It’s actually kind of hard for me to talk about games that are created primarily to spread a message. Regardless of the message I can’t help but be interested in it because it’s a game, so I’ll end up playing it for a bit. And since this game is hosted on a site called ‘Kentucky Fried Cruelty’ it’s pretty obvious what the message is.
Super Chick Sisters is a pretty blatant rip off of Super Mario Bros. In fact, the plumbers make an appearance, they’re unable to save the day because they were injured while playing with their new game system (a Wii, natch). So it’s up to two chickens to go after the Colonel for his business practices.
The game is really pretty generic. You run more or less to the right, rescuing chickens and getting bits of trivia from concerned citizens who are inexplicably standing everywhere. You can get a powerup that makes you bigger. And you fight lots of Colonel Sanders-themed… things.
In all, the game was pretty bland. I only made it to level 2 before throwing in the towel. There just wasn’t a lot of game here, just a message with a couple of cute mascots.
Ever wonder what it’s like to be a librarian? To shelve books according to the Library of Congress Classification System? Well, wonder no longer! The game simulation you’ve been waiting for is here!
I played this game for about two minutes before I gave up. I have it on good authority that classifying and arranging books can be fun, but not this time.
Give it a try here if you’re really hard up for something to do. As an added bonus, there’s another game with slightly more action to keep you occupied called I’ll Get It. Can you help patrons locate the material they need before they give up on you and leave? Do you dare take part in the digital representation of library life?
Nanaca Crash is one of those silly Flash games that made the rounds a couple of years ago. It’s kind of hard to explain what the game’s about since I don’t know Japanese, but I have been led to believe that the game is based on an adult-oriented manga series. The game, though, is pretty tame.
So, what is it? I’m not real sure. You have this girl on a bike that crashes into a guy, sending him flying down a course. Along the course is a random assortment of four girls and two other guys. Hitting the guys will slow you down or change your angle of flight. Hitting two of the girls will boost your speed, hitting the third girl will negate the effect of the next girl you hit, and one girl stops your progress and ends your game. Unless your ’special’ is lit for the girl you hit, then you have a tiny window to press the mouse and get a crazy boost. You can also call the ‘bike girl’ a few times to give you a couple more mini-boosts.
Confused yet?
Part of the game is trying to figure out how to take advantage of (read: abuse) the system to get the best distance possible. It’s also just kind of oddly compelling to crash into that poor guy over and over again and watch him bounce helplessly down the course.
I mentioned that I played Final Fantasy XI for a time. I really liked the concept, but ran into some issues. Mostly going to school full time, working full time at a retail store in the evenings, and trying to not fail catastrophically at either of those things. This left precious little time to play games of any sort, much less games that take a massive time investment. So, after I shelved my character, I realized that it would be a scant couple of months before the next new hot thing in massively multiplayer online role playing games was getting much much nearer to completion than I was aware of.
So I did some digging, signed up for the ‘open beta’ and gave the game a try.
And I liked what I saw.
World of Warcraft follows the story laid down in the Warcraft series and picks up just after the conclusion of III. But it’s nothing like other games in the series. You, an adventurer, have decided to venture out into the world. What do you do? Well, quite a bit. You can slay monsters, craft and sell items, do quests, socialize, or some combination of those. And there are thousands upon thousands (though now millions) of other people doing the same thing in the same game world. It’s pretty crazy to think about.
What makes this game a bit more accessible than Final Fantasy XI is that it’s quite a bit more friendly to the casual player, the solo player, and the casual solo player. There’s plenty of cooperative content, too, but if you’ve only got a bit of time at odd hours to squeeze in like I did, then this game might be for you.
I invested a lot of time into this game, but my odd schedule meant that the group of regulars I played with often were unavailable, so I did most of it solo. And a game like this has a certain amount of fun for the soloers, but that wears thin after a while.
I played in a few ‘pick up groups’ to lengthen the game’s appeal, but I had a bit of trouble finding folks that I could deal with. I’ve mentioned before that I like playing multiplayer games like this, even though I don’t really like using them to make new friends; I prefer to play with people that I know in real life. So, after about eight months, I retired my character. I still keep up with the game a bit, with the happenings and the changes. The game now only partially resembles the game I left, so I hear the call to come back occasionally. And since Blizzard’s character retention policy is quite a bit less restrictive than Square’s is for their MMO offering, I may try it again someday.
A few months after I bought the original Warcraft III I played through most of the single-player mode, in between savage beatings at multi-player. The story actually gets kind of interesting. It deals with the rise and corruption of a young prince and the world-altering consequences of his actions. It’s pretty typical Greek tragedy stuff. The Frozen Throne picks up pretty well where the original game left off, you, in control of the corrupt prince scheming with a more powerful entity in a ridiculously circuitous plan to get even more powerful.
I had a hard time following the story after a while, but I got the highlights.
The game is pretty well identical to the base game, but just with more. Which is the whole point of an expansion, I guess. It also closes the story arc started in the first game, answers some questions, and raises still more.
Oh, there’s gobs more added to the story, I can’t hope to convey it all in the space I have here. But this game also really shines in the multi-player arena, just like the base game did. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t get this game primarily so I could enhance my multi-player experience. Although I still took my losses straight up the poop chute, I still got my money out of it.
I never actually played Warcraft II, even though I did play and like the original game. I suppose that’s because II looked like it was very similar to the first game, and I didn’t think it was worth my time.
Several years later, I was working with a gentleman who was affiliated with a large Blizzard fansite. As such, he had access to the beta of Warcraft III, which he brought over and demoed at a LAN party I threw at my house. I was then immediately interested in the series again.
Warcraft III, like its progenitor, is a strategy game in which you and your opponents all work in real time. This is to say, you don’t take turns. So it really tests your speed, reflexes, and ability to change strategies on the fly. And once you get really good, it can get a little tough to follow what’s going on.
The story in this game is far more fleshed out and in depth than it was back in the Orcs and Humans days. In fact, you could just play through the single-player mode and get quite a lot out of the experience.
Although the single player mode of this game is pretty good, I really spent my time playing (and losing horribly) multiplayer games. Trying to out think, outmaneuver, and out strategize an actual person is usually pretty tough. And though it turns out that I’m really bad at it, I still enjoyed it. I also was intrigued by the seemingly endless possible strategies. Even though I never really executed them, I still liked watching other people do them, which is some kind of victory, right?
Yellow Out is one of a series of games where you have to use your wits to try and get the odd-colored car out of a parking lot by moving the other cars in the lot. The cars can only move forward and backward, no turning for you!
Turns out that this is somehow a popular game, and I don’t understand why. I tried playing it a few times, in various incarnations, and each time manage to only play a couple of levels until I give up out of frustration. It might be because my brain doesn’t work the correct way to play and/or enjoy this game.
Give it a try here if you like inflicting pain upon your brain.
Quake II follows the story of Quake, a game I’ve still never played. I understand, however, that Quake is very similar to Doom, another game that I haven’t played, but am at least somewhat familiar with.
Quake II is about aliens and you killing aliens with a variety of large guns. To be honest, I don’t know any more than that. I never actually played the single-player version of this game. I was only in it for the multiplayer.
I really only played this game to test out the network in my apartment. My roommate and I had just discovered networking and needed some way to try it out. Other than the Internet connection sharing. That’s boring. Running virtual avatars around virtual rooms filled with virtual explodey things on the other hand. Way more fun.
I came kind of late to the PC gaming party, so although I had heard of Sam & Max, I had never actually spent any time with the games. As a result of that, the characters just kind of hung around in the back of my mind and were briefly brought back to the forefront by an announcement at E3 in 2006 that some new games in the series were being produced and distributed by GameTap. But, since my experiences with GameTap were less than extraordinary I kind of forgot about the series’s resurrection, even though I knew it was purchasable online. Months later and my local Best Buy has a copy of the complete ‘Season One’ collection for less than is available from the developers, and I suddenly remembered that I wanted to try it.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the game, since I hadn’t so much seen any of the other games in action, I went in pretty well blind. Turns out that this game is kind of a throwback. It’s a point-and-click adventure game. They’ve kind of fallen out of style these days, so if you’re not familiar with the genre, I’ll try to explain. Using only the mouse, you click on things to make your character do or say things. What you have to do is find the right things to click on at the right times to move the story along. It sounds kind of boring on the surface, and I usually don’t get in to them too much, but I gave this one a chance.
The game is broken up into six ‘episodes’ that were released throughout 2007. The idea being that the game can be released in bite-size chunks throughout the year. Since they’re short they can be developed quickly, released relatively often, and purchased reasonably cheaply.
So the episodes themselves are each about the titular heroes, a giant dog and a rabbit-thing with an aggression problem, trying to solve a series of cases involving hypnosis. They do this through a unique style of private-eyeing (a.k.a. ‘Freelance Police’) which typically involves deduction, reasoning, wordplay, and large firearms. What you’re really doing is wandering around the game space pointing, clicking on things, occasionally picking up things, and then using things, all in an effort to find the correct combination of person, place, thing, and time to advance the plot.
You don’t play a game like this for the compelling gameplay, the complex puzzles, or the razor-sharp platforming elements. You play it to experience the dialog, to see the well-crafted story. Thankfully this game has that in spades. It’s reasonably entertaining, and voiced competently. It compels you to play just to see or hear what kind of things are going to happen next. It’s rarely what you expect, which definitely adds to the fun. The only complaint I can come up with is that occasionally it’s very unclear what to do next. Though I only got stuck about three times those three times really kind of sucked some of the fun out of the experience. Though, for this kind of game, it’s a lot better than I usually do. And I was able to see this game through to the end in about nine hours. I’d say that was definitely worth my $20.
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.
