Cyberpunk Novel: Tower Defender

Tower Defender is a must-read Cyberpunk novel.

The premise is that CommUnitas is harvesting mind overlays for their androids in preparation for departure from earth, a departure that threatens humanity! Can Robert Holdforth and Sally Riggs stop the deranged Kantor and his CommUnitas from launching Comm Tower?

For a science fiction read you can't put down, buy Joseph Hurtgen's cyberpunk romp, Tower Defender

Cardhunter: Multiplaying and Playing and Playing

Competition is compelling. Cardhunter provides endless--yes, endless--competition. With players from the US, Europe, and China, there are always games going on. You can track game history here. It has a solo campaign adventure that is fun in its own right, full of death touching zombies, brutal trolls, and over-powered dragons. The game is a throwback to Magic: the Gathering mixed in with AD&D. But then you wander over to the multiplayer portal and things get interesting (read: addictive). You play for a bit (read: a month). Watch the best players hand your severed head to you a few times. Get some decent gear and start getting some solid wins against top elo guild players (more on elo later). Then you get approached by a guild principle and agree to join their guild. Now you're in the so-called metagame, fighting for pizza, the in-game currency that can help you secure better weapons or new skins to make your avatars look more intimidating. Every month is a new guild season in Cardhunter. Every month is a new chance to compete, to be the best! Oh, and it's really, really fun.

Players and guilds come and go, but if you stick around over a period of a year, you'll see many of the same players. For the past year, Kraken has dominated the game with Gurel, Dark Brightness, Sasoo8, and Auburn toasting and roasting the competition. Although The Braves of Glory have presented Kraken with an ever-present threat, with greats like Sucre, Fcx Hiro, Zippo, Krystalis, and OldManRigney playing with unprecedented skill.

But even though those two guilds are almost always above the rest, any group of committed players can form a guild and challenge them. All you need is some pluck and a good deal of luck.


The multiplayer system has adopted chess's system for ranking players. The all-time high was achieved by a player from Istanbul with the handle Pappas just like week. He crested over 1960 which beat Sucre's high of 1954 from late 2017. Players start at 0 and as they win and lose, their elo goes higher or lower. I'm not actually sure if it's possible to get a negative score. Suffice it to say that the highest elo players win much more frequently than the lower elo guys. Here's a breakdown of what the elo range means in game:

1900+ Truly rare. Requires a combination of expert understanding of the game, at least a few of the very best weapons, a build that fits with the month's map rotation and the current meta (which means the sort of equipment and team composition players are using), and a good dose of luck. Win rate of 90% needed. There have probably been no more than 10 players achieve this score in Cardhunter's 4-year history.

1800s If you get to elo 1800, you've won the game for all intents and purposes.  There have easily been a hundred players reach this milestone, but it's still quite rare. Win rate of 80% needed.

1700s. Watch out. A 1700 player is a cardhunter expert. They know all the tricks, have solid strategies, solid equipment, and know how to win. 70% win rate

1600s. Strong player, but has weaknesses. 60% win rate

1400s-1500s Solid players. This is where you generally start finding guild players.  55% win rate

1300-1400s The odd builds. As players grow in their understanding of the game and gain new items, they will make some unexpected builds. Unexpected builds can sometimes win against the best players--because who knew that Cardomania197 was carrying rocket charge and an all-out-attack (AoA) paired with a laser thrust. 52% win rate

1200 - You made it! This is where you begin to compete with more battle-hardened cardhuntrians. 50% win rate

0-1000 - Novice level. A player that knows what they're doing can start a brand new character and get to elo 1000 in a few hours of play. A brand new player both in account and experience could easily take a couple weeks to get to 1000.

Age of Empires ii

I have played ages and ages of age of empires II.

Let me give you a scenario. It is 3 o' clock on a saturday afternoon and my little brother and my cousin want to play Age. We get together, set up a LAN network and the age is underway.

We generally team up together and take on as many of the computer adversaries all teamed together as the game will allow.

The first step, is to get to the 2nd Age in order to build some decent walls.

The very next step is to build what we like to call the rainbow wall. Why the rainbow wall you ask? Because when 6 different colored teams attack your wall it becomes a rainbow wall. Cyan, blue, green, yellow and pink guys all battering against the stones in order to come in and batter your stones.

So the rainbow wall is as thick of a wall as you can possibly build. 20 wall pieces thick is generally what your aiming for but 30 is better. Once accomplished, you can add some castles here and there and pump out some trebuchets to knock back at the more dangerous long range weapons the computer will throw at you.

Somewhere along the way it's a good idea to build a market and something like 50 trade carts in order to get that economy pumping. There should be another 50 or so dudes chopping wood and maybe 50 farms or something.

Once that's done, you've got to figure out the best units to buy as far as not using much / any gold but still able to do some bruising. You'll want to have a healthy team of units on hand in case the unthinkable happens and the rainbow wall busts.

Okay, it's not really unthinkable at all. The rainbow wall is going to bust, it's just a matter of time.

Incredibly, as long as you've got some castles and trebuchets to send ongoing volleys of death at the onslaught, it will taper off. It may be an hour or two before it tapers off, but it will. The computer isn't smart about getting those trade carts going and they'll eventually spend all their gold.

At this point, marshall a huge force and coordinate a strike between your two comrades to get the maximum effect out of your resources.

You've got to have trebuchets and you've got to have protection for them.

Also, you'll probably have two or three of your squads blitzed before you manage to turn the tide to complete victory mode.

After you victorize, you'll want to look at your stats and find out who led the way in kills and resource gathering.

What's the longest and most impossible Age session you've played?

Mario Brothers

So here we go with some Break Room statistics talk. The reason for all of this is that most of the time when I take breaks from video gaming with people, we talk about video games. One subject that can come up fairly often is exactly how much of a particular video game we've played.

The Mario Brothers have taken up a lot of the hours of my life. I figure if my life was measured in percentages of stuff I have done it would come out looking like this:

Sleep 32%
Eat     5%
stand in a line 1%
watch tv/movies 4%
read books 4%
play music 2%
conversation in person 5%
conversation by telephone 3%
bathroom stuff 3%
video games 7%
non-video games 2%
driving / travelling 1%
athletics 4%
sit in school learning 3%
sit in school not learning 3%
indescribable moments of insane beauty .01 %
zoning out 3%
shopping 1%
wasting time on internet 3%
writing 1%
cleaning random things 2%
waiting 1%
work 12%

which adds up to 100.01 %

But if we divide up the important video game part it would look like this.

video games

Nintendo      25%
PC                27%
iphone            2%
Diku MUD    31%
sega                .3%
xbox               9%
playstation       3%
gameboy         2%

(as a note, MUDs can be extremely addicting. I played one called DarkCastle. I'm sure I'll discuss that more in later Break Room articles).

Okay, so now lets delve into the Nintendo area.

Nintendo

Mario Brothers games
(including super
mario kart games, mario rpg,    
mario 1, 2, 3, super mario
world, and mario 64)                   50%
Legend of Zelda games                8%
metal gear                                     3%
sports games                                 5%
puzzle games (tetris)                     2%
shooters                                        5%
Sim games                                    12%
TMNT games                                6%
Mortal Kombat type games            3%


Breakdown by Mario Brothers Games

Super Mario 1                    3%
Super Mario 2                    3.5%
Super Mario 3                    5%
Super Mario World            5%
Mario RPG                         .5%
Paper Mario                        .25%
Mario 64                             7%
Super Mario Kart                74%
Mario Kart 64                      .5%
Mario Kart Double Dash     .25%

Now what are the total hours involved?

There's really no telling, but I know that I've played more than 1,000 hours of Super Mario Kart
whereas I probably played Mario RPG for about 14 hours and I probably played Super Mario 1 for about 50 hours.

Hmm. This whole thing is skewed for me though. I at first thought that SMK was the game I had played more than anything but now I realize my numbers could be way off because of some other games, namely:

Empire Earth
Heroes of Might and Magic III
Sins of a Solar Empire
Age of Empires I
Age of Empires II
Age of Mythology
Darkcastle MUD

I shudder to think of the many hours that I've spent with those games. Far more than the scant 1000 I spent playing SMK. Darkcastle represents the craziest share of my video game playing time at something like 10,000 hours.

I'm really cringing at the knowledge of this right now. I think I'm going to stay in the Video Game Break Room for a while until I get my bearings.

Anyway, please share how much time you've spent playing games. What games have you played the most? How many hours???

Games

You would think someone was ridiculous if they played games in order to lose. This is because a very important defining aspect of a game is the idea of their being a winner. We can agree that a game isn't really a game if someone doesn't win and if someone doesn't lose.

Oh, but wait. If we take that as our definition, then suddenly a massive back-log of pc games, xbox games, Nintendo games, videogames of all kinds, fall into some sort of no-man's land category. Video games marked an important step in the history of gaming of moving into territory where only one person has to play to make it a game, and so long as the human player wins, the loser doesn't possess consciousness and so doesn't understand in an emotional way that they have lost. The same goes for the situation of the human player losing and the computer winning. Since the computer cannot feel the concept of winning, is it still a victory?

Well, the answer is probably yes because of the human player's ability to imagine the great humiliation of the computer's loss or the swelling of the computer's pride after victory. Now, this sounds pretty dumb, but we have to realize, that the hundreds and hundreds of hours we've dropped into games like Pokemon, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, or whatever, are all contingent on the feeling of beating competition. It all comes down to Nietzsche's will to power really, the idea that men are driven by a desperate desire to assert themselves as the best.

Now, what this means is that real estate barons and video game champions are really operating on the same principles. But, unfortunately for big-time gamers, it's near impossible to earn a living through video gaming. Maybe someone should make a stocks and bonds video game that was tied into the world market. That way we'd start to see a lot of eleven year old millionaires dropping out of elementary school to put more time into cultivating their empire. This plan could solve our educational woes. Education sucks because it's a pathetic game. I've played Uno and War and frankly, they just aren't very fun. I don't plan on playing Uno or War again any time soon because their are plenty of far better games out there. Similarly, the educational process is as boring as watching a pile of rocks. If someone could figure out how to turn it into a decent game, that could be okay, but the best situation would be to sidestep education altogether and go ahead and let kids, teenagers, and young adults become contributing members of society through a game platform. This is a free idea for anyone to take by the way.

Robotics will change the way that games and work can intermesh.

First, apply Asimov's laws of robotics so that no one can be hurt, and then have a kid controlling a team of robots that run a hydroponic farm in Northern Ontario. The game aspect is that winning results in earning money. I'd say that Education should consist of about six years of learning robotics, programming, systems administration, language, economics, writing, communication, business mathematics, and entrepreneurship. At the end of the first three years of school, kids pick which sort of services or business they are interested in and then learn how to program and control their robot team and conduct the business they will be doing. After another two years, the games begin. Graduates are given their own team of robots and begin work. For the first couple of years, the kids are monitored heavily in order to assure that they aren't running their businesses at a loss, and then, once they learn to successfully run and operate their business, they are left to do it. The money to fund giving a kid their own robot would be freed up by the mere fact that education ends at 11 rather than 18. Seven years of not having to pay educators, build and upkeep middle and high schools, bus students around, and on and on, would result in the funds to give graduating 11 year olds their own robot team with which they could make a living for all time. 

And what's more, the interface that kids would be running their business from would be very much like a game. Kids would feel like they were playing an awesome game, but they would also be earning a living 10-20 years before our society is currently preparing individuals to do so.

It's time that we stopped playing the game of pretending to educate young people, only to send them out to the world unprepared for anything but failure and a wish to play a fun game. Anyone can see, from the amount of time they've spent in line waiting to buy a drink at a gas station while poor idiots throw their money away on lottery tickets, that people long for a game that will successfully marry fun with financial freedom. Lets get rid of the lottery and change the educational system around. Lets allow anyone to re-enroll in this new kind of school to right the wrongs of the terrible education we've all received in the US.

Lets play.

How to Survive Long Video Game Sessions

Games can go for a long time. Ah, ok. Games can go on for a long, long, long time. Lets face it, right now, there is a game you could be playing, but as odd as it seems, sometimes games go on so long that you have to take a break. That's why we've made a game breakroom after all! In this post we'll discuss what you can do to survive a long video game session. I mean, we've heard all the urban myths about kids dying after drinking 2 cases of energy drinks and not even getting up to hit the head. No one's really sure if that story is true or not, but neither does anyone want to test it!
Okay, so here we go.

1) Let Darkness Reign

First of all, you've got to cover windows up with blankets. You are just not going to be able to make it through the day with light streaming through. Reflections on the screen are bad and a huge concentration breaker. Also, you'd be surprised how much a good blanket over the window will muffle unwanted outdoor noises.

2) Mini-fridge

You need a mini-fridge within the space of a 3 second dash in order to stay stocked on game fuel. Some think it would be better if you can get the mini-fridge to within arm's reach, but lets face it, part of the greatness of the dash is that you havn't stretched your legs for a while, and it actually feels pretty good to get some blood pumping somewhere other than your thumbs and eyelids.

 3. Skype

Dial up your buddies and talk through your gaming session because the only thing better than a long video game session is a long video game session with your friends. The one drawback is that the skype call may drain a little of your ping power, but at least you'll have someone to talk to. 

4. Making a living

Nothing destroys a long game session like having to go to work. What you want to do is make sure that you either don't have to go to work or the work you go to is sort of the same thing as video gaming. There's really all kinds of things you can do to keep the green coming in and be a major player in the video gaming world. You could, for one, make video games for a living. I have a cousin-in-law that does this quite happily in San Francisco. When the last Diablo game hit the stores, the whole company declared it was Diablo day and did nothing but play the game during regular operating hours.

If you aren't able to make video games to pay the bills, I suggest doing things for a passive income, like selling stock photography or making a blog and monetizing it. For instance, this blog brings in a whopping $130 a week! Just enough to buy plenty of game fuel and hot dogs to let me defeat HOM III's Barbarian Breakout on Impossible setting for the 4th straight time.

5. Sleep At some point, even a gamer has to bed down. You just want to make sure that you get your game started before it gets so late that you can't help but fall asleep in your chair. Believe me, I've been the guy asleep with his hand on the mouse only 20 minutes into a game. With LAN games there's always the possibility that it could take an hour or more to get everything going, especially if someone shows up and proclaims they just deleted everything off their computer and will have to reload it all, split their hard drive, load up bootcamp, load up windows, download the game from the internet, and on and on and on. But to tell the truth, I've been in Age of Empires type games when I fell asleep for an hour or so and when I woke up, nothing really had changed.

6. Cleanliness

Do not use axe body spray. Your body odor is pleasing compared to the smell of axe body spray covering your body odor. The thing about axe body spray is that it starts out smelling unpleasant, and then the truth of your body odor is hard to take. The two mixed together is perfectly terrible. One thing you can do is just change your t-shirt. A fresh shirt will do wonders for your smell. The old, grubby t-shirt compounds the smell factor, whereas a new, freshly laundered shirt, has a way of neutralizing your body odor for a time. What to do when the new shirt reaches max capacity? Put on an even newer shirt!

 7. Hand Cramps

I recommend that you switch your posture out now and again. Lay for a while belly down, lay on your side for a while, sit for a while, maybe even stand! Now the next move isn't for the faint of heart, but if you can learn how to play ambidextrously, switching out your left hand to control the mouse, then you'll really be ahead of the game. This is better for slow-pace games like Empire Earth rather than your League of Legends style game.

8. Hostile Trolling

Other gamers can be the worst. Sometimes the best thing you can do is reduce your game window so that you can't see any of the trolling. When you're headed for a 5+ hour game session, the last thing you need is low morale. Instead of losing your esteem to rage gamers, play some rock music and jam out while you game. I suggest a little Dio, some Steely Dan, and the Flaming Lips. So there you have it. Hopefully you'll be able to apply these ideas to max out your gaming sessions. What are some other key strategies you've employed to assure long game session success?