What Video Games Have You Been Playing #15: Computer not on fire yet? Better add more mods!

[hobbsyoyo]

2000 had arcologies.

4 doesn't have 3000's soundtrack and I object to it being the best on that ground.

 

[Takhisis]

Suggestion: You can just play 4 with the music turned off and 3000's soundtrack reproduced separately by an audio player programme.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

That is a fair point but wasn't what I was objecting to.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Suggestion: You can just play 4 with the music turned off and 3000's soundtrack reproduced separately by an audio player programme.

Or replace the music outright, though that depends on whether its stored as a proprietary format or just loose MP3/WAV/FLAC/whatever files. I once replaced every song in Half-Life 2 with Funkytown.

In some 1990s games (Half-Life 1 and Quake are the two I'm aware of), some games ran their soundtracks right off the discs and you could actually put the discs in a stereo and play them from track 2 onward. This had a funny effect though because if you had another audio CD in the drive, it'd play whatever was on that. This actually wasn't changed in the Steam version of HL1 (GoldSrc version) if you want to try it out.

EDIT: I just checked. Take a look here. https://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=XA

 

[hobbsyoyo]

There are not very many online, non-youtube resources for SimCity 3000 which makes it tough to look up random issues like when your airport fails to develop.

I did see a site that hosts a bunch of downloadable mod buildings that I really want though...

SimCity is great because I can pop into it for 5 minutes when I need a break from something else. Ah the joy of working from home.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I don't think I've ever met a game I could "pop in for five minutes" and reliably return to work.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Typically, changing focus back to work from a distraction requires 10-15 minutes of "reentry" time to get back up to speed. If you are going to work, work. Play later.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

If you are going to work, work. Play later.

Hence my motto being "Just play now."

 

[Takhisis]

Or replace the music outright, though that depends on whether its stored as a proprietary format or just loose MP3/WAV/FLAC/whatever files. I once replaced every song in Half-Life 2 with Funkytown.

An excellent idea.

Back when I was betatesting the Hegemon scenario for Civ3 I got tired of restarting each turn several times and having the music get stuck in the first couple tracks so I turned it off and opened the entire music folder with either Winamp or VLC. Hell yeah. Hegemon has one of the best soundtracks I've seen for a videogame, not just for mods but for strategy games outright.

 

[civvver]

Typically, changing focus back to work from a distraction requires 10-15 minutes of "reentry" time to get back up to speed. If you are going to work, work. Play later.

Even context switching between problems at work costs a lot of valuable productivity. I hate working on multiple projects in the same day but sometimes it's unavoidable.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I've had two major career phases where a lot of my working time was spent on idle, so my views on the "context switching" or "changing focus" are skewed. Sitting at the reactor plant control panel on a billion dollar warship and being somewhat responsible for 130 lives...I very often played games. But I was also fully expected to, and capable of, instantly adapting if a needle moved or a siren went off. Similarly standing around on the point with my fellow car salesmen often involved games of quarters, or liar's poker if we were more flush, but being first off the point and able to shift completely into making a deal by the time you reached an up that appeared on the lot was just part of the job requirements.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

"Sir, do you care to explain why you allowed one of our major cities to get nuked?"
"Uh...just had to play one more turn..."

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Admittedly, access to playing Civ may have presented a problem. We actually mostly played a variation of Mastermind using words.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I've had two major career phases where a lot of my working time was spent on idle, so my views on the "context switching" or "changing focus" are skewed. Sitting at the reactor plant control panel on a billion dollar warship and being somewhat responsible for 130 lives...I very often played games. But I was also fully expected to, and capable of, instantly adapting if a needle moved or a siren went off. Similarly standing around on the point with my fellow car salesmen often involved games of quarters, or liar's poker if we were more flush, but being first off the point and able to shift completely into making a deal by the time you reached an up that appeared on the lot was just part of the job requirements.

The context switching we are talking about I think is different. It is more related and pertains to time when you are concentrating on a task or process that demand mental focus over time: writing, creating reports, developing spreadsheets, translating, coding, reviewing budgets or financials, drawing?, etc. Once you are in that mode and then switch out to check messages or answer emails or talk on the phone, it will take 10-15 minutes to rebuild that focus and level of concentration. I do not know how this translates into monitoring nuclear submarine equipment and war readiness.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

The context switching we are talking about I think is different. It is more related and pertains to time when you are concentrating on a task or process that demand mental focus over time: writing, creating reports, developing spreadsheets, translating, coding, reviewing budgets or financials, drawing?, etc. Once you are in that mode and then switch out to check messages or answer emails or talk on the phone, it will take 10-15 minutes to rebuild that focus and level of concentration. I do not know how this translates into monitoring nuclear submarine equipment and war readiness.

Got it. That's why I said my perception is skewed. I have excelled in jobs that totally fit the old cliche; hours of mind numbing boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror.

Frequently, I would walk into maneuvering for my six hour watch, take a quick scan of the panel and see that the thirty two meters showing various conditions in the reactor plant all read exactly the same as they had twelve hours before when I left, listen to the guy I was relieving say "still drilling a hole in the ocean," and watch him sign the logs over to me. In almost all cases six hours later after having written in the logs what a number of those meters were showing every hour on the hour, forming neat little rows of the same numbers repeated 24 times to fill the daily log sheet, I would tell my relief "still drilling a hole in the ocean" and relinquish the seat without ever touching the panel other than to flip some of the meters through their different channels that all read the same anyway.

But the cases that make for that being just an "almost all"...those are the ones they paid me to be there for. There is, I think, no other way to get paid for such a rush.

 

[Synobun]

I've had Northgard installed forever but just haven't had the motivation to play a new game. I decided I'd finally try it. It's been a lot of fun. Kind of like a mix between Banished and Rise of Nations.

An ungodly amount of achievements, some of which are really stupid (win 1000 games!). I tried at first to get as many as I could but now I'm just trying to get to the end of the story.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I tried at first to get as many as I could but now I'm just trying to get to the end of the story.

https://github.com/gibbed/SteamAchievementManager

Granted I really only use this for dealing with glitched achivements

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Build four on-ramps on each corner where the two highways meet.

Thank you for telling me this! It works great.

 

[cardgame]

Put another hour or so into Superflight. Such a ridiculously fun game for its simplicity. With this new monitor I can see everything so much clearer, all the little gaps and holes for secret bonus points are more obvious. Topped my previous best combo-wombo score by an additional 60% in the first or second run.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Put another hour or so into Superflight. Such a ridiculously fun game for its simplicity. With this new monitor I can see everything so much clearer, all the little gaps and holes for secret bonus points are more obvious. Topped my previous best combo-wombo score by an additional 60% in the first or second run.

One of my earlier monitors had a handful of dead pixels right in the middle of it (kind of looked like there was a hair stuck in the middle of my field of vision). It was amazing to finally get another monitor without it.