Felt a bit creative, so I made two tilesets for Pipewalker:

Pipewalker Roads1 Tileset

and
 

Pipewalker Railway tileset

Minesweeper is one thing, Shisen-Sho another. This is another Mahjong solitaire type game, where you can remove pairs of tiles from the board under certain conditions, but everything is stacked 1 high. Only two matching tiles can be removed at a time. Two tiles can be removed only if they can be connected with a maximum of three lines. Lines can be only horizontal or vertical, but not diagonal. Lines may cross only the empty border. The game is over if future moves are not possible and tiles are left on the board, or the player successfully removes all the tiles.

The version I prefer to play is by Daniel Valot. In fact I liked it so much I made two tile sets for the game (the one above based on Windows Wingdings, and a SubGenius version), which were later included in the distribution. You can vary the rules and the size of the board, and the window is scalable, so you can shrink it to a corner of the screen. I like to play with some additional rules, namely that a tile can only be removed if one of the pair removed has either the top or bottom edge clear of other tiles (and either top or bottom for the whole game). And my preferred size board is 24 x 12 - any larger than that and it is too easy to solve, and smaller and a solution becomes either trivial or problematic.

Anyway, like Minesweeper, this solitaire game seems to have a life lesson for me. Success in the game is about planning. Often whole sets and areas of tiles are blocked because tiles next to them don't seem to be clearable. But often as well, that only seems to be the case for the current turn. If a player concentrates on the moves they can make - rather than the ones they can't - often either another way of removing those tiles becomes apparent, or it becomes redundant anyway when the tiles can be removed because others have been removed already. Either that, or the situation becomes unsolvable, and if you want, you can try the starting configuration again.

And here I am seeing yet another metaphor for life. Often with my own situations, if concentrate or focus on problems that are not immediate, they often seem to be unsolvable, because I cannot work out how I get there from here. But often if I'm focussed on the now, instead of what was or what will be, it doesn't matter. The imagined problem either goes away (it wasn't a real problem after all) or becomes redundant because I've solved a more immediate problem anyway. Other times if I have just a general idea of where I'm going, but not an over detailed map of what it is, I find that I've been focussed on that while I've been dealing with day-day stuff anway, and I'm closer to the goal than I thought.

So, a second metaphor for life, maybe another dumb one, but just something that struck me as I played the game.

But, I love the simulation! It really felt like driving on a real road. I puttered around in the back roads for a while and lost exactly where my home was (should have bookmarked it) before I started a new game. Love driving on those freeways. Apparently you can go online and interact with thousands of players but I'm nowhere near that yet in skill, and there is still much for me to explore (and I also need a gamespy account).

Golly - I wonder if therte are mods for other areas? I'd love to hoon about in the Hunter Valley!  

I bought a copy of Trackmania United Forever today when i went food shopping, for $10. It's been out for a few years, and apparently it can be downloaded for free (500 MB) from the website, but it was still a well spent $10.

I used to play a lot of racing games in the arcades back in the 80s (especially Spy Hunter). I played a "party game" with Michelle and Kevin for 90 minutes. I'm registered online as LauraEss, and even though I thouroughly enjoy this game, I'm not very good at it. Michelle is the best driver out of all of us.

Go speed racer!!!

.

[Error: unknown template qotd]For me "old school" video games are the ones I played in the video arcades in a literally misspent youth. That being the case, it would have to be JUMP BUG.

Never quite got to the final level, but with MAME I can one day...

So, I wonder if the makers of this actually watched the film?

Will attempting to get back into the swing of doing my Tales of the Galli strip (which I like to have some authenticity in, even if it's only a little), I've been reading and investigating different sorts of connections.

You might remember I was reading lots of ancient Roman detective stories.

I'm still doing that, but have discovered a couple more authors from which to read. The first is Rosemary Rowe, who writes about the freedman Libertus, a mosaic maker in Britannia who mostly investigates for his Roman patron. Only read the  the first book so far but I found the character a real contrast from the others I've read.

Paul Doherty is an author I've come back to after failing to read one of his books last year. I find the style of writing to be a tad patronising, with characters telling each other things that maybe they wouldn't, but do so that the reader will understand. If this were done in an SF story it'd be dead boring exposition. The main character in  this series is Claudia, a spy for the Empress Helena who has the ability "not to be noticed". I'm reading this currently as it's set in the same locale and period as my story. Hmmm - phosphorus matches in 313 CE?

CivCity Rome is a PC game I've picked up where the player has to build a functioning Roman city or town. There are different "missions" one gave go on with different goals and objectives. I quite like the idea of building Rome or Ostia from scratch. I also had the idea that maybe it'd be a cheap way of creating backgrounds for the strip.

That is, until I came across Google Earth Rome. This morning I used Google Earth (minus the ancient Rome bits) to help me a map for the strip. It's a mixture of accuracy and fantasy, but at least I got some details right.

And finally, just because I could, I bought a dual package of Rome and Rome: Barbarian Invasions on the Total War series of games. The expansion is about the right period for my strip and might just be fun to play too.

I just discovered that En Garde! - a role- playing game set in 17th century Paris and on which I used to run postal games with about 40 players in the late 70s - is still around!

It's been revived by a new company and even has its own web site. Cool stuff. I just sent the people running this an e-mail to see if they'd like to see copies of the "expanded rules" I wrote.

Instead of looking at web comics like I was going to, I spent a fair bit of time last night going through the Source Forge listings. And I found some great stuff!

I found a windows version of a solitaire game called Shisen-Sho, where you remove pairs Mahjong tiles until you clear the board. Sounds exactly like any of the hundred versions of solitaire Mahjong, doesn't it, but there's just one difference - all the tiles are flat in a rectangle, and you can only remove pairs that that can have an unblocked route of no more than three lines to each other (see pic at right). The only thing missing from the download was the rules - but I found these elsewhere!

This game is extremely absorbing for me, just like Links was - I love elegant puzzle games. Apparently it's a port of a version of the game that ran under KDE (a Linux GUI) and can use the tile sets for KMahjongg. I went out and found the download page and converted them (as simple as changing the extension from .tileset to .bmp). There are heaps of other versions out there too (and Ishido looks just as interesting). Cool!

The other big find at Source Forge was the number of train and railway games and simulations. I've always been interested in trains and railways since I was a child. My father was a guard on freight and passenger trains for over 30 years, and even took me with him on a couple of runs up to the Avon Valley marshalling yards.

In Simultrains you "build the transport networks, with platforms, quays, level crossings, signals and much more. Transport passengers between nearby cities with a commuter train or use a high speed train to earn big money by connecting cities further apart". I haven't tried it yet but it looks a lot like A-Train and Sim City (though there's also FreeTrain).

 Rails is a java implementation of the 18xx series of board games. What's 18xx? I have an original copy (with Northern expansion) of 1829 by Hartland Trefoil. This was an elegant board game based on the first railways in Britain in the 19th century. Each player bought shares in one or more companies and built track (by placing tiles), bought engines and ran trains for profit or loss. It was deceptively simple, requiring a mixture of strategy and shrewd management. Like Diplomacy, the game seems to have created an entire following and variants.

And then there's the Crayon Rails game (not open-source, I found it while looking for Cyber Rails, which doesn't seem to have anything to download yet) which is clearly inspired by Empire Builder. Years ago when I was in Fandom, they used to have Rail Baron tournaments at Swancon. I used to own a set of that but I really found it difficult to play the game because the board would freak out my vision and (like Monopoly) I'd always end a game with a migraine headache! An alternative to RB was Empire Builder. I own two sets - America (the original) and Britain. The thing about these games was that you built rail networks by drawing in crayon on a laminated map. Much more interesting than Monopoly styled RB.

Actually, there seems to be a whole site devoted to these old board games, called Rail Game Fans. I must investigate this more thoroughly, as I should at Rail Serve as well.

But, without a doubt, the big "gob smacker" of a discovery in my browsing would have to be Rail World and Yard Duty. Both are railway simulations that use satellite photos of real railway complexes to simulate railway management. There's no "winning" as such, but by golly, the most realism I've seen yet! I must see about adding the Kewdale Freight Terminal and other locations sometime.

Yes, I know this all sounds obsessive, but trains (and train games) have been a passion for a long while.

Discovered this DownloadSquad today, that has blogs about things you can download. I found it when looking for a reference to MS Word for DOS which I used professionally between 1989-1995.

The amazing thing is, that it's been available free for download since 1999. Not of course, that if you had anything running anything like Linux, or Windows XP, that you'd actually use this and not Open Office or (heavens forbid) MS Office or equivalent.

Maybe it's nostalgia for me. Earlier I was looking for a simple DOS game that ran in coloured text mode and was a rip-off of something called Boulder Dash. The one I was looking for had a bulldozer clearing out a grid of diamonds, dirt, rocks and dynamite (you can guess what happens when the boulders fall on the dynamite). I got this from the freeware/shareware archives at W.A.I.T used to play it on my XT. Hours of mindless fun including one episode where (and I swear I'm not making this up, or trying to be funny) I saw a vision of a Flaming Jesus above the PC while I played it.

Strange days.