the way. Of course, some of the objects are needed to interact with objects in the room in order to find ANOTHER object. For example, you'll need to find a coin to use in the soda machine to get a soda to spray on an electrical box to short out the door lock. See? You need to do a little more thinking for this game!

There are also traditional hidden object pieces in the game. The museum curator will call you on your cell phone asking you to save some of the museum pieces. Then you will get your traditional list of objects to search for. I found this part to be a little more difficult than other hidden object games. Mostly because some of the items were so small, it was difficult to see them - especially in some of the messier rooms. But you can always call for help if you need it.

I thought this was a really great game. It kept all of the aspects of a hidden object game but changed them up a bit to make it more interesting. This isn't a game that kids would be able to play easily. However, it is a good game if you are an adult looking for a little more oomph in your hidden object game.