Old games that are not popular enough

My dad used to sign up for this magazine that would give you a floppy disk insert every month that had DOS software & games on it.  These disks kept me occupied in my elementary school days.  They had text-based adventure games, dungeon crawlers, first person shooters (pre-cursor to Doom),  puzzle games, word games, etc.

Sadly, I can't find any of them available for download on the internet.  I guess they JUST WEREN'T POPULAR ENOUGH.  ARGH.

ZZT
Conflagration
Catacomb 3D
Murder in the Museum
and a ton of others I don't remember the names of

There's also this one game that was on our copy of OS/2 Warp.  It was a puzzle game where you had a character that had to move boxes around on a tile-based grid.  It was similar to Chip's Challenge except there were no fancy water/fire/ice tiles and no monsters.  It just had one-way tiles and boxes arranged in specific ways.  The goal was to move the boxes to the indicated tiles.  I just can not for the life of me find any reference to this game.  O_O''

RPGs

I had been toying with the idea of getting into tabletop RPG for a while but it had seemed a large and daunting world to step into without the assistance of someone who already has experience. Well, yesterday night we went to Game Empire in Pasadena and bought a book to start with:
Anima

It's got pretty pictures and is encompassed in only one book. It's high fantasy and the graphics look like Final Fantasy/anime style so it appealed to Lawrence.

Upon getting home, I started looking into anime-style RPGs and found one that looked interesting:
Maid RPG

It's only $8 for the pdf and apparently you only need to read 20 pages of it to start playing. The site you order from is Indie Press Revolution, which looks pretty awesome. Looking around I saw some other RPGs I may want to try as well as a totally cute looking Redwall-esque comic series called Mouse Guard.

Board Game equilibrium

I haven't posted much about my gaming here. At first I was in a board game purchasing frenzy! I quickly acquired 10+ games. They cost a bit of money too. It also seemed like a lot because Lawrence just wasn't as into them as I was. I would try to get him to play a new game with me, he wouldn't really want to. He would humor me and play, I would be happy, then he would get frustrated at the game because he didn't understand, and I would get depressed that he wasn't enjoying himself. Then we would both be frustrated at each other. A few months down the line and many many game plays later, we've settled into a nice equilibrium.

We play mostly on the weekends now because that's when we have a third person (Phillip) to play with. Weekday nights have been reserved for cooking, cleaning, video gaming, programming, knitting, exercising, and TV/movie watching.

The games that we have been playing the most recently are: Pandemic, Catan: Cities and Knights, and Dominion.

We were stuck on Pandemic for a while because we couldn't beat the game on super hard mode. Finally last weekend, we beat the game. Haha, we didn't even realize it until we thought we had lost again. Then, we were like....wait, didn't we cure that disease a while ago? It was the first one we cured, and I forgot to move the marker.

Pandemic is a cooperative game. There are 4 epidemics breaking out in various regions around the world. The players are randomly assigned roles which they must then utilize to try to contain the spread of disease and ultimately to find the cures.

Last night we watched the Battlestar Galactica 2003 Miniseries. It was a little slow in the beginning, but pretty good once it picked up. I'm looking forward to watching this show, and perhaps afterwards I'll feel more inclined to read through the rulebook for the BSG board game.

Back into the groove of things

Last night I went to see Melody at the gym. She had me do 10 sets of alternating 10 kettlebell swings and 10 wheel outs on the rolling wheel of upper body doom. Then, I had to do 3 sets of 10 squats with a kettlebell and 10 presses with a kettlebell using each arm (holding the kettlebell at the chest and then pressing straight up). By the last kettlebell press, my left arm could not lift any more - muscle failure. Woohoo! It feels good to be sore today. I'll be even more sore tomorrow.

After dinner, Lawrence went with me to Borders where we bought some drinks and played Dominion. It was our second complete game and with that I decided to draw 10 random action cards to use. Lawrence wanted to use the suggested beginner action cards, but I put my foot down and made him choose 10 random ones. :) That's when I found out I got the rules wrong. I thought that you were supposed to re-shuffle all your cards after each turn. You discard all the cards in your hand after a turn, but you pick up your new 5 cards from your deck. It is only after you've exhausted all the cards in your deck that you shuffle the cards in the discard pile and make that your new deck. It made the game very fun to play.

We actually didn't finish the game before Borders closed at 11pm, so we took the game and drove to the dealership to finish the game in his office before going home. :D

ETA: oh my gourd...coughing hurts my abs...