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Cookie Clicker: playing the stock market

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I have had a Cookie Clicker save for many years. It has moved with me between laptops, and, since I unlocked the ability for it to continue to earn cookies even when closed, I feel less attached to it, dipping in and out every few months. I have found the ways in which the game has expanded to be well thought out, if overly complicated. Nowhere is this more true than the stock market.

You unlock the stock market by upgrading your banks, and suddenly there’s a whole new currency to be learning, which varies with your cookies-per-second measure. While it means that the game is relatively stable compared to the main cookie attainment, the added layer of abstraction means it’s tricky to understand how it’s going to affect your cookie balance.

Anyway. Buy low, sell high. But what is low, and what is high? Each of the stocks – which are tied to the cookie-producing buildings you own – seems to have a different natural level, although they do each seem to vary all over the place. It looks as if the minimum is $1, and the maximum is up around $250. Things don’t vary too fast, but they do span a wide range. As a result you need to be monitoring the movements fairly regularly, and I just find it far too stressful trying to work out what is going up or down.

And yet there’s the prospect of a 4.5 quindecillion cookie profit …

Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: there’s been an explosion!

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Having completed Nico’s prologue, I moved into more familiar territory. It is many years since I’ve played Broken Sword, but I remembered most of the story and puzzles in the first section – the way the clown looked with the accordion, the annoying policeman Moue, the workman who had seemingly missed the huge explosion a few metres away from his hole. I made my way to the sewer, where I remember searching for ages in the Playstation version before seeing the tiny red dot of the red nose.

In this version, interactive points are highlighted, which makes all the difference.

Woven throughout the first hour or so of the game are more elements of Nico’s story, with her revisiting the quayside and Imelda Carchon, but the main focus remains on George. Maybe it’s years of experience and cynicism, but the story now seems very unrealistic – travelling between countries at the drop of a hat, particularly as an American; finding very specific villages in the middle of nowhere; a very limited number of people to actually talk to. And Nico, who (from George’s point of view) is always just sitting in her apartment, waiting for him to drop by.

Travelling to Ireland uncovered many stereotypes, and a goat which I remembered to be a pain to pass, but which I seemed to fluke my way past within a minute. I found a gem which had been dropped through the pub’s cellar grate. I paired this up with a tripod that Nico had stolen from the museum, and then found (again seemingly accidentally) where to place these, after an awkwardly-scripted meeting between world leaders in a sewer, which then revealed the next location.

So, I’m off to Syria.

Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: there’s been a murder!

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Apologies for silence over the past few weeks, I have been in Paris. In real life, with my family, watching Olympic events and having an amazing time in a city that was fully embracing the celebration of the Games. And virtually, in a Paris with much darker overtones.

In fact, I have had very little time for videogames at all, since most days saw us out until late in the evening, and so I have made very little progress on this. Ahead of my trip I fancied revisiting the Broken Sword series, following an article in Retro Gamer, and since I had to take my laptop with me it seemed an ideal fit. I already owned the first four games on GOG, so I installed the first two and off we went.

As it turns out, I didn’t revisit anything. The first game is on GOG as the Director’s Cut, which includes a side story set before the main game in which Nico finds the body of Pierre Carchon and sets off to solve the murder herself. After following clues to the quayside, I found my way in through use of annoying sliding block puzzles and having to crush a bullet case. I found a lot of documents lying around on a table.

That’s as far as I got; the explosion in the cafe came next, but that will have to wait until I have some more time.

Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg: I’m rolling

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For years I had the theme tune from Billy Hatcher on my phone to use as an alarm, though I had cut the initial spelling off the front so I would be woken with a cockerel crowing.

I never really played much of the game, however – this was back in the days where I had more money than spare time, and £20 spent at HMV on the reduced-price GameCube stock was good for an afternoon of entertainment. At the time there was a glut of 3D platformers, and despite its Sonic Team heritage this just didn’t feel like it stood out. It didn’t help that the first part of the game is set in comparative darkness, with shadowed colours and a lack of spark.

Going back to it today, though – albeit via the slightly glitchy Dolphin emulator, since I currently can’t connect my GameCube to the TV – the egg rolling mechanic does actually make the game a bit different to the standard platformer, adding in a sense of vulnerability when you lose your egg, and fostering an element of wanting to collect and hatch different egg types.

The controls work pretty well, and the camera doesn’t get in the way as much as other games of the era. I have rescued the Chicken Elder, who has brought morning back, and then found and beat a big lizard thing who tried hiding in the grass. The relatively free-form nature of the levels (as opposed to something like Crash Bandicoot) has meant I’ve had to do a fair bit of exploring at times, which is only problematic because I’m still not sure I’ve got the controls down pat.

I died a fair few times falling off those rails, even though I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to be able to.

Sonic Advance: completed!

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You may notice an uptick in the image quality on this post compared to the last.

I tried to persist, and played Sonic Advance on my GBA SP all the way through the six acts and to the final boss. The first two boss battles made me smile, being replicas of the Green Hill and Emerald Hill bosses from Sonic 1 and 2 respectively. And then the proper boss battle nearly led to my console being embedded in the wall.

The screen resolution on the GBA isn’t amazing. It’s better than the GBC, of course, but it still needs to have some allowances made for a relatively small viewport. A famous example of this is Sonic Genesis, a port of the original Mega Drive game, which suffers from you not being able to see far enough ahead. Generally, Sonic Advance avoids this through clever level design, slightly smaller sprites, and a more exploratory nature.

Not the case with the final boss. Robotnik is in a spike-covered machine with multiple attacks, and you have to avoid each of them in a different way. Laser? Duck. Bouncing bomb? Jump or move to the apex of the bounce. Grabby hand? Jump out the way. You can only know which attack is happening by standing all-too-close to Robotnik, or by looking at the blurry few pixels right at the edge of the screen. The laser fires almost as soon as the weapon appears, so you have to stay in a ducking position while waiting. Then you have to peer through the blur to work out what you need to do to avoid the attack – and also to put in your own attacks.

I lost a large number of lives.

So I decided to try the game in an emulator instead, so I could see what I (and more importantly what Robotnik was) doing. I initially grabbed my save file from the GBA cartridge, but for some reason it wasn’t recognised by the emulator and I decided it was actually worth playing through the game again. So I did.

When played like this the game is immensely colourful, and it’s much easier to judge jumps with the higher quality screen. I quickly progressed through the levels, losing no lives, and exploring more. On one of the later levels I jumped on a red spring near the top of the level and it took me to a special stage – which I found entirely uncontrollable and where I failed to get enough rings to even pass the first checkpoint. Even the level with the reversed gravity wasn’t too difficult.

I reached the final boss with a full complement of lives, even getting past the annoying wobbly bridge boss (where you have to jump on the ground near to Robotnik to make his machine flip upside down so you can hit him) on my first go. I did still die a couple of times on the final final boss, but it was so much easier when I could see what was happening.

The end was ripped straight from Sonic 2, which was a bit disappointing, but otherwise the game is actually really good and enjoyable. I’m not sure I will ever explore it fully to find the springs to get to the special stages and the chaos emeralds, or even play it through as Amy Rose who is annoying, but I’ll be back at some point.