League of Legends: ARAM Queue!

Today saw the release of a fairly big content patch for League of Legends. There's a new champion, two remade champions, and a bunch of lore around those champions. There's also a revamped 5v5 map, with only one lane. All 10 players are given a completely random champion and have nowhere else to go except that one lane. So it's one giant cluster of people spamming spells and such back and forth. There are also rules preventing you from healing back at base or from buying new items unless you die. So it's just a lot of back and forth death until someone wins.

Players had been organizing such games for a while, but the problem initially was you had to trust everyone to pick a random champion. And you had to trust they wouldn't go heal, or buy. Riot made a map that removed a lot of that required trust by forcing random picks and restricting purchases and whatnot. But then the problem became that there was no penalty for leaving the game before it started. You could see all 10 of the random champions, so if you didn't like your champion, or your team, or the enemy team you could just leave. And join another game in a matter of seconds. With no way for anyone to blacklist you for doing such a thing! So the same people could cycle through games causing them to not really start over and over again. It was rather frustrating. Especially if you were the sort of person who just took whatever random champion you got since you were apt to lose. (Any time you had a big advantage the game wouldn't start, but any time you were at a disadvantage the game might start since you weren't quitting.)

The big innovation in this patch is to build a queue for the map. So there's the same penalty for quitting during champion selection as there would be for a regular game. Quit and you can't join another game for 5 minutes. Do it again and you can't join another game for 30 minutes. On top of that they've hidden the champions that the other team randomly generated so there's no way you can tell if your team is 'good' or not. The icing on the cake is they give you a limited number of 'reroll' abilities which let you trade in your random champion for a new random champion. It felt like I'd probably be earning a new reroll every 4 or 5 games, which feels like a good spot. You can't reroll all the time, but if you really don't want to play Karma you don't have to.

ARAM isn't a great game variant by any stretch, but it is a fun, quick diversion. And I'm glad they've put a little more support into it to get rid of the annoying people aspects that used to exist. Boo people! Yay systems!

Battlestar Galactica: 2-Player Variant?

Snuggles commented on my revealed cylon post by saying he thinks the chaos spread by an unrevealed cylon is actually the biggest thing and he's strongly opposed to having both cylons reveal early. He posited the thought experiment of considering a game where the cylons start out revealed, and he asserted the humans would win almost every time. I feel the opposite, and that the cylons would win every time. I spent some time in the tub last night thinking about how to test this out. The easiest way would be to get 5 people to agree to a test game, but I've rarely found 5 people around to play an actual game of Battlestar Galactica. I don't know that I would even want to convert one of those games into a test game, and I doubt I could convince 4 other people to do it either.

On the other hand, if the cylons start revealed there's not really any need to have 5 people at all. It's a lot like Scotland Yard at that point... Ostensibly a 6 player game, but actually a 2 player game. BSG has a little bit of extra stuff going on (the humans get an advantage by knowing precisely what cards will be thrown in instead of having to use the 'little' or 'lot' of help explanations) but once you remove the randomness from who is on which team you get a pretty reasonable two player game. One with some wonky book keeping (needing to keep 3 separate hands and turn order), but probably still reasonable.

What sort of rules modification would you need? I'd think the following would be a good start...

• Draft characters in order, human-cylon-human-cylon-human. Then randomly choose two of those five players to become cylons. This keeps the humans from overloading with strictly awesome for the human characters. I'd prevent the cylon from picking two supports, which means the humans are guaranteed to get to pick a second pilot with their last choice. My main reason for setting it up this way is to keep the human team from always being Helo-Starbuck-Apollo-Kat-Roslin, or whatever the optimal split is. This way the human has to decide if they want to deny the Boomer (by first picking a pilot) or lock in the Helo (the cylon will likely pick a military leader second pick if the human starts with a pilot, probably Gaeta). 
• Turn order would be in the order drafted. So some games you'd get the cylons acting in sequence. Other games you'd get them split up.
• I'd put some sort of 'announced punting' rule in. The first time a human player could add cards to a skill check the human has to tell the cylon if they're going to throw any cards in with future players. This is to try to bring back some of the 'secret hand' stuff from the main game. Though with the cylons drawing 2 cards per round and a max of 3 skill checks they may well have a card to throw in every time anyway.
• Start the cylons on the resurrection ship with a super crisis each. I'd also start players 2-5 with 3 cards from their initial skill-set. If the first player is a cylon they only get 1 card at the start of that turn, which hurts, but they get to go first, which is pretty sweet. Launching a super crisis while the humans have drawn a total of 9 cards as a team could be pretty hot.

Depending on who is right between Snuggles and I you may need other rules tweaks to make the game not be an auto-win one way or the other. Options to do that would be...

If the cylons need to be buffed:

• Deal out two 'you are a cylon' cards at the start of the game and resolve them to get some initial damage in there.
• Reduce some of the starting dials.
• Go back to the old version of the cylon ship space which lets you play a crisis by removing the jump prep icon again.

If the humans need to be buffed:

• Don't start the cylons with super crisis cards.
• Let the humans draft 3 characters of their choice and just randomize turn order/cylon seating.
• Let the human player have one hand containing a max of 30 cards. (This has the advantage of reducing bookkeeping issues, but is a really serious buff.)
• Add free resources to the starting dials.
• Make it easier to shoot centurions?
• Some sort of tweaks to allow repairing to be more reasonable? Though I think the answer to this problem is just to draft the Chief as a character.

Anyone see any flaws in this plan? Other suggestions for rules that need to be tweaked? Own a copy of the game and want to play?

Don't Starve!

A week ago Sthenno posted about a game he'd been playing in beta that was due to be released shortly. The game is called Don't Starve, and he made it sound like the game actually made good use of a beta period so would be launching in a relatively finished state. When Steam advertised the game as being on sale for only $13.49 I took the plunge. Despite having tons of games to play and (soon to be) no income. I'm not a very smart guy is what I'm saying.

Don't Starve was totally worth it, though. I've put in a few hours playing in the last couple days and it's been really fun. It's a game of exploration and death, so it's the sort of game I can't say much about without feeling like I'm ruining it for other people. And when it comes right down to it I don't even know what I'm supposed to do. Other than keep my character from starving. I'm proud to say that I haven't starved. I've died many times, mostly to bees, but I haven't starved.

The game actually reminds me a lot of the game Alchemy. In that game you started off with access to the four elements (earth, air, water, and fire) and combined them together through trial and error to make all sorts of things. Planning out different paths to test different combinations was the whole point of the game, and it was a ton of fun to just experiment with things. Eventually I remember giving up and looking up on the internet how to make a robot or an alien or something. It got me over a hump in the tech tree that I couldn't figure out on my own but it pretty much killed the game for me. It was fun to try new things. Getting told the thing to try killed that fun.

So while Don't Starve has similar combinations of things that can make you slap your forehead, and I'm sure it would be great for progression to look that stuff up, I want to play in the dark. The trick to getting manure made me laugh it was so simple/silly/awesome, and it's worth figuring it out on your own I think. I got to feel really clever when I acquired my first rabbit, even though it's probably blatantly obvious what you need to do.

It's fun enough, and cheap enough, that I think people who like trial, error, and dying to bees should give it a shot. Just don't tell me how to do something awesome!

Final Fantasy VIII: Addicted To Cards

My characters just got launched into space by a giant rail gun. Rinoa has been in a coma for a while and there are some doctors up here who might be able to help. Squall has been getting progressively pissier and pissier about the whole situation, and he's been snapping at the doctors. He's yelling at people to hurry up and get to work. Logically, I should run out of the room and try to find the head doctor to come look at Rinoa. Instead I turn to the assistant guarding the room and challenge him to a game of cards! Actually, more like 7 games of cards. He might have a rare card I can win, so I need to give him plenty of time to use it!

Lino asked me the other day if I knew of any stand alone games similar to the card game in FFVIII. He's tired of having to deal with all the annoying RPG parts of his CCG. I really like the RPG parts too, but the CCG is really quite good. I didn't know of one for him (Tetra Master, which came packaged with FFXI, has apparently been closed down) but if one does exist I am interested in finding out about it.

So... Does anyone know of any good positional CCG style computer games? Preferably without a 'pay a ton of money' feature.

Battlestar Galactica: Revealed Cylon Changes

Andrew commented on Facebook that he thought Sara was a human because she didn't choose to reveal as a cylon. Now, I've long asserted that a cylon should reveal as soon as possible, and I feel like I've said that a lot to Andrew over the years, so maybe I've brainwashed him into that line of thought. If that was true, and if there wasn't a shelf, then I can see the logic path that leads to executing Byung. Byung did have a full hand of cards, and if he was a cylon then he probably could have done some damage that would be prevented by executing him. But is it true? What exactly changes when a cylon reveals, and are they actually better off revealing at the earliest opportunity?

• An unrevealed cylon draws 5 cards at the start of their turn. A revealed cylon only draws 2. Skill cards are worth 2.2 on average, so a revealed cylon draws 6.6 points of skill power less each time around the table.
• An unrevealed cylon can throw any number of cards into a skill check. A revealed cylon can only throw 1. This really means that a revealed cylon can't cause any given check to fail, but their existence does put extra pressure on the humans. Every skill check is potentially a little harder. An unrevealed cylon can pretty much guarantee any given skill check will fail, assuming they draw the right colour of cards.
• An unrevealed cylon is restricted to certain card types. A revealed cylon can draw any colour card, including treachery. Unfortunately the treachery deck sucks, and is only worth 1.8 on average with a max of 3. The colour split only really matters if the unrevealed cylon has a very restricted colour set. Yellow and green tend to be positive, so it's harder to make a check fail if that's all you draw. Someone who draws lots of red and blue cards is in a great position to make skill checks fail.
• An unrevealed cylon has access to their character abilities, which can include some truly powerful once per game abilities. If Cally reveals without executing a human first it's probably a huge mistake, for example. 
• A revealed cylon gets access to the cylon board spaces. Generally speaking the cylon board spaces will inflict more damage than the human board spaces. Way more damage. Most human spaces can only help the humans along. Probably the best you can do is draw extra cards or play 'launch scout' cards.
• An unrevealed cylon can hold a title. The admiral gets to choose the next destination and controls the nukes, both of which are very powerful abilities. The president can potentially draw cards to throw people in the brig. The CAG can't really hurt the humans, and they have to be pretty blatant to refuse to help the humans, but it's still something.
• An unrevealed cylon who plays it straight seeds potential confusion and disruption amongst the humans. As soon as the cylons have revealed the rest of the humans gain complete trust with each other. This has to have some benefit, but it's really hard to quantify and depends on the paranoia level of the other players. It seems like staying unrevealed has the potential to put Andrew on tilt, for example!
• An unrevealed cylon can be targeted by actions which hurt humans. They can be thrown in the brig, they can be sent to sick bay, and they can be executed. They can be forced to discard cards. If you've played it really straight you probably won't be abnormally hit by these, but if you've been at all shady you might well get hit. I've often said it's just fine to force the humans to waste a bunch of cards throwing you in the brig, but there are crisis cards with 'failure' conditions which force the humans to do bad things to one of their own. Having an unrevealed cylon as a target for these penalties is awesome for the humans. They don't need to pass the skill check, they get to hurt the cylons, and they don't get hurt themselves.
• A cylon that reveals on their own accord (not executed or in the brig) gets to use a powerful special ability when they reveal, they get to draw a powerful super crisis card, and they get to keep 3 cards from their hand. A cylon that reveals from the brig still gets the super crisis card. A cylon that is executed has to discard their hand and gets nothing special. 
• Cylons don't get a crisis card at the end of their turn. This both slows down the damage done to the humans and slows down their progress towards game end. The lack of jump prep (which is apparently on 67% of the base game cards) is the biggest reason I've always wanted to reveal early. But is the extra damage done from those crisis worth it? On the one hand they're going to need the same number of jump prep to end the game so they're going to hit the same amount of damaging crisis cards along the way. As such revealing has to be good, because you can throw non-crisis damage their way. On the other hand by spreading those crisis cards out over more rounds around the table the humans get to draw more cards to use passing them.

Unrevealed cylons actually have the advantage in almost all of these bullet points. Some of the advantages are pretty big, even. Holding the admiral title, using your once per game ability, and being able to make a skill check fail are all huge. On the other hand the advantages you gain for actually revealing are really powerful. The revealing ability tends to do at least as much damage as failing a crisis, and the super crisis cards are often worth the damage of a couple crisis cards as well. Slowing the game down by denying jump prep is actually good. I think staying unrevealed to sow discord sounds really good, but doesn't really work out. If you do minor damage while staying unrevealed you risk a crisis coming up which brigs/executes a human player and then you're in big trouble. Getting executed for free is brutal. Even getting thrown out the airlock is pretty bad. 

I feel like in a game with inexperienced players, where you can do minor damage and get away with it, or where you can really making someone else seem suspicious then it can be worth sticking around. If you can manage to stick around and cause multiple crisis skill checks to fail it'll be awesome for you. But I'd always be keeping my eye out for a way to do some blatant damage and reveal as soon as possible. 

I actually wonder how viable it would be to claim to be a cylon right after the sleeper phase. In a 'hey, other cylon, whoever you are, executive orders me so I can use my once per game and reveal' sort of way. The best would be if you did that, were human, and got someone to executive orders you. And then you threw them out the airlock! Mwahaha!

At any rate... Do I think Sara should have revealed as her very first action? No, I don't. She hadn't had any opportunity to do any damage at all on her way out. She was Baltar, so she didn't have any good abilities to use (I think the cylon detector was broken), so maybe not? But sticking around for one turn around the table in order to cause a skill check to fail seems pretty reasonable. She was also president, so she had the potential to dig for 'brig you' quorum cards and she could make bad choices on 'president chooses' cards. The biggest thing, I think, is none of the other players had even had a chance to make obvious pro-human actions. There was a ton of opportunity for chaos and discord still. Especially with Byung and Andrew at the table. It would be a little different if I wasn't already revealed as well. Getting the first cylon revealed to slow the humans down a little and start using cylon actions is very good, and it doesn't cost you the chaos potential. So I probably reveal in her spot as the first cylon, but not as the second one. But the first chance I had to hurt the humans, I'd be all over it. (She eventually revealed to make use of her cylon reveal action, costing Andrew 7 skill cards which was pretty great.)

Speedy Von Ogre!

One of the neat things about the FumBBL site is they track stats for every player that has played on any team in any of their divisions. I've mostly played a human team, and my big guy Ogre happened to get +MV on his first level and +AG on his second level. This seems pretty terrible, since it only makes him average on the human team in terms of movement and agility and he suffers from having loner and bonehead. But I thought it would be fun to try to score a bunch with an Ogre and see if I could top those leaderboards.

Turns out that really wasn't a very hard thing to do at all. It takes 10 touchdowns to get on the leaderboard and there hasn't been a single human Ogre to score 10 or more touchdowns. My Ogre is up to 8, so he's not there yet, but he's getting close. There are some other categories though, and Hulk X-90 is getting up there on all of them! Here's his position on the all-time blackbox leaderboards.

SPP - #6
Casualties - #13
MVPs - #16
Games Played - #23
Blocks Thrown - #13
Rushing Yards - #1

There are no Ogres on the top passing, scoring, fouling, intercepting, or passing yards lists. My Ogre does have 1 interception, but no fouls or passes at this point. I don't think he's ever going to try for a passing record. But I hope to live long enough to put up tons of touchdowns and rushing yards. Hulk X-90 will be immortalized forever! Assert!

Battlestar Galactica: Favoured Side

A few months ago back at the Niagara Boardgaming Weekend Sara asked me while in a teaching game of Battlestar Galactica which side was favoured to win. I was playing something else at the time so I gave a pretty basic response: cylons win more when people are first starting; humans win more when people know what they're doing. I didn't elaborate any more (I wasn't asked to do so, and I was busy) but the idea has been spinning around in my crazy little brain ever since. I played a game of BSG last week with Sara, Duncan, Andrew, and Byung which the cylons won, but I feel like Andrew made a bizarre human play that pretty much caused it to happen. He figured I'd post about it, and I don't want to let him down, so I'll try to weave the two together...

At any rate, BSG is a game where any individual player can be in one of three states, each with their own goals and decisions to be made. You can either be a human, a hidden cylon, or a revealed cylon. The play behind each of these states evolves as you get experience with the game, and I feel like these evolutions are what causes the favoured side in the game to change over time.

First off, human players are at their very core playing a resource management game. You have access to a lot of different resources and have to make decisions about which ones to lose at which points in time. The whole goal for the humans is to survive until the end of the game. The biggest resources humans have to contend with, and one most people don't really think about, is cards in hand. Frequently over the course of the game the humans are given options to trade cards in hand for other resources to prolong the game. I've found that rookie players often feel like they need to try to pass every skill check that comes up and will throw cards into lost causes. Alternatively, and just as bad, they'll throw way too much into a skill check. If you need to get your total up to 10 it's great to end up in the 10-12 range. It's fine to end up around 15, or around -5. It's terrible to end up at 7, or at 25. When you end up at 7 you've thrown a bunch of cards away and still lost your skill check. At 25 you've thrown even more cards away. Giving up, staying at -5, is actually fine. You're going to fail some of the skill checks in the game. You can still win. So there's a lot of play involved in figuring out when to pass a skill check and when to intentionally fail it. New players don't have this ability. They won't be able to predict whether a skill check will end up at 0, 7, 12, or 20 without their help. They aren't going to know which resources are critical to protect and which can be sacrificed for the common good. A game with a lot of new human players is therefore going to be more inefficient with their resources than a game with a lot of experienced human players, and efficiency is pretty much everything for the humans. You can use up most of everything and still win, you just can't go critical on any one thing.

Revealed cylon players tend to have a pretty easy job regardless of their game experience. There are very limited numbers of actions they can take, and a limit impact they can have on skill checks. For the most part they exist merely to slow the game down and bleed off human resources. You can certainly be a better revealed cylon if you know what you're doing, but the difference between a passable revealed cylon and an awesome one isn't very big. For the most part it's pretty hard to target down a specific human resource so the revealed cylon is just trying to do damage anywhere they can, and that's an easy thing to grasp. Especially when pretty much anything you do will cause some damage somewhere! Certainly some games get won or lost based on the revealed cylon being able to shift gears at the right time and focus on a critical weakness, don't get me wrong... But a mediocre revealed cylon isn't apt to make big mistakes. A mediocre human player can make huge mistakes.

Unrevealed cylons are tricky. You'd think having a lot of experience with the game would have a big impact on how much secret damage you can inflict as an unrevealed cylon but I haven't found that to be the case at all. The thing is that as the humans gain experience with the game they become better and better at noticing strange plays. It's the start of your turn and you're the CAG... If no one knows what they're doing it's easy for you to 'forget' to use the CAG special ability. Probably everyone else will forget too! And if they notice you can easily feign ignorance and then do the action. I can't pull that off with experienced players. If I'd tried to 'forget' to use my CAG ability the jig would have been up. I probably wouldn't have gotten executed for it, but the spotlight would be on and I'd never be able to get away with anything. In the game last week I actually gave the CAG title away so I wouldn't get caught using it poorly. (As Apollo I could also use Duncan's CAG activation to reveal out of turn!) But now that I've done that once, I don't know that I can do it again. Now, maybe I'm just bad at being an unrevealed cylon but I find my best play is just to do blatant damage and reveal ASAP. Flipping up more jump prep on crisis cards only helps the humans out, I feel. Regardless, I think that the humans gain more in cylon detecting with experience than an unrevealed cylon gains in stealthiness. At least in games I play I find the unrevealed cylons have to go to great lengths to take pro-human actions or I'll sniff them out.

Which reminds me of a game a long time ago at Andrew's place where a brand new player was an unrevealed cylon. She made brutal misplay after misplay which hurt the humans. Everyone else at the table was convinced she was just new to the game and making mistakes. I knew she was a cylon, but I was playing as the cylon leader who wanted the humans to lose so I saw no reason to rain on her parade. It was glorious, and the humans got obliterated. But if the humans had more experience with the game at the time, or if she had more experience and couldn't play the newbie card, it likely wouldn't have worked at all.

My feeling is the humans get a lot better at managing their limited resources and at uncovering unrevealed cylons as they gain experience. This in turn makes the job of an unrevealed cylon harder! (Especially if you take into account human players who will track card colours in people's hands and in the destiny deck.) A revealed cylon can get better, but not much better, and the unrevealed cylons actually feel worse to me in an experienced game than in a newbie game. All of these things combine to make it more likely the humans will win with experienced players, and I think they contribute enough to shift the balance of power from the cylons to the humans.


And yet, the cylons won the game last week. And not by a little bit... Sara and I were in a dominating position. Four damaged sections of Galactica, 3 boarded centurions, and all four resources in the red. I don't know if the humans would have won one way or the other, but Andrew made certain they couldn't win. The sleeper phase went off at the end of Byung's turn, giving everyone a new loyalty card. I was already a revealed cylon at this point, so I gave my extra card to Andrew who was the admiral at the time. Duncan was next, and used an Ionian Nebula character to throw Andrew in the brig, taking the admiral title. Duncan then put out a new Nebula character, into the brig, and could either make Andrew discard his hand or let him out of the brig. Duncan then took a fairly human action and ended his turn. Sara went next, drew two Quorom cards, and said go. No skill checks came up on either turn. Andrew was next, found that Duncan had let him out of the brig, and decided that meant Duncan was human. Sara hadn't revealed, so obviously she was human. Therefore Byung was a cylon. So Andrew threw him out the air lock. Andrew spent 5 cards to pull it off and managed to convince Duncan that this was a good idea so Duncan chipped in a card as well. Byung was not a cylon. This cost the humans a morale, and it cost them all the cards in Byung's hand, and it cost them the 6 cards they spent. I think Sara and I also threw in a card. All told it was something like a 14 card loss, and a resource lost, and Andrew didn't take a real action on his turn. Oh, and we were playing with the 'set aside' loyalty card, so Andrew gave me a 50-50 chance of getting a cylon friend if it happened to be the shelf that was the extra cylon.

Byung hadn't taken a single action. Not that he hadn't taken a pro-human action... He hadn't done anything at all! I was convinced Andrew had to be a cylon because he took that action, but no. It turned out Sara had just punted her first turn in the hopes of getting a good skill check to sabotage before revealing. I'd say it worked out pretty well!

I was the next player in line, and since Andrew had killed Byung instead of letting Duncan go defend the space areas I was able to take my turn to shoot down 3 civilian ships. Which in turn cost the humans enough population that Duncan couldn't pick a far away planet on their next jump as it would have cost too much pop to pull off. Which gave the cylons enough time to decimate all the human resources. The game goes very differently if Andrew doesn't throw away a ton of human resources for no reason. But even though I had an awesome start to the game (I was revealed with 2 base stars in play and their jump prep track was still at the start) it was by no means in the bag.

Missile Command Insanity

I just stumbled upon an interesting website that tracks video game high scores for all sorts of games. The company started back in the 80s as an arcade tracker and now have all sorts of crazy rules when it comes to submitting a new high score. Like you have to video tape the entire playthrough, including turning the console on. And if it's an arcade machine you need to film the mother board inside the machine in order to prove you're playing on the right settings. Oh, and you have to pay them a bunch of money to even look at your submission. But for a chance to put your stamp on history? Worth it!

At any rate, it turns out there was a high score set all the way back in 1982 for Missile Command. It took that guy 56 hours to set that record. FIFTY SIX HOURS! What?!? Playing an arcade game for more than 2 straight days seems absurd. And the record tracking website rejects plays that abuse glitches in a game, so it's not like Pac-man where you could just hide in a corner and go to sleep for 8 hours while the game runs. (Though looking at their Pac-Man leaderboard it seems the fastest perfect game is less than an hour, so I imagine using that little glitch isn't actually needed.)

A guy from Sweden made it his goal to beat the Missile Command record score. He streamed his game live on Twitch and you can actually go and watch all 56 hours and 15 minutes of it over two videos. I jumped around a bit to check out what was going on and it seemed like a lot of the time he was just staring at the screen without trying. It turns out while you have 6 cities to defend on every level the enemies will actually only kill 3. Once 3 cities and all 3 missile bases are destroyed the wave ends and you move on to the next level. So you can quickly move through levels by not defending and just letting yourself get blown up. This lets you trade in extra lives for mental sanity and also moves you closer to levels 255 and 256. Which is apparently important because they have absurd score multipliers. Wave 255 has an insane amount of incoming bullets to shoot for points. Wave 256 has no enemies at all so you just score up all your missiles and cities with a huge multiplier. And then because you get extra lives based on how many points you score you actually rack up a ton of extra lives just by clearing wave 256. The game then resets at wave 1. So if you possibly made it that far once you're pretty much set to go infinite since the first time around you had no extra lives as a buffer and now you have 80 plus whatever you'd earned up to that point. Around the 36 hour mark or so the guy actually mentioned he needed to lose a bunch of lives because he was about to collect a huge number of them and would end up rolling over his extra life counter.

So he didn't need to play perfectly for 56 straight hours, but he did have to pay enough attention to track his extra lives, millions, and current level. He set up a program to track it when he typed on a keyboard that auto-updated the stream with the info which was pretty sweet. Oh, and when I said it would be easy to go infinite after wave 256? For a robot, maybe. But humans start to degrade after staying awake that long. There was an article up on the tracking website that talks about how he'd started hallucinating. He was getting paranoid that someone was watching him from behind, and he started thinking the game was a multiplayer game and he only controlled one of the three missile bases. And yet through that he still played pretty darn well to keep going and going and going.

It reminds me a little of when Andrew wanted to try to break the world record for longest bridge game. It was something like 5 days? I would have gladly tried, but I feel like we would have actually gone crazy at some point. I just checked again and it looks like the longest card game was 170 hours which is a little more than a full week. But they cheated. They used 6 people are just tagged in and out. That seems like something that would be pretty "easy" to beat with a little commitment from people...