Odd Player

Perhaps nothing, other than tantalizing dinner smells, brings people to the same table as well as a jigsaw puzzle. Especially at holiday time, when after unwrapping presents, families and friends often welcome an activity that unifies the generations.

“Growing up, there was always a puzzle under our Christmas tree,” recalls Anne Williams of Lewiston, Maine, a leading jigsaw puzzle historian. “After we opened the presents, we’d get out the card tables. You can drift in and out; you can talk or not talk; you can compete a little bit if you want to see who will finish their section first. For most people, it’s a very relaxing, pleasant activity and you have the satisfaction of seeing a picture emerge as you continue your efforts.”

In the Williams household, the goal was to start a 1,000-piece puzzle at Christmas and complete it by New Year’s.

Stevanne Auerbach, an expert on child’s play known as Dr. Toy, considers jigsaw puzzles a group entertainment bargain.

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Lately, IVe noticed that some games (such as Unreal Tournament 3 and Clive Barker’s Jericho) require you to install the software version of Ageia’s physics engine onto your system. It bathers me, because it’s wholly separate from the game and integrates itself into Windows as a service, and you also have to uninstall it separately from whatever game is using it. Why can’t this software be just part of the gaming code itself, like the Havok system (from Source games) or earlier physics engines? Ageia has already been all but laughed out of existence for its silty hardware “physics accelerator,” so is the engine worth the extra intrusiveness into my system?

This brings up a larger point: Lots of online games require other add-ons to facilitate matchmaking. Personally, I despise GameSpy and its ilk, and I wonder why more games can’t have their own integrated software that doesn’t need to be installed separately on your system. Is the industry just specializing? Are developers just outsourcing more and more of everything?

Am I the only person who gets annoyed by the intrusive third-party apps? What do you guys think of all this?

Kids play many games–baseball. basketball, video games, board games. But unlike those activities, there’s one so-called game that is injuring and even killing young people.

It goes by many names, such as the choking game, the pass-out game, space monkey, and American dream. But in spite of the fun-sounding names, the effects of the game–where kids make themselves pass out on purpose–can be very dangerous. The game can even be deadly.

First things first: The “choking game” is not actually a game. “Sometimes things may not be what they seem,” says Samuel Mordecai, of California, whose twin brother, Gabe, died from playing it.

The Danger

So why would someone do something so dangerous and call it a game? Some people say fainting makes them feel good, and others think it’s funny to watch their friends pass out and then recover. But what happens to the brain when a person causes himself or herself to pass out is no laughing matter.

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I just finished reading the Ultimate Gaming Machine article (GfW) and saw that the winner, VoodooPC, underperformed Falcon Northwest on all of the test-run scores on pages 122 and 123. To me, it looks like Falcon won. What’s up with that?

Speaking as a Christian myself, I often find the Christian culture to be annoying. We are called to be the salt of the earth. We are to engage culture, not avoid it. Instead, we often take secular things and make mediocre, Christian versions of them. A problem with videogames that all gamers are starting to notice is the lack of decision-making: The basic plot is “this person is bad, so we must kill them.”

This is often not the case in real life; we have to live with people we do not like, and often people are not murderous and evil. We all sin; the question is…what do we do with that sin? God calls us to repent and sent Jesits Christ to die for our sins.

Christians are often stale and hypocritical. Its hard to be a Christian gamer, because I cannot support many amazing games thanks to the amount of things in them that God does not approve of. I call everyone to make an alternative - not to make a Grand Theft Auto clone where the objective is to throw Bibles at people and watch as they become saved, instead of throwing Molotov cocktails and watching them explode. Life is precious, and God allows for recreation along with work. As Christians, can we come up with an alternative that rocks…or are we stuck with saying, “Well, at least it isn’t secular”?

It’s nice that the people you interviewed in the World of WarCraft cover story mentioned their favorite areas, bosses, and raids.

It’s too bad that most of these are no longer visited as the content in The Burning Crusade has rendered any and all loot out of these instances obsolete in less than three weeks of questing.

Ragnaros was mentioned two times: As a denizen of Molten Core, he gets very few if any visitors these days, Onyxia? When was the last time her head (never mind Nefarian’s head) was seen in Orgrimmar or Stormwind? Blackwing Lair? AQ40?

Naxx? Phttt!! Why bother?

And that is the biggest failing of TBC. In one expansion, Blizzard has removed any and all reasons to venture into pre-TSC high-end instances.