I only really played the original SimCity game on the Super NES and really liked it. But I kind of forgot about the series for a while until I found a copy on clearance at a local game shop and simultaneously remembered that I actually owned a computer.
Apparently I missed a bit in the interim.
It’s still city building, with the same Residential, Commercial, and Industrial zoning. The same making sure that your little Sims have power, building and maintaining roads, taking care of police and fire coverage, that kind of thing. But you also have to worry about building landfills, making sure your Sims get water, and making deals with your neighbors. It’s actually quite a bit to keep track of.
It turns out that I make a really bad mayor of a town. Especially when I have to be the one actually building the plumbing network, the power grid, the transportation infrastructure, manage taxes, and about a hundred other things. Oh, but I have advisors! Advisors who sit around and tell me how wrong I am instead of actually doing anything constructive.
Despite all of that I still played this game a lot. It’s mostly because it’s just about the only game that my laptop that I had at the time would run. So it was either this game or Eric’s Ultimate Solitaire.
The story in Half-Life is very convoluted, and not all of it makes sense, but it’s overall pretty good. I won’t go into a huge amount of detail, but the gist of the story is that Gordon Freeman, a scientist, is involved in some kind of experiment (the nature of the experiment is kind of vague). The experiment goes horribly awry and creatures from an alternate universe start invading the research complex. The military is called in to assess the situation (i.e. kill anything that’s still moving) and you, as Gordon, have to fight your way out.
The story is much longer, and much much more convoluted than I’ve gone into here. You have to kind of piece everything together using clues given to you by listening to the conversations between the remaining scientists, the security guards, and the hired military force.
I guess I like this game because it’s not your typical first-person shooter. It actually tries to tell the story as you’re playing it rather than in cutscenes in strategic places. This makes it a lot more immersive and really puts you in the shoes of Gordon, the silent protagonist. In fact, you never see Gordon in-game, and he doesn’t make a sound (other than some heavy breathing at the beginning), which kind of makes you mentally fill in the blanks with yourself.
The single-player portion of this game is really good, but I really had a lot more fun playing multiplayer. Sure, it’s pointless running around and shooting anything that moves, but the sheer amount of weaponry available makes a lot of play styles viable. One of my favorites was using the Gauss Gun to shoot people through walls. Hard to do, but oh so satisfying.
This was also the game that taught me the correct definition of the word ‘irony’.
As it happens, I had obtained this game in a … less than reputable method. I decided that it was a good enough game that I really should go out and buy a legal copy. So I went to my local Wal-Mart one evening and purchased it. When I got home I opened the box only to find that in the box was a jewel case (with a key), but in that jewel case was a CD-R with a pirated copy of the game on it. Someone had opened it, copied the disc, put the disc in the jewel case, kept the manual, and re-sealed the box. So, yes, in an effort to legalize my copy of a game, I purchased an illegal copy of said game. That was one of the more difficult things to explain to the cashier at Wal-Mart. Trying to convince her, and eventually the store manager, that I had bought the game less than 15 minutes prior (I lived real close to Wal-Mart at the time), and that with current CD writers that there was absolutely no way I could have gotten the game home, copied it, and then tried to return it. And even if I did, why would I tell them I did it? They eventually capitulated and let me exchange my game for a good copy, but I made sure that I opened it in the store to show them what the box contents should look like.
I really liked the original Diablo game, but found it to be a little repetitive after a while. So I was kind of interested in the sequel, which promised to expand the story started in the first game.
A few months after I heard about it, I picked up my copy and started playing. The game is a lot like the old game, convoluted story intact. It so happens that the hero of the first game, after killing Diablo, shoved the rock containing his soul into his own head, in an attempt to contain it, and then wandered off to the East to destroy it. You follow him in an attempt to do the same.
The game takes a lot of the more annoying things about the first game and fixed them. Probably the most important thing that was fixed was that your character can run, which solves the problem of the low-speed chases in the first game.
The game does boil down to just being the same as the first game, but just more. You still run around hitting things until they quit moving, but you have more ways to do it (more classes) and more things to bludgeon your enemies with (more loot). Instead of going down dozens of levels in a dungeon under a town you do a few quests in a wooded area, a few quests in a desert, a few in a jungle, and a few in Hell. But the ending is fairly wide open. It turns out that a while after this game went on sale that an expansion was announced. But it wasn’t an expansion in the normal sense. It was the final chapter of the game. I was pretty upset that I had to pony up another couple of Jacksons for the rest of the game that I was playing, so I passed on it for a long time.
I did acquiesce eventually and pick up the expansion, but not for several years. We’ll talk about that another time.
I don’t really know if it has a proper name, but one of the silly little games that I wasted a fair amount of time on was referred to as simply ‘Grid Game‘. The concept is super simple: you have a grid with balls on it. The balls rotate clockwise and have crescents on them. You can rotate the balls by clicking on them, and when the lines of the crescents touch each other they move the one that they’re touching. The goal, then, is to set up the largest chain reactions that you can.
There’s really not much more to the game than that. I think I have just as much fun watching the chain reactions do their thing as I do trying to set them up. It’s no small wonder, though, I’m pretty awful at setting them up. So I just load up the game, click randomly a few times, and then move on.
You too can click randomly by clicking here (among other places).
I’ve played a couple of MMORPGs over the years, but they’ve all got one thing in common: keep the player playing as long as possible to keep bringing in the monthly fee. Guild Wars is a little different, though. It still features hundreds, possibly thousands of people playing the same game in the same virtual world at the same time, but this one manages to do it without that pesky monthly fee.
Guild Wars really has two parts: story and battling. Story has you going through the epic tale of the kingdom being invaded by the evil Charr. You go through a series of missions designed to move the story along, but what’s kind of weird is that there are cities dotted around the landscape. These cities act as hubs where players can congregate, talk, organize groups, and where you can allocate your skills (more on that in a bit). The giant expanse of countryside between the cities is where you’ll be spending your time doing the missions and generally slaughtering evil, but the thing is that each group gets their own private copy (or ‘instance’) of the area. That way there aren’t folks fighting for resources, and your group gets to experience the story at their own pace.
The game, like other MMORPGs, is focused on getting people in groups and general socializing. So it allows you to take these groups, here called ‘Guilds’ (big surprise, eh?) to do your normal adventuring, but also for intra-guild fighting. And although you can fill up your group with computer-controlled folks for wandering around the countryside and killing things, you need to have people for the Guild battles. I never bothered joining a guild or tweaking my character for Guild combat. Why? Partially because I really only like playing with people I know personally, and I only know one other person who plays this game. Two people make a pretty shabby guild. The other reason is that I found the character customization to be a bit limiting. Early on in the game you have to pick two classes for your character, and each of the two classes comes with a laundry list of skills. And you can only have eight of them at a time. It kind of reminds me of Pokémon, where you get a couple of hundred monster choices, but can only use six.
So how does this game remain free? Unlike the ridiculously awful 9 Dragons there aren’t ads plastered all over the place, which is pretty nice. But what the game does have is a periodic ‘content pack’ and ‘expansion pack’ so that every few months you buy access to more game to while away the hours. Though if you buy the content packs every few months, you end up spending about the same that you would with the monthly fees of some other MMORPGs… but of course buying the content packs is totally optional. You can play as long as you like with the bare bones pack, so long as other folks are buying expansions and other goodies to keep the game afloat. And, since the last expansion was released in August of last year, I think there are plenty of folks doing just that.
Wire Hang Redux is supposedly a remake of the original Wire Hang game, at least that’s what the website says. I never really heard of it until I heard of this game, so we’ll accept that.
The game is a little weird. You have to use your grapple to ascend a never ending sky full of floating platforms. The higher you go, the more points you get. You also get bonuses if you make your grapple line longer or recover (fall just off the bottom of the screen and then save yourself), but you also risk falling off the bottom of the screen and losing the game. You only get one life, so that becomes fairly important.
I like this game because it’s simple to control, you only use the left mouse button; it can be picked up quickly, you can learn to play in minutes; and it will run on just about any computer that will also run Windows (sorry Mac guys, Linux Guys, and the two Sun users out there). If you’ve got a few minutes to burn you might want to give the game a shot, and you can do that here.
I don’t really get into most racing games, especially the ones that strive for realism. Of course, I don’t really know if Moto Racer is realistic or not, my knowledge of motorcycle racing is limited to what I’ve been able to glean from those reality shows where people crash a lot. Nevertheless, I played this game a bit because I had just gotten one of my first 3D video cards for my PC (a lovely Riva TNT card), and it was packed in to show off what 3D could look like.
Unfortunately, it turns out that I’m really bad at racing virtual motorcycles.
Shortly after I played this game I got really bored playing it the ‘right’ way. So I started driving around the courses and seeing how fast I could go before I crashed. Then I bought Final Fantasy VIII. And then I never played this game again.
Meetings are pretty much the bane of anyone stuck in the corporate world… or so I understand. I don’t really go to them myself. It seems that in this particular simulator of Cube Life your character has had enough of attending boring meetings and when the latest mandatory invite comes in he decides to kill himself rather than attend. So you have five minutes to wander around the office and do enough damage to kill yourself before the meeting starts otherwise you’ll be attending it and be bored senseless.
This game is actually a lot harder than it sounds initially. You’d think that stabbing yourself in the stomach with a pair of scissors or running your face through a couple of paper shredders would do the trick, but you’d be mistaken. But they do move the process along. It’s actually quite the challenge to off yourself in the time allotted and with the apparently extremely safe office you’re in. But the truly dedicated, the ones that persevere will find a way, they always do.
Shoot ‘em ups (colloquially referred to as ’shmups’) are a lot the same: you have a vehicle of some kind (usually one that flies) that’s extremely maneuverable yet extremely fragile. You have to take this vehicle up against a ludicrous amount of enemies, and use your extreme maneuverability to pierce their defenses and kill them all. This typically requires you to have pinpoint reflexes, extremely quick reflexes, and a bit of memorization of the enemies’ attacks.
ChoRenSha 68K is a throwback to some of the classic shooters. There’s no story (that I know of), just your ship flying through space shooting and trying to kill lots of enemy ships. And it’s hard. Real hard.
This game was too hard for me, but I’m admittedly a wimp at shooting games like this. The main reason I picked it up was that it was free to download, free to play, and not half bad to boot. An odd combination, really. This game looks almost professional quality, which is quite impressive for a game that takes up less than 2MB of hard drive space. You can download it and give it a try here.
When the CD-ROM medium was still the new technology, folks wondered how developers would be able to fill up so much space. The answer, more often than not, seemed to be with video clips. And with video clips the content is pretty limited.
This game is about trying to break into the stand-up comedy business. A more noble goal there isn’t! But it’s not going to be easy. See, comedy’s all about timing, they say. So you have to try and weasel your way up the comedy ladder and schmooze with patrons of the comedy club you’re working in. “How?” you may ask. Easy! Click on them!
What you end up doing in this game is clicking on someone, then they’ll give you a little monologue that’s supposed to be funny. Then, assuming you clicked on the right person, you’ll get a comedy item. Get all the items and you get your big break! Talk to someone out of sequence and you get sent to the basement where you get to play some game or other to get back on the first floor and try again.
This game is a pretty big waste of time. If you do decide to play it for some reason, though, I can tell you that the game is mercifully short. This game is so bad that the only media I can find is some that I created myself, but I promise this game exists, and isn’t really worth your time.
