Remowned

Anyone who has played the Xbox Live Arcade board game adaptation Catan, about which I have previously posted, is surely familiar with the neverending admonishment, “Not now with you.” For reasons completely beyond my comprehension, NPCs will often not simply reject your resource trade offer, but will spew that rejection alongside a finger-wagging emoticon. There seems to be no rhyme or reason behind it - my friends and I have tried to apply all sorts of empirical theories, to no avail. Alexander (The Great, presumably) seems to be the most dogged of these naysayers.

Anyway, after a few hours of Catan last night, I couldn’t get that endless drone out of my mind, so I constructed this unnecessary non-sequitur:

(Download above track)

For some reason, I just completed every single-player level of Metanet’s N+, the Xbox Live Arcade incarnation of the original floaty-ninja indie hit N. This includes the 50 expert challenge levels. Holy lord that was difficult. I had really hoped that there would be a secret achievement for beating all the expert levels; there were several regular achievements awarded for the standard levels. No such luck. I didn’t get jack shit, other than hours of frustration and a disappointingly hollow sense of accomplishment.

So I’m letting The Internet know, because it’s really all I can do: I am awesome at N+.

I’ve never really had any familiarity with that tradition of specialty board games like Settlers of Catan and its ilk, those games that always seem to have German designers and feature strong economic elements–like a lot of niche hobbies, it’s absolutely huge once you become aware of it, but if somebody involved doesn’t induct you into it, you are extremely unlikely to ever become aware of it.

I took my first (and, so far, only) steps into that world when a friend of mine showed me Alhambra, positing that we, The Guys, who had never played these sorts of games, would enjoy it. He was right. I spent about a month in San Diego earlier this year hanging out with my old high school buddies, and we played that Goddamned game about twice a day every day for weeks straight. It was then that the corruption seen in this post’s headline was spawned. (more…)