It's All In The Game

Well, folks, after over a year of working in the challenging and kinda fun field of child care, I've decided to cut my hours back. Hopefully this means I'll actually be able to sorta live my life again. I hate it when work interferes with living, don't you? But when work takes over and becomes the only thing in your life -whether you're passionate about your job or not - then you better be stationed in Iraq because there's absolutely no other excuse for that. And daycare? Well, there's a reason there's a high rate of depression and burnout in that field.

Anyway, I'm just tellin' y'all that I'm hoping an extra coupla days off a week will not only improve my outlook, but allow me to start re-engagin in those activities I enjoy. One being blogging.

And then I had this whole mushy thing about how blogging gives me this and that and the feed back keeps me in touch with those who have been so important in my life, blah, blah, blah. But I'm so pissed of (yes, I said pissed off) at this new game I've been playing on my computer that I can't see straight. (I did say I wanted to get back to those things I enjoy? Wasting a great deal of time on cool computer games is another one.)

So I got this game called...oh I don't know what the hell it's called...Secret of the Ark: The Sword of Death or some such thing. I'm thinking it's going to be an Indiana Jones meets Tomb Raider meets Myst kinda thing. Close. It's more of a Resident Evil meets Uru (you had to have played the Myst trilogy to get that one). It's not a terrible game. It's really one of those fun kinds where you play the private detective (who has no butt and really 70s wrangler jeans and an eerily strange resemblance to George Michael) who has to walk around the room/hotel/meat plant/Turkish Synagogue finding clues and objects to interact with and figuring out how to solve each level's puzzle. I love those games. They're awesome and I love doing them. They kind of make you feel all Macguyver-ish. Find a ballpoint pen, some string, a silk handkerchief, and a copy of a Kitty Kelly book and suddenly you're assembling some gadget that saves the world - or removes the ventilation fan from the bathroom window so your accomplice/partner can climb in via the back way.

Now, even though I love these games and am fairly good at them, there always comes a point waaayyy down the line where I have to go online and find the cheat-sheet walk-throughs (because I'm too cheap to actually buy a book or whatever). It's telling me something when, in the first fifteen minutes, I'm already hooking up the hints function and finding out what I'm supposed to do. In fact, there hasn't been but two puzzles out of...ten...twelve...that I've figured out by myself. I understand why their hint page is free to all. Some of these things are absolutely ridiculous. Witness the last level when I was actually in the meat packing plant (run by 'goons' which was a big tip off that this was not an American made product - in fact, it's kinda bugging me that I can tell that most of the voices are British doing stereotypical New York accents) where there's about 7 different rooms with various stuff to do, take, pocket, figure out and waste time on. And in this game, they've never heard of the old adage "Never put a gun on stage if you're not going to use it". There's all sorts of red herrings that make things even more difficult. Anyway, somehow I'm supposed to figure out how to get these 'goons' out of a room that I can't access. I'm thinking that all the clues would be in the area and I should just have to figure things out. How was I to know that I was to take the fire blanket from room 4, pick up the smoldering log in the smokehouse room 5 (which was only revealed after I had overheard a piece of dialogue), carry the log back through four rooms, climb up on the forklift holding the dumpster, place the log in the windowsill, climb back down, go back through 5 rooms into the back of the refrigerator truck sitting in the dock, grab a piece of ice, run back to the forklift and dumpster before the ice melts, put said ice on log to smoke out the goons, then find a "where-exactly -did-that-come-from" dead body hanging on a meat hook, search his pockets for a key card that takes you through a secret door where you climb meaningless stairs for three flights until you're in the smoked out room trying to open a big metal file cabinet. But wait!!!! You find an old photo in a silk handkerchief in the desk drawer, which somehow you were supposed to realize needed to be taken back down into the smokehouse room (where you got the smoldering log) and put some dripping grease on it, come back up into the room, grease the wheels of the file cabinet and push it out the glass window where it lands in the 'bone crusher' conveniently located just under.

Normally, if I get this frustrated and unimpressed with a game, I just give it up. But I paid 30 bucks for this game, dammit. I'm gonna play it. And I'm gonna cheat to do it. I printed off all of the hints for the whole game, I have it all neatly lined up in front of the computer and tonight, I'm going to finish the damn thing and get it out of my life once and for all!

Then I think I'm going to give the game to someone I don't like.