because I don’t have anything better to do. honest.
Sometimes work can become tedious, monotonous and downright boring. Sometimes it can get even worse. The sure-fire remedy for work related boredom is to drop into a quick shoot-em-up game, mindlessly frag everyone and everything in sight and then come back to work - dripping virtual blood, gore and bits of exploded space craft. I even had understanding employers who allowed this during work hours. It was not uncommon for me to stop coding, zap a few zombies and then come back to work refreshed. I presume employers operated on the basis that it’s better to let a game-happy employee occasionally kill zombies rather than stare at a piece of code too long and become one.
For a while, I used to employ conventional shoot-em-up classics for this purpose - Quake, ROTT among others. Then, games become progressively more demanding in their hardware requirements and the effort involved in closing editor windows and stuff to play a game became … too tedious. So, lightweight alternatives were urgently required.
Actually, I had a manic Tetris stage during my undergrad project too. But that’s an abherration. It’s not a real shoot-em-up and it’s far too addictive.
For the past year and a half, I’ve been playing a cutesey little flash game called AlphaForce. It doesn’t have fancy graphics or chilling sound effects but you do get unlimited ammo and progressively harder opponents. There are even cutesy powerups that allow for a bit of strategy. When in a rebellious or just plain destructive mood, I just load up the game and blow shit up.
And then recently I discovered another - Hoverbot Arena. Slightly better graphics, better sound, slightly worse gameplay but still - very satisfying explosions.
And now you know where all that pent up aggression goes.
On 12-Mar-07 at 8:52 pm,
Darwin wrote:
Cool, more worktime distractions for me, thanks! Right now I’m killing the monotony on dailymotion.com glued to Lost and 24. Bliss!
On 13-Mar-07 at 6:04 am,
Psy wrote:
It was always Minesweeper. I’d visualise the little mines going off, killing dozens of enemy troops. Then I’d win the next game, making it back to base camp in one piece. It’s like a strategy/FPS… only in your head.
Anyways. Who needs shoot-em-ups and dripping virtual blood anymore when there’s Ach? *grin*
And… OMG you, YOU, are playing flash games?
On 13-Mar-07 at 9:45 am,
drac wrote:
Darwin: Woo. dailymotion has the latest episodes? I gave up after youtube got all protective and started wiping out uploads… Need to start watching them again. thanks for the tip!
Psy: yes, flash. I have a rarely used IE with the Flash plugin installed, just for playing
Minesweeper, too random - especially at the start.
On 24-Mar-07 at 3:12 pm,
The Lair / the art of defense wrote:
[...] I wrote about some of the online games that I play when I’m bored. Yesterday, I discovered Desktop TD. Oh my. I’ve become so obsessed with [...]