The Closeout Warrior

Foggy Boxes is another game that’s part of the After Dark Games collection, and certainly one of the simplest. It’s a variation of Dots and Boxes that is played against a computer-controlled disembodied hand on what appears to be a fogged up piece of glass.

Essentially, you’re presented with a series of dots and take turns connecting two of them, either horizontally or vertically (never diagonally). The goal is to create a complete box. Complete a box and you claim it, and get a bonus move.

It’s quite simple, and is really only fun when you’re trying to outwit an actual person instead of the computer, but it’s good for a few minutes of fun.

Not all of the games in the After Dark Games collection were good. While Bad Dog 911 was an enjoyable little game about maiming a clock cleaner, Fish Schtick is a pretty terrible game about… fish, and then only slightly.

See, you have this view of some underwater scene or other, it doesn’t really matter. Occasionally a set of fish will swim by, each with a letter on them. Your goal is to unscramble the word they spell out. Figure it out and you get some points and some time added to the clock. Don’t figure it out either before the time runs out (the fish swim off the screen) or you give up (you hit the space bar), and the word is revealed, and it’s on to the next word, assuming you have any time left on the clock.

This game is so simple that it’s intensely boring. I’m almost convinced it was put in the collection to pad the number of games they could include on the box. Heck, I couldn’t even find a picture to attach to this post (and my copy of the game is long gone). I wouldn’t fret too much about it, though. It’s not that good.

Bad Dog 911 was a part of the After Dark Games collection, which was based on the screensaver of the same name (famous for its flying toasters). It starred the Bad Dog creating mischief for a hapless clock washer. The dog runs across the screen, and manages to knock the clock washer’s platform down to the ground, leaving him hanging on to the hands for dear life. You have to take the letters in the scrambled word at the top of the screen and create as many words as you can. Each word will send the platform up a little higher, and eventually will rescue him. Assuming, of course, that you spell enough words to get the platform high enough in the time limit. Fail and the poor guy falls down and breaks a limb. He’s a trooper though. He’ll get back on the platform, cast and all, and head back up to clean the clock.

The game sounds simple, and it is. It’s a part of a larger collection, and all of the games in it are pretty quick and easy. If you like playing with letters, you’ll probably like this game.

Bloons is one of those Flash games that makes the rounds on the Internet. People tell me it’s awesome, I see my coworkers playing it, and eventually cave in to give it a whirl.

And I almost wish I hadn’t.

Bloons is a very simple game. You, a monkey, are armed with a number of darts and must utilize your cunning (read: trial and error) in deciding what angle and how hard you’re going to throw the darts into a field of balloons. The goal is to pop a certain number (your ‘goal number’) so you can continue on to the next stage.

As the game progresses, special balloons and obstacles get thrown into the mix, but in the end, it just you, a monkey, popping balloons with darts. Really, it’s as fun as it sounds. You can play it here if you’re so inclined. Though you might want to make sure you set aside enough time to fully enjoy it.

Five minutes ought to suffice.

Minesweeper, or some variation thereof has been readily available on just about every computer I’ve ever used for a number of years. It’s a deceptively complex game hidden behind a fairly simple to grasp concept: using your wits to locate and mark mines.

You’re presented with a grid, and on that grid a number of mines has been placed. You can click on any space on the grid to see if it had a mine under it. If it does not it will either vanish or show a number. The number represents how many squares are adjacent to it that contain a mine. If you right-click on the space, you mark it with a flag, which means that you think there is a mine there. Your goal, then, is to use your wits to reason which spaces have the mines, mark them all and win the game.

The game is also pretty unforgiving, if you click on one space that has a mine, you = dead and your game = over. So it’s in your best interest to methodically poke around the grid and carefully consider each move. Or do what I do, make the grid as large as possible and the number of mines as small as possible. Then there’s a very good chance that you’ll solve the puzzle with a single click… Unless you happen on a mine on your first click.

Skifree was one of those crappy little games that was put on nearly every personal computers in the 90’s thanks to being included in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack. It also happened to be one of my least favorite.

The game is you, an unnamed skier, skiing down a mountain, avoiding hazards, and generally trying to do stunts to increase your ’style’. The goal, then, is to get a high style score. And that’s pretty much it. There’s almost nothing to this game. Its simplicity does not hide a deeply nuanced experience. It’s just you, skiing down a mountain, wiping out occasionally.

Much too simplistic for my taste.

The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page

Crossposting from my main site today, lucky you!

A while back, Acclaim folded as a game company. The Acclaim name was bought by one of the guys from Activision, turned into Acclaim Games, and began pumping out MMORPG’s. Wikipedia’s article is somewhat lacking, but will give you a basic understanding of the situation.

I got an invite from one of my friends to try out one of their RPGs, 9 Dragons. It’s a game based on Kung-Fu. You travel the land, join a Kung-Fu clan, and beat things up. Seemed like a reasonable premise for a game.

Acclaim’s MMORPGs are the kind that are free to download, and free to play. The catch being that to generate money to cover bandwidth and development costs ads are injected into the game and you have ability to spend some of your real-world money to purchase things in game, such as extra abilities, exclusive outfits, and exclusive items.

The ads that you see are a nearly full-screen picture ad on each loading screen and a smallish one that will pop up in the center of the screen toward the top. It doesn’t obscure your view too much, but it certainly takes your focus for a second when it pops up. It’s worth noting that of the ads I saw, two of them were for the game I was playing, and the others were for Acclaim itself.

The download for the game is relatively small for a Massively Multiplayer game, weighing in at just under 800MB. After downloading and mucking through the obnoxious installer, I tried to start the game, only to find out that the desktop shortcut it installed would open up a new tab in Firefox. Doing a little digging, I was able to find out that the game inexplicably uses Internet Explorer to launch. Since I use Firefox as my primary browser, I had to follow these directions to make the shortcut on my desktop point to the actual game.

Once I was able to actually start the game, I ran through the fairly limited character creation process, created my character, and was told that the name ‘basscomm’ could not be used. The game apparently found a dirty word lurking in my handle. I’m not surprised, Uniracers invalidated my handle for the same reason. So, I chose a new name, ‘Food’, only to get the message that ‘This character has already been created’. Turns out that the message really meant that the name had been taken. I eventually settled on ‘Bland’, picked my starting area and started the game.

Immediately upon dropping into the game world, I had the option of doing a tutorial quest. This optional quest promised to show me the basics of the game, with a paltry reward at the end. I accepted and was spirited away to a field where someone behind me was needing some assistance.

It was here that I became acclimated to the controls. I’ve grown accustomed to the standard WASD controls or even the arrow keys to move around. In this game, you left-click on the ground where you want to move to, and hold the right mouse button and move the mouse to move the camera. Since you also use the left mouse button to talk to people and generally interact with the world, you need to make sure you click directly on the person that you wish to speak with otherwise you run right past them and have to fight with the camera to get back.

The tutorial quest is an escort quest, before you can do anything, you get to watch some instructions running through the basics of inventory management, enemy engagement, using skills, etc. I found it odd that instead of using in-game graphics, the person doing the motions in the tutorial was a small looping movie with a missing frame. I only knew that the frame was missing because he would turn into a large red block for a split second every time the video would loop.

After learning how to ready myself for battle, I started escorting my way up a hill and was attacked by three bandits. I was then introduced to the two modes you character can exist in, Peace Mode and Battle Mode. In Peace Mode you cannot attack anyone, and in Battle Mode you can. Why you would ever not want to be in Battle Mode. The bandits appeared behind me, so I ended up wrestling with the camera while simultaneously trying to frantically click on the enemies that were surrounding me. it didn’t help that you can’t press ‘Tab’ on the keyboard to select an enemy, that button is to go in and out of Peace Mode. So what happened was that I was running around in circles, not attacking because I was not in Battle Mode.

I eventually managed to take down the assailants and it crashed to desktop. No worries, I thought, I’ll just log back in and finish off the quest. Turns out that my progress was not saved, so I had to start the quest over, and I got to watch the tutorial videos again. Then my game crashed again. I went through this process a couple of more times before I restarted my computer. I never could figure out what was wrong.

After restarting, the game was much more stable. I was able to finish the tutorial quest, gained a skill that allowed me to regain my health, and entered the game world proper. To the game’s credit it looks reasonably good. Until you start interacting with things. Throughout the village I started in there were these pots that kept spawning on the ground. A couple of whacks with my stick cracked them open so I could get the gold piece that lay inside, but the animation of the broken pieces was almost comically bad. Chunks would fly up and then land on the ground, but had no inertia. It looked like they landed on flypaper.

I puttered around for a while killing livestock while I explored the town, getting stuck as my guy couldn’t figure out how to walk around anything. You can’t jump, so if there’s a couple of pebbles in the way, they’re suddenly an impasse.

Around the village there are folks that sell skills, I bought one, and then learned that you have go to some training ground to train in the skills you’ve purchased. I never was able to find the training ground, and so was never able to use my awesome fist skill. I was, however, able to load it into my quickbar. Four times, in fact. I noticed at this point that my ‘regain health’ skill (meditation) was gone, and that I couldn’t figure out how to remove the worthless skills from my quickbar.

I eventually found a quest giver who gave my my first real quest, killing the foxes that were harassing his chickens. Sounds easy enough, the foxes just kind of stand around the town and aren’t aggressive in the slightest, even when I’m bludgeoning them with a quarterstaff. While killing foxes, one of them decided to walk away from me, directly up to and then through the wall of a house. Cunning.

I finished my quest, turned in my ‘fox skin’, sold my ‘fox hair’, and was offered another quest. I accepted, logged off, uninstalled the game, deleted the uninstaller, and burned down my computer.

I don’t really think there was ever any danger of me getting addicted to it, even it it was free.