Risk!

I bought the 1959 First Edition Classic Reproduction of the Parker Brother's Continental Game Risk! I had never played Risk! before so it took me two days to read over the rules and practice play before I had it completely figured out. As of this post (Oct 16, 2009), I have only played two actual one-on-one games with my wife but I had a blast and I look forward to playing Risk! with my family and friends and especially 6 player games.

I am a gamer at heart. My roommate in college was quite the gamer and we gamed a lot at Monmouth University. We played some games similar to Risk! as board games and on his primitive gaming machine. It wasn't primitive then. He usually won but it was still fun. We'd have 4 to 8 player games of various games and I'd work pretty hard to win but almost never did. Since college, I have not played many board games but I get the sense that I've missed out.

I just learned that my friend Jeff enjoys playing Risk! with his friends so I'm looking forward to joining them sometime.

I read how Risk! is played today on Wikipedia and it hasn't changed much since 1959 which is very cool. I thought the game would grow in complexity over time but the complexity has only risen slightly in 50 years.

One thing I like is how you can vary the rules to make the game longer, shorter, harder or easier. I came up with a rule variation on my own then discovered from Wikipedia that it's the way 2 player games are played these days.

I like these rule variations:

1. Allowing for armies to move to any owned territory during reinforcement (rather than an immediate neighbor), if there exists a connected path of owned territories.
2. Granting an attack advantage when attacking from or to a territory for which the attacker holds a Risk card

XBox 360 Games for Windows Vista

I bought Bioshock and Halo 2 for Windows Vista. These were originally XBox 360 games but I don't have an XBox 360 (yet) and I really wanted to play them. I also like PC gaming better than console gaming maybe because I've been PC-gaming long before I was console-gaming.

The mouse is a better control than the console controller for first-person shooters. You can look up and down quickly as well as spin around quickly. A real time strategy game can have lots of keyboard short-cuts. How do you implement that with a console-controller?

I started playing Halo 2 and finished about 1/3 of it when I hit a bug. Suddenly I could not pick up weapons nor use devices. This prevented me from finishing the level and moving forward. I was done. I'd have to wait until I got an XBox 360 to play Halo 2 from start to finish.




Next I started to play Bioshock. This is the scariest game I've ever played. I get totally immersed into the experience. I was really getting into it, playing about an hour per day and I reached maybe the 1/3 point again and the game crashed taking Windows Vista with it. I rebooted and kept playing, saving often, but every 5 minutes it would crash and I have to reboot. I could keep making progress this way but it's a bit hard on my PC plus the progress is slow so I gave up again.

I'd sell them on eBay but the amount I get is not worth my effort so I'll probably give them as a Christmas present to someone.