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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rather than try to explain what Line Rider’s all about, I’ll just let the blurb on the front of its site set the stage:
Boy grabs sled. Boy rides sled. A simple concept yields endless fun and the latest Internet Phenomenon is born! In Line Rider the player draws their own landscape with a simple pencil tool creating as many ramps, hills, and jumps as they can imagine. Then they send a virtual sledder careening down the course until he wipes out. The possibilities in Line Rider are only limited by the player’s imagination.
It may not be obvious from the description, but Line Rider is more or a creativity tool than a game. You don’t really score any points, and it’s not really possible to win. You just create a course for your little sled-guy to go down. You can tweak it to your heart’s desire to try and get him to do interesting things, then record the course, set it to music and post it to Youtube. Like so:
You should note that’s not me playing. I’m barely talented enough to draw a couple of straight lines, and there’s no way I could spend more than a few minutes drawing a course, much less the multiple days that some of these things take. In fact, I had lots more fun seeing what actual artistically talented people can do, and what they can do is, more often than not, pretty amazing.
If you’re so inclined, you can try the game out over at the official site.
I’m only just familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, and I only know a couple of people who are. I thought about trying to learn about the game, but the rulebooks are quite the investment if you don’t really plan on using them for more than just reading through them a couple of times. So, I decided to get the next best thing, a game that took care of all the Dungeon Mastering and the Dice Rolling for me.
Neverwinter Nights is more than just a game. It’s a toolkit that you can use to create your own campaigns, and it’s a tool to use to play through them with friends without having to lug around all of those cumbersome dice, character sheets, and rule books. It also comes with quite the lengthy single-player campaign, taking you through an adventure trying to save the world from some kind of Mysterious Plague(tm).
I made quite the effort to complete the included campaign when I first bought this game (on release day, no less). I made a bit of progress before my hard drive does what my hard drive does and I lost my game save. So I tried again and just couldn’t get motivated.
A couple of years later and several more campaigns and expansions were released. Expansions that I thought that I’d like to try, but never went out and got. A bit later than that, however, a package came out that had all of the expansions with the original game for some crazy low price. So I got that and installed it, ready to finally tackle the game and clear it off my ‘to do’ pile.
It should be noted that the game is still on my pile, and that I’m still ready to take it on. Just… not right this instant.
It would appear at first glance that I’m a huge sucker. I see a game on the shelf called Alien Disco Safari that I can just sense is going to be awful. Then I see a price tag of $6 and I start to think that the game might be hilariously awful and might be worth $6.
Turns out that this time the game isn’t actually awful. It’s not great, either, but it’s not awful.
The story doesn’t make any sense, something about a space probe got sent out to deep space with the sum of human information. Aliens found it and really liked the disco music, so they came to Earth and invaded. You have been charged with taking them out.
You do this with various forms of heavy weaponry in two kinds of stages: action stages and ship stages. Action stages just feature some kind of scene where aliens run around aimlessly. You have to shoot them, and various other targets, to get points. Get enough points in the time limit and you clear the level. In the ship stages you have several ships that fly overhead. You have to shoot down the ships to get points. Get enough points within the time limit (and don’t miss more than 5 ships) and you clear the level. It’s all pretty easy since the aliens don’t shoot back at you, so all you have to worry about it shooting and hitting things.
I can’t say that this game is great, but for a $6 game with a goofy title, it was better than I expected it to be. I ended up playing about halfway through the game before I got tired of it, but it’s decent enough that I might pick it up again someday. Or just any time I feel the need to shoot a few hundred cartoon aliens.
If there’s one good thing about the games in the Final Fantasy series it’s that even though there are 12ish games in the series, you generally don’t have to have played the previous installments to enjoy them. Each game is its own self-contained story, with some similarities thrown in so that you know it’s still Final Fantasy. So even if you, like me, couldn’t wrap your head completely around Final Fantasy VII you don’t need to do so to play VIII.
The story in this game is also quite convoluted and confusing, and I know I’m going to misremember and misinterpret some of it, but here’s what I can recall: You start out with Squall who’s a pointlessly rebellious guy in a military academy. He’s eventually sent, along with some of his classmates, on a mission to assassinate the ’sorceress’. The Sorceress is the latest in a line of sorceresses that have ill-defined magical powers and pass them down to some random girl every generation. The ragtag group of people, it happens, are all orphans that grew up together, at an orphanage run by what would become the current sorceress (and whose husband is headmaster of one of the military academies), but they don’t remember any of this because they have amnesia. Amnesia brought on by using powerful summoned creatures known as Guardian Forces. So the assassination attempt fails and two things happen: Squall’s new girlfriend becomes the new sorceress and a sorceress at some point in the future decides to do something called ‘time compression’ that makes all moments in time happen simultaneously. Oh, and there’s a side plot involving some guy whose daughter has the ability to send minds back in time to experience things, and things you do while in the past will influence the future.
Got all that?
Gameplay wise, it’s a lot like other Final Fantasy games. You run around fighting bizarre monsters while working your way to the next plot point. Where it differs is in how it handles stats.
Role Playing games are all about stats. Your stats determine your worth. Health Points dictate how much damage you can take before you die, Strength determines how hard you can hit, and so on. Typically, in a Final Fantasy game, you also have Magic Points. Each spell you have costs a certain amount of points to cast, and these come out of your pool. In this game, the developers have dispensed with this system in favor of the junction system. To gain magic spells in this game, you have to ‘draw’ them out of your enemies or from random points throughout the world. You then attach to your various stats for boosts. You are then immediately faced with a conundrum. The magic spells are typically some of your best attack and support avenues, and if you use the ones you have you decrease your stats. And an RPG character with sub-par stats is a pretty lame character.
The other problem has to do with the Guardian Force creatures. You use these creatures for extremely powerful attacks, but the attacks take a long time to play out. I fully understand that every time you do the attack that it always plays out to do the damage, but I would have loved the ability to skip them, especially when I got the longer ones.
Sure, they look cool the first couple dozen times you see them, but after seeing the same Guardian Force do the same minute-plus attack a hundred or more times, you just quit using them, opting for the slower, but much more interactive, mundane battle.
I’m the only person that I know that has actually finished this game, but I never felt compelled to play through it a second time. Or to complete any of the optional sidequests to fully understand the story. In fact, toward the end the it began to feel more like a chore than a game.
This would also be the last game in the series proper that I would play (not including Final Fantasy XI) since it was the last Final Fantasy game that would come out on the PC. Had IX, X, X-2, or XII come out for the PC, I’d have probably given them a shot. Not all of us own Playstation consoles, you know.
Most of the games in the Bomberman series are about one thing: getting lots of people in an enclosed area, giving them bombs, and having them try and blow each other up. It’s not as gruesome as it sounds. It’s all very cartoony, very intense, and lots of fun… assuming you can find people to play with.
Atomic Bomberman supports up to eight people in a tiny area, each laying bombs and trying to do each other in, all accompanied by some of the most abrasive voice acting I’ve ever heard. The voice work in this game was done principally by Charles Adler, who is very distinctive and whose range leaves a bit to be desired, and Billy West, who is also very distinctive, but significantly less annoying. Even the limited pool of actors and voice samples wouldn’t be so bad, except that the voices play absolutely all the time. My ears were bleeding within minutes.
Like I said, this game is only really fun if you have multiple players. You can have the computer stand in for any players you have missing, but it’s just not the same. I’m not that good at the game, but the computer is way better than me. I don’t think I ever managed to win. It’s also a bit difficult to trash-talk a computer. Another problem is that, although you can play this game over the Internet, by the time I got hold of it, there were zero games being played. Or, I assume that’s the case, there’s no way to browse for games (and the company that made the game is defunct now). The third big problem is that if you get the maximum of eight players in the match, there are far too many competitors. There are so many players laying so many bombs in so many places that it’s nigh impossible to keep track of them all, and you’ll invariably either die because you got blown up by a bomb that you didn’t even see or you’ll end up with a draw because everyone died because they got blown up by a bomb that they didn’t see.
The best thing about this game has to be that I didn’t spend more than a dollar for it.
A few years ago, due to some epic shortsightedness, I managed to move into a new house that had all the amenities: power and water. What was missing was cable, phone service, and Internet access. This was before I had a cell phone and before unsecured wireless networks were in every home, so I was essentially cut off from the world. The earliest I could get hooked up was over 10 days away, and as I was pondering what I could do to pass the time a friend helpfully suggested that I could read a book. I ended up not taking his suggestion and instead used the time in isolation to play through one of the more peculiar games that I’ve ever played.
American McGee’s Alice is a game set some time after the Alice in Wonderland books. Somehow Alice’s house burns to the ground and her family dies within, leaving her the sole survivor. She ends up at an insane asylum, clearly off her nut. As it seems, Wonderland exists within Alice’s head and since she’s so traumatized the world is warped, twisted, and barely resembles the Carroll tales.
So you have to guide Alice through the landscape and attempt to restore the order of things by brute force… brute force and a kitchen knife (named the ‘Vorpal Blade’). It’s a bit intense.
The game manages to be equal parts creepy, intriguing, and oddly compelling. I’m really glad that I took the time to plow through this game in a couple of days, because I just didn’t want to stop. The only problem? The ending! The intro to the game was well done, the backstory was fleshed out very well, and the game took me a good amount of time to complete. The ending? A 30-second clip where everything’s OK again. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it was more than what I got. It was a huge letdown for such a well crafted experience to completely fall apart at the end.
I would still recommend this game to those interested in the subject matter, just don’t let the ending taint your experience.
