It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

I know what you’re thinking:  ”How can Cammy possibly have more stupid ass games she’s addicted to?”

Beats the shit outta me.  All I know is that I need to stop because I really do waste an inordinate amount of time playing ridiculous web-based games.

And then Google had to go and make it that much more tempting with the plug-ins for Chrome (my browser de jour).  There are plenty of helpful time management plugins through the google web-store, but no.  Oh no.  I get started playing addictive stuff like “Entanglement” a crack induced puzzle game of linking curvy lines.  Or Mr. Fancy Pants 2, which has the kind of two-d simplicity of the old Super Mario days, but which much cooler movements.  And then there was Poppit.  A game that addicted me eons ago right out of college (Megan, if you’re out there, do you remember playing poppit late at night and having conversations in the public chat window under bizarre assumed identities….I seem to recall one night when I was pretending to be someone who’d just moved to Topeka with the husband and kids).

At any rate, I’ve frakked off for way too many hours (once again) this week.  Time I should have spent getting the house clean and writing.

Time vampire strikes again.

I need to find another addictive online game about as much as I need another 6 inches of snow to shovel off my driveway.  But, like the weather, some things are just beyond my control.  The latest in the list? Magic Pen.

The object is simple–which is always key in the addictiveness of a game–you get the red ball to roll across the little flags.

You, armed with a crayon and some vague idea that making things bump into a ball will make it roll, are in charge of drawing in whatever shapes you need to guide that red ball as well as figuring out how to get that ball rolling.  It’s the most subtle lesson in Newtonian physics you’ll ever find yourself loathe to part from.  It’s so addictive that I actually found myself paying more attention to manipulating the path of that stupid red ball than I did to the new episode of Bones (which is unheard of for me).

And with that, I will leave you to get your own ball rolling.  I have a game to get back to.

I have a love/hate relationship with riddles.  They’re fun, and I enjoy the blissful moment of feeling smart when I solve one.

But.

The self-esteem degrading blows and hair pulling agony of trying to figure them out is a total bitch.  And I can’t walk away from it.  It mocks me, drawing me back when there’s a house to clean for my soon-to-return bi-continental parents.

The massive, 1000 level riddle-quest at A Clever Waste of Time has been doing the mocking lately.  I’m embarrassed to say I’m a mere handful of levels into the thing and that I definitely needed some of the hints in the first 5 levels (I had no idea how to even start).  After that there’s a forum where you can seek guidance, but I’m avoiding it, though it’s a very tempting beacon….So far basic web knowledge has been the key to moving forward–I have no idea what lies ahead.

Hello, my name is Cammy, and I have a Sims problem.

Yeah, this is sad enough that it was close to being billed as a Secret Heresie, but then I decided to let my shame go and just dwell on the hours I’ve lost to Maxis games.

It started with Sim City 2000.  My brother bought it.  I had played the original Sim City and it was okay, but I rocked Sim City 2000.  I had a massive Metropolis named Ivanoville (in honor of Ivanova from B5.  Because I’m so shamelessly nerdy).  I played iterations there after (although not to the level of success of Ivanoville, I’m sad to say).

And then came the Sims.

Sure, Sim City was fun, but who wants to be a city planner?  A minor god in the lives of mini people however?  Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.  From laying every detail of their computer generated homes, to literally controlling when they went to the bathroom, this was simply brilliant.  And the control has gotten better as time has gone on.  I’m now up to Sims 3 and my demi-god-micro-managerial tendencies show no signs of ceasing.

The upside of any Sim game has been that I go through cycles.  I’m unfortunately hitting an upswing right now.  This means that I will find hour upon hour of a weekend simply vanished into a lot of nothing as I try to get sleep deprived simulated parents through the infancies of a set of twins, and try to get two completely dissimilar Sims to fall in love.  Minutes tick away as I click.

It’s probably a sad commentary on some kind of control issues in my own life, or something to that effect.  I prefer to be more positive and call it some kind of innate need to formulate stories of lives and orchestrate them in an entertaining format.  Alternative story-telling if you will.

The upside is that I do get tired of it and walk away, but only after somewhere between 20-30 hours of my life have whizzed by as I huddle before the computer.

And on that not, excuse me.  There’s a computer generated baby that just messed her diaper, a father who is “fishing indefinitely” and a set of three boys who all seemed to think that ice-cream for dinner was a good idea…..

As a kid, I never had a Nintendo.  My parents are thrifty.  To them, computers should be for doing work, so we had a home PC.  But dedicated gaming consoles?  Not so much.  Eventually they did give in, but Nintendo’s were higher than the Atari 2600.  If they were going to “waste” money on a game console, it was going to be as little as possible.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Atari (viva Ms. Pacman!), but I felt left out of the side-scroll adventure world of Super Mario.

Then came a substitute–something similar, but, honestly, cooler, for the home PC:  Commander Keen.

It had the same side-scroll action as Super Mario, but it was different–and I liked different.  A kid in a Bean & Bacon Mega rocket, crash landed on a planet, battling with wolfmen and toothy-green aliens armed only with a blaster and pogo-stick.

Hours of my life were poured into this game.  My brother and I even managed to find the “secret” level.

And now, far more years having passed than I like to admit, I found out that some clever souls have put Commander Keen online.  Apparently it’s sans sound, but already I’ve wasted several hours of pleasant frustration as I try to get my fingers to replicate the old moves.  I still haven’t found my pogo-stick and I’m getting zapped by the clammy things too often for comfort, but it’s worth it.

Sure, this is an oldie, but it’s a goody. Virtual bubble wrap.  Especially when you’re having the kind of week where you need to just turn off your brain.  The soothing sound of rhythmic mini-explosions at the click of a mouse?  It’s simple.  It’s beautiful.  And I’ve just gone through two virtual sheets.

I happen to enjoy manic mode–yes, there are modes!–where I don’t actually have a click, just the cursor moving over the virtual-plastic-goodness is enough to yield the happy crackle.  There’s also a self timer, because, well, it’s really important to know how much bubble wrap you can obliterate in a given amount of time.

It may not be challenging or visually stimulating, but after a long day of meetings and thinking fast?  It’s just what I need to vampire away the few minutes before you crawl into bed.

Defense of your property is rarely a waste of time.  Except when the property is a virtual desk and you’re building little pellet-launching towers to defend it from little dots.

Yes, I’ve found myself a victim of the time-suck that is Desktop Defender.

I made the mistake of clicking a link from some little blurb or other referring to this addictive little game.  At first, I really didn’t see what the attraction was.  I didn’t think it was possible to become addicted since I didn’t think the concept was that enthralling….

But once I got started I couldn’t stop.  I take way too much delight in mowing down little creeps in my amazing maze of death.  It’s therapeutic.  If only I could defend my real desk from real creeps as easily….

This week’s time vampire is a true testament to how low you can sink while unemployed.  During my year of the great job hunt, I wound up clicking through some junk mail from Disney.  They told me I could design my own Pixie.  Well, really, how cool is that?

So off I went.  And despite the fact this site is aimed at the invariably annoying pre-teen set, I couldn’t help it.  I got drawn in.  What started as me killing a few minutes designing leaf-and-petal-based outfits for wide-eyed pixies who are about as realistically proportioned as Barbie, turned into a few hours of my exploring Pixie Hollow, which then morphed into a few days of playing the random little games which were actually pretty entertaining.  Unfortunately, they started to give me badges for playing, which made me want more badges, so I found myself spending countless hours flying around to “collect” acorns or bits of fluff and more badges and….basically I was like an addict.

I should probably be ashamed, but really, the games were well designed (I’m rather partial to “Harvest Hustle” myself), and incredibly well-paced.  I say well paced because often these kinds of games aimed more at the younger set don’t have any real advancement in difficulty–these games do, and they do it on a nice scale.  Nice enough that even I can avoid too much frustration.

So, if you’ve got time to kill and a penchant for flash games, slay what’s left of your dignity and fly off with the pixies.