Some Knowledge

Here’s how to make a lot of coin in Morrowind.  Get a mortar and pestle and have a character who has decent alchemy skills like a mage.  Go to Balmora and go to the temple on the north side of town.  In the temple are three herb merchants.  The one on the first floor sells two herbs that make a nice restore health potion.  These are marshmarrow and wickwheat.  He stocks five of each, but every time you buy he restocks so you can get an infinite amount of ingredients for your potions.

Now, start mixing potions.  You will not be very good at this at first, but as you make hundreds and hundreds of potions you will level up your alchemy skills.  As you make potions, sell them back to the herb merchant and get more marshmarrow and wickwheat.  Just keep making potions and selling them back to the merchant.  When you get all his gold, keep going.  Trade completed potions for ingredients and make as many potions as you can stand to mix or as you can carry.  When you are stocked with health potions go around to all the other merchants in Balmora who buy potions and sell as many as it takes to get all their gold.  It is a good idea to join the mages guild so you can rest in their beds.  You will need to sleep after mixing so many potions so you can level up.  If you are a mage this is a good way to get some levels because it puts a big multiplier on your intelligence attribute when you level up.

A more efficient way to collect gold with this method is to just buy the herbs and mix the potions, then go to the mages guild and ask the teleport mage to warp you over to Caldera.  In Caldera go to Ghorak Manor and upstairs the Creeper will buy your potions for full price.  You might want to download the mod for the rich Creeper so he has a lot of gold.  In any case, once you have collected all the merchants money rest for a day and they will restock on coin and you can go out collecting again.

Using this method, gold will no longer be a problem in Morrowind.  You should buy better alchemy gear at the shop on the northwest side of Balmora, and soon your alchemy skill will be maxed out and you will be able to make any potion in the game.  This method is a lot easier then wandering around trying to loot animals and fighting all the time, and it will net you a pile of gold that you can spend on good gear and anything else you want in the game.  Have fun.

Epsilon is a game that is supposedly based on particle physics.  It loads and plays in a browser and seems at first to be a very simple puzzle game involving a ball and a series of targets and portals.  The game explains itself well and is scripted with some mellow music to go along with the interesting puzzles.

If I were to categorize this game, it would be as a kinetic puzzle.  I played through the first couple levels without much of a problem.  It seems pretty fun, if you like puzzles, and costs nothing to play on your web browser.  Have fun.

Now you can control the noodly appendage of the great Flying Spaghetti Monster and convert random scurrying peoples into piratical pastafarians.  This Site has a flash game of the FSM that comes complete with 70’s vintage video game music and other cool sound effects.  Here are some clues on playing the game:  First, mouse up and get some altitude.  Match the speed of the person you are targeting for conversion.  Get them right in the shadow, then click the left mouse button.  The noodly appendage will descend and touch your convert.  The person will then sport full pirate regalia and emit an Arrrr! like any good pastafarian.  So far my high score is 14 conversions.  The game is pretty fun, for a flash game, and is of course free.  One note, plates of flying fish bones seem to be time adders, while attempting to convert a black-robed school official will result in a disturbed sound from FSM and a loss of time.  Have fun, and may the noodly appendage reach down and touch you.

Midnight Race is a flash game.  It loads directly to the browser and starts once you click the play button.  There is a chat app that runs on the game screen so you can shout out to other players.  I tried this game, and to be honest, it’s not really worth playing.

First of all the only control is left and right arrows.  The speed is set on floored and you have to scurry back and forth across the screen trying to avoid the cars that are going your way, which might be hard to see, and the headlights coming at you in the other lanes.  There is some spastic music that plays along with the game action, and the game takes about a minute to load with a high speed connection.

I guess if you’re really bored you might try this game.  I didn’t have any real problems with it, except that I kept crashing into other cars.  Once you crash it’s game over.  It doesn’t look like there is any interaction with other players aside from the annoying chat text.  I found one site where I could get code to embed this game on a blog or a web page, but in my opinion it’s a waste of bandwidth, so I wouldn’t go to the trouble to put a copy of it here.

So, I finally played this little shockwave game this morning.  It took about ten seconds to load and I picked out a car and the race started.  The first trick I can recommend is to stay on the track.  The car drives with a combination of the arrow keys and the spacebar and the “B” key for speed boost.  When the race starts press the up arrow key and keep holding it.  To steer, flash the right and left arrow keys, but don’t hold them for long, because if you do the car will spin out and you will be going backwards.

Along the track there are candy packages and wrenches.  When you get good at steering, try to drive through these and pick them up.  I didn’t have much use for the jump keys or the boost button, as the car seems to be pretty fast.  The main problem is staying on the track.  Sometimes net latency will cause a command you enter to be delayed and you will be off the track.  This is a common problem with network racing games and makes the car handle badly.  The best you can do is to have a high speed network connection and hope the Internet is not too laggy when you play.

I have to admit that the first time I played this game I was pretty terrible.  I came in last and got only 4000 points.  As far as I know the contest for this game is over, but you can still have fun racing other people in this interesting little game.  There is no client to download, and once you have shockwave installed the game should play right from your browser.  I guess one trick that would make this game easier to play would be to have some kind of ESP for net lag so you could enter steering commands slightly before you need them in case your control input is delayed by latency.  You can simulate this by just steering slightly before it looks like you would need to steer.  The car has a tendency to spin out, so I would recommend that any steering maneuvers you do should be limited to short bursts.  Have fun.

I just went to check if the Blizzcon site was back up, and guess what?  Clicking the “buy tickets now” button caused my browser to lock up and my CPU to go into a loop.  I had to ctrl-alt-del out of that mess and close out the browser.

Perhaps this is some evil trick Blizzard is pulling to keep people away from their ticket sales site.  While similar things happen from time to time, rarely, it seems more intentional to me in that they are trying to keep people from using the site while it is down.  I don’t think I will waste any more of my time checking on this issue.  Just thought people might be interested in if the site was back up and if they could get tickets.  The answer appears to be no to both of those questions at this time.

So, in regards to that last post, Blizzard has yet to sell any tickets to Blizzcon, because the ticket sales site crashed.  I guess they weren’t prepared for the flood of traffic they got from people trying to buy tickets.  Perhaps they should have learned from Toys ‘R Us, who had similar problems the first Christmas they tried to do online sales.  It seems all Blizzard has from this convention so far are a lot of headaches to sort out.

It seems, if you want tickets for this con, you will have to stay online and keep clicking the ticket button until they fix it and it works, which will probably cause the site to crash even more from all the page requests.  In the meantime, you can always waste hours reading the random stuff I write on this blog, and click on the button every now and then in another tab.

Hurry hurry hurry!  Get your Blizzcon 2008 tickets here.  Scheduled for October 10-11 in Anaheim, California, this is set to be the biggest event in the popular gaming franchise’s year.  The cost of the tickets is $100, but you will probably have to pay far more than that for travel and lodging.

And, as if a convention for your favorite game is not enough, you will also get some kind of free game-related schwag along with your admission.  The website listed above has all the pertinent information and links on how you can score a ticket to this popular event.

I just searched on Google for free brain training games.  There are a lot of these on the net.  Most of these games are flash games that you can play on the browser.  None of these games appealed to me.  I don’t like solving puzzles so much, and figuring out words like in wheel of fortune is not my thing.  Still, there is no reason to pay for games when so many are available for free.

I noticed that there are a lot of places where you can buy these kinds of games.  Most of these games seem to be stand-alone software for the PC.  There is a big difference in the price of some of this software.  I noticed one site that wants $129 for a one-person license to use their program.  I guess if you are selling warez to people who have a deficit in brain function, you jack up the price because they probably don’t know they can get similar stuff for free off the web.

Just about any game you play is going to challenge your brain.  That’s the whole point of games.  Even physical games like baseball or golf have a mental aspect to them.  If you want to keep your brain active, consider a game of cards, or checkers, or chess if those are too easy for you.  Almost any game you play, even whack-a-mole, will involve using your brain in some way.

Before you lay out a lot of cash for some game that is supposed to train your brain to be better than it is, consider how much fun you are likely to have playing this game.  If it’s something boring like finding letters or doing crossword puzzles, try to find something that’s more interesting.  Racing cars or slaying orcs is probably going to be more fun for you than spotting birds or trying to remember what you had for breakfast last week.  You might even ditch the whole concept of games and read stuff in books or on the net, then turn around and use that information to do something like write an article for your blog.  The brain is like any other part of your body.  The more you use it, the stronger it gets.

Lumosity, at lumosity.com, is a series of games designed to make your brain more acute.  The games are designed by scientists based on the principles of neuroplasticity.  These exercises are supposed to improve memory and brain function.

Lumosity is a membership site that costs $80 a year or $10 a month for access to the games.  They have a free trial membership now so you can try out the games and see if they help you.  Recently, the company raised $3 million in capital to implement and promote their business.

It’s interesting that a game on a computer might actually help your brain function.  In my opinion, just about any computer game can exercise your brain.  It takes some mental functioning to play World of Warcraft or Everquest.  It takes hand-eye coordination to play FPS or driving games.  It takes some mental planning to play real time strategy war games.  From what I saw of the Lumosity games, they are matching tasks, and games where you identify birds.  I only saw four games described, but I guess it’s a start.