GFWL: Tinker

If you're an achievement hunter like me, you're always on the look out for your quarry. This is how I found out about Tinker which has Live achievements, specifically of the Windows flavor. While I am not a fan of the Games for Windows Live client, the game is free. To give an idea about its lineage, the game apparently came out initially in 23 Sept 2008 as part of the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras pack and wasn't made available to GFWL until 15 Dec 2009 . You may recall that Vista was once the unfortunate barrier to another source of achievements, but I digress.

Tinker is a fun little puzzle game that is essentially a Sokoban game, and features 8 sets of 20 levels each for 160 levels total. So far, I've only run through the tutorial set and some of the first set, but if the difficulty increases quite a bit, I could see the game easily providing 10-ish hours of playtime.

Achievements

In general, achievements are broken down into three categories based on how they are awarded, and I will attempt to describe them below.

1. Normal types of completion

These are usually earned incidentally like performing an action a number of times below the bare minimum to beat the game and/or completing levels on easy-to-normal-ish difficulties. A player can expect to get most if not all of these from a single play through.

2. Elite types of completion

These are usually earned by completing levels on the harder or hardest difficulties and/or completing these objectives in much more difficult ways including no-death-runs or the restriction of easier methods or abilities. These tend to be both difficult and frustrating, the latter due to restarting because of the former.

3. Bizarre kinds of behavior

These are usually earned by performing actions you would not ordinarily perform during the game and are generally the more wacky achievements. A game's more memorable achievements tends to fall under this category.

4. Grindy/Collection

Ah, the bane of many a 100% completionist are the grindy and collection type achievements. Grindy achievements generally require an large investment of time in the form of simply clocking in a large amount of play time or earning a large amount of kills or wins. Collection type achievements require a player to collect every single map, flag, post, gold piece, body part, whatever. These are generally more frustrating than difficult, especially if the game in question doesn't have a built-in checklist.

In case you're wondering, Tinker only has achievements of only the first three categories.

One little peculiarity about Tinker is that it has 200 points spread out over 15 achievements. XBLA games typically have their 200 point allotment spread out over 12 achievements, but then again Tinker isn't technically an Arcade game.

Here are some closing statements about the game:

[10/9/2011 23:12:00] Me: It's not that bad.
[10/9/2011 23:12:08] Me: It's like a more complicated Sokoban type game.
[10/9/2011 23:16:43] Ozan D: which tinker game?
[10/9/2011 23:16:55] Me: That's the name of the game.
[10/9/2011 23:17:09] Peter C: It's sortof like Sokoban, but more complicated
[10/9/2011 23:17:25] Me: Heh.

Someone made a mistake.

Anyone ever try to sort a protected Excel worksheet?

More specifically, I want to be able to retain the sorting feature available via AutoFilter. As it turns out, this is not easy to do and is something that has eluded me for the last day or so. Allow me to explain my problem. I have a spreadsheet that contains a lot of easily sortable data that is accessable by a lot of people. I don't want anyone to be able to change the values, but they still need to be able to sort. However, sorting counts as changing values within cells, so that just isn't available. I'm not going to get into the details of my trials and, in fact, I don't even care if it works anymore. I'm just going to vent.



Here's my sample worksheet.



Say I go to protect this worksheet but still want to enable some features for the users that aren't forbidden.



Okay, so duh, right? I should be able to sort and use the AutoFilter.



Denied!

u doof, how old r u

Me: Oh, I found an online Pictionary-like game called iSketch.
Me: The problem with it is that I was banned for drawing a penis.


Figure 1. Unfortunately, I wasn't fast enough to screen shot my actual work of art. Note: My word was oyster, which mots people correctly answered.


Figure 2. After being warned about not drawing penises, I was kicked from my room and warned again. Then I was banned from the game. Talk about heavy-handed.

Me: ...
Steph: u doof
Steph:how old r u
Me: 24, sadly.

I said I was sorry!

This is all in response to Peter C's status of "Trouble with a capital T and that ryhmes with P which stands for Plumbers. Stupid, messed-up, rotting pipes in my place. :(" Additionally, Peter had perviously complained about not having Internet at his residence.

Me: Did the pipes that bring you the Internet also break?
Peter C: Haha
Peter C: No, those were just shut off.
Peter C: Although having internet pouring down through my ceiling would be quite a sight.
Me: Well, yeah.
Me: It'd be mostly spam, porn, and Justin Beiber.
Peter C: When you put it that way, it definitely makes the gray water from my upstairs neighbor's shower sound much more appealing.
Peter C: Of the two options, that is.
Me: Well, I didn't specify what the composition was.
Me: In fact, it could be one homogenous mixture.
Me: Justin Beiber spam porn.
Peter C: shivers
Me: For all of those weird tweeners (aged 10 to 40+) in Hawaii.
Peter C: Rule 34, man. Now that stuff exists
Me: I apologize to the Cosmos.

Help me pick a Twitter account name for my cat!

Now, most of you who read this blog have met the family cat. His name is Linux (I didn't name him, The Sister did). The Girlfriend suggested that I make a Twitter account for The Cat to chronicle his (mis)adventures; this is a concept that other families have explored. The most obvious choice for the account name would be LinuxTheCat, however, this is already taken.

So, here's some history about Linux. He used to be quite overweight because of an ill-fated open feeding policy that has long since been abolished. As a result, he is on a diet and somewhat diabetic now, but has lost a lot of weight. He is also a jerk, as cats are want to do, frequently going places and bothering people he shouldn't. Lastly, he is somewhat dog-like in that he is quite eager for attention and not quite as coy as some other cats I've seen.

Here are some suggestions I've seen:

LinuxTheMeow
LinuxTheDogCat
LinuxTheNotDog
LinuxTheJerk
FatCatLinux

Please vote or make suggestions!

How do you say SNES?

That's for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. So, how do you say SNES?

Growing up, I only heard one pronunciation and that was to enunciate each letter in the initialism, or something like "ess-en-e-ess." Recently, I heard someone say it as one word, with the opening sound like the "snuh" in sneeze, or "sness". I thought that was weird, but others in the "room" echoed similar usage, claiming that my pronunciation was weird. These are, like pronunciation is, probably the result of some local effect (on a side note, I hate saying that, because I'm not sure if I'm ever using that term correctly, or at least rigorously). I have also heard the SNES referred to as "Super Nintendo" or "Super NES," but those people use these as optional to their preferred pronunciation of the above.

Interestingly, the same Wikipedia article has a footnote regarding this.