Archive for the 'Games' Category
(Chronologically Listed)
And speaking of scary…
…the Onion plays with all our minds:
‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’
Heh. ..bruce w..
Soccer memories
James Lileks on changes in American childhood:
I don’t think they had soccer balls in North Dakota until 1981; it was brought in on a special train and placed behind glass and people got to walk around it and get close, if they felt comfortable, and become accustomed to its strange surface. It is faceted, yet round. It doesn’t seem like a gateway sport that leads inevitably to socialism. Maybe we should give it a try. No, we had baseballs. Hard, unforgiving, painful, American baseballs. When it came at your head you got out of the way. Now in the space of a single generation we’ve trained the young to stick their heads into the path of an oncoming ball.
I first played soccer — or some very crude equivalent thereof — my senior year of high school (1970-71). After the end of the football season, I skipped my last-period PE class for two months or so, until Coach Roberts ran into me on campus one day and let me know that I’d better get my butt back to gym. One didn’t argue with Coach Roberts. We (by which I mean all the seniors in that class) still did pretty much what we wanted — lifted weights, ran some, dinked around with track and field gear (I briefly contemplated joining the Track team when I discovered an unexpected aptitude for the discus, but we all decided I really wasn’t all that great at it), and generally suited out for an hour before hitting the showers.
Oh, and we played “soccer” on occasion. Of course, this was on a dirt field surrounded in part by low (4′) chain link fences, and tended to look more like Rugby Without Hands. We used at least one of the fences as a field boundary, which meant that you ended up with a few dozen guys scrunched up against the fence, all kicking furiously at the ball and each other. In one such situation, I leveled a mighty kick at the ball — and hit a (metal) fence post instead, doing my best to jam my right big toe back into the middle of my right foot.
I limped for several days and went back to lifting weights. ..bruce w..
New game for the Wii!
My son Wes sent me this link from ThinkGeek:
As any good geek should know by now Japan has some of the wackiest and most unusual products anywhere. So when we were visiting Tokyo recently and saw lines of Japanese schoolgirls waiting to play an amazing new game for the Wii called Super Pii Pii Brothers we were only a little surprised. After all with games like WarioWare and Raving Rabbids the Wii is no stranger to crazy gameplay mechanics… but it was quite unusual to see the “strap-on” style accessory and peeing action that Pii Pii Brothers provides. Normally ThinkGeek doesn’t carry video games, but we were so blown-away by Super Pii Pii Brothers that we immediately got our trusted Japanese importer on the phone and arranged to bring over a limited quantity of this amazing Wii game along with some cross regional boot discs to allow play on USA Wii consoles.
Uh…read the whole thing. ..bruce w..
December 8, 2007: “Pretend to be a Time-Traveller Day”
UPDATED: Here’s a comic to check out.
OK, this is the funniest idea I’ve run across since “Talk like a Pirate” day (which comes up just next week, by the way):
You must spend the entire day in costume and character. The only rule is that you cannot actually tell anyone that you are a time traveler. Other than that, anything’s game.
There are three possible options:…
2) Dystopian Future - This one offers a little more flexibility. It can be any kind of future from Terminator to Freejack. The important thing to remember is dress like a crazy person with armor. Black spray painted football pads, high tech visors, torn up trenchcoats and maybe even some dirt here or there. Remember, dystopian future travelers are very startled that they’ve gone back in time. Some starters:
- If you go the “prisoner who’s escaped the future” try shaving your head and putting a barcode on the back of your neck. Then stagger around and stare at the sky, as if you’ve never seen it before.
- Walk up to random people and say “WHAT YEAR IS THIS?” and when they tell you, get quiet and then say “Then there’s still time!” and run off.
- Stand in front of a statue (any statue, really), fall to your knees, and yell “NOOOOOOOOO”
- Stare at newspaper headlines and look astonished.
- Take some trinket with you (it can be anything really), hand it to some stranger, along with a phone number and say “In thirty years dial this number. You’ll know what to do after that.” Then slip away….
Heh. I just may do this. Unless, of course, I’m at trial or being deposed. ..bruce..
P.S. Be sure to read the comments — there are some great suggestions there.
The ReDistricting Game (no, really, it’s a game)
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’m a bit of a political junkie, and one of the great political spectacles is the national redistricting that occurs every 10 years — after the Federal Census — and sometimes more often than that.
So it has been fascinating to run across The ReDistricting Game, a browser-based Flash game that gives you the role of a political consultant involved in redistricting. You have to redraw political boundaries to meet certain goals and criteria, while stilling getting your plan (a) through the legislature, (b) signed by the governor, and (c) approved by the courts (or, at least, not thrown out).
Eyes glazing over? Actually, it’s fun and fascinating. And while the caricatures seem to be a bit more kind to the Left than to the Right, it does drive home the real challenges in redistricting. Plus it shows that gerrymandering can be fun.
Hat tip to Play This Thing! via Greg Costigan’s blog. ..bruce..
Why FastCrawl matters
OK, so I praised a simple dungeon-crawl game that can be completed in 30 minutes. You may ask, why?
Well, here’s this report (in the New York Times, no less) by Seth Schiesel about The Burning Crusade, the new expansion to the massively-multiplayer on-line role playing game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft:
The big draw in massively-multiplayer online games like WOW is that they bring together thousands of people into one shared real-time virtual world. And so when a new expansion arrives, providing a bunch of new areas to explore, a natural land rush mentality can emerge among some players as they compete to conquer the new content.
In the new World of Warcraft expansion, called The Burning Crusade, that has been the race to level 70. Since the original game was released in 2004, characters have been capped in power at an arbitrary level 60. The main attraction in TBC is that it raises the level cap to 70 and provides a host of powerful benefits who players who reach that plateau – first among them the ability to fly, or at least to buy a flying mount like a gryphon.
Each of WOW’s hundreds of servers, or copies of the game world, is home to thousands of players. (The game has more than 8 million subscribers total.) And so on each server – within each community - the big question on many players’ lips as the expansion approached was “Who will be the first to level 70?â€, “Who will be the first player flying around?â€
I am proud to report that on my server, it was me. After racking up about 76 hours of playtime in a little more than 4.5 days of real time, shortly after 4 pm Saturday my warlock became the first character to hit level 70 on my server. Unhealthy? Probably. Exhilarating? Definitely.
Thirty minutes at a sitting (for a complete game, no less) is more healthy than 15 hours/day for five days in order to move from level 60 to level 70. At least, IMHO.
But beyond that, I am far more impressed by minimalist game design — that is, letting complexity emerge from a small, carefully selected set of rules. The ultimate example of that is Go, a game I learned in college (for a graduate CS class in artificial intelligence). Go has only nine rules and is played by placing black and white stones on a grid, but it is such a tough and subtle game that computers have made only slow progress in playing against humans. I’m also a big fan of FreeCell, a solitaire card game found on Windows systems, because it is (a) simple, (b) quick to finish, and (c) in most cases (though not all) winnable — which keeps me poking at a given game, even when I appear to be stuck.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t like big, complex games; indeed, my favorite genre is the 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) class of games, such as the Civilization series, the Galactic Civilization series (no relationship), and my all-time favorite, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (alas, it is now dated and over-played by me; Firaxis Games should really come up with a new-and-improved version). But I tend not to keep such games installed on my computer simply because I don’t want to get sucked into a game that keeps me from getting other things done.
This is also one of the reasons why I gave up on MMORPGs as well. (The other reasons include the tendency of most on-line communications to devolve to the level of a 13-year-old male who thinks that illiterate scatological spewing is the height of eloquence, and the lack of a sufficiently interesting end-game; on the latter, see the NYT article above). I prefer games that I can readily pick up and readily put down again; I rarely have time for anything else. Speaking of which…. ..bruce..
FastCrawl: short, fast, and fun
As some of you know, I was a computer game designer some 20+ years ago, and I maintain an interest in computer games. Lately, I’ve been buying most of my games from Manifesto Games, a computer game distributor with a business model geared towards inexpensive (and downloadable) games from independent game companies.
Well, my latest purchase is a little gem called “FastCrawl“. The game is summed up by its title, which comes from an old D&D term, dungeon crawl. You take a randomly-generated band through a dungeon, battling monsters and scooping up ever more powerful weapons and armor. The “fast” part? You can play a complete game in under 30 minutes.
Rather than follow the chase after ever-more realistic (and complex) graphics and gameplay of most current computer role-playing games (RPGs), FastCrawl looks and plays more like the computerized version of a clever boardgame.
This, in my opinion, is a good thing. The game is fast, well-balanced, and varies just enough to keep things interesting. FastCrawl runs within its own regular window on your desktop, so you can (ahem) close it quickly if you need to. All games controls are via the mouse. In starting a new game, you can select the length (short, medium, long) and the difficulty (easy, normal, difficult, fiendish, insane). The game also has built-in help and a tutorial. You don’t even have to worry about character generation or game economics; your adventuring band is randomly generated for you, and there’s no gold, silver, treasure or stores in the game. And the game is turn-based, so you can hide the window from your boss pause the game for as long as you like and then come back to it later.
You don’t need a high-end graphics card, gigs of disk space and RAM, or an expensive strategy guide. You just need a computer with Windows XP and the Microsoft .NET 1.1 (or later) framework installed (a free download from Microsoft).
FastCrawl was developed by two guys, Glen Pawley and Alan Cachia, who live, of all places, on the island of Malta. It’s already won at least one “RPG of the Year” award. You can download a free, fully-functional 60-minute demo version from the Manifesto Games or the PawleyScape web sites. The cost is only $19.95 for the game itself.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. ..bruce..