Two Slashes

It’s been three months since I last reviewed a game for my BGS “series” (I put it in quotes because you can’t really call something a series if you’ve neglected to do it for a quarter of a year).  Oops.

Anyway, I found Snapshot Adventures:  Secret of Bird Island at Big Lots and decided that, with a price tag of just $4, it would be something reasonable to review and then set aside, and that I really wouldn’t be wasting anything in doing so.  When I posted a picture of the game box to Twitter, the responses I got (all two of them) were mixed.

When I finally opened and installed the game, I was expecting something along the lines of a Pokémon Snap game.  I wasn’t disappointed in that respect from a concept standpoint, though the implementation is far from fun.

The game itself is rather wacky in that it only runs at an 800×600 resolution, which caused a few problems for me with the game being weirdly cropped (until I managed to come across a “widescreen” option in the options menu; this is the first time I’ve seen a game get cropped rather than scaled) and blank screens happening from time to time.  Despite the fact that I’m running a PC that can churn through Team Fortress 2 without breaking a sweat, I was also a little concerned that the game startup took much longer despite the game itself being tiny and designed to run on the PCs of yester-decade.

The back-story the game provides is as perplexing as why I thought this would be a good game in the first place.  The game asks you for your name, then quickly tries to lure you in by saying that your grandfather died and that you eventually happen across his old camera and a mysterious journal entry that you (well, the “you” in the game) want to investigate.

She looks thoroughly convinced that I'm a great photographer, doesn't she?

In order to solve the mystery, you have to take pictures for some of your grandfather’s friends that all seem to end up on the covers of regional ornithology journals.  For someone who happened upon the camera only a few minutes ago, that’s quite a feat.

Of course, the game also takes a draw from Ian Fleming’s James Bond series and coughs up random gadgets for you along the way, including “magic” bird seed, a model airplane that seems to cause birds to fly, and (my favorite) the “electronic satellite-based bird identification system” (which simply tells you what bird you’re about to take a picture of, even though the game will tell you what to look for in the corner of the screen).

To go along with the questionable story (which I left halfway through because I couldn’t tolerate it) and the overuse of Comic Sans is the create-a-bird mode, which the game won’t even let you check out until after you’ve played through some of the story.  I was confused as to the presence of create-a-bird mode, especially the fact that you can upload your designs to the Internet (and download others, obviously), as the game seems quite adept at making what you design look more like a winged fish than a bird.

If birdwatching is one of your interests and you would love nothing better than to spend all day “taking pictures” of birds, I suggest you go find yourself a cheap digital camera and actually go out and do it.  This game is a poor substitute for anything, including entertainment, and I highly suggest mass burnings (of the fire kind, not the CD-R kind) of this game.

Now to go find a cure for my boredom…

For everyone else, there are prank calls.

Alright, so maybe I don’t have the cleanest record when it comes to telephony.  I’ve been the silent listener in a few prank calls (though I’ve never placed one myself, and if you’ve ever met me you can probably figure out why), and I’ve done a bit of manual wardialing.  Technically, that doesn’t make me a troublemaker, at least no more than most of the people I’ve met.  And at no point did I overstep past slight annoyance into genuine mischief.

On the other hand, there are always people willing to cross that boundary without any thought at all.  Usually it’s for a laugh, but there will always be times where there seems to be some further motive driving these people, a reason you know they’re going through the trouble to mess with your head.

If you thought that I was giving you just such an example, you won’t be disappointed.

Last Saturday, I got a phone call around 2 A.M. from one of my friends.  Such late phone calls themselves aren’t unusual or even unexpected, but when the first words you hear are inquiring about whether you’re contemplating suicide, you know something is up.

After I reassured my friend that I was not dangling from the ceiling, he proceeded to tell me that someone had called his home only a few minutes before, and that one of his parents had answered.  This unknown caller (who I have no way of identifying) proceeded to tell my friend’s parents that it was me calling them, and hinted that I was in a depressed state and considering suicide, or at least something around those lines.  Naturally, as soon as they hung up, they did what any responsible parent would do:  flipped out.

My friend was out and returned home minutes after the phone call, at which point he immediately called me to verify that the story was, as he believed, false.

Between the two of us, we took what little information we could put together and realized that someone (we don’t know who) was trying to screw with both of us, and that it had to be someone with the resources and enough brains to use fake caller ID information (or use this…*ahem*).  After all, who else would think to spoof their phone number as 212-666-1337?  (For the uninitiated, 212 is an area code in New York, 666 should be instantly recognizable, and 1337 is a “hacker” designation for someone with “elite” or “advanced” (a truly skilled person wouldn’t brag) skills.)

I’m not writing this because I have a guilty conscience for my past actions and thought a story would be a fun way to clear them, or even because the events that transpired over the weekend are weighing on my mind.  This post is, like so many others, a reminder that there are people willing to screw with your thoughts, willing to overstep social boundaries simply because they’re bored one Saturday night.

Sure, there are times where we want to break from the mold, times we want to be just the slightest bit darker than we usually are.  While indulging these desires isn’t a problem, just make sure you do it in a manner that doesn’t hurt other people.  There are constructive ways to channel that energy; I suggest you find one.  Especially if you’re the mystery caller.