Tuesday Braindump - Tu m’offres une glace a la vanille?
I can’t seem to concentrate on anything today… not Puzzle Quest, not reading…. My brain might have melted. There was a slight lack of sleep last night… maybe that has something to do with it.
Pyrrhic (my desktop) is occupied with starting the task of backing up the hundreds of gigabytes of crap I have stored on his hard drives. This is the first time I’ve ever burned a DVD, and I gotta say… good god, it’s slow. An hour to burn a 4GB DVD at 18x? Daaaamn. Ah well, it has to be done. I have about 600GB over four aging drives, and I’ve been too negligent for too long in my backups. Of course, if one of them was to fail, with my luck, it would do so right now. You can’t see it, but I am now knocking furiously on wood.
I marathoned the rest of Nanoha last night, while Alice was working on her paper. In the end, it’s a fun series that uses its cheesy emotional string-pulling and cuteness to make you care about the characters, but also throws in some pretty okay action (relatively speaking). I liked it. Nanoha A’s and StrikerS are probably in my future, but not as priorities.
Puzzle Quest is pissing me off. The AI cheats like crazy… it definitely cheats in at least one way: it makes moves that it knows will give it certain benefits (i.e. extra turns), even when the benefits are supposed to be determined by chance. For example, if it has two identical matches it can make, but it knows the RNG will give it an extra turn for one and not for the other, guess which one it will take? Whereas the player, of course, has no way to know…. I’m also fairly certain the game tailors gem drops for the AI to increase its combos… maybe to artificially increase the difficulty or something. Bah! I’ve had a string of 5 crushing defeats. We’re talking about matches in which the AI is routinely taking 5 or 6 turns for every one of mine, and I die when my opponent still has 2/3 health remaining. Of course, for all my whining, we all know I’m going to keep playing the damned thing….