Pro Tip of the Day

If you've played through Neverwinter Nights enough to have gotten bored with the combat, you might consider spicing it up a little bit.

First, make sure that DebugMode is activated by hitting the "~" key and typing "DebugMode 1"

Then type "dm_cowsfromhell"

And you will summon... Cows from Hell to attack your enemies!

They don't do a lot of damage, but it is kind of neat to watch them spawn on the battlefield and then viciously attack your foes.

I was lured into buying the newest Ghostbusters game over the weekend, and I've got to say, it's a better game than the last Ghostbusters game that I played.

But, right at the beginning, I started to explore and found this interesting screen on one of the computers in the firehouse:

Which looks startingly like this screenshot of the ending sequence from the old NES game

Which doesn't seem like much, I know, but the NES game came out in 1986, so if you're younger than about 24, you might have missed the connection... until now.

If you're like me (and, you probably wouldn't be reading this site if you weren't at least a little like me), then you probably will occasionally play a game part way through, forget about it, and then pick it up again months (or sometimes years) later. So what do you do when you go back to a game like, say, Quake 4, and just want to get through the rest of the story?

Well, you could press the Left CTRL + the Left ALT + the "~" keys all at the same time to bring down the Console. You could then type the word "Undying" (without quotes, natch).

Done right, you'll get a confirmation message, and the result?

Your health will take a beating (like normal), but can't ever dip down past 1 (not like normal). Which effectively makes you immortal. You should be able to finish the game now, no problem.

Space Siege is a whole lot like Dungeon Siege, but in Space.

Obviously.

But if you take some damage and there are no healing items around, you could hit 'enter' to bring up a chat box and type the word 'heal' (without quotes)

For a quick refill of your life bar!

Which is incredibly handy for making progress.

If you're playing through Dungeon Siege II and just can't find any awesome fingerwear, you do have the option of just making some.

If you hit the Enter button and type:

You get a confirmation message

And a ring with fairly good stats will drop at your feet

Of course you'll probably find something else better pretty much right away with the amount of loot that drops in this game, but hey, it's pretty good for the beginning of the game, and for free.

When playing through Episode 3 of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, I came across a manual page from one of the games within the game: Limozeen's Hot Babelien Odyssey.

Remembering yesterday's tip, I ran over to my binary to ASCII converter and plugged in the numbers and got:

Which doesn't actually mean a whole lot to me. In fact, I couldn't make heads or tails out of the code, which leads me to believe that it's just a random string of ones and zeroes.

So don't be fooled.

Back when I used to play World of Warcraft I ran through a dungeon called Gnomeregan. In it, I got all these cards with lots of ones and zeroes on them. Ones and zeroes that looked like they might have been encoded secret messages.

So I went to my favorite Binary to ASCII converter and fed it the codes. Here's what I discovered:

White punch card: "Thrall and Jaina sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G"

Yellow punch card: "If you can read this, you're standing too close"

Blue punch card: "The gnome king wears night elf underwear"

Red punch card: "Help! I'm trapped in a binary punch card factory!"

Prismatic punch card: "Message to Castpipe: your laundry's ready for pickup."

These messages add a whole new insight into the fallen Gnome city.

In Tetris, you occasionally will have to maneuver pieces so that they fit in spaces where it doesn't initially look like they're going to fit.

Like this T-piece, for example.

It would totally fit in that hole on the left column if some of those pieces weren't in the way.

But if you let it get partway in

And then rotate it at the last second, it slides into place

Which is easier to show in animated .gif form

This is a pretty useful maneuver, since it lets you slip those T-pieces in places where they wouldn't normally go.

Like a lot of the SimWhatever games, part of the experience is constructing a budget and slowly making money, which means that for a good chunk of the game you're going to have to deal with some pretty low cash flow, and that means that you won't be able to buy much of the fun stuff.

So, what to do? Do you plan your budget carefully, expand your course slowly, make smart investments, and watch as your pile of cash slowly but surely rises?

Yeah, you could do that, or you could hold down the Left Shift button and press the =/+ button on your keyboard. Every time you press it, you get 10,000 Simoleans. Do it enough times (or hold it in, if you're into that kind of thing) and you can rocket your cash flow up to some pretty ridiculous levels

Which means that you can do pretty much anything you want, now that you've been freed from the restraints of a 'budget'.

So go nuts!

It's the first of the new year, and that means (among other things) that it's pretty much the middle of Winter, and that means that (around here, at any rate) that it's really cold outside. But I can get some company.

All I have to do is start up Bookworm Adventures, go to the title screen.

And type the word: Winter

Then Lex dons a scarf, produces a hot beverage, and prepares to weather the, erm, weather.

Which sounds like great advice on a day like today.