Gaming

Last week on Hacker News, someone announced a new Wordle variant, QWERTLE. As an avid Wordle player and optimizer, I was excited to try playing and solving this new game.

I’ve seen a lot of “best first Wordle guesses” posts online, but while they may provide the most theoretical information, I had trouble using them as a human. Here are my adventures coming up with the best starting words for my own play style.

I love the tower defense game Kingdom Rush. More than anything else, it has just the right amount of complexity - just enough towers and abilities to give you options, and just enough tactical play to keep you busy between build steps. The difficulty rises smoothly across the levels, slowly asking more of you as you improve. It’s great fun...

The latest in my series of game replays is Batman: Arkham Asylum, thanks to a recent GOG Sale that had it going for $5.

Quest for Glory 1 is one of my favorite role-playing games, and one of the first I played. Sierra walked the line between adventure and puzzle games beautifully in the series, making something that still feels unique. Ultimately, though, what keeps bringing me back is the setting and the story, told with impressive graphics, great music, and witty dialog that...

Some quick tables about DOSBox that I kept looking for.

I needed Windows to run SimTower, so I decided to try getting Win95 to run on DOSBox. The walkthroughs online had some skippable steps and I ran into some problems, and then I got distracted optimizing it.. Anyway, here are my terse, working steps for getting very nice Win95 DOSBox images.

A few days after my previous SimTower adventure, I wanted to revise my tower design. My retail-heavy-attempt was straightforward and didn’t take too many floors, but I thought it’d be fun to try to build consistently all the way up to the 100th floor cathedral, and to try to max out many of the in-game limits right when I...

When playing through SimTower again, I was frequently looking for facts from the help and from online walkthroughs. Here’s a double-checked, complete set of the details I was looking for when replaying the game, with more useful details together in one place than the original help.

It’s 1994, and Maxis is a big name in gaming. The excellent SimCity 2000 released last year, but we’re looking at a lesser known title, SimTower. SimTower was not actually developed by Maxis, but instead by Yoot Saito, who was inspired by the 1989 SimCity. The game was released as “The Tower” in Japan and was relatively successful. Maxis learned...