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Today’s Blaugust prompt is from the blog Azerothian Life: What is some popular piece of content/media that seems to be universally loved that you have never been able to understand? I think it takes a very small person to judge what someone else likes. Everyone is different, and this difference, this diversity, is part of what makes us special. This whole social media phenomenon is so transformative because it allows people to connect in ways impossible in any other era of human history. ...

Dragon Age: Inquisition I’ve been back and forth on this entry. Whether it should be this high on the list. Whether it should even be on this list. And yet I feel if this wasn’t on the list, I’d regret it. Because the fact is, I really enjoyed my time with the Dragon Age games. Dragon Age: Origins was my first exposure to the modern multi-character Mass Effect-style epic RPG for which Bioware was famous. I’d played Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, but this was something special. Half a dozen different origins – entirely different opening chapters to the game depending upon the race and heritage you chose at the beginning. Elves were reviled. Mages were hated and feared. The classic RPG tropes were turned on their heads. ...

When a Japanese friend I’d met in Treasure Abyss invited me to try A Bit Lucky’s “Lucky Train”, I thought immediately of the legendary train sim “Densha de GO!”. The description sure sounded like it. Build trains and send them from your town to those of your friends, past country scenes you design. I was absolutely there. Well, I was close. You do build trains, and you do send them from your town, but you don’t go with them. Lucky Train is a fairly simplistic city sim, except instead of built around a town hall or castle, it’s built around a train station. As you progress, you raise a town and later a city around that train station. In your city, the only thing anyone wants to do is leave – by train. ...

I figured when I finally got the chance to bomb my neighbor’s yard from orbit, that that would be the turning point. But, I guess not. Apparently twigs just don’t do that much damage. I have a plan. Next time: I drop pebbles. Right onto the Tesla coil. Bzzzzzzt, indeed. Backyard Monsters, a whimsical tower defense game from Desktop Tower Defense creators Casual Collective, is about as cruel with its goo-formed monsters as any sadistic game of Lemmings. You can zap them, shoot them, bomb them, mine them, shoot them, trick them… ...

If you’ve ever played the Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh or Magic: the Gathering card games, you’re already pretty familiar with the game behind Zynga’s Warstorm: collectible card battle games where you build a deck and then draw monsters from it with which to attack your opponent’s health. First to lose all their health (called ‘morale’ in this game) or run out of cards, wins. You obtain cards in the now-familiar metaphor of the booster pack, bought for in-game silver or real world cash. Each card – all of which are beautifully illustrated – represents a unit. Units have a draw time – the number of turns a card must wait after it is drawn before it can be played. This can be as much as ten turns for the most powerful cards, or as little as one for cheap, expendable infantry. Cards also have an attack power, health, and an optional special ability. ...

I thought I would never find a game on Facebook that tied together social gaming and RPGs. This whole experiment with Facebook games has typically been one spam-filled sim game after another. Frontierville, City of Wonder, My Empire, Virtual Villagers – all share the same half-hearted copying of better single player games combined with a financial urge to turn the player into a whining beggar who is a burden on their friends. ...

I quit Frontierville tonight. No big deal. I ended up playing it a lot longer than I thought I would, actually. I got to a point in FV where I’d just log in once in the morning and once again at night, harvest stuff, visit neighbors, see what folks were up to. Some people arranged their homesteads so that they just had mass herds of animals that they’d tend to; otherwise made gigantic farms; some folks just tried to make their homestead a pleasant looking place. There clearly could be a lot of creativity in the way the farms were laid out, and Zynga holds frequent contests to find the most innovative designs. ...

Okay, seriously? I get this ad on my adbar when I load up Facebook. Looks like some me-too Bejeweled clone, so already it gets a negative one zillion on the Tipa Cool Game Scale. BUT! WAIT! You can also ad(d) to your pain enjoyment by installing the “mywebsearch toolbar”! OMG! I was HOPING someone would let me install MORE SPYWARE ON MY COMPUTER! Last company I worked as an IT admin. It was part of my job to go around and remove all the viruses and spyware that people would blithely install on their computers. That weather toolbar scam of a few years back? The COO had that on her computer. Spyware-laden screen savers which displayed ads as their save image? Head of sales for our most popular line had that on hers. Made me sick. But I wasn’t allowed to lock down those computers so that nobody could install anything not approved by IT. ...

If you’re going to waste time playing social games, you might as well play a game that elevates wasting time to a paying activity. In Astroape Studios’ Office Heroes, out now for the Apple iPhone and soon for Facebook, you’ll spend your day tweeting, drinking coffee, updating Facebook, surfing the web and trying to look busy when your boss is around while moving up the corporate ladder. Heck, I think I LIVE this game. ...

I didn’t just play Guild Wars this weekend. I stopped into Wizard 101 a little, and, oh, finally got around to moving Dina from Befallen to Najena, where she happily joined Nostalgia. Almost as soon as I got transferred and reset my AAs, I got a group invite to Runnyeye 2. Who was going to be the enchanter for the run? Me. Yup, troub mezzes were going to be the only thing between us and total annihilation. It got a little nervewracking on the final epic x2 mob, since the usual strat is to mez all the adds, kill the boss, then kill the adds. Well, I can only keep two locked down. Three with no resists, but that’s iffy. The group leader figured out a strat where only two needed to be mezzed at a time, we did it, and we won. ...