A couple weeks ago we added a new friend to the family . . . one "Tim Pachui" or simply "Timmy" as we've all been calling him. (The name comes from a joke about my cursive handwriting and how it looks when I sign my name.)
It's Tim Pachui! Everyone's favorite dude!
Timmy is a rambunctious 3 month old male kitten with TONS of energy, and he's a lot different than our current cat Zoodles, who is a 3 year old female primadonna.
Zoodles Purdoodles!
Where Timmy is white with shorter hair, Zoodles is grey with longer hair. Where Timmy is playful and energetic, Zoodles is a lazy sunbather. (give Timmy time). Where Timmy gobbles up food anywhere he can find it, Zoodles must be coaxed into eating and pampered until there's a level of comfort that her food may now be eaten. Where Zoodles is afraid of getting near the door leading to the garage, Timmy finds a way to sneak in there 2-3 times a day.
It's been a bit time consuming since integrating a new cat into the house is super challenging and especially when our new kitten has tons of energy and just wants to play. The last thing we want to do is create life long enemies. In fact, that's exact opposite of what we want to do. We love our primadonna (and Zoodles could use a buddy tbh) so introducing them and making sure they get along has been very important.
Two cute!
Let me tell you! There's been baby gates and pheromones. There's been space confinement and escape acts. There's been play fights and real fights . . . and there's been lots of sniffing, hesitation, and finally acceptance. Yup, I think we're to the point where they're finally accepting each other in their spaces. somewhat.
But y'all . . . Timmy is so much fun. He's an acrobatic high jumper. He's a piggy eater. He loves car rides and exploring. He's got a big loud purr when he's happy and loves being loved.
The back of his head looks like a boo ghost with two spooky scream mask eyes and a wide open mouth. His tail is a Tigger tail that looks completely different from the rest of his body, and he's got a silly mouse nose.
The spooky side of Timmy!
Timmy's great, and we're happy to have him in the family.
Yesterday I got a great quest that popped up that made me incredibly happy, the game said . . . hey . . . you've done enough Tier IV quests, let's open up the Tier V trader for you then. Sound good? Thank you, game! That does sound good!
So I took the quest to open up the Trade Routes, got on my minibike and rode the 3.2 kilometers to talk to Mister Fabulous Beard (aka Trader Joel). There I was sitting late in the day on Day 48 of 7 Days to Die where Day 49 (ye' old 7 x 7) was just about to happen.
It's a precarious place to be honest, and it's one of the feelings that I love so much about this game: Judgement calls. It makes you teeter back and forth between the chaotic explorer side of your personality versus the cautious wise side of your personality. I love when games manage to conflict you like this.
So I took my first Tier V quest, which happened to also be in the direction of my house -- wise decision, right? I believed so, but when I arrived at the Skyscraper, I realized that this looked hairy.
Welcome to the corporate offices of Higashi Pharmaceutical
So I went in anyway to see if perhaps it was a bit of a façade, you know? I've seen hollowed out buildings before where you can manage it in a half an hour. Maybe this is one of those situations?
After being swarmed by a gaggle of suits on the first two floors I had some hopes that maybe I could do this quest after all.
The rag doll physics of these suit zombies dropping down the broken escalator was hilarious
But when I looked up the shaft of the elevator on Floor 2, I quickly realized that I was going to have to nerd pole up to the top of this thing and fight for my life with each floor. This was not the façade I was looking for.
The cubicle farms of Floor 3 were full of things to check for loot, but I just started skipping past them at this point feeling like time was running out.
The wise part of me finally spoke up when I got to floor 4, and I totally noped out of that quest. I'm just glad I had a boot mod that allowed me to drop down the elevator from floor to floor so I could quickly get out of there and got home just in time for the zombies to all wade through my moat of wooden spikes.
Whew . . . ok, now we can let the real fight begin.
It makes me wonder though . . . What would happen if I spent the blood moon at the top of this skyscraper instead at my home base. I might survive it by just hiding out, but what's the fun in that? The Blood Moon is an opportunity for experience and loot! I may have to try that next Blood Moon just to see what the experience is like. I imagine they'd find their way to me, but maybe not?
Either way, I'll be back to explore a Tier 5 quest when I have more time and don't feel quite as pressured. Higashi Pharmaceutical looked like it'd take a nice 1.5 to 2 in-game-days to complete. I wouldn't mind exploring that more fully.
There's a particular Tier IV quest I've been repeating a lot of lately in 7 Days to Die, and it feels like I've almost got it down to a science. It's an underground Military installation called Red Mesa.
Welcome to Red Mesa -- it ain't restricted no more!
Upon entry beyond the front outer perimeter you get attacked by 4-5 zombies. There is a chance that one or two of them may be feral, but usually it's easy pickins with a hunting rifle.
If you scoot off to the left, you get a side view of the end of the "dungeon" and you can actually help yourself out here and pick off a couple of the zombies from shooting the outside in through the window grates. It takes a bit of creative jumping, but it can be done. If you really wanted to, I suppose you could use boxes to get to the top of the building and hammer your way through the top door and crawl the dungeon backwards, but I haven't done that yet.
Just inside, you open an access hatch to a broken elevator and slip down through. The first door in below this has a nice horde of zombies that try to swarm out. Use that door's pinch point to your advantage.
Off the right there's a chance that the vending machine will be active. Check that for your favorite buff food. I always buy the loot finding buff here if it's available. This is car part nirvana and you have 2 full military vans and a car -- great place to get gas. After this room, you may actually need to lay down a crate for all the goodies you've collected just at the front. There's plenty more loot to come.
The door beyond this always has at least one zombie, usually hidden off to the left. Up the stairs you'll find a broken window for you to crawl through and make your way down the catwalk level by level until you get to the bottom. Every door and false wall here contains a zombie or two on your way down. Eventually you'll jump down to the bottom and crawl the tunnel between buildings. There's a zombie dog here that's very bitey.
I'm ready for you bitey dog!
Across the tunnel, you'll find a couple of old barracks. These two rooms are book reading paradise! I can't tell you how many books and schematics I've found here. Reading is for winners! You'll find a couple zombies in the showers here that connect the two barracks, but nothing that can't be dealt with easily.
Next up in your crawl is the mess hall and it's full of goodies! After you've looted the store room, try sneaking around the corner and picking off a couple of the motionless zombies down the hallway. It makes this spot easier so you don't get swarmed. Always check the soda machine here. It's great for finding energy drinks that give you a speed boost.
After the mess hall comes a place I like to call the control room. Not only is it full of office chairs, but it's full of zombies. What I like to do is path to the far stairway, take a quick step down to spawn the hoard, and then sprint back to the beginning. Typically they just come around the corner and start walking down toward you in a nice straight line. Armor piercing bullets can cut through them all with super efficiency.
Line 'em up, and gun 'em down!
There's an extra room of loot down here that's through a door that you have to break down, but I typically skip it because my bags are full anyway to be honest, and your end goal is just up some stairs. Cue this fight by getting close to the motherload door and then sprint backward a bit . . . in fact, going all the way back down the stairs you came from is a pretty good idea because they always seem to find a way behind you.
Thank you for your service
This final horde of zombies is no joke. It's about 6 army zombies and a few others. If you're ready for it though with a full load out of loaded guns, it's not a problem.
Pop those loot bonuses my friends because at this point you're entering ammo and weapon heaven. Those military zombies were hiding a couple boxes of shotgun supplies, a gun bag, a couple ammo piles, and two locked chests of loot.
Loot heaven!
If you're low on ammo, this is a good spot to quest. If you happen to have any other tips or tricks for this area or if I've missed something you like to do when in this Tier IV quest, let me know!
I casually dropped by my Bandcamp page to see how the stats were doing, and as I expected, they were pretty abysmal. hehe. I never expected there to be a stellar play count AT ALL. I just really wanted to make my music available to those that might be interested and especially old acquaintances of the past.
3 complete plays! (Pretty sure they were all me)
By selecting the tabs underneath "Plays" you can get specific details about specific time periods. I'm sure for popular bands, that's kind of a cool thing, but for me, the coolest feature of this chart is the "defender" mode. When you click this button, it literally turns your stats into an old school game of defender.
Destroy the aliens! Play my music!
This is actually playable and gives you 3 lives to mess around with. You don't actually wreck into the collision of the bars, and once your humans are all gone, the aliens go into hyper mode and eventually swarm and destroy you. Your "plays" becomes your score, and honestly 3,300 plays of my music would be amazing, but for a Defender score, that's not that great.
It's that cute gamification touch that I love to see from websites. From Google, it's expected now that you'll see an amazing game from them every year or two (just like they did for Pac-man 30th anniversary or the 2021 Olympics). From other companies, it's nice to see when it happens.
If Bandcamp was really savvy, they'd find a way to automatically make a rhythm game out of your uploaded music. Now THAT, I'd like to invite people to come play. :)
To say I've been playing a lot of 7 Days to Die lately would be an understatement, and it's been my go to game for the past week. I'm finally starting to get my groove in the game, and it feels great.
As I talked about previously, I started a new game along with the acquisition of a new computer for my birthday. It is the base "Navezgane" game world, which is completely new to me because I've never played this game before. I don't have any special rules running on my game as well. If you die, you have to make a corpse run. Day and Night lengths aren't modified, and stuff happens as it happens.
Yesterday I just finished up Day 35's Blood Moon and lived through it, which felt pretty great. So far my score is as follows:
- Day 7 Blood Moon: Victory! It wasn't bad at all. I sat on the roof of my first house and shot the zombies down as they invaded my base.
- Day 14 Blood Moon: Fail :( I wasn't prepared for the jump in difficulty, and they broke through my base's defenses and I ran out of bullets, which made me panic, and I opened a door that led to me getting swarmed. They should have had to break through 3 more doors, and I could have possibly ridden it out and survived.
Tower Defense Base 1
- Day 21 Blood Moon: Victory! I moved my base to a house in the snow and made a defensible building. Most zombies got stuck on a stairway as a turret punched them back down. I shot them safely from a corner of a roof.
Tower Defense Base 2
- Day 28 Blood Moon: Fail! I moved my base to a house in the desert and ran out of time. My defenses were weak, my fences were weak, my bullet supply was low, but I had earned enough to buy a motorized bike from the trader in the desert, and quickly found out that you can't run from a blood moon.
- Day 35 Blood Moon: Victory! I stayed in the desert and fortified my walls, doubled my walls, added a ton of barriers inside the house, made walkways to get around, and generally, just did much better against the relentless hoard. I didn't even have to resort to hiding in my secret enclosed, double doored safe room on the third story of the house.
Tower Defense Base 3
I don't know why it took me so long to fully realize what the Blood Moon actually is . . . it's really just an immersive 3D Tower Defense game where you set up a base and the zombies try to break through and kill you as you act as a player-controlled turret.
. . . and that's why my friend Lessah completely made fun of me when she visited my house yesterday for the first time after I finished my 35th Day. It was the ultimate guy-in-the-apocalypse house, treating the game like it was simply Tower Defense. My set up was a maze; I had broken stairs and trash around the house; and the only food and water I had was Grilled Meat and Boiled Water.
By the time Lessah was done playing with me, the house had a small garden started and a little water source. She helped me craft a forge. My boxes were a touch more organized, and she just generally improved the place overall.
It went both ways though! Knowing that someday Lessah would drop by to visit, I had been saving some stuff I found, just especially for her . . . including a much-beloved Iron Club. I gotchu fam! It's nice to have friends in the apocalypse. :)
Last night my son went to a local roller skating rink. When I went to pick him up, he was incredibly excited to play the Galaga arcade machine they had there for some reason, so we gave him a couple quarters, and it was over pretty quickly unfortunately.
Shootin' the digital insects!
I was reminded about how ruthless those old arcade games could be. They were absolutely designed to suck your quarters down, but what made Galaga so insidious and so great at the same time was the self-sacrifice aspect of the game.
In Galaga, for the price of a quarter you get 3 lives, but what most people tried to do was sacrifice their first life to the invading aliens, who could tractor beam the ship and carry it behind them during the level. Then, if you shot the ship that was carrying your ship when it was dive bombing you, then that second ship would snap together with your current ship, creating a double shooting ship. Of course, a double-sized ship was also twice the target, but that double shooting ship could then be used to score big points on the bonus waves in-between the levels.
Typically you'd take the gamble and it wouldn't pan out and you'd end up losing both ships in frustration, but every once in a while you'd rock those two ships and beat the challenge levels to the point that you earned a new ship and felt pretty great about your decision. That sacrifice paying off as a reward is definitely "The Galaga Effect" in my mind -- it's a soft gamble that won't outright kill the game, but could result in a fantastic feeling while it lasts. It's a little bit of the same feeling someone might get from when they're on a slot machine hot streak. It's also a much stronger sacrifice than a laying out a chess pawn for sacrifice because it's literally sacrificing 1/3 of your life to get 2x the power.
I read a really fascinating interview with Shigeru Yokoyama, the designer of Galaga where he talks all about how Galaga came about and some of the thought process behind it. When he designed the game originally, players were getting longer play sessions about 7-8 minutes with one quarter, which wouldn't fly with arcade owners, so Namco came in and ratcheted up the difficulty:
"Yeah, although I was really worried after the location test failed to pull in a very good income. The average playtime of a single coin back then was about 3 to 4 minutes, but people were playing for 7 or 8 minutes with our game, so the income was lower. There was some grumbling about that at Namco, but I asked them to let us leave it this way. I said the fact that people could play longer would make it popular, and it would still draw a good income. However, from the arcade operator’s perspective, short-term profits were the priority, so in the final commercial versions of we ended up caving to management and doing it their way." - Shigeru Yokoyama
I quickly found a free version of Galaga online, called Galagon 2004, just go to www.freegalaga.com and you're there. I'm sure there's more of them out there as well. All the old games have been recycled and redone hundreds of times, and if you're into old game Emulators, I'm sure you can find even more.
The arcades these days have a version of Galaga called Galaga Assault where you play for tickets. It's amazing to see how controlled play times are on this game. They've really got it down to a science. In addition, Galaga Assault has a "redemption mode" where you actually buy extra fighters in exchange for quarters. If you really want to throw extra tokens down the drain to try and win the jackpot, you can have extra fighters already attached at the get-go of the game!
Galaga Assault quadruples down on hedging your bets. I feel like there's something to be said here about pay to win, but in a ticket arcade, that's . . . a given?
I'm trying to think of some modern examples of the Galaga effect in games. If something comes to mind, please share it in the comments.
Personally, since I've been playing Risk of Rain 2 lately, I'm reminded of the shrines where you sacrifice life in exchange for gold. 50 life for 25 gold is a big risk. Although sometimes that feels more like an act of desperation in that game and the benefit probably isn't quite as tempting as it was in Galaga.
Part 4 -- Enter the MMO, the Elixirists, and the Future
~~
Playing several years of Everquest and World of Warcraft kind of changed everything for me. Video Games became king in my life. Who had time to write music when there were giant virtual worlds that would gladly absorb every last ounce of spare time I had? You mean I can be social and play games at the same time? Yes please!
How to explain? I don't know if I can fully explain it. At the time I was writing emails and forum posts about games and then journaling my adventures became kind of a big deal to me. It was absolutely revolutionary. Yes, I would still mess around on my music software, but now writing about playing video games kind of . . . just . . . took over.
The year before I started playing Wizard101 I also started to learn how to beatbox, and I was beatboxing like crazy all the time. I think people at work were pretty sick of me beatboxing in the hallways. whoops. I tried incorporating beatbox into electronic music, but it wasn't really working out. Perhaps that's because I never really was that good at it. Jus' sayin'. (I think the very first wizard101 theme remix I did had some beatboxing in it -- but that wasn't MY beatboxing, it was sampled from someone else.)
I made a whole string of videos that showcased me beatboxing and playing around with my kids called the "Saturday Morning Crazy Stuff Show." These were all done at 2x speed to amplify the crazy part of the crazy stuff show. Every once in a while, I'll still pull out the DVD I made back in 2007 of our Saturday Morning Crazy Stuff Show, and the kids and I will get a kick from the 20 or so 3-minute-long segments we made together.
Then 2008 happened! I started playing Wizard101 and writing about the game on this very blog and the words just came pouring out of me. I threw myself into the community and started writing little podcast segments for a Wizard101-themed podcast known as Ravenwood Radio -- hosted by none other than Steve and Leala (Yes, THAT Leala)! These segments often turned musical with my background in music, and I ended up making a number of strange parody songs about Wizard101. I even wrote the theme song for Ravenwood Radio! I was all in.
It's hard to believe this is approaching 140k views. I still have people mention this parody to me on Twitter to this day. Crazy. And really, this just started out as being a segment for Ravenwood Radio when Selena Gomez was added to the game, but I made a full video, and it kind of took off.
I have a folder on my cloud storage with a bunch of old wizzy jams. Maybe someday I'll make a collection of them and put them up on Bandcamp as well in a Wizard101 themed album. In the meantime, you can always check out my Parody Playlist on YouTube. This Katy Perry parody never got the love it deserved. Jus' sayin. Uber Wife's rap at the end is fire.
One of my favorite moments as a Wizard101 player was when my Grizzleheim remix was put up on the ringtone page of Wizard101 for all players to download. It felt epic. That link no longer exists on the webpage, but still . . . it was pretty great at the time. I love putting energy into video game communities and doing this with music is right up my ally.
But it wasn't only about videogames and parodies . . . Around 2010-2011, I was contacted by a guy that was in a band that I opened up for one time back in the 90s during my industrial phase. This was was my old friend Brian Jenson. We met for lunch and had a great time talking about the old days. He was looking to collaborate, so we formed a little virtual band together and wrote songs and back and forth very slowly for several years under the band name "The Elixirists."
My favorite song from The Elixirists: Time Creeps Up
The Elixirists aimed to be be in a genre somewhere near the feeling of trip hop, electro funk, industrial and generally in the Electronic music world. One person described our sound as a newer version of Severed Heads. That's actually not a bad comparison. I used to listen to Severed Heads in high school.
It was Brian that convinced me to switch from Acid Music to Ableton, and the hope was that we would be able to collaborate more closely together. We made a full album's worth of music but never released those songs as a collection for some reason. I went ahead and uploaded them to Bandcamp as a collection.
Unfortunately Brian would end up taking his life on January 1st, 2018. Brian wanted a recording contract more than anything in the world. He tried for several years with no success. I remember one time he told me that if he didn't have a recording contract by the time he was 45, that was it, he was going to take his life. He didn't want to be old and, I suppose, unsuccessful in his eyes.
An old picture of Brian standing with Howard Jones and Howard Jones' Daughter
I tried my best to be a good friend and a positive influence in his life, but his mind was made up. We had emailed weekly back and forth to each other for 8 years and talked about all our hopes and dreams. No amount of talking on my part was going to change his mind, and he avoided the topic whenever I'd bring it up. He took his own life. It was tragic, and I was devastated. He never said goodbye to me, and I had a hard time finding music inside me after that.
Of course, there was more to come . . . in part 5!
