Arctic Light

On io9: March Madness bracket showdowns to determine your favorite science fiction movie of the last ten years.

This was so much fun and SO HARD. I ended up with my final brackets being Black Panther vs. Wonder Woman and Inception vs. The Martian, and I just sort of ground to a halt there because HOW DO I CHOOSE. (They're not even my top faves out of the entire field necessarily -- Inception, for example, I've only seen once, ages ago, though I remember it was really trippy and fun -- but some movies that might've won against these washed out earlier because of how the brackets were set up.) I think BP edges out WW in my personal bracketing, but Inception vs. The Martian is a total toss-up because they're just such utterly different movies, and then putting either of them up against a superhero movie it's like ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

... so yeah, it's fun! Go play! I ended up doing my brackets on a sheet of paper alongside the computer to best keep track. I also haven't seen a number of these, so anything I hadn't seen washed out against anything I had seen, unless I'd absolutely hated it.

.... continues to be haunting, lovely, and absolutely impossible to progress though. XD On my last voyage, I managed to avoid getting killed by anything (mostly by running the other way as fast as possible as soon as I saw a monster or a pirate ship), only to run out of provisions and fuel. Pirate Sally (my latest doomed character) ended up abandoning her ship and mutinous crew, and becoming a castaway on a rocky island.

I'm sure you can do more than sail in a random direction until you die, but so far none of the islands I've landed on have been able to give me much in the way of useful items. I did find one island where I could replenish my provisions (in the form of fungus) but wasn't anywhere near it when we ran out of food and had to resort to cannibalism. I'm starting to realize that loading up on EVERYTHING at any point you can get it is probably the only way to survive. Not unlike a real 19th-century ocean voyage, I guess ...

(One thing I will say for this game, especially with the Rogue-style "one death is all you get" gameplay, it ABSOLUTELY impresses upon you the claustrophobic terror of being stranded on the endless dark sea, with no land in sight and every chance you won't make it home again ...)

My sister innocently sent me an email asking, "Do you remember the Hulk rules for Ambush? Because I don't think we wrote them down."

I do indeed, and after I stopped laughing, I typed them up for her, and then decided to tell the whole story on Livejournal. Basically it's the story of how my sister and I hacked a WWII board game into first a Stargate game and then an Avengers game.

For people -- mostly guys -- of a certain (my dad's) age, military board games were a big deal. I think this has probably given way to computer games now, but in the '70s and '80s these things were pretty huge, and my dad was really into them. The games come with a map, combat rules, lots of different counters representing soldiers, equipment, weapons, etc, and you design different strategies and put them through combat and see how much of your army survives. Most of the ones he liked to play were WWII-related, though he also had some Napoleonic Wars and medieval ones.

When my sister and I were little, we used to enjoy watching him play the games and "helping" by rolling dice and so forth. Our favorite of the games by far -- which meant that we ended up spending hours and hours and HOURS playing it with him -- was a WWII game called Ambush!, because of the roleplaying-game aspect, although neither of us had encountered RPGs yet. You create characters, name them, roll up different skills for them, and then use a game book of predetermined enemy movements to put your characters through a series of missions, competing against spontaneously generated enemy combatants who move/attack according to the game book. Your characters gain experience points during the mission, so you can put them through the entire war if you want to, or at least as much of it as is provided in the expansion modules.

( You can probably see where this is going )

I finally got the 1024 tile in 2048. Twice! I am ridiculously pleased about that. :D Of course, it gets harder the higher you go, so getting from 1024 to 2048 is going to be the really hard one ...

This game is stupidly addictive. I don't normally find myself getting hooked on this kind of thing, but for whatever reason 2048 just happens to hack my attention span perfectly -- I think it's a combination of the numbers and strategy combined with the incredibly simple gameplay providing constant rewards for little effort. I'm having to severely limit my access to the game, just allowing myself one game every now and then as a reward, because I played it for four hours a few evenings ago and then I was seeing little sliding tiles every time I closed my eyes, which wasn't fun.

One thing I discovered about the game after a while ( Is game strategy a spoiler? )