![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Because Varwuff (You do read his journal, yes? Read his journal. He's more erudite than I am) has massive amounts of influence over my mind, I'm going to shamelessly rip off his style for a post and make a giant blurting post about THINGS and STUFF. If you're not in the mood for a post made up entirely of candy with the occasionally philosophical meltdown, feel free to skim right past this one and carry on about your day.
So, the rest of you will find it no surprise that I've been playing games again. Having filtered the worthwhile ones through my head (so that you don't have to expose yourself to the bad ones) I wish to offer out a recommendation.
One particularly good, if painfully frustrating number is called Enigma, and if it looks familiar from a glance at the screenshots you've probably played a game called Oxyd sometime in the past. Oxyd was a game in which your goal was to bounce a marble (controlled ineptly by your mouse or precisely by a trackball, not that I am evangelistic) off of boxes. These boxes would unfold and present you with a colored dot. Then you skitter-roll off and find the matching dot in another box elsewhere on the level.
If it were that easy, this wouldn't be a puzzle game. Instead of placidly rolling around and going "bink" off boxlike structures, you end up navigating mazes, playing Sokoban (the box-pushing game), blowing things up with dynamite, blasting through walls with lasers, and fighting the force of gravity itself.
Playing this game gave me an unexpectedly bittersweet memory, which is utterly unrelated to the game except that it took place around the time I first encountered Oxyd. Back when I was working at KB Toy Liquidators in Maryland, we had a regular customer who would come in and walk up and down the aisles for a while. Eventually he always made it to the same place, the model car aisle, where he would sort through them silently. He never really said anything to anyone, and he always looked, well... depressed. The first time I saw him I honestly thought he'd break into tears over the 1960s muscle cars.
One day he came in looking even more upset than usual. Now, I preferred this man to most of our other model collectors, because they usually tended to leave models scattered gleefully around the aisles as they hunted around in back for anything rare. (Then they'd leave, trusting the Model Faeries to come and put them back on the shelf. I hated those bastards.) I'd been worried about him since I first saw him, and today he looked so... sad, that I just had to do something. So, I wandered up alongside him, asked if he needed help, and then asked, quietly, if there was anything wrong.
He turned around and blinked at me for a minute, then shook his head and grabbed a box off the shelf and headed for the counter very fast.
I never saw him again. Asking a couple of my coworkers on different shifts, I found they hadn't seen him either. As far as I know, he'd just stopped shopping there entirely.
I still feel faintly guilty, like I drove him away for good somehow by trying to reach out. I still wonder what was wrong in his life, if anything actually was, if I should've just kept my mouth shut. I left the job soon after that, for reasons I may post about later.
...huh, this didn't turn out to be as long as I thought. Oh well.
So, the rest of you will find it no surprise that I've been playing games again. Having filtered the worthwhile ones through my head (so that you don't have to expose yourself to the bad ones) I wish to offer out a recommendation.
One particularly good, if painfully frustrating number is called Enigma, and if it looks familiar from a glance at the screenshots you've probably played a game called Oxyd sometime in the past. Oxyd was a game in which your goal was to bounce a marble (controlled ineptly by your mouse or precisely by a trackball, not that I am evangelistic) off of boxes. These boxes would unfold and present you with a colored dot. Then you skitter-roll off and find the matching dot in another box elsewhere on the level.
If it were that easy, this wouldn't be a puzzle game. Instead of placidly rolling around and going "bink" off boxlike structures, you end up navigating mazes, playing Sokoban (the box-pushing game), blowing things up with dynamite, blasting through walls with lasers, and fighting the force of gravity itself.
Playing this game gave me an unexpectedly bittersweet memory, which is utterly unrelated to the game except that it took place around the time I first encountered Oxyd. Back when I was working at KB Toy Liquidators in Maryland, we had a regular customer who would come in and walk up and down the aisles for a while. Eventually he always made it to the same place, the model car aisle, where he would sort through them silently. He never really said anything to anyone, and he always looked, well... depressed. The first time I saw him I honestly thought he'd break into tears over the 1960s muscle cars.
One day he came in looking even more upset than usual. Now, I preferred this man to most of our other model collectors, because they usually tended to leave models scattered gleefully around the aisles as they hunted around in back for anything rare. (Then they'd leave, trusting the Model Faeries to come and put them back on the shelf. I hated those bastards.) I'd been worried about him since I first saw him, and today he looked so... sad, that I just had to do something. So, I wandered up alongside him, asked if he needed help, and then asked, quietly, if there was anything wrong.
He turned around and blinked at me for a minute, then shook his head and grabbed a box off the shelf and headed for the counter very fast.
I never saw him again. Asking a couple of my coworkers on different shifts, I found they hadn't seen him either. As far as I know, he'd just stopped shopping there entirely.
I still feel faintly guilty, like I drove him away for good somehow by trying to reach out. I still wonder what was wrong in his life, if anything actually was, if I should've just kept my mouth shut. I left the job soon after that, for reasons I may post about later.
...huh, this didn't turn out to be as long as I thought. Oh well.
