Results tagged “games” from jmac.org blog

Announcing The Gameshelf Blog, a new community of intelligent-if-eclectic game news and discussion. I hope that it will fill out the long and dreary spaces between new Gameshelf episodes with interesting game-related tidbits that share the show's spirit.

I've invited everyone whose name has appeared in an episode's credit roll to join the site as a contributor. I went by memory so it's entirely possible I overlooked you (or your mail client ate the invitation as spam); if that's the case, and you want to help, please contact me!

Yes, it's the same URL that the show has held for years. I quietly replaced the static site with blog software a few months ago, and more recently redesigned it so that a link to the most recent episode will always appear at the top. The blog and the episode videos have separate RSS feeds, too. (Rather, one's a subset of the other.)

It's fun, and I recommend it. It fails to reach the conceptual heights of last decade's Super Mario 64, but the games it plays with gravity and perspective and make it a unique and worthwhile platformer.

Galaxy's levels are surprisingly linear. For the most part, you start at point A, and bounce along a unidirectional graph - the tiny planetoids being nodes, and the fixed flight-routes between them the edges - until you hit the flagpole star at the end.

Several levels feature branchpoints in their routes where you can go grab a "hidden" star instead of the main one, encouraging you to play that level twice. Nice, but adding an extra arm to the graph doesn't make it less graphy.

It is not an exploration game like Mario 64. Your interaction with the environment is more like a tourist than an adventurer: land somewhere, admire the scenery, do whatever's on the itinerary for this location, and then move on to the next destination. There's no need to figure out what to do or where to go next, and almost never any backtracking.

The scenery, however, is beautiful, and those itinerary tasks are all perfectly fun, usually involving nosing around a little planet collecting things and exploiting the various crazy new power-ups this game introduces.

Small gripe: the game continues the Mario-game tradition of keeping track of lives, and awarding you with extra lives for clever exploration, valiant deeds, or just collecting lots of stuff. The trouble is that lives are meaningless to a modern platformer. You start out every Galaxy play session with five lives, and playing almost any level results in a net gain of two or three more. I typically had 15 or so lives every time I was done playing. I seldom bothered to go fetch 1up mushrooms placed in tantalizing locations. It would have been nice to replace these with something more appreciable.

You should still play it (especially if you can borrow a copy like me, ha ha). Wii owners who find themselves enjoying this game owe it to themselves to also check out the orginal Super Mario 64, which can be purchased and downloaded for $10 from the Wii Shop channel.

The MIT Mystery Hunt is only a few days away. I'm determined to get as much money-work as I can done before then; there is a backlog, with end-conditions in reach. There won't be much Volity or Gameshelf progress, despite so much I want to do in both. (Though maybe I'll squeeze more in if put the video games away for now...)

Some of my team (Immoral, Illegal, and Fattening, Attorneys at Law) gathered at MIT Saturday night to practice, breaking up into groups of four and then running through a shorter puzzle extravaganza. (It was this one, actually, by Dan Katz.) I was on fire, solving three puzzles alone, and helping to finish up a couple more. My puzzle-fu has never been stronger, and I was pleased when another group still finished well ahead of us, suggesting that our whole team is really well poised this year. (That group contained a hunt veteran who is joining our team this year, so that's exciting too.)

I hope that we at least make it into the endgame, which would be a first for IIF. I was last night reading the 2006 hosting team's description of that year's endgame, and filled with fear and desire.

I am eBaying my copy of Medal of Honor Heroes 2 for Wii. An impulse buy, mostly due to the allure of 32-person multiplayer (via Internet play). Mechanically, though, it's a full-on no-frills first-person shooter, and as such it's just not my cup of tea. I think I expected it to be more like Resident Evil 4, because it shares the mechanic of using the wiimote to aim, but now I see all the ways that RE4 is not a FPS.

It may be worth checking out if you do like FPS games and you want to see how they can work on Wii. Here is its MetaCritic page.

Though I haven't played it to the end yet, I highly recommend the 1991 Sega Genesis title Rolling Thunder 2 to all action-game fans. It just became available as an $8.00 download via Wii's Virtual Console. Someone on a Virtual Console message board said that this game is like a 2D Gears of War in the way it forces you to balance attacking with diving for cover. I thought that was great.

Not a straight-up port of the arcade game, it's an effective home-console adaptation, tweaked to encourage longer play sessions. There are lots of hidden power-ups that extend your dude's life bar past its usual amount. Its level design is pleasantly varied; while most of it is pure twitchy action, it pauses now and again to get surprisingly puzzley.

While your character can leap around in a typical video-gamey way, he's quite fragile (usually dying if shot once) and can only fire his gun while standing still. This lets the game present you with situations where the particular terrain forces you to stop and think about the best way to approach an enemy before he gets a chance to blast you, since charging them head-on won't work. (Note this when you're fighting those ridiculous blue bastards who roll bombs Donkey Kong-style down the stairs at you.) For a side-scrolling jump-n-shoot game, this is very good level design.

It's also got a two-player mode, and I have no idea how well that works yet. The single-player game alone is worth the price of admission.

Zack & Wiki is the first Wii game on my "I really want to like this" pile. It's a puzzley adventure game, light on the adventure and heavy on the puzzles. (I would call it a "puzzle game" but, annoyingly, that is a loaded term referring to games like Tetris, which this is not.) It has pretty good puzzles, actually, but its attempts to use the Wii controllers makes it clumsier than it ought to be, and then the game further hobbles itself with unfortunate design decisions.

The controls aren't terrible, but they fall short of what they aim to be. Most of the time, the wiimote controls a cursor that you can use to make the hero run around, pick things up (if they're pick-uppble) or examine them (if they're not). The latter activity switches the camera to a static close-up view of the contraption under examination, where you can use the cursor to interact with specific parts of it, such as poking buttons on it.

So far, so good, but it leads into one the game's let-downs. Much of the game's selling point is its claim that discovering how things work means moving the wiimote in gestures that mimic using the items. This is technically true, but there's very little discovery involved in the process. Your character can carry one object at a time, and the option to use any object in any way at all only appears during the zoomed-in detail view of an immobile object. And even then, the held object only becomes interactive if the game has a these-two-objects-interacting animation queued up.

Once it's established that you're in a position to use the item you're holding on something else, the game stops to tell you (with an enormous screen-covering graphic) exactly how you should hold the wiimote in order to perform the object-using gesture. When it hands control back to you, a little animated caricature of the player, holding a little wiimote, shows you the one way to use the item. You either perform that one gesture to let 'er rip, or you hit B to back out.

While making a sawing motion in order to saw a tree down is kind of fun, going through this whole process quickly proves less fun than it would be to walk up to the tree and press a generic action button. Through this cumbersome hand-holding, the game makes itself seem like it would work just as well, perhaps better, with a traditional game controller. Sometimes things are slightly more interactive, such as requiring you to rotate an object before applying it, but it doesn't happen enough, or with enough net Wii-ness, to make it feel worthwhile.

It would have been significantly cooler if, while holding that saw, you could make sawing gestures with the wiimote at any time, and the hero would lay into the nearest target (which would usually be un-sawable and result in a "You can't use a saw on that, you dummy" animation, and that'd be just fine). I would bet a dollar that that was what the designers wanted, but they just couldn't get it to work right, and deadlines were looming, so they punted.

Now, I would willing to play the game through anyway, because the puzzles are cute and the characters are charming, but here we get to another problem: the as adventure games go, it can be cruel, a bit more than it really has any right to be.

Once you're more than a couple of levels in, it becomes pretty easy to either die or put the world into an unwinnable state (dropping a key item into the lava before you get a chance to use it, for example). Now, that's perfectly fine in the world of interactive fiction, where you can typically save the game anywhere you like. In Zack & Wiki, death means either starting the level over or spending some in-game gold to buy another life. That's harsher than letting you just jump back in, but it's not totally unacceptable. However, making the level unwinnable in a way that doesn't kill you always means that you have to start it all over from the beginning.

And that sucks. What you get is a chilling effect that makes you, the player, too timid to try dangerousthings. But you will anyway, because that's how these games work. And when you discover that you once again failed to catch the babel fish, and off it goes flying into the void, then you need to blow about ten minutes setting the level back up to that point again. This is not fun, and I really don't know what the heck they were thinking, especially since the puzzles themselves are often pretty good.

It's bad enough that I wonder if I'm missing something, amid all this game's generally positive reviews. I have to conclude that the reviewers either played only the first few levels, or they love doing the same things over and over again.

I hope the sequel will be better. It has lots of potential, and I love to see true puzzle games, but sadly I cannot recommend this title.

Found unexpected unlocked WiFi, accessible only from the corner of my parents' room. As usual, Xmas here is a soup of frustration with cold chunks of grace floating in. The current crisis is Ricky refusing to eat any dinner because he caught dad spooning extra butter into the food before it went in the oven. Dad denied it (while holding the buttery spoon) and then went outside to sulk. When I went upstairs some minutes later to investigate better WiFi spots, mom triumphantly proclaimed to Ricky that his awful behavior had driven me away.

Every day is like this, with them; the only thing that makes Xmas special is that I'm here, too.

This year everyone hates the Chinese. Mom wrote "From China" on all the presents she gave, as a way of grumbling over perceived trade imbalance, and speculating on the gifts' lead content. And this has potential for actual biting humor, but then she goes and rails in all sincerity about how everything is made in China now and how we clearly lost the Cold War and I remind you this is a woman who buys everything in Marden's or Wal-Mart. I am refraining from having any conversation with her on this topic.

But my dad liked Wii Sports bowling so much he wanted to play twice, so that was pretty good. Talked to Peter and Aunt Jan on the phone.

I'll be returning tonight.

I'll be offline for a day or two while I make my annual Christmas visit to my 1960s-tech-level family in Fairfield, Maine. They are like unto a museum exhibit, a living piece of history. This is why I tolerate their ceaseless yet period-appropriate racist and panaphobic speech, which would make any of my bleeding-heart friends' hair turn white upon exposure.

I will attempt to lighten my visit by bringing games. Ricky enjoys playing Memoir 44, but last year's attempt to play it with him ended prematurely and poorly, as he used its theme (WWII) to start ranting about the WoT. So I am steering clear of militaristic subjects this time, and opting to bring Bohnanza, which I haven't played in ages and my family might actually both understand and like. Ricky, if he plays, will play according to however the UFOs tell him to, but the game supports this strategy.

All that said, my Zipcar reservation lasts only 48 hours, so I am guaranteed an out before things get too twitchy. I also made a late-night run to the Harvard Bookstore to pick up the second collection of the Brust saga, so I won't go insane from boredom from lack of internets.

I wish a most Merry Christmas to those who desire one!

I had a good game night at the House of Roses last Tuesday. In a game of Carcassonne against very good gamers I played so aggressively that I surprised myself. I ended up winning, mostly on cities, and half of those I shared or swiped outright from others. By the time the game ended I was so far ahead of the pack that the winner of the field war was still a few points behind me. I always like to see a Carc victory on a non-agrarian basis, and should that winner happen to be me, so be it.

Question to the audience: does starting a game of Carc with the river tiles versus the single starter tile increase the likelihood of there being one enormous motherlode of a field by the end? I want to say it is so, but I have no proof.

Then we played Attika, which is new to me. It's pretty neat. I want to play it again. (Didn't win.)

Saturday night was Doug's solstice party. Learned Cash 'n Guns, which has got to be on The Gameshelf sometime, if only because of its main gimmick: each player denotes who they're attacking each round by pointing a life-sized foam pistol at them. (This was the American edition, so the guns were Day-Glo orange instead of black. This didn't make it less fun.) I managed to win, hooray.

Played one session of Figaro, a fast and cute game that would probably go over best with clever little kids. Discovered while playing that it has game design superstar Reiner Knizia's name on the box (and photograph snuck into the card artwork), but in the manual he's only credited for "Game Idea", with two other guys having done the actual development. Sheesh! He's become the Matt Groening of the tabletop game world. (I wanted to be snarkier and say "The Jim Davis of", except that his games are actually good, so.)

Then came my approximately annual game of The Princes of Florence. I appreciate this game but I don't think I really care for it. It's got a feeling of constant forward motion, and of setting and meeting personal short-term goals, which I always like in games. But I have yet to grok the ultimate goal of, getting more points than everyone else, and my sense of accomplishment sours where I think I'm doing really well until the game ends and I'm not just in last place, but a good 15 points behind the pack.

And yet, I want to play it again, because I have an idea of what I did wrong. Grr!

At any rate, after that brain burner I announced that I wished to play Doug's unopened copy of the Dungeons & Dragons board game, a UK-only release from 2002. It's less stupid than I expected. I think I expected a rehash of the old Dungeon game, but instead it's an honest-to-goodness RPG dungeon crawl, using simplified rules streamlined for the simple joy of invading monsters' lairs and bashing them into jelly. We played the intro adventure and smeared six goblins while taking two casualties on our side. Good times.

I've been working for a long time on a post listing my current podcast subscription list. Every time I find myself enjoying a particularly good podcast episode, I say to myself, "Ah, I really gotta finish that post." But it's taking too long, so instead please enjoy this series of occasional posts where I highlight one podcast per. My "podcasts" tag should bring up the full list, after I've written a few.

So, first one:

He's just released two shows within a month of each other, so I'm prepared to say that Gaming Steve is back on the air, after life forced him to take a good 18 months or so off (not counting a couple of ad-hoc E3 shows he did months ago). His is still my favorite game-related podcast. Basically, Steve Glicker is a long-time producer of digital games, mainly Flash games using licensed characters and properties, and a longer-time fan of digital gaming going all the way back to the first-generation systems of the 1970s. He effectively and entertainingly combines his knowledge, his enthusiasm, and his industry connections to make a good show time after time.

My main gripes are that his interviews with other industry folks tend to lean a little on the Hi Steve, let me recite our latest press releases at you side, and on the other hand when he's alone he often gets a bit too grumblingly cynical about the workings of his business. But the bulk of his show is talking about games and why some work or sell and others don't, and these analyses are always enlightening to me.

Steve has a nice voice and a subtle sense of humor, so I don't mind that his shows usually run longer than an hour. But he needs to edit himself more than he does. He misspeaks a lot, often switching names around, and invariably mangling the German words that come up whenever he talks about board games. (The most recent eposide features him saying 'Spiegel' - let me spell that, S-P-I-E-L, yeah, 'Spiegel'). He knows he does it and sometimes jokes about it, and for all I know he does edit out most of them and I'm only hearing what he doesn't catch. But I don't think that's the case.

At any rate, it's good to hear him regularly again. I really did say "!" with a smile when I had my iPod play its most recent podcasts, and I found myself assaulted with his wonderfully overproduced theme song (quoted in the title of this post). I had missed it!

I am now two books into the Brust canon, having finished Yendi last night. It's a good time, and not what I was expecting. (What I was expecting was unfavorably set by the front cover copy on my ancient Jhereg paperback - "A young man bound for adventure needs a faithful reptile companion!" Which makes it sound like a YA quest-type story. Which it isn't. (It might still count as YA, but I am doubtful.) )

Was Jhereg written as a winking reaction to Dungeons and Dragons? The author perhaps challenging himself to write a coherent story set in a world that seems to operate under D&D-like rules?

I mean, here we have a faux-medieval-euro-world where it's no big deal to suffer an untimely death, so long as your friends or family have access to a sufficiently high-level wizard and you don't totally blow your dice rolls on your way back. And characters conduct long-distance psionic communication with not just the ease but the conversational manner of cell phones, asking each other what's for dinner and such.

But it goes beyond simple parody by then starting to follow through with societal implications for this stuff. The main character is an assassin, a job suddenly fraught with unusual complications in a place where death is often non-fatal. Here is a world where, if you want to send a "stay out of the west side" message to someone, you kill them. This is actually hilarious.

And on top of all this, the protagonist and all his friends each have what some of my friends would call a PC glow that basically lets them hew effortlessly through most any physically dangerous situation, particularly fighty ones, but that's as much an artifact of adventure fiction as it is role-playing games.

I found it a fast and goofy read. Yendi I had to struggle with a bit more, since the first act feels like looking over someone's shoulder while they play Fantasy Underworld Tycoon on their computer. Reading a turn-by-turn account of how Vlad acquired new resources and moved his existing ones around the map made me want to play the game too, but it wasn't otherwise all that interesting. It got better once the plot finally kicked in.

Looking forward to starting Teckla soon.

A lot of really nice video games seem to have bubbled up lately, especially for Nintendo systems. There's the obvious new Mario game, and this Zak & Wiki thing for Wii seems to have gotten a lot of praise. The one game I have been playing and enjoying, though, is The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on my DS. (Mostly because it's Amy's copy. Free money!)

The game has pulled one trick particular to the DS hardware that I can't recall seeing a game do before. It's most similar to the meta-parody one finds in the first Metal Gear Solid game, but without the self-consciousness of it, and therefore with a bit more subtlety. It was a delight to see, in a game that's been generally delightful from the start.

One regret I do have is that only after I gave my character a typically sophomoric name did I realize that the best possible player-character name in these sorts of games is "Dammit". This would lead to all sorts of excellent dialog. "Only you can save the kingdom, Dammit!" "Dammit, hit the switches in order!" I'll have to remember for next time.