The Stack

Once again, I seem to have gotten stuck in a pattern of starting Battleships sets and not finishing them. It’s funny: when I finished the last of the Battleships in the first Games Interactive, my reaction was one of relief that I would never have to do this again, even though I knew there was an entire additional volume of the things waiting on the Stack. The Paint by Numbers sets may take a great deal longer than the Battleships, but I’m finding the Battleships far more onerous. I think this is because Paint By Numbers is marked by near-continual progress. It can get slow, but you’re always improving your knowledge of what’s in the grid. Whereas in Battleships, I can just plain get stuck. It makes me think there’s got to be some approach I haven’t discovered yet, some way of looking at the grid that simplifies the impenetrable.

I do think I’m doing better than I did in the first game. If nothing else, I’m managing to check for mistakes before submitting my solutions pretty consistently. (The UI changes help here.) But the fact that I’m aiming for real solutions in the first place is pure stubbornness on my part, given how contemptible a production it is, and especially given that I’ve already cheated. Finishing this game obviously means solving the Final Puzzle, and, lest we forget, you don’t actually have to solve any other puzzles to do that. You just have to attempt them. Actually getting them right is effectively a side quest.

But if I were the sort of person who’s willing to just skip over the content to get to the end, I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog. Look: It bothers me that I cheated my way past the final boss in the South Park FPS. I recently got a bunch of Sonic the Hedgehog games in a Humble Bundle, and I’ve been contemplating putting Sonic CD back onto the Stack. That’s is a game I played before starting this blog — at the time, it was the only Sonic game for PC. I played through every level and reached an ending, but it wasn’t the good ending, and I’m thinking lately that it shouldn’t count. I have similar twinges about my suboptimal completion of Police Quest 3. So I have good reason to believe that if I don’t do my best to complete Games Interactive 2 for real, it’s just going to haunt me later.