Digging for Treasure

Apart from a Baldur's Gate marathon Wednesday night, I have spent precious little time gaming lately. I have gotten in quite a few hands of Texas Hold 'Em and completed a few of the game's single-player scenarios, though. Strangely, I tend to do better when I pretend I am playing against real people. Most people would probably not think that unusual, but I tend to lock myself into a metagame of sorts, where I look for ways to exploit a game's coding to the exclusion of the game itself. I have noticed that the 360 title's AI tends to assume raises mean a strong hand, so I can thieve quite a few chips by simply making sure I am the first player to raise the stakes in a pot. However, I zero in on finding the magic raise amount which will drive opponents away. Pretty much anyone can see the flaw in this scheme; if someone else has a strong hand, they will not throw it away just because some schmuck keeps flinging money at them. I finally won one of the game's tournaments when I remembered that I am playing poker rather than merely number-crunching. Make no mistake -- I am still quite aggressive, but I am more likely to fold a weak hand than doggedly push my way into oblivion.

I was finally able to acquire a PlayStation 2 copy of Deus Ex this weekend. I have yet to play it, and I will not get the chance until at least tomorrow, but I was shocked in one respect. Either this copy of the game is brand spanking new, or the person who owned it before me took more immaculate care of their discs than I do. Ask around town, and you will find the latter is well nigh impossible.

My wife spent this afternoon playing Dragon Quest VIII after our television service lost our coverage of the European soccer championship final. She pulled a true Phil, starting from scratch rather than picking up her last save file. I never would have guessed when I married her that she could spend several straight hours with a Japanese roleplaying game. Forget Lou Gehrig -- I am the luckiest man on the face of the earth.