Down With Numbers

The Geometry Wars excitement continues. A couple of hours before writing this post, I became the proud owner of two new Xbox Live achievements.

The first one informed me that I have “Mad Cat Skillz”. Now, they could be referring to my expert skills in hooking up networks with cat5, unlikely as that is. Fortunately they aren’t; it actually means that I managed to have nine lives in my possession at some point in the game. This is rather tricky: you start off with three, and you get an extra life every 75,000 points, so in order to gain another six lives you have to reach 450,000 without dying. Alternatively, you’d get it if you reached 525,000 having only died once, which is what I ended up doing. Somehow.

While “Mad Cat Skillz” is certainly a fairly tricky achievement to get, I’m much more proud of the second one I got: an award for scoring over one million points in a game.

1,104,060 points, to be exact.

I thought it’d take me at least another week to get to a million. Next stop, two.

A while ago, Richard Smith (overlord of the Bearkey network of sites) came to me and asked if I could throw a simple RSS reader into the existing Bearkey Alerts client, so that people could receive news from sources other than the ones provided by the remote Bearkey Alerts news service.

Time passed, and before we knew it (well, okay, a few months after we knew it) I’d coded a completely new RSS reader, one whose focus was on the RSS with support for the Bearkey Alerts system as a small, optional extra. It was officially released about half an hour ago.

What makes it different from the other RSS readers out there? Well, aside from actually being good (which is much more than can be said for the majority of amateur-hour attempts out there), it doesn’t treat news as something that you read at the start of the day in a big, bulky e-mail client system. News doesn’t all happen at once. Events happen throughout the day, and so Alertbear presents news to you in a flow rather than a block.

Try it.

Oh, and please Digg it too.

Doubtless many of those in the know with games have heard of Geometry Wars, the ridiculously popular 2D game on the Xbox 360. I’ve had one of the consoles for a couple of months, so naturally I’ve played a fair bit of Geometry Wars.

At the rate of something like 20-30 minutes a day for a couple of months, I’ve managed to rack up a high score of just under 875,000. This places me somewhere between 6000th and 7000th in the world.

That’s 6000th in the world for a game I’ve played a few rounds of nearly every day for a couple of months. So what’s the top score? Well, right now, it’s 33 million.

A fair way to go yet, then.

Newsflash: A few hours after writing this post, I bumped my high score up to 885,000. It could’ve gone to 900,000, but when I notice that I’m near my high score I get nervous and make silly mistakes. Ah well.