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I know I promised new Worth a Thousand updates every Monday. And I know that today is Tuesday. But if you check the timestamp, you’ll see that this week’s entry, In Parallel, was technically posted last night, which was Monday. Hey, if you’re not going to sitting on the Worth a Thousand page hitting “refresh” every five minutes, there’s not much more I can do to help. (Except post a link, I suppose. Which is what I’m doing.)

So… yeah. New fiction posted: In Parallel. Check it out. Like it, share it, tweet it. The artwork is courtesy of my good buddy Bradley K. McDevitt, who’s been inspiring me with his illustrations for years.

I’ve been playing the original X-Com lately. Sad to say, I hadn’t touched the game since 1995 or so. Every time I got near it, I was held at bay by its dated graphics and cludgy interface. I know, I know — a true gamer would look past these things, or even embrace them a symbols of his geek purity. (“I don’t see blocky, pixellated characters. All I see is strategy.”)

The time has come to try again. And once I got past the graphics and interface, I found myself caught up in the game more than I would have expected. I was the commander of the X-Com forces, fighting a desperate struggle against invading aliens armed with what little tech I could scrabble together and an army of untrained morons straight from the local temp agency. It was the summer of 1995 all over again, and I was sitting in front of the computer at 2:00 AM, sweating in the cramped and overheated apartment I shared with a half-dozen geeks, trying to finish one last mission before going to bed.

But it’s not 1995. I’m not just a geek, I’m a game-designer geek, which means that I can’t just play the game, I have to analyze it. (I know. It’s sick.) After all, this is a game that’s over 15 years old, but still considered one of the greatest. I want to understand why.

Here are some of the things I’ve found so far:

• Every decision counts. During the tactical mission, each unit only has so many time units. If you spend them to move one more space, then you might not have enough to take a shot at the alien you uncovered. Do you spend them to rotate one step? Two? There could be an alien right behind you, and you won’t see it if you don’t look. During the strategic part of the game, you must decide what to research, since each new item unlocks subsequent items in its chain. Running out of money? Better sell something — but what? The game has so many decisions, and every one of them is meaningful — either immediately, or somewhere along the line.
• The split between the strategic and tactical elements provides pacing to the game. The elements are virtually separate games; though they deeply affect each other, their methods of play are so different, switching from one to the other feels like taking a break to play a different game. And that feels good.
• But I think the most engaging element of the game is that it is tense and scary. It is a horror game, wrapped in a sugary outer shell of sci-fi. The fog of war means that you are always dealing with the unknown: What aliens are here? Where are they? What are they doing? Like any good horror story, you get glimpses of the monsters as they scuttle and attack from the shadows, but rarely get a good look at them. And like the protagonists in an H. P. Lovecraft story, your units are fragile, physically incompetent, and given to panic. The sense of dread is overwhelming: In other games I might be disappointed that I’ve run out of enemies to frag for xp on this level; in X-Com, as my troops are dying and panicking, I find myself praying to nameless, uncaring gods of PC gaming that each alien I kill will be the last, so that this fatal mission may finally end. (I think 2K’s new XCOM game captures that horror atmosphere, so even while it’s a completely different animal, it might be able to retain the creepy feel of the original.)

I’m still playing X-Com. Turns out I’m still pretty bad at the game, so it’ll take me a while to finish it. If you need me, I’ll be here in 1995, sweating and playing just one more mission before going to bed.

How can it be Monday? Last I checked, it was Thursday, with just the tip of Friday appearing over the horizon. I was robbed of time, I tell you. Robbed! I’m getting a lawyer, and I’m suing July.

Stupid, too-hot July.

But if it’s Monday, then I must have a new Worth a Thousand story for you… and I do! It’s called Homecoming but features neither dancing nor football, so it’s clearly not that kind of homecoming. Maybe next week.

I’m so witty with my headlines, I just want to punch myself in the face for being such a pretentious git.

First things first: It’s Monday! That means new fiction! And a re-stocked supply of exclamation points! This week’s entry in the Worth a Thousand collection is entitled Hard to Find (and yes, the title is a riff on the Flannery O’Connor story — a bit more of that face-punching wit in action).

Secondly, I didn’t think it would happen so soon, but I’m already running out of artwork for these things. If you’re an artist, or know an artist, or have an artist tied up in your basement painting commissions while you threaten his family, drop me a line about featuring your artwork in a Worth a Thousand story. It’s strictly an art “loan” with no money or rights changing hands, so if you’ve got some cool artwork lying around collecting virtual dust, drop me a line and let’s put it to work.

Leaving the cats to fend for themselves, my beautiful GPS-minded wife and I set out on the Great American Roadtrip. We were prepared to take risks, discover charming locales, and learn a little something about ourselves and each other — all during a montage featuring music by Journey and the Indigo Girls. (Not at the same time, though that would be a mash-up I’d like to hear.)

Instead, we discovered the long, dark tunnel of despair that is North Dakota at night.

The town we’d planned to stop at for the night had no hotels with vacancies. Odd, we thought, but no to reason to Stop Believin’. The next town was less than an hour away.

They were full too.

“Convention in town,” explained one helpful hotel hostess. “Jehovah’s Witnesses, as far as the eye can see!”

The next town? Construction workers.

We’d planned to stop well before midnight. This was our last night without parental responsibilities, and we’d hoped to celebrate by not driving for 12 hours straight, and maybe vegging to whatever schlock showed up on the hotel HBO. Instead, it was 2:30 by the time we found a place to stay. It was an act of steely willpower not to wrap the night clerk in a sleep-deprived bear hug.

I’ll spare you the rest of the trip. Really, there’s not much to tell. If you want to read stories of my truly fantastic (and far less fact-based) adventures, you should follow me on Twitter. I’m visiting a strange land there. It’s quite exciting.

One more thing before I abandon the machine and go wallow in a weekend: This week’s Worth a Thousand entry is up. It’s a story called Pitstop and is, quite coincidentally, about a group of people having their own version of the Great American Roadtrip.