Time killah

This past weekend was an expensive one that’ll have my budget for this month covered in red ink. You see, I was at the car dealership this weekend because the little wrench indicator light lit up on my dashboard a few days prior reminding me it’s time for a maintenance check. I went to the service department hoping to just get an oil change but unfortunately that wasn’t the case.

Last time I had my car serviced I passed on the suggested valve adjustment which would have had me paying over 600 dollars for the total service job. This time I decided to bite the bullet and go forward with it (curse my responsible ways). In the end, with an oil change, rotated tires, and a valve adjustment, I ended up paying nearly 400 dollars. Geez, let me tell you that having a personal vehicle is such a great symbol of freedom (and almost a necessity for Southern California living) as you can go anywhere, anytime but man is it an expensive symbol of freedom.

I didn’t know it at the time but apparently valve adjustments take a long time to service as the mechanic has to wait for the engine to cool down before servicing it, so I had a lot of time to burn through before my car was ready. When I’m in these situations where I have a lot of time to kill, I usually play a game on my phone. My game of choice: ChuChu Rocket! for the iPhone.

During short waits like at the barber shop or at the dentist office I usually play the arcade mode of Castlevania Puzzle: Encore of the Night, but if anything is going to take longer than 30 minutes I bust out ChuChu Rocket! If you don’t know, it’s a puzzle game where you guide mice called “chuchus” to a rocket ship while trying to avoid these crazy-eyed space cats that’ll eat them if they cross paths. You can’t control them directly as they run in a straight line or they’ll turn right when they hit a wall, but you can guide them with a limited set of tiles that allow them to change their direction.

You’ll fly through levels relatively quickly through Normal mode as it is setup as a sort of warm up to how the game plays, but things will get really difficult after that. Some levels later on in the Hard and Special modes are real headscratchers that it will have you focusing so hard for a solution that you will become blissfully unaware that you are staring angrily at your phone and making all around you very uneasy because they believe you’re about to go ape crazy on them all. On the plus side, it’s a great way to have no one sit next to you.

I exclusively play this game while in waiting rooms and I’ve played over 70 levels thus far. At the pace I play, this game could be unlimited because there are over 500 levels crammed into it! I’ve played this game over the span of a couple of years and it’s good to know I’m nowhere near of completing it, making it my game of choice in the near future to be used at any car dealership’s service department I may be stuck in for a number of hours.

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