1. Okay folks, here is how you stop yourself from playing Cookie Clicker on a Windows PC:
Run Notepad as an administrator, go to file > open
Open C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Add this line to the end of the file: 127.0.0.1 orteil.dashnet.org
Save and restart your browser
2. Congratulations on your newfound freedom. Go and actually get something done!
3. To be fair, while Cookie Clicker seems to have been designed by a mad psychologists to maximize addictive potential, the only way it makes money is through ad revenue and not by hammering you w/ endless microtransactions. There are no loot boxes or other types of gambling, just an endless and effective gameplay loop.
4. Your goal is to make as many cookies as possible. By making cookies, you are able to buy buildings and upgrades to allow you to make more cookies, which allow you to buy more buildings and upgrades and so on. This is really no different than Diablo at its core. You do a thing to get better at doing a thing just for the sake of it.
5. While this gets called an idle game, it only really is until it dawns on you that your most effective strategy is to get as many bonus-providing random drops as you can. You will at first be excited to leave it running overnight to see how many cookies you build up but eventually that just becomes downtime where you can't get the random drops.
6. You do thankfully get options to play less actively but it is never as lucrative as getting a lucky couple drops in a row, where you can gain days worth of cookies in a few seconds.
7. So you keep it open in a browser window all the time.
8. You get an upgrade at some point where a sound lets you know there's been a random drop in the open browser window even if you're not actually looking at it at the moment. At this point, the game is only nominally in the background and whatever you might have been looking at in another tab is secondary to keeping an ear open to listen for that little sound.
9. The sound is a bell which is appropriate for the Pavlovian tab-switching response it evokes.
10. As far as the actual idle aspect of the game--buying buildings and upgrades to those buildings to make cookies to buy more buildings and upgrades--it's wonderful. You would not care so much about getting the random drops were it not.
11. You see, not only do you buy buildings to make cookies and then buy upgrades to those buildings, you also buy upgrades that allow one building type to improve a different building type. This is just the beginning. You get achievements that let you make more cookies. You can give up all your cookies and start afresh w/ which gives you additional upgrades. You have mini games that improve your output cookie output.
12. This is to say, finding an optimal strategy to Cookie Clicker involves serious mathematics and that's awesome.
13. I am not kidding about having to block Cookie Clicker in my hosts file but I really don't hold that against it. By giving me a reason to think about math instead of doing my actual job, it really added a nice layer to my day-to-day. Eventually, I just needed the mindspace back. It's a real classic of the genre so give it a go sometime--just not when you have a deadline approaching.
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Thursday, July 11, 2019
13 Points on Infinifactory - Zachtronics - 2015 [PC]
1. I have started and never really gotten into a couple of Zachtronics games in the past but now that I've let Infinifactory get its hooks into me, I think I'll have to revisit them all again. This game is great and you should play it.
2. This frequently gets described as a puzzle game but that's not quite right. You solve problems more so than puzzles. Puzzles normally end w/ elegant solutions. Infinifactory gets ugly.
3. Your task is to build constructions of block shaped elements that are then used to assemble other block shaped elements into multi-block shaped elements. It reminds me quite a bit of making automated machines w/ redstone in Minecraft.
4. Number 3 makes sense as apparently Infinifactory's predecessor, Infiniminer, was a huge inspiration for Minecraft. I didn't know this until now. I'm sorry.
5. The setup here is there's a bunch of evil aliens making you engineer the stuff described in number 3. You learn more of your situation through audio logs you find laying around because this is a video game and that's just how it's done.
6. You are not actively involved in plot development aside from beating each stage. Everything interesting goes down off screen and you find out about it through the setting. This is fine. The plot serves the purpose of creating a tenser atmosphere and that is all it needs to do.
7. Number 6 being said, Infinifactory does reward you w/ quite a bit more depth and nuance than you'd typically expect from what is basically an excuse plot, especially as you push into later levels. It builds a realistic feeling world when all is said and done.
8. You are also rated vs. other players on various criteria such as how many blocks you've used and the footprint of your structure. You put a lot effort into the solutions you've build so this little bit of incentive is enough to really push you to coming up w/ better ideas.
9. Honestly though, while it is satisfying to come up w/ solutions that are clever and elegant top to bottom, the best thing is when when of your ideas doesn't quite work and you have to slap together hackneyed fixes that take longer than it would have to just redo the whole thing from scratch and you wind up w/ hilarious monstrosities that people will ignore when you incessantly post them on social media.
10. Speaking of, this has a animated .gif exporter and it's awesome.
11. The magic here is that there is no definitive solution to any of the problems you're presented w/ so any way that you might figure it out is equally valid. Once curious thing that you'll find if you go looking for other folks' solutions to the same problems is you'll frequently be surprised by how common some of what seems like your clever solutions prove to be and vice versa.
12. This game is much longer than you might initially think so if you are just trying to get through it, maybe don't spend too much time refining your earliest solutions until you see how much there actually is to offer. The later problems are more interesting anyway.
13. Infinifactory feels quite a lot like designing circuit boards or writing code but being good at it has no practical application so it's fun instead of being something you can make money at. As such, this is a good game for those days when you want to exercise your mind w/o the man breathing down your freaking neck. Go for it.
2. This frequently gets described as a puzzle game but that's not quite right. You solve problems more so than puzzles. Puzzles normally end w/ elegant solutions. Infinifactory gets ugly.
3. Your task is to build constructions of block shaped elements that are then used to assemble other block shaped elements into multi-block shaped elements. It reminds me quite a bit of making automated machines w/ redstone in Minecraft.
4. Number 3 makes sense as apparently Infinifactory's predecessor, Infiniminer, was a huge inspiration for Minecraft. I didn't know this until now. I'm sorry.
5. The setup here is there's a bunch of evil aliens making you engineer the stuff described in number 3. You learn more of your situation through audio logs you find laying around because this is a video game and that's just how it's done.
6. You are not actively involved in plot development aside from beating each stage. Everything interesting goes down off screen and you find out about it through the setting. This is fine. The plot serves the purpose of creating a tenser atmosphere and that is all it needs to do.
7. Number 6 being said, Infinifactory does reward you w/ quite a bit more depth and nuance than you'd typically expect from what is basically an excuse plot, especially as you push into later levels. It builds a realistic feeling world when all is said and done.
8. You are also rated vs. other players on various criteria such as how many blocks you've used and the footprint of your structure. You put a lot effort into the solutions you've build so this little bit of incentive is enough to really push you to coming up w/ better ideas.
9. Honestly though, while it is satisfying to come up w/ solutions that are clever and elegant top to bottom, the best thing is when when of your ideas doesn't quite work and you have to slap together hackneyed fixes that take longer than it would have to just redo the whole thing from scratch and you wind up w/ hilarious monstrosities that people will ignore when you incessantly post them on social media.
10. Speaking of, this has a animated .gif exporter and it's awesome.
11. The magic here is that there is no definitive solution to any of the problems you're presented w/ so any way that you might figure it out is equally valid. Once curious thing that you'll find if you go looking for other folks' solutions to the same problems is you'll frequently be surprised by how common some of what seems like your clever solutions prove to be and vice versa.
12. This game is much longer than you might initially think so if you are just trying to get through it, maybe don't spend too much time refining your earliest solutions until you see how much there actually is to offer. The later problems are more interesting anyway.
13. Infinifactory feels quite a lot like designing circuit boards or writing code but being good at it has no practical application so it's fun instead of being something you can make money at. As such, this is a good game for those days when you want to exercise your mind w/o the man breathing down your freaking neck. Go for it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)