You can find the new Squishy Bugs market page here. I don’t expect to ever have to change market urls again. And if I do, you can always get the proper url at WaggSoft.com.

With this update I reduced the number of rows of tiles since some players complained that toward the end of the level it seemed to take too long for the bullet to reach the top-most tiles. This allowed me to display the player’s score at the top of the page. Which brings me to the other update.

The scoring system has been revised. Previously you were awarded 1 point for every tile that was falling the moment you squished a tile. 3 tiles falling? Squish a tile for 3 points. Squish another tile for 2 points (since there would only be 2 tiles left falling). And so on. Squishy bugs were worth a 2 point multiplier. No longer! Each tile awards a ridiculous number of points following the same number-of-tiles-falling rule. However, now you lose points for not catching tiles. Each tile that drops off the bottom of the screen will cause you to lose the same number of points as you would have had you managed to squish the tile. This prevents players from exploiting the multiplicative nature of the scoring system.

Also, the groundwork for adding new power ups has been completed. It should be relatively straight forward to add new power ups in the future. So in addition to the bouncy ball power up that’s already present, there will be a “drop similar icons” power up and a “drop similar colors” power up. They will work similar to the way dropping groups works right now, which is that groups of the same color and icon fall together if one of them is hit.

Some update in the future will see the addition of accounts which will tie into a WaggSoft community page. This will allow for global high scores (another feature to add) and potentially allow for the addition of special events.

Humble Bundle 4 featuring Super Meat Boy.

Yes, that means Linux.

Like the majority of the things I do, I did it with selfish intent. It’s an app to help me price items for auction in The Lord of the Rings Online. I hope others find it useful, too.

That’s not to say that Amnesia overstays its welcome. I kept thinking, “I must be close to the end now!” only to find that more of the story unfolded. So I don’t know where everyone is getting the idea that the first play-through averages 6 to 8 hours. My next playthrough, one I intend to modify to allow unlimited health and sanity, will be for the purpose of listening to the developer commentary, much like a commentary track found on a digital video.

This game is good. The visuals (insanity? yes, please), the audio (insanity? yes, please)… the insanity. If you’re a fan of survival horror, or horror fiction the likes of which H.P. Lovecraft would have been proud to write, then you owe it to yourself to purchase Amnesia. You’ll scream. You’ll swear. You’ll laugh nervously.

Now that this survival horror is complete, I’m moving on to Alan Wake.

But it’s a good feeling knowing that I’m passing it by. Other good feelings? Not obsessively checking Steam on Tuesday or Wednesday to see if the midweek madness has been posted yet. Or Steam’s weekend deal.

On a similar note, a couple weeks ago I completed Just Cause 2 (on the PC) and I have yet to fill that gap with another game in my huge list of unplayed games. I have options, but I find since I’m putting less focus on acquiring new ‘stuff’ I’m putting that focus toward learning and doing other things. Plus, I’ve got that free mmo, LOTRO, to play

On to the details, the only allowable ‘new’ games that I can add to my collection are:

• Gifts — but I am not allowed to prompt the purchase with, “Hey, I’m not purchasing any games in 2011 but if you buy me X then I’ll buy you Y in 2012,” because that is cheating.
• Board and card games — they are not video games.
• Game demos, trials, and ‘free’ games — XBoxLive Indie Game trials, Steam demos (and mods and free games), etc, so long as they are freely available for download by the developer/publisher.
• Code giveaways — kinda sorta the same thing as ‘free’ games
• Borrowed games

If the game doesn’t fit the criteria above, I can’t add it to my collection.

Why? Well, this is where the benefits come in. See, I went kind of crazy with game purchases starting at the end of 2009. My Steam collection ballooned to a crazy size over the course of the last year. I don’t think I could possibly complete all the un-played games in my Steam games list if I try all next year, and an un-played game is an unappreciated game.

Why else? I’ve got a note taped to my monitor that says, “Why are you sitting here? Spend some time with your wife.” I put it there, and it’s pretty self explanatory.

I expect to enrich my personal life by putting less emphasis on video games and more time with family and friends (non-gamers). I expect my wallet to thank me. I expect my productivity to increase as I will cease to compulsively check Steam Game Sales and Cheap Ass Gamer throughout the day. I expect to spend more time reading through my neglected bookshelf. I’ll never make it as a game designer & developer if I spend more time playing games than making them.

Wish me luck in 2011. I have no doubt this is going to be a hard habit to break. I’ll post throughout the year under the tag #stateofthepenny here on the blog and twitter.

sh uplink-complete-1.54DOWNLOAD.sh

complains

Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Uplink complete 1.54DOWNLOAD............................................................................................
.setup9739: error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-1.2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I found the solution at the Introversion forums, written by forum member pl3w5y.

Download the following deb files. I prefer to use the command line.

wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gtk+1.2/libgtk1.2_1.2.10-18.1build2_i386.deb
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/glib1.2/libglib1.2ldbl_1.2.10-19build1_i386.deb
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gtk+1.2/libgtk1.2-common_1.2.10-18.1build2_all.deb

You can swap out the ‘ca’ part of the url with ‘us’ or whatever your Ubuntu repository country code might be.

Now, inside the directory you downloaded them to, run

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

And that’s it. Now re-run the Uplink installer and the game should install fine.