Good Morning; Coffee and a Little Chess

I was browsing Reddit.com, enjoying a cup of coffee this morning, when a link sent me to a Chess Variants website.  On this website, there are over 100 types of variant chess games programmed into simple Java applets.  The computer A.I. isn't incredibly intelligent, but neither am I with only a half cup of coffee.

Try out Bughouse Chess, in particular.  When you capture an enemy piece, you can then place it anywhere on a second game board.  But the computer can do the same!  It gave me a headache, but a fun one!

Dead Money DLC Now Available (!?)

Pardon the interrobang, but SERIOUSLY?  How come I have to find out about Fallout: New Vegas DLC: Dead Money from Twitter?  How pedestrian!  Bethesda should just implant a small device at the base of my skull, so there wouldn't be any kind of delay with this sort of thing.

Edit: By the gists of the review I just read, I added the want tag to this DLC.  It sounds buggy as hell, but I hadn't expected anything different.

Trism (iPhone)

There are plenty of iPhone games you know about, but there may be one with which you are unfamiliar, even though it has been around for years (first released in July 2008): Trism. 

My husband first found out about this game from an online friend, who also happened to be its super-hunky developer, Steve Demeter.  Knowing that the game was made by a cute gay guy only increased the urge to play it.  It's a puzzle-game, which at first glance looks a lot like Bejeweled, but it is so much more.

Demeter specifically designed the game with the iPhone in mind, taking full advantage of its tilt recognition.  And when first released, it was one of very few games to do so.  Triangular blocks can be slid vertically, horizontally, and diagonally.  Match three colors and the blocks vanish (matching more results in higher scores and special blocks).  The uniqueness comes in the feature that new blocks will fall based on the direction you are holding your iPhone.  So, after making a match, it wouldn't be uncommon to twist your hand and wrist in discomfort, trying to line up that perfect combo.

So if you've got an iPhone and you haven't picked up this gem, launch the App Store and fork over the measely $2.99.  Not only will you be getting a fun and easy casual game, but you'll also be supporting my eye-candy. 

Want!: Pokemon Black/White

Just about every so often, I remember my first experience into the world of Pokemon: the highly addictive narcotic of handheld video games.   My great friend Wyett had given me his copy of Pokemon Crystal, having accidentally destroyed his game file.  I was enraptured with raising my precious Chikorita to power and finding all sorts of other cute/creepy monsters to play by my side.

I was fortunate that it was almost time for a new iteration of the series, Ruby/Sapphire to be released for the GBA.  Since then, I've been hooked by the series, picking up a rehash of Red/Green for the GBA, and even convincing my husband to play Diamond/Pearl with me!  The fourth generation, however, seemed to be the end of me.  Despite to joy of exploring a new world (and yet more of the damned creatures), I was becoming wary of the new facade on an old game.  I didn't even beat the Final Four, bringing shame to my household.

And then HeartGold/SoulSilver came out.  It was a remake of the first Pokemon game I'd ever played, with Gen IV graphics and an exciting perephiral device that allowed my Pokemon to level as I walked around in the mortal coil!  I was instantly back into complicated breeding schedules, and IV calculations (all in time to spectacularly take 4th place in our work Pokemon tournament), like I had never left them!  A Pokemon fanatic!  Nothing could strip me of my love for my carefully raised Forretress.  Go, Lulz: use Spikes!

Shortly thereafter, Black/White was announced - a whole new, Fifth Generation.  I was incredibly disiniterested at first.  The excitement of HG/SS was more nostalgiac than anything.  I wasn't really ready for another Pokemon game.

However, as the date of March 5 approaches, the saliva in my mouth froths.  I am genetically anticipatory of a new Pokemon game.  I scour the internet for images of what might be my next companion.  And this sudden flood of interest is what qualifies me to put Pokemon Black/White in the Want! column.  At a pricetag of $35, it's not all that expensive for a new game, but I might have to settle for actually beating Diamond/Pearl before justifying a shovel out for it right now...

Fallout 3

This weekend, we did quite a bit of spring cleaning. It was reminiscent of my last bout with spring-ish cleaning (it might have been winter-break-ish), that had me taking quite a haul into the local GameStop for trade-in credit. I ended up having an absurd amount of money, and I preordered Bioshock 2 with it, but I also picked up a couple games, and among them Fallout 3.

I'm not really a huge first-person-shooter (FPS) kind of guy. In general, it scares the crap out of me when all of a sudden there's a huge monster on my side eating me, and I move the wrong way and end up wasting a clip of hard-to-find bullets into the ceiling. My only real experience in the genre was Goldeneye for N64, and I'm afraid I never really played another since... However, after picking up, and playing the hell out of, Bioshock, I was willing to give another one a shot.

Fallout 3 had received rave reviews, and was even the Game of the Year. I was only a couple years late to the party (typical, actually, for my gaming habits).

The Fallout series is set in a distopian future, wherein conflict over resources between the United States and China culminates in nuclear conflict. Fallout 3 is set in the Washington, DC Metroplex, now called The Capital Wasteland, which has been savaged by nuclear fallout. Those that survived the rain of atomic fire did so in underground vaults.

I was immediately impressed by the immersion. I felt part of this unknown world, and had a lot of drive to explore every nook and cranny of my "home," Vault 101. The game sends you eventually out of the vault, and the Wasteland is magnificently huge, and overwhelming. The game certainly gives me some options on where to go and why (there is a general, large story arc), but it's entirely possible to do almost whatever you want. This is a great deal different from most of the games I'd played to this point, where you could take two hallways down to the same path, but didn't have an entire world to distract you between objectives.

Unfortunately, my first playthrough was slightly downhill from there. My inexperience with basic concepts of aiming, and over-utilization of V.A.T.S. (a system in which the game will aim at, and shoot, enemies for you; but is limited by your Action Points), led to early death at the hands - or rather, the mandibles of a town-full of fire breathing, giant, radiated ants.

I gave up on the game from there, and resigned to play other games in my queue. However, the draw of the initial immersion, stilted by ant-death, still tugged at my core. I put Fallout 3 back in, turned the difficulty down to psychotically easy, and gave it another go.

I'm really glad I gave Fallout 3 a second chance, which it richly deserved. My own ineptitude was really no reason not to play what a lot of people had agreed was an awesome game. While not granting you to shoot lightning out of your non-dominant hand, this FPS did have quite a few RPG elements: as you best enemies, or complete quests, you gain experience which increases your proficiency with weapons, or stealth, or communication, or ability to maintain armor. Before long, I started getting the knack of the system and was able to mow through the previously feared Fire Ants with a Minigun.

You can develop into quite a badass in the game as well. This only makes sense, seeing as your father is voiced by Liam Fucking Neeson. Your proficiencies are never really game breakers, but the basic travel and exploration become a little less terrifying when you know you can riddle a Super Mutant full of bullets before he even gets within swinging distance.

The game has a system of Karma. Doing good things, like saving slaves, increases your Karma, whereas stealing things or massacring an entire town-full of people. Karma does determine which ending is revealed to you, as well as trophy acquisition. I have been conditioned by society to play nice and not murder and steal from every NPC I come across, so getting the "evil path" trophy was a bit of a challenge.

Fallout 3 has great replayability. I have long since received a platinum trophy in the game. It's my fifth playthrough, and I'm still noticing aspects I hadn't before. A lot of the initial "what's over this hill" exploration fantasy is done, but it's still just as exciting to play through the main story and myriad of side quests.

The Game: Fallout 3.

The Cost: Available for XBox360 and the PS3, used for about $15. But do yourself a favor and go ahead and get the Game of the Year edition, which has all of the DLC included. It'll only set you back a couple extra dollars.

Worth It? I've played the game all-the-way through four times. Each playthrough probably took between 30 and 40 hours. The net result is about $0.15/hour of entertainment.

Best Parts: The replay value is astronomical, and the game is incredibly immersive and engaging.

Worst Parts: It can kick your ass if you're as green to FPS games as I am. Consider turning down the difficutly until you get the hang of things.

Overall: Fallout 3 continues to reign as one of my favorite games, if you have any interest at all in exploring the war-torn D.C. ruins, be sure and grab this gem and give it at least one playthrough.

Bonus! Zack Finfrock, who I find to be amazingly attractive, did a fan video set in the Fallout universe, which is great for a chuckle.

Flash Game Friday: Launch Games!

Have you ever played a launch game? Don’t get them confused with a physics game which involves launching (like Angry Birds), but has a finite space vertically and horizontally. I became somewhat enraptured with them this past week. So I wanted to review, compare, and recommend three of my favorites.

1. Flight
2. Burrito Bison
3. Pogo Swing

(Quick note: I don’t particularly have a favorite Flash Games site, and listing two links to http://www.armorgames.com/ should not be an endorsement, but I will say that their website is one of the least distracting, and didn’t flood Google Chrome with tons of cookies or malware or any of that.)

The basics of a launch game are that you are in a contraption, and it is going to launch you forward, with the goal to go as far horizontally as possible. You are rewarded for your travel with money, which you then spend on upgrades to your launching ability. Launch games also include an endgame, either by acquiring so much money, or being able to travel so far horizontally.

Flight

In this game, you are represented by a paper airplane, which is being launched around the globe (or at least, around the eastern hemisphere). The design is great, and the accompanying story is touching and funny.

The really big stand out for Flight is the dynamics of gameplay. You are given an amount of “fuel” for each launch that allows you to control the pitch of your paper airplane, or gain a slight boost to your speed. Conservative use of fuel can help you adjust the plane’s trajectory and gain a great deal of distance; or you can blow through all your fuel to ascend to the heavens. During flight you are encouraged to collect stars for money and paper cranes, which award higher multipliers for stars collected. Aiming for stars is somewhat tricky, but you will collect plenty along a long enough flight.

Burrito Bison

So, you’re a bison, minding your own business, walking peacefully through a grocery store when suddenly you are kidnapped into a bag of candy to participate in a coliseum wrestling match against a giant jawbreaker. Already, I’m in love. Unlike the other two games I’ve mentioned, this launch game is completed only when you are able to travel the full length of the game horizontally. This entrant also has the least amount of player interactivity post-launch. You could launch your bison and go make a cup of coffee for all the game cares.

The delight of the game is in its whimsy, but also its challenge. A great many things are standing between you and freedom from your captors, including two giant doors and a glass pane. The speed of the bison must be above a certain level, or you won’t break through the door, and go back to the launch point. Speed can be increased through hitting certain gummis (some are carrying bombs, you know, as gummi bears sometimes do), but can also be decreased by missing a gummi (landing on the ground) or hitting a gummi police officer. Lose too much speed, and you are paid for the distance you traveled (and robbed from poor gummis you landed on) and sent back to the launch point.

Pogo Swing

This game made me laugh. Twice. Not just a polite chuckle at a moronic joke, but actual aloud laughter. It doesn’t take itself seriously, but has a more real worldly premise than Burrito Buson. Sort of. You are a group of teenagers, eager to buy something expensive. The answer? Earn money by jumping off a swing onto a pogo stick as far as you can.

Pogo Swing allows you to rotate your character midair. Full rotations earn you more money, but if you don’t land pogo stick first, the results are undesirable. This mechanic adds a risk to greed, which I always find to be an enjoyable gameplay element. When I fail, it’s my fault for being too greedy in going after a seventh rotation, and I watch my teenager bounce to the ground on his head.

Each of these games can easy suck two or three hours of free time away from you, and are fun enough to play, but probably not as enjoyable to play over and over again. Once you have purchased all of the upgrades and reached the end game (either through traveling total distance, as in Flight; escaping the candy bag in Burrito Bison; or by earning enough money in Pogo Swing), there isn’t much else to do, and the sense of trying to accomplish something is gone.

The Games: Flight, Burrito Bison, Pogo Swing

The Cost: Free – these are all Flash games and should work perfectly fine on any recently purchased PC

Worth It? The only thing you are giving up is time, and you were probably going to waste in on the internet anyway.

Best Parts: For launch games in general, it’s the simplicity of play which is a big draw.

Worst Parts: Not a lot of post-game, if you’re into that sort of thing. If you finish the game and still want to play, find another launch game.

Overall: I started playing these Flash games at work, because almost anything is better than work. But when I got home, I still wanted to play them, instead of using any of my much more expensive video game systems. A testament to good (and addictive) design.

Kirby's Epic Yarn

I remember when my co-worker Josh and I first heard about the new Kirby game planned for the Wii (it was amid a series of other announcements Nintendo made). We were fairly excited; Kirby games have always been a source of pleasant platforming. And, the title even promised great things: Kirby’s Epic Yarn. It would be epic, right?

Josh picked it up to play before me, and promptly brought it to my desk and disgustingly tossed it towards me. “You can play this, if you want,” he said, looking at the game box as if instead of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, it actually read Sing-a-long with Justin Beiber. I couldn’t figure out his revulsion, so I asked what was wrong with it.

“You don’t eat people.”

WHAT? What do you mean, you don’t eat people? You’re Kirby. That’s what you do. Making a Kirby game where you didn’t eat people is like making a Sonic game where you don’t run. I had to see it for myself, so I launched my Wii in the first time in months and it updated for three or four hours while I read the manual suspiciously.

There was no mention of not eating things, but I figured it was a lie. Written materials often lie.

The updated Wii was finally ready and I started the game. There was a story introduction – and let me go off for a second here – there are games in which story is important, and highly contributes to my love of the game. Platformers are typically not the medium for that. I don’t care about Mario saving the princess. She will get kidnapped again, and I’ll be off to find more fucking stars to save her. This isn’t Bioshock. I don’t care how coins got into these weird yellow blocks with question marks. The mechanics are designed for fun, not for an overarching purpose.

Anyway, there was a story. Its purpose was to tell us why you can’t eat people (spoiler, it’s because you are turned into yarn). So now, not only am I kind of upset that I lost a few precious minutes watching a story that I cared about, but I really hate the story because it represents a loss of the entire gameplay mechanic the name Kirby on the front of the box had promised.

The game itself is fun enough. You jump onto platforms and there are puzzle-like moments where you have to do one of three things to proceed. Each level challenges you to collect a certain number of beads, which are scattered throughout the level and also dropped by unraveling yarn enemies. However, I can’t shake the feeling that pushing the 1 button (you hold the Wiimote sideways) should cause Kirby to eat someone.

And before I continue to criticize, I will say it’s got a stunningly fun style to it. It reminds me greatly of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island. The game’s fabric motif opened a lot of design opportunities, and they were well taken care of. The Wii has a limited capacity with graphics, and this game embraces it, rather than fighting against it.

However, the game gets monotonous in its simplicity pretty quickly. As a nod to this, additional challenges are unlocked if you are able to decorate the apartments of other residents of this yarn-filled existence by collecting trickier to get items from the levels. However, the decoration concept is wasted and introduces further levels of childish gameplay. I wish it’d just give me the additional challenges.

I made it through the first few worlds, each of which culminated in a “boss battle” which involved employing one of two or three strategies. I became disenfranchised, and haven’t played it since. In the end, I just felt as though I was playing a game that was excellently designed and crafted, and then slapped with an intellectual property to garner sales. And my feeling isn’t far off from the truth; according to an article discussing conversations between the development team and Nintendo CEO, Satoru Iwata:

One of the big revelations from the column is that Kirby's Epic Yarn originally wasn't a Kirby game. Good Feel developed the game with the desire to try something new, and so they started from zero. The Japanese name for Kirby's Epic Yarn is "Keito no Kirby," or "Kirby of Yarn." Instead of this, the game was originally set to be called "Keito no Fluff," or "Fluff of Yarn" and would have starred a character named Fluff in a world known as "World of Yarn."

The greatest weakness of the game, in my opinion, is the very thing the development team felt they needed to secure a character with more recognition. How disappointing, as this likely delays having a new actual Kirby game, wherein the gameplay mechanics we love will finally return.

The Game: Kirby’s Epic Yarn

The Cost: Should be easy to find at Gamestop for around $30-$40. A new version will still set you back $50.

Worth It? For non-Kirby enthusiasts: It’s a fun platformer, and would probably be a hoot for kids (there is co-op play, which I didn’t review), but why not spend it on a better game, like Super Mario Galaxy? For Kirby-enthusiasts: purchasing this game probably has the unintended cost of weeks of therapy, buy Kirby Superstar Ultra for $25 instead.

Best Parts: Design. Collecting beads is disarmingly addictive, since the game judges you at the end of every level based on your success in doing so.

Worst Parts: Kirby not being able to eat people and have their powers.

Overall: Playing this game was like getting a chocolate éclair from the donut shop, getting home to eat it and realizing it isn’t filled with custard.