Archive for December, 2007

Gimme Friction Baby

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

Gimme Friction Baby is a game that was featured for some game design contest a while back. I forget the details. But it’s an entrant in the ever-popular ‘casual games’ category. It’s a puzzler, so you’ll have to use the old greymatter to play it effectively.

It’s a bit hard to explain what it is, but I’ll give it a shot. You shoot pucks onto a playfield. When they stop moving they expand until they touch something else. Hit them with other pucks and the number on them will count down. Once they hit zero they leave the field and you get a point. The gotcha is that if any of the pucks cross the bottom line, then you lose and game over.

The problem with this game is the intensely slow gameplay. You plod along so slowly waiting for the friction to slow the pucks down and then waiting for the cannon to aim in the correct direction that you’ll find better things to do real quick. You can play it here if you like being both extremely bored and frustrated at the same time.

Borestrated?

Bloons 2: Tower Defense

Monday, December 10th, 2007

I first played a version of Tower Defense as a mod for Warcraft III. It’s a silly little game where you have creatures trying to escape, from some kind of prison, I believe, by running down the only path available. A twisty-turny affair. You need to keep them from escaping by any means available to you, and that usually means violence.

Bloons 2 is significantly less violent than its Warcraft cousin. It’s still the same basic concept, though. Balloons are trying to escape by running down a path… somehow. It’s your job to put up defenses that pop as many as possible, letting none escape. You get money for every balloon that you pop and bonuses for popping all the balloons in a wave. Which you can spend to upgrade your armaments. This is a Good Thing ™ since there will be more and more enemies with each wave.

I only managed to play this game for about 5 minutes or so. I made it to the 8th wave before I got tired of the silly sound effects and the tiny amount of money you get to upgrade your armaments with. I still like the War 3 mod much better, it just seemed like a better package to me. Still, give it a whirl if you have a few minutes you don’t mind never seeing again.

Super Mario Kart

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

I really liked Super Mario Kart. Still do, actually. It’s one of those games that’s easy enough to pick up that anyone can play it, and complex enough that you can spend hours upon hours learning its intricacies.

So what is it? It’s a series of kart races, starring characters from the Mario universe. Why are they racing? Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you have to take your go-kart of choice and try to win races set in courses themed after locations in the other Mario universe games.

To make it a little more exciting, you can get coins to slightly boost your speed, but the real fun comes with the items you come across. You have shells to throw at your enemies, mushrooms to give you a boost of speed, feathers to jump real high, etc. It makes the game just a little unpredictable, which adds excitement.

There’s also a ‘battle mode’ where you and a friend scoot around a track, hunting each other down and trying to pop balloons on your opponent’s kart by hitting them with the items.

I played this game a lot when I bought it, but I really got my enjoyment out of it from the XBand modem. After playing with my circle of friends for weeks upon weeks, I thought I was pretty good at this game (and I was, really). But there were some folks on that network that were leaps and bounds better than me. Though I still won my fair share of matches.

I still like to pick it up occasionally, though finding opponents is getting tougher and tougher these days. They want to play the new games in the series, which I can’t really fault them for.

Mario Party-e

Saturday, December 8th, 2007

I think that I’m the only person in the Western Hemisphere that bought an e-Reader. It was a device that allowed you to scan dot codes on cards for various effects. Most of the time it involved stupid little gamelets or unlocking things in other games. But Mario Party-e was a little different.

Mario Party-e

It’s kind of hard to explain the game, but it’s essentially just a card game. You have to collect parts of Mario’s costume, get a star, and win. But! To get the pieces of the costume you have to scan cards and play a silly little game.

In short, it’s kind of a cool fusion of old-fashioned card-playing technology and new-fashioned video-gaming technology. But I only could convince people to play it with me one time… and I lost.

Animal Crossing

Friday, December 7th, 2007

Animal Crossing is not so much a game as it is an activity. There are no scores, no bosses to fight, and no real goals to achieve. It’s really just kind of a life simulator. You, a human, move into a town completely inhabited by animals. Why? Nobody knows. You just set out to see the world, apparently bereft of cash, and direction. The minute you get off the train, in your new town, the local store owner makes you a deal for a house, which makes you indebted to him for quite some time. You work off the debt at first by doing some errands and some odd jobs, but you’re eventually free to do whatever you want. Don’t want to pay off your house anymore? OK.

So what else is there to do? Several things!

You could:

  • Meet your neighbors, send them gifts, chitchat, teach them catchphrases, or run errands for them
  • Pull weeds
  • Collect, plant, and sell the fruits that grow in your village
  • Fish
  • Dig for fossils
  • Design your own clothes
  • Decorate your house
  • Visit the mysterious island
  • Participate in the events throughout the year
  • Listen to concerts every week
  • Etc.

Lots to do!

The game seems to be set up to allow you to play (or ‘visit your town’) for a little bit every day. Certain events happen on certain days throughout the year to keep you going. This all kind of gives you the impression that your town is there and stuff’s happening, even if you aren’t playing.

This doesn’t really sound like the kind of game that I’d be interested in too much, and you’d normally be right. But there’s something oddly compelling about checking out this little town every day or so. Makes it worth coming back occasionally.

Okay, so the silly little town isn’t the main reason I got this game (although it didn’t hurt things). The real reason I even gave this game more than a quick look was that several NES games are available in the game, tantalizingly locked away. They’re pretty hard to get, but I did manage to build quite the collection, and eventually just played this game so I wouldn’t have to fight with my aging Nintendo to try and get these games to play.

Ironsword: Wizards and Warriors II

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

As a alluded to yesterday I think I was spoiled by Ironsword. I just found the original game to be pretty boring by comparison. This game, its sequel, while being a bit more complex, was a whole lot more fun and required pinpoint accuracy to win. I never actually won, but I got real close, which counts for something, right?

I don’t really know how this game ties in with its predecessor, all I know is that you have to kill off fiends in the form of four elementals: wind, water, fire, and earth. Then you have to kill them off again, but all at the same time. The evil wizard from the first game is involved somehow, but don’t worry about that too much.

Each stage has two parts to it. Part one has you meandering around a landscape, killing things, collecting treasure, spending (or gambling away) your treasure in the local shops, all looking for a golden item of some sort. Bird wants an egg, frog wants a fly, etc.

Find the Golden Thingus(tm) and you get to go to the second part of the stage, where the boss lives. There you have to find the spell that… erm… spells doom for the boss (you can’t hurt it without it), find the boss, kill it, and move on to the next area.

Like in the first game, Kuros is almost completely harmless with a sword. You press the attack button and he just kind of waggles it in front of his face. Maybe he thinks that’s menacing enough to scare off the monsters, I don’t know. But he is quite the jumper. You have to carefully maneuver him across the various landscapes. Leaping from tiny platform to tiny platform at breakneck speed. One wrong move and you’ll slide down the most inconveniently-placed slides I’ve ever experienced in a game.

The game does get a bit maddening after a while, but it has some of my favorite music of any NES-era game. A lot of the time I spent watching others play this game was just to hear the soundtrack, which in hindsight sounds kind of sad. But, hey, it was a cheap way to keep two kids entertained for weeks on end.

Wizards and Warriors

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

The title of this game is a little misleading, there’s only one wizard and one Warrior. You get to be the Warrior, Kuros, and have to kill Malkil, the Wizard. Why? Because the wizard’s evil. Duh.

Unfortunately your warrior is incredibly valiant and cunning. I say ‘unfortunately’ because he’s just about worthless in combat, so gets to use his wits to defeat his enemies. At least that’s what I tell myself to justify his completely impotent attacks.

So you guide your little warrior guy through several levels, gathering gems. You need the gems to give to the mysterious knight who won’t let you pass. Bribery works, I suppose. Then you get to kill the boss he’s guarding, all to rescue the damsel of the level, and to get you one step to vanquishing the evil wizard.

One of the weird things in this game is the powerup system. You get various things to enhance your warrior, like a Dagger of Throwing, and a Shield of Blocking, but you can only have one at a time, and you won’t know what’s in a chest until you open it, take the item inside, and irreparably break your current item. So if you have your Shield of Blocking and get the Boots of Force (which let you kick things), you’re pretty much screwed.

I played this game some, but it was the second game in the series that I played. The first game that I played was the sequel to this one, and it spoiled me a bit, I think. The second game in the series is much better, and much harder. Although, for what it’s worth, I did read the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book based on this game. I remember it being pretty terrible, so at least this game is better that that.

Plantasia

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Plantasia is a game about gardening. But it’s not a game about regular gardening, that would be way too boring. Instead it’s about some fairy who needs to grant just one wish to graduate Fairy School (or something else equally inane), but the person she’s assigned to will have none of it! He’s much too busy to have a wish fulfilled, so to get rid of her he offhandedly wishes that his garden wasn’t a disgusting weed-patch. But the young fairy-in-training is strong! She will prevail! She’ll use her magic fairy powers, fairy trowel, and her fairy watering can to grow weird little flowers with faces on them. Flowers that can be harvested for magic points. You have to get a certain point total to clear the level, but you also have to use the points to buy upgrades, flower seeds, and the like. It’s a delicate balancing act.

Plantasia

This game is kind of like a gardening version of SimCity, except instead of millions of Sims, you’re controlling the lives of a few dozen plants at a time. It was kind of fun for a while, but I got bored with this game after two levels. It didn’t really do anything for me other than satisfy my ‘frantically click all over the place’ impulse. But if that’s your thing, then go for it.

Where’s an Egg?

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

The fake video game company that shows up occasionally on the Homestar Runner site, making crappy games. They actually get better as time goes on, though.

Where’s an Egg? is supposedly a game that was imported from Russia and poorly translated. The game is about… well… finding an egg. You have to question the people in the town and try to discern the location of the egg. Figure out who has it, shoot that person, retrieve the egg, become a national hero. Guess wrong and shoot the wrong person three times or run out of time, and it’s off to the gulag for you. Fun times.

Where’s an Egg?

Each of the people in the game always tells the truth or always lies. You have to discern who’s who, and then connect the dots to figure out the solution. Or you could just do what I do and run up and shoot three people. Gives you a nonzero chance to win, and I’m all about the nonzero chances.

Play it here if you wish.

Final Fantasy XI

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Final Fantasy XI is different from all of the other games in the series in that it is an online role-playing game, meant to be played simultaneously by a large number of people. Otherwise known as a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. This was the game that introduced me to the genre, and even though I don’t play it anymore, it still holds a bit of a special place for me.

The story and scope of this game, as is the case with MMORPGs, is absolutely huge. It has to be, you’re expected to pony up a monthly fee to continue to play this game. You can kind of think of it like a service that you pay to access. But, like I said, there is a story, but it’s not important in the beginning, all you need to know is that there are humanoid ‘beastmen’ outside the main towns and you have help your home nation in the war effort.

So, what do you actually do in the game? The main thing you’ll be doing is killing monsters. Gather a group of friends together and head out to the Killing Fields and start slaughtering away. End enough of their lives and you’ll get stronger.

Other things you’ll be doing in this game include mastering a tradeskill, and… gathering materials to support your tradeskill.

There were a lot of things to like about this game, the jobs your character could do (kind of like a class in other role playing games) are lifted out of other Final Fantasy games, and there are references to the previous games all over the place.

The classes all work well together, and each one was pretty fun to play, but pretty quickly I started to see some problems. Your first 10 levels or so are where you learn the absolute bare minimum about your class will pass by extremely quickly. Then the forced grouping comes into play. Much past the level 10 mark and you can’t do much by yourself. So you have to find a group of people to help you out. The problem I had was that I really only liked grouping with people I knew because most of the people I would find in random groups were pretty worthless.

If you do manage to find a group of people that don’t suck, then you have to go find a spot to camp. Then you elect one person to go find a monster, bring it back to camp, and you work together to kill it, gaining experience points. Compounding the problem is that it takes huge amounts of experience points to gain a level. You’ll be sitting in the same spot for hours upon hours killing dozens and dozens of the same monster over and over again.

The progression in this game is so slow, in fact, that in the seven or so months I played it I only managed to get less than halfway up the ladder, and each rung was further apart as I ascended. In short, I got bored. The game started to feel like work, and I don’t really like the idea of paying people to let me work, in my free time. So I hung up my character and waited a couple of months for World of Warcraft to hit, which we’ll talk about another day.