Connect Four, The Most Dangerous Game

Monday night I was playing Connect Four with the kids. With a five-year-old you can play by rules and have an actual game. With a five-year-old and a two-year-old, it quickly devolves into a contest to see who can shove as many red and black checkers into the slots as possible to fill up the board. When the checkers are spilled, it also becomes a bare-knuckled, scratching, screaming fight to see who can drag the most checkers into their laps. (I could have gotten the most if I really wanted to.) There was also a little bit of sticking one of the black checkers in my eye and pretending to be a pirate, which the kids then tried to imitate.

That’s not the most dangerous part, though. The most dangerous part comes in the disassembly. Our version of Connect Four is a little different from the version in the above video. As a kid I had the version in that old commercial and that think would fall apart if you breathed on it too hard. The newer version snaps together so it’s sturdier, and has a ring around the base that not only makes it more stable, but makes sure that checkers don’t go rolling all over the place when you slide open the bottom of the board.

I had it all taken apart except for the last side. It didn’t want to come free, but I had to get it off to store it back in the box. I applied a little more pressure (I didn’t want to break anything so I was trying to be careful) and the support leg came away from the board in a sudden jerk. My thumb was in the way and the dull bit of plastic that was sticking out dug in.

I tell you people, watch out for Connect Four, otherwise, this could happen to you!

The Latest Time Suck

More than anything else lately, I’ve been spending the greater part of my free time writing. A couple weeks ago, though, I had the fortune/misfortune of looking at some of the software in the iTunes store when I came across Undercroft, which is made by the same folks that make Runescape.

It’s a basic dungeon crawler type game, where the player controls a party of up to four adventurers as they travel the country to complete one big quest, with many, many other side quests along the way. Players can choose from Warrior, Mage, Priest, Summoner, and Assassin. It uses a turn-based movement and combat system, and the only real drawback I’ve seen for it so far, in terms of game play, is that it’s very items-heavy, and it seems like you have an infinite storage capacity. Despite selling off a lot of junk every chance I get, I still accumulate a lot of crap. Overall, though, I’ve really enjoyed it and it thus far has been my favorite app for my iTouch, free or paid (it’s a free app).

For a while now, I’ve felt a hankering to get back into Dungeons & Dragons, which I haven’t played in years. But things get in the way of that, kids, wife, work, house hold shit, life. And it’s the same for the friends I used to play with, adding in distance now that we all at least think we’re adults and don’t all live 5 miles from each other.

The worst part of the game though, is that every time you save, it the game tells you how long you’ve been playing to that point, up to the second. Looking at my most recent save file, I have logged 12 hours, 57 minutes and 5 seconds playing the game. This does not include times I forgot to save, the couple of times my character has died, or the times I’ve gone in to try and solve of puzzle, haven’t solved it, and not bothered to save. Counting all that I’d probably round up to 13.25 or 13.5 hours worth of game play. There’s nothing wrong with that when you consider I’ve been playing the game for a week and a half to two weeks, but still, that makes me wonder what all I could have accomplished in all that time.

Nerds Everywhere Lament

I saw the sad news today that Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungons & Dragons died today at the age of 69. Apparently, he lived in Lake Geneva, WI, a place I've been to a few times. I was first introduced to the vast world of D&D during middle school, around the age of 12. I played that or some other d20-based game system that probably wouldn't have been around if it wasn't for him until sometime in college. I'd probably still be playing if the core game group hadn't dispersed.

It is unfortunate news, but I can't say that I'm terribly upset by it. It was intersting to see from the report that Gygax was holding weekly games at his home until as recently as January. I'm sure he would have been a very interesting and intelligent man to meet and hold a conversation with. Sad news for the world of gamers everywhere.