| 
| | January 18, 2007
Guilty as charged, Your Honor
It snowed Monday night. Now, I knew there was a chance that it might, but I still left my laptop at work. Why? Because I just wasn’t thinking. So of course we get snowed in on Tuesday, and today I return to the office with dread in my heart, knowing full well what I’m going to find: skeletons. Just a whole screen full of little bleached skeletons, and a few pitiful dialog boxes. | |
| Yep, my Virtual Villagers are dead. Their primary food source ran out sometime on Tuesday, and without anyone to turn their accumulated tech points into a farming advance, they all just expired. And I’m embarrassed to say that I feel really, really guilty about it. I guess that’s a credit to the game developers, since you end up feeling very involved with their little virtual creations: after watching the villagers forage for berries and build little huts and try to start a family, you just can’t help rooting for them to succeed.
The moral of this story: if you think you may be away from your computer for a while, make sure to pause Virtual Villagers, Fish Tycoon, or any other real-time games before you leave. Otherwise, while the inevitable result might not be as traumatic as going off on a two-week holiday and forgetting to ask anyone to water your plants… yes, this is a painful personal memory… it’s still going to make you feel like a jerk.
I’m going to start over with a new village, and this time I’m going to take better care of the little guys!
Badges? BADGES?!?
Well I, for one, definitely need all the steenkin’ badges I can get. I’m sort of a badge addict.
If you’ve won any of the weekly and monthly special achievement badges for various games, you’ll know that the folks in our art department really outdo themselves on them. The standard badges for each game are spiffy enough, with separate animation for each achievement level. But I swear, our designers must have some sort of running wager about who can stuff the most creative silliness into a small square image.
This week, you can get limited-time badges for Scrabble Rack Attack and Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters; for the rest of the month, there’s also one for Magic Match. (The Lucky Letters badge made me giggle fiercely.) But that got me to wondering… is there anyone out there who has all of the special achievement badges released so far? I mean, every single one of them? I probably have about 80% (some weeks were too busy for me to play the badge games), but I’m guessing that somebody out there has me beat.
If you’re that person, I’d love to hear about it! (And since I’m asking anyway… what’s your favorite badge so far? Mine was “Squaresville”.)
Assorted rambling | |
| 
| Okay, so this doesn’t have a thing to do with games, but I just had to show off something absolutely adorable. One of my coworkers, Irongirl96, saw that I was doing these Coffee Breaks, and stopped by my desk to tell me that I shared a name with a little ball of feline fluff. Needless to say, I begged for a photo, and here she is in all her glory: Moxie the kitten. Apparently she’s rowdy as heck and enjoys playing in the snow… just like me!
Actually, now that I think of it, there is one cat-related question I’ve been going crazy over for ages now. I’m just enough of a geek to feel really grumpy if I can’t finish every level of a particular game. Most games give me no trouble. | |
| But sheesh, I’ll be dipped if I can finish the download version of Granny in Paradise! I cleared all the beach and jungle levels, but the industrial levels were apparently beyond my ability to conquer. Every couple of weeks, I load up the game again and give it another try, but again and again, I get my butt handed to me.
Has anyone out there completed the whole game? And if so, could you possibly send me a few tips? I swear, if there was a button for “make Granny leap up and down and cluck like a chicken”, I’d be willing to try it at this point… I’m stumped.
Tech time
This week’s issue is a blast from the past: we’ve been seeing a resurgence of questions about entering the Classic Bridge lobbies. If you get an error that says “Unable to Launch Room”, there are several possible causes. If you're trying to play on a corporate computer, you may not have Administrator access on that system. You may also need to open ports in your firewall or proxy server, or possibly just reinstall the MSN Games software... for more information, just check our support article on the subject.
See you next week! | |
