Well, I am approaching world 300 in Populous. I've been enjoying it a lot more lately since I gave myself an out with the hack I performed on it. Probably about 1/3 or 1/4 levels I find myself needing to take the AI's reaction time down just one notch. But I've kind of made it a rule that I'll only do it after 4 attempts where it just seems nonsensically bullshit hard. Usually go in with a strategy, get walloped. Try to do the strategy harder or faster, get walloped. Try a different strategy, do even worse. Etc.
if after 4 of those attempts it doesn't seem like I'm making any headway at all because the AI is just too damned fast, it's cheat time. I'm just not that masochistic. I just want to have a good time. Having the AI operate just a tiny bit slower seems a good way to maintain the spirit of the game without turning it into a cakewalk. Although I often find after beating my head against it, and optimizing my strategy, the moment I take it down even one notch I absolutely steamroll it. When I was going through the assembly code, it looked a lot like at the highest setting, the AI has a think every game cycle. Then every 2 game cycles, 3, 4, etc all the way down to 10 on the lowest speed. So I guess the 2nd fastest setting could be fully half the speed of the very fastest.
The last few levels have had the AI with only bottomless swamps and knights, but cranked all the way up on reaction time. It's been interesting trying to rehabilitate my domain, as well as expand as quick as possible, while the knights rampage through my land. At a certain point I can turn the tables and just volcano them relentlessly. But it felt like a real tightrope to get to that point. Attempting to knight them back just resulted in swamps being spammed on my papal magnet. So the slow road it was.
Although in retrospect, if I'd just made the terrain totally pitted, it couldn't have been swamped. But who knows, maybe it just would have provoked the AI into swamping a larger area. Or it would have turned into a mana pit for it, endless swamping unswampable terrain. Oh well, maybe next time.
When I wasn't playing that, I was dabbling in Duke Nukem 3D. Never really played it at the time, I was an id software diehard. Gotta admit, not a fan of the level design. I get stuck a lot and the flow feels very awkward. But maybe that's just because I haven't memorized them all like the back of my hand the way I have with Doom's levels.
I think once I get either Populous or Duke Nukem 3D off my plate, I need to play Monkey Island. Never have before, although I did acquire a copy of Monkey Island Madness.
Win95/DOS 7.1 - P233 MMX (@2.5 x 100 FSB), Diamond Viper V330 AGP, SB16 CT2800
Win98 - K6-2+ 500, GF2 MX, SB AWE 64 CT4500, SBLive CT4780
Win98 - Pentium III 1000, GF2 GTS, SBLive CT4760
WinXP - Athlon 64 3200+, GF 7800 GS, Audigy 2 ZS