Triumph!

My quest: To play Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, a game that came out in 2003 and only runs in Windows. (I blame my brother for the existence of this quest.)

The problem: I only have non-Intel Macs.

The goal: Somehow obtain a computer setup that will run the game, as cheaply as possible.

Not having an Intel Mac, the only possible emulation solution was something called VirtualPC, which nobody recommends. However, Shawn Powers had an extra copy lying around, so he sent it to me in the hopes it would help. Alas, it didn't. T.T (But thank you Shawn for trying. This was a year ago and you've probably forgotten all about it by now...)

The next possible solution was to acquire the cheapest possible Windows-running machine. That plan stopped the whole quest for a while, due to the whole spending money thing. I couldn't quite justify to myself that I should spend a few hundred dollars just to play one game. But then Christmas came around again, I went back to the place that had the game, I succumbed to the temptation to play it, and thus: here we are again.

So I shopped around. And found a $200 Acer Nettop. :) In the picture below, it's the small white box between my iMac and the other monitor (also new, for another $110).



It lacks a whole lot of features that most people would want in a computer, and some friends yelled at me thoroughly about the whole plan. I should save up until I can get something better, some said. Or I should just not spend at all, said others. However, it does what I bought it for and I don't need Windows for anything else, now or in the future, so I'm quite happy with it. Plus I hoard quite well the rest of the time, and will make it just fine to my next move (either a new job or, if I still don't have one when my lease here ends, into the house of some friends who have offered to let me stay rent-free). And who knows, maybe I'll run into other Windows-only games. ;)

Bloons! T.T

(or, alternate title: Where I've Been All Month)

Bloons Tower Defense 4 is the fourth in a series of tower defense games that I've been playing since the first one (Bloons Tower Defense, later followed by 2 and 3). In it, you pop balloons as they go around on a track, and try to get them all before they reach the other end. It's a cute game, and the bloon popping sound is a lot like for popping bubble wrap, which makes it very addictive. Here's some screenshots of the game in action:


So, basically, I wasted my entire first week of the month on this game. >.> Over the weekend, it occurred to me I could try to recoup some lost time by writing down everything I'd figured out in a series of strategy guides. Thus: Bloons Tower Defense 4 Strategy Guides for Map 1, Map 2, Map 3, and Map 4. :D They're long, detailed, and full of progress screenshots. I'll probably do one for Map 5 too, just as soon as I figure out how to beat it on level hard. Map 6, though, that looks terrifying.

While I was working on them, I clicked over to someone else's article about Bloons Tower Defense 2 - and noticed that it was terrible. Vague useless tips, some of which were completely wrong. o.O Clearly I'll have to write strategy guides for the other three games too, maybe when I've recovered from doing them for 4. I'm a bit sick of bloons at the moment. (Update: here's one for Bloons Tower Defense 1. :D )

Also while I was working on them, someone requested that I write a strategy guide for sudoku. So I did that too. :)

And that's been the first half of my month, which has gone entirely not the way I was originally planning... >.>

News from the Sprouts Farm

At first I was going to make crop circles and other patterns, such as:



It turns out, though, that other people are much better than I am for coming up with patterns to make (*cough* Anne *cough*), so now I'm going the route of Nerd King instead. Here's my first Farm Town Sudoku:



I got the pattern by playing a round of Jigsawdoku, then writing down the numbers at the end. I then assigned nine different crops to the numbers (carrots, peas, tomatoes, rice, wheat, watermelon, potatoes, strawberries, cabbage) and planted accordingly. Voila. :D

In other news, it's high time I did a sequel to my pylon bunny. That one became my trademark on Battlenet and in RPoL's chat. Amongst the UCF, however, I now have: o.O In online chat situations this is a commonly used ascii facial expression, but most UCFers hadn't seen it before I came along, and it became associated with me. Just like the bunny did. Meanwhile, Farm Town seems to have become the official UCF pasttime (even if half the membership have not yet been sucked in). Thus:



:D

Clan [Wolf] Reunion

Clan [Wolf] was an awesome bunch of Starcraft and Diablo 2 players that I knew back at the beginning of the century. We're having a reunion. I'm collecting snarky comments. Take it away, guys. ;)

Sprouts: Behind the Name

Once upon a time in Facebook Land, there was an Ultimate Hitman game - where you go around to different places around the world, assassinating people. A friend wanted me to sign up so that he would have an extra cell member, and therefore be able to take on bigger and better missions. To get in, I had to pick a home country and a name. Since I wasn't planning to play, I searched the list for the most loserlike country I could find - which I eventually decided was Belgium. It's certainly not the first country that comes to mind when one thinks of mercenary assassins. Then came name. Obviously, it should have something to do with Belgium. Well, Belgium's capital is Brussels ... and thusly did I become Spooky Sprouts.

Then, a while later, there came another game, Mafia Wars - which I did plan to play. Well, I had a hitman name already, so obviously that should also be my mafia name. And thus Don Sprouts was born. Unfortunately, Mafia Land is a cruel, cruel world, and poor Sprouts got pounded into a pulp a lot. Something about the name that just says "please beat me" I suppose. So when Vampire Wars came along shortly thereafter, it only made sense to name my vampire Undead Sprouts. Don Sprouts dies, Undead Sprouts rises.

By that point it was a trend. In Pirates of the Caribbean I was Captain Sprouts (with pet parrot Lady Carrots!), and in Dragon Wars I was an elf named Sprout. And when Farm Town caught everyone's eye, there finally was a place where the name made sense. Yay Farmer Sprouts, who "retired" from all those wars and bought a farm. :)

Now I've embarked on a whole new career of making crop circles with my virtual crops. Here's the first one I made:



It's supposed to be a swirl, not a swastika, but an 8x8 grid turns out to be a bit small. Eventually I'll have more land, and will make larger, more complicated patterns. Maybe I'll post them here from time to time. ;)

Exit Diablo 2, Enter PackRat

Diablo 2, once you get done with the storyline and quests (and some people don't even bother with them the first time), is basically a game of item collection. You go around whacking the same key monsters over and over in the hopes that they drop interesting loot. Getting to the monsters can be time-consuming and boring, and experienced players eventually just skip past all the little treasure chests and smaller loot from lesser monsters killed along the way. Their paths are usually littered with unclaimed junk. (The most hardcore of them try to set up bots to automate all this, which Blizzard frowns heavily upon and thwarts with great vigor.)

Once interesting loot has been obtained, it often gets traded for higher level loot that other people have collected. At its peak, Diablo 2 had an entire economy based around the Stone of Jordan ring as its standard currency. The value of the SOJ fluctuated on a daily basis, just like in a real life stock market. And then one day it crashed - at which point, since they were worthless as money, someone gave me a couple to keep, which was the first I ever saw any. I wore them as rings; they weren't bad as actual items in actual use. There were other items like that as well - so valuable that nobody ever actually used them, because they were more useful for trading. (The Um rune comes to mind. Imagine my brother's horror whenever I talked about inserting ours into a hat....) Nowadays, as far as I know without knowing any hardcore players to keep me informed, it's back to old-fashioned barter.

Facebook PackRat takes all of the item collection and trading aspects of a game like Diablo 2, and turns it into a game all by itself. No longer must a player spend countless monotonous hours killing monsters to get to their loot - now you can just get them directly. No longer is there the flimsy excuse that collected items are supposed to do something for the player; once these are collected, they get put into a limitless-sized vault where they just sit there and look pretty for all eternity. It goes a step farther too - every few weeks the gamemakers introduce new sets of cards for players to collect, and retire the oldest sets - so there's always a rolling assortment of them no matter when you come in, and always something to do no matter how long you've been there. Trading, as I hear from the hardcore players, is heavy and fierce, especially for cards from expired sets.

I'd always thought of the item collecting aspects of Diablo 2 as kind of boring but required. Then again, the whole game is really kind of boring - but it gives me something to do with my hands when I'm too brainfried to do anything else. PackRat now does the same, except with all the boring parts of it streamlined out.

(Except for the waiting. All I need is one more %@#$& Farmer Stubbs and I can feat the Barnyard Ruckus set, and he hasn't been seen all day. -.- )

The Severe Downside of Being Addicted to Sinta

Ninja Kiwi, the people who made Bloons (the latest rendition of which is Pop Three), have a new game out called Sinta. Basically you run around as a little white cat, armed with bow and arrows, in a trap-filled dungeon. It's very addicting. Unfortunately, there are some serious flaws with the game.

1. Unless you have extremely well-coordinated and dexterous left fingers (which I don't), it requires three hands to play - two on the keyboard to run and jump, and one on the mouse to shoot. It would work a lot better if shooting was also a keyboard button, such as the spacebar.

2. After you acquire your fire arrows, the game gets extremely lagged. It is impossible to get through the entire game without fire arrows - and because of the lag, it's also very difficult to get through the game with fire arrows.

3. Layout of the page it loads on is unspeakably bad. The game itself ignores scrolling, which is bad because the bottom part is cut off in every browser I have (Firefox, Safari). So, no idea how many lives I have, what my health is, how many arrows I have, how many stars I've collected, etc. Opera's true zoom function can zoom it down enough so that the entire game is within the window - but the game is unplayable in Opera because the keyboard buttons don't work the way they're supposed to.

Some of the browsers will also load advertisements over the top of the game - and although they can be scrolled out of the way, it's tricky to find a free spot where enough of the game is unblocked.

This is a problem with all of Ninja Kiwi's games. They recently did a revamp of their site's layout, and now it's a lot worse than what they had before. Also, every game has developed a slight lag that wasn't there before, and which gets increasingly bad the longer the game runs.

Even so. I like the cat, so I keep going back to play the early part of the game - before the lag sets in. I just wish I could continue on in the Wizard's Tower to find out what happens. :(

Dragon Cave

This post for comments about dragons. That way they don't end up scattered on random posts. :)

For more about Dragon Cave dragons in general, check out my articles:
The Dragon Cave: A Review
How to get Dragon Cave eggs to hatch (and hatchlings to grow)
How to transfer a Dragcave dragon to a friend

Retardedness: A Gamer's Tale of an Obsessed Loser

Prologue: The universe is Diablo II. The server is Europe, which usually has the nicest possible fellow players. The game I'm in is a mule game. I'm a paladin. My mission for the evening? Either to rescue the old sage Deckard Cain from the village of Tristram, which has been sacked by demons and set afire, or to find all the waypoints (save spots) that I'll need to do it elsewhere later.

Scene 1: A Cave

My paladin is standing in there, next to the exit, doing nothing while I'm fetching myself a bowl of soup from the kitchen. As I'm settling back into my comfy chair, I see another guy run past and out. Then I hear someone declare me an enemy. "Hmmm," I think to myself. "Maybe I better go back to town while I eat."

So I make a portal. And just as I'm going into it, the other guy comes bursting back in, I hear a clank as something hits my shield... and then the screen freezes.^*

When it unfreezes a few seconds later, I'm safely in town. A few seconds after that, the other guy loses his connection to the game.

Scene 2: Some Dark Woods

I'm proceeding at a leisurely pace with my evening plans. Someone else had already found Cain first, so I was just wandering around in the Dark Woods looking for its waypoint.

The other guy comes in. Based on how long it took for him to come back, the freeze probably crashed his computer.^* He immediately declares me his enemy.

I sigh with some annoyance and leave the game.

Scene 3: A Marsh

I was back to looking for waypoints again. Originally I thought I'd just proceed in a different game. On the one hand, there were 7 other players in that one (all of them just standing there doing nothing), which meant nobody else could come in. On the other hand, there were 7 other players in it, which meant all the monsters would be a lot harder to kill. Also, because it's a different game with a completely different map, I'd have to start my waypoint searching from the beginning.

So I came back to the first one. I'd found the Dark Woods - it wasn't far at all from where I left off, and had gone on to the next area (which was a marsh).

Other guy comes in again - just as I find an Experience Shrine. These things are rare and valuable, because it means faster levelling. So I decide to use it. To be safer, I go to a cave that's not part of any game quest and has no waypoints, and therefore nobody ever goes there.

Scene 4: Another Cave

Other guy declares hostilities (no big surprise there). I actually look him up this time to see what exactly I'm up against. Level 91 paladin. I'm Level 11 (read: toast). But hey, I'm in a nice safe cave, right?

Just after the shrine wears off, he suddenly appears in the cave, teleports over (a sorceress spell not normally available to paladins), and kills me in one blow.

Let's stop and review here. First, he's 91 to my 11. Second, he's quite obviously decked out on high-powered items, because he's a paladin that's somehow using sorceress spells. Third, he's obviously outfitted with a map hack if he's able to find me at all, let alone so quickly. And he's just spent the better part of two hours stalking me, a total non-challenge who is trying to stay out of his way, just so he can kill me in one blow.

I resurrect in town and say "compensating for your tiny penis or something? :p" Then I leave the game before he can reply.

Oh the wave of fury that rolled in right then. He was so pissed I was shaking, and it didn't go away for like 20 minutes.

Epilogue: Saving Cain

It's virtually impossible to save Cain in a public game. First, it's a very low level quest, which means most people who make games have already done it. Second, Cain is useful, so mule games want him already saved. Third, even in games where he isn't saved when I first arrive, he will be by the time I find where I need to go - because everyone seems to have a Cain-saving hack.

Thus, having collected the waypoints I needed, I spent the rest of my evening in a private game (that is, with a password). The enraged shaking eventually faded enough that my own emotions on the matter could come through, which mainly involved lots of snickering.

And Cain was saved. Hooray. :)

^*This is not unusual while someone is running game hacks.

Whack-A-Mole, only sillier

Tontie is a whack-a-mole game. It all starts out so simple. Use the hammer to whack the one-eyed mole as it comes up out of the hole. Collect money if it drops any. Lose life for missing. Sometimes get life back if it drops hearts instead of money.

Then it turns out there are different kinds of moles. Then it turns out there are also different kinds of hammers. Then it turns out that not all hammers can hit all moles, and some hammers need to whack twice instead of once to kill some moles. Then there are the treasure chests, explosives and ray guns.

The eyeballs with numbers are the worst for me. Not only do I have to stop and think about what button I'm pressing, sometimes I'm not whacking what I think I'm whacking - and sometimes what I actually whack is something I don't wanna whack.

In the end, it's still simple. If it has an eye, you must whack it before it disappears. (Unless it's a bomb. Those are all bad.) If you don't know what your hammer does, try not to whack anything that doesn't have an eye. And collect calculators. Those are important.

The level of silliness reminds me of the original Insaniquarium. Feed fish, get better critters, defend the tank from aliens using a ray gun. Also well worth wasting a few days if you've not seen this before.

Bloons Tower Defense: A Study in Poverty Economics

Being Poor in Bloons Tower Defense 2 is knowing exactly how much everything costs. It's having to buy 30-point road spikes and 40-point monkey glue because that's all you can afford and you need something Right Now, instead of saving up for the 600-point cannon that you know you need. Being Poor on "hard" is always being exactly one level behind where you need to be. Being Poor is having no margin for error - make one mistake and you're doomed.

At least in a bloons game, you can just keep playing over and over until you know what's ahead, where to put every tower, and which upgrades to bother with. And then on Round 50 at the end when you suddenly don't need money anymore, it's disproportionally hilarious to cover the entire track in monkey glue.

How to reduce your overall productivity to nil

1. I've mentioned Jigsawdoku before. It's sudoku as a jigsaw puzzle. Each puzzle piece is a square tile with a number on it. I like it better than other online options (such as Websudoku, Samurai Sudoku) because it's colorful and has sound effects.

2. Bloxorz will brutally exercise your ability to visualize things in 3D. Many people seem to get stuck on Level 7 - my hint: you need to land on that useless-looking bridge in just the right position in order to line yourself up right for the hairpin turn.

As puzzle games go, this one has an unfinished feel to me. There is no real ending to it; after the 35th level it just stops. Also, because each puzzle has only one solution, it feels limited. You also can't tell whether a soft button is helpful or "you've just lost, throw yourself off the edge" until you try it - and because the game records how many times you try the level, that seems unfair. Overall though, this game has potential to develop into something more interesting than it is at present.

3. Bloons is where you're a dart-throwing monkey who wants to pop balloons. If neither of the above games halts all other activities, this one will. :)

4. Then there's Bloons Tower Defense, which I personally like better because it's more relaxed. You set up your towers and then sit back and watch balloons pop, which is hypnotic and oddly musical, especially on the higher levels. I hope the fine folks at Ninja Kiwi will make more maps (and tower types, and maybe even mobile troop types) for this in the future, or even let players make some the way they can with Bloons.

Also, if defense games are up your alley in general, there is also Defender. It's rather more complex than the Bloons version and has a dark medieval feel to it. It doesn't work on all browsers/platforms, however.

5. And finally, my current obsession is Collapse. This is a frenetic-paced version of the game, where you have to eliminate colored blocks before it hits the top. As levels go up, so does the game speed... It has some similarities to Tetris, but the game it most resembles is Playstation II's Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo.

6. Future obsession? A friend has passed me a link to ClickDragType. I think he's trying to find revenge for all the bloons.

Star something

Starship Troopers is a book by Robert A. Heinlein, published in 1959.

Starship Troopers is also a 1997 movie directed by Paul Verhoeven. Allegedly it's based on the book. In practice, aside from the title and a few minor setting elements that are more flavor than plot-crucial, it has nothing in common.

Starcraft is a real-time strategy computer game. Rumor has it that it was inspired by the book. It has the same sort of gritty realism feel as the book does. It has humans in it (also called Terrans), some of whom are telepaths. It has a race of bugs (Zerg) that sort of resemble the book's Arachnids. It also has a third race (Protoss) that could conceivably be the same ones inhabiting that alien city that the book's protagonist was assaulting in the opening chapter (if one squints at it just right and doesn't think too hard about it). Beyond that, however, the storyline and characters are completely different.

I watched the movie because it was a sci-fi movie. I played the game because an ex-SO insisted I'd like it, and then when my brother found out, he dragged me into his online community. Personal history ensued... I read the book because of the game. I like all three. It probably helps to think of them all as separate entities, but I enjoy comparing the book to the game, as it adds to my appreciation of both.

Starcraft also has its own line of books, at least two of which are novelizations of the game's plotline (Liberty's Crusade by Jeff Grubb covers the first set of Terran missions, Queen of Blades by Aaron Rosenberg does likewise for the first Zerg missions) and one is a prequel (Uprising by Micky Neilson - released as an ebook only, swaddled in anticopy tech, no longer being sold by Amazon, may be impossible to find, was a damn good book). They've been putting out others as well, continuing to expand the universe in new directions; Speed of Darkness by Tracy Hickman is totally awesome, Shadow of the Xel'Naga by Gabriel Mesta totally sucked.

Star Trek was my main obsession all through my youth, resulting in a fairly sizeable collection of books (mostly TOS). No money was safe in my hands back in those days because I would use it to buy books instead of lunch/bus tickets/save for emergencies.

Stargate is my current biggest sci-fi obsession; I jumped to it as the Star Trek franchise went stale and sank. SG1 has since gone stale and sunk as well, though Atlantis is still decent.

Star Wars I-III is an epic story about the fall of a man who sacrificed himself out of love for his wife - only to find that in so doing, he lost her. Unfortunately, it was badly written and executed, so nobody noticed. IV-VI would probably have been about his redemption had I-III been filmed first, but they stand alone as their own complete story pretty well.

I think that's everything that has ever passed through my sci-fi life that starts with "Star."

Pylon Bunny

This is an ASCII bunny made out of Protoss pylons.

Protoss pylons are from the real-time strategy computer game Starcraft. The Protoss are one of three races in the game setting, and pylons are their basic building for supporting troops and powering other buildings.

An ASCII bunny looks like this:

(\(\       <-- ears
(o.o)     <-- head with two eyes and a nose
(")(")    <-- feet bottoms (bunny is seated)

Although I wasn't the first or only person to draw ASCII bunnies in Brap's Battlenet channel, somehow they became my trademark.

One day, while I was watching a lengthy free-for-all game between seven other people (map was "Continental Divide"), I got bored and started drawing things. My bunny turned out large enough to be visible on the game minimap:



A while later, LittleMinions (in teal on the minimap) came along with his horde of Zerg (another Starcraft race) and wiped it out with great enthusiasm. He went on to win the game. Luckily for me, the game has a "replay" feature - where one can save an entire game to watch again later. I took numerous screenshots and assembled the bunny in Photoshop:



A few years after Brap ceased to be, I submitted it to RPoL's portrait gallery. They cleaned off the game-related bits and made the background a uniform green. And now I use it as one of my regular identifying avatars.

Three Short Things

1. I now have a more or less functional website of HTML forms with PHP as a middleman between it and the postgreSQL database. It's not pretty, but it basically does what I need it to do.

2. Jigsawdoku. I'm so doomed. This is all Websudoku's fault for providing a link to it.

3. I need a tshirt that says "I'll let you know when I care what you think of the way I look" for the times I visit the trendy smoothie shop and gourmet deli.

Snoodoku postmortem

As Word of Mouse games seem to go, the shareware only allows a certain number of higher level games before it won't let you play anymore. This number is large enough to make sure that you're thoroughly addicted by the time it runs out.

My Snoodoku ran out last night. Now I'm stuck with "easy." Having just spent an entire week where I did nothing else with my non-work waking hours, this is probably a good thing.

Was it all a colossal waste of time? At the risk of sounding like I'm rationalizing: I would say no, because I learned things. I went from being so utterly clueless that I couldn't even complete a "child" puzzle correctly, to doing "evil" puzzles in as little as 25 minutes. I learned how to look at all Snood possibilities for each box, and then I learned it was faster to look at all box possibilities for each Snood. I learned and invented terms for a number of recurring situations that help winnow them down: singlets, line eliminations, mated pairs, orphans. In my last two allotted evil games, I began noticing some emergent patterning properties, which would probably become more clear if there were 4x4 games (16 possible Snoods in 256 possible boxes) or 5x5 games (25 possible Snoods in 625 possible boxes) - but so far as I know, Sudoku is only ever 3x3.

Were any of the things I learned important?

Well, yes. For the same reasons that IQ tests are based on discerning patterns. For the same reasons that one learns maths more advanced than arithmetic in school, even if one will never use them again. Puzzle games are logic exercises. Ways of thinking learned from puzzle games can be applied elsewhere in arcane, unexpected ways. They can even be the foundations of entire paradigms. ("Life is like a game of Snood because..." etc.)

Also, mental stretching of any kind is always good. The brain is like any other part of the body - use it and become more powerful, or lose it.

Or, in my case since I'm as done with the learning as I can get without paying, and no longer have access to the levels that require thinking, it now becomes one of those mindless things I do with my hands while I'm thinking about other things.

Snood!

Snood is a puzzle game that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Tetris.

Snoodoku is a puzzle game that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Minesweeper.

I've been playing the former for at least a decade and have a win rate on the "evil" setting of around 70%. The latter I downloaded a few days ago, much to the detriment of every other hobby presently in my life. There are a bunch more games by the same guy at Word of Mouse Games, but I think I'm set for another decade.

Virtual Mules

The one thing that would vastly improve Diablo II for me is a single big stash space, shared by every character I have on a given account. Right now it's eight little spaces. As a result, I spend at least half of my playtime passing items back and forth among them (a process called "muling"). Last night I started a second "real" character, and it took me five hours of muling to set him up with items collected by the first "real" character, before I even started playing. This is retarded. It's a game. Why am I spending my playtime doing mindless tedious tasks?

Yes, I know, the creators of Diablo II insist that item collecting is not the point of the game. I say to them, you're the ones who are missing the point. The storyline and quests are only entertaining the first time (and for some people, sometimes not even then). Once you've done them, there is nothing else to do.

Q&A

1. What's a mule?
A mule is a character that was created for the express purpose of storing things in its stash space. The term "muling" means "transfer of items from one character to another." How to mule in Diablo 2 explains it in more detail.

2. Why did it take me five hours?
a) Because I only have two computers, and can therefore only have two characters in a game at a time. This means that on one computer, I have one character stand in the game, while on the other computer, other characters take turns coming and going, and they pass items back and forth a little at a time. I had a total of one "real" character and seven mules when I started setting up the second one. By the time I was done, I'd decided to start the second one on a different account, where he now already has one mule of his own. To make it more complicated, I had to delete one of the mules of the first character, because I wanted to use his name for the second character, which meant scrounging together enough space to hold all of the stuff he was holding.

b) Because I'm terribly disorganized about stashing things wherever they fit. I do have a system, but I refuse to go to the lengths of actually creating a spreadsheet to track everything, the way some of the hardcore players do. Also, half of my good beginning-level equipment was being worn by the mules, and I had to look at the clothes on each one individually (seven total mules plus their hirelings, which are mostly where I store my low-level bows). Also also, once I had multiple versions of the same items next to each other, there was a lengthy winnowing process of discarding inferior copies.

And also also also, there's been a bug since the latest version was implemented, which sometimes causes the game to crash when I exit games. This is why my slower computer just has the one character standing there the whole time, instead of also switching them in and out; on its older operating system, game crash means having to reboot.

3. If I hate it so much, why do I bother collecting stuff at all?
Because you never know when you might need something! Unfortunately, I am a hopeless packrat, and even though I consciously threw away a whole ton of crap that I didn't want (or, more accurately, dumped them in "mule park" games where people stand around in camp with their mule characters while organizing their stuff; one player's trash is another player's treasure), and even some relatively good items that I should've kept, my first character still somehow ended up with a staff of seven mules. (He's a paladin. He'd probably like the idea of having staff.)

It's a slow upgrade process of constantly improving stuff. Items that were good when I started from scratch are now crap, and much of the stuff I consider good now will be crap later, and I'll throw them all out. But I need to keep them now because they're the best I have right now.

At some point in the future, I will hopefully get around to writing a post drawing some parallels between Diablo II items and Wikipedia articles. The lengthy process of starting a second character has been rather enlightening in some interesting ways.