The stuff of nightmares

Teletubbies and left 4 dead mashup.

So very very wrong

Dusting off the CCGs

CCGs (Collectible Card Games) are something that I sunk a whole lot of time and money into at various points in the past.

• From 1995->1998 it was Vampire : The Eternal Struggle
• In 2001 it was Lord of the Rings and a bit of Harry Potter for something a bit lighter :)
  

They are horrible horrible evil things. I cannot stress this enough. Do not get involved with them! The amount of money you put into them is absolutely insane for the amount you play them. Don't even buy a starter deck. That's like a crack dealer giving you your first hit free.

Seriously, it's like if someone tried to sell you a car, but in order to get the most out of it you had to buy individually boxed extra parts, but you can only buy parts in identical looking sealed boxes containing a random part, and the best part can only be found in a few random garages in the UK... You'd just tell them to bugger off in that case, but for some reason in the shape of a CCG the concept is somehow really appealing.

Despite all this I found myself getting them out of the cupboard. At first the Vampire cards as there's talk of a few of the guys from Garforth Tabletop Gaming getting together for a game or two. Then I thought it would be fun to get the Potter cards out for a couple of games with Cat. They originally got put away around 2002/2003 when Cat developed an unbeatable Hermione deck and I got in a strop ;) . Luckily with my new gaming experience I managed to put together a better deck, and we're currently at 1 game each this time (plus I'm a much better loser now :D).

But still, I stand by my original opinion. I'm never buying another card again. These things are pure evil and should never be bought. There's so many great games out there that will cost you far less than getting into these things, there's really no justification for them! For those that really do love building decks try Dominion instead.

A few things I would really like to see dropped from JRPGs

Items / Endings / Areas that can only be found from following strategy guides from the start of the game.

E.g. The god damn Zodiac Spear in Final Fantasy 12. This item could only be got if you avoided opening 4 chests early on in the game, which had no marking, clues, or warnings to differentiate them from any of the other thousand identical chests. Nice.

Also see: Some of the missable quests in Last Remnant. I have to go back to a distant area and talk to a guy before and after each of 6 connected missions in order for a quest to open afterwards or it's missed forever?!?!? WTF.

No further explanation needed :)

70 hour+ game times.

Long gone are the days where good games were few and far between, or I just couldn't afford more than one game every 3 months. Nowadays I don't need my games artificially stretched out. Once I've seen every game mechanic around 100 times, and you've not got anything new in the
gameplay to surprise me, it's time to wrap up the plot and show me the credits.

Again, The last Remnant is a hideous offender in this respect. It's main way of stretching things out is unskippable extra long battle animations for any action (even swinging a damn sword). I've taken to reading a book whilst letting the battles play out, stopping occasionally to issue orders.

Personna 3 is an absolutely brilliant game in most respects, but suffers badly from this. I've been playing it on and off for around a year now, because the battle sides of it do get horribly repetitive until the boss shows up :| Does that freaky tower really need that many floors?

Unskippable, slow moving battle animations.

Already mentioned this above a little regarding The Last Remnant's (Seems like I'm picking on it, but honestly there is a lot to like about that game) gameplay being extended by the long winded battle animations . Final Fantasy is a well known offender for this as well (Knights of the Round being a move taking 1 minute 21 seconds to execute).

Yes we love eye candy, but is there really any reason to force it upon us the 10th time if we want to skip it?

Disgaea showed the world how it's done. You can turn all animations off! Now this may seem like it's taking the fun out of it, but when you're just fighting through an item world to level up you're glad of any time saving device the developers give you!

Alchemy

Oh how I hate alchemy in JRPGs. Some people might love the idea of alchemy in RPGS, but to me they're yet another mechanic to sell the strategy guides and prolong the game.

They're never intuitive, combinations being either trial and error, or done to fixed recipes you have to find in the world. Not that having a bloody recipe helps, because it's never obvious which is the only place in the whole frigging world you're going to find that piece of necrotic metal.

Even once you have all the ingredients, you usually don't dare make the ruddy thing. You never know if that ingredient you're using to build that slightly better sword is the only one of it's kind, and it might be the core ingredient of the even better (but only slightly so) betterer sword you'll get the recipe for in the next part of the game.

Seriously, what is alchemy bringing to the game? Sending me off to the other side of the world (via a strategy guide) for a piece of item that only drops from monster X if I have item B and have killed 300 of them. THAT'S NOT FUN. Give me shops with gradually improving stock and nice item rewards for doing side quests. IT WAS LIKE THAT FOR A REASON.



Got any pet JRPG hates of your own? Comment!

Image Credit : "Moogle" by Christina L. Frazer

All you need is love (and a lot of plastic instruments)

Should I buy it.. Shouldn't I buy it? It was a massive dilemma considering my current situation. I'd already turned down Batman : Arkham Asylum this month despite a very impressive demo and it getting great rave reviews. Did I really need another Rock Band?

I was mainly undecided because it seemed to go against everything I liked about the Rock Band concept: you buy the software once (okay maybe twice - Rock Band 2 was a pretty upgrade), and then all you buy after that is songs you want. Alarm bells sounded when they buggered it up with the AC:DC branded version, whereby they provided a severely crippled version of Rock Band, which even if you export the tracks to Rock Band / Rock Band 2 worked out much more expensive than a track pack would have been. Then I head the bad news that the Beatles version would go a step further and not allow you to export the songs, or play any non-Beatles DLC.

Not good. I decided I wasn't going to buy it. Then the trailers hit and I realised this wasn't going to be a crippled version of Rock Band, but an entirely rebranded, re-worked game. It showed a proper story mode. Lots of unlockable photos and videos and stuff. Plus: It's the frigging Beatles.

Combine this with a sudden discovery of a cache of Tesco Clubcard vouchers and of course I caved.

Do I regret it? Not at all! I have to say this is the slickest version of Rock Band so far, the presentation is gorgeous and there's lots of neat interface tweaks, for example a difficulty display on the screen where you choose between Guitar & Bass which is a huge help for avoiding tedious bass lines / obscenely tricky guitar tracks. So far we've only played a little way through the Story mode (Cat's still suffering with post-viral fatigue, we have to take things easy) and browsed the track listings but we've really enjoyed it. In fact I practically had to wrestle the controller off her last night and use the classic parenting line "It'll still be here tomorrow" ;).

The bonus content really is something special. We've only unlocked a little, but so far the photos and accompanying text are very interesting and we've learnt quite a few suprising things already. An impressive "prize" extra we unlocked today was the content of a very limited edition Christmas record that was sent out to Beatles fan club members in... 63 I think? Was very silly but incredibly fun to hear, the quality of the recording was outstanding!

Need to have a gathering at some point and see if we can get enough xbox microphones to try out these 3-part harmonies some of the tracks support. Then again I think most of me and my friends struggle to find the right pitch when solo :D

But is this going to happen? I honestly don't know. Even with 45 greatly varying tracks, I don't know how this would go down with my Rock Band buddies. The only couple of friends I know that are definitely Beatles fans don't normally touch Rock Band, and the friends I have really into Rock Band definitely aren't Beatles fans. Perhaps this isn't a match made in heaven?

For me and Cat though it's going to be a fantastic experience, and that's all we need.

They don't make them like this anymore - EVIL

A friend of mine used my laptop whilst he was over, and when I turned it on I found this on one of the tabs: Rick Dangerous - Flash Remake.

It's incredibly faithful, i.e. totally unforgiving with death often striking from nowhere. There's no way to beat the game but to memorise every trap, every enemy, and get those pixel perfect jumps right every time. Everything that would be flagged up as bad design nowadays.

I love it.

How appropriate, you fight like a cow!

So tonight me and Cat finished playing Monkey Island - Special Edition.

Point and Click adventures are one of the few games that Cat enjoys playing with me, so when Monkey Island appeared in the xbox live arcade I couldn't resist buying it again for us to play. We weren't dissapointed as it's a very good remake. The graphical style works well and is a good bridge into the style used for the 3rd game. It was very clever of them to include the ability to switch back and forth between the original graphics and the new, both for nostalgia's sake and the fact that on some of the screens it's easier to spot items in the old graphics (how did that happen developers?).

As far as gameplay is concerned there's not much to complain about, Monkey Island was always one of the better designed point and click games of the 90s, so there's very few frustrating puzzles and only one part in the game where you can die (and frankly if you do die at that point you deserve it, in fact you actually get an achievement!). There's a couple of bits later on in the game that frustrated us, but luckily the remake contains a very handy hint guide. Try not to rely on the guide too much though, you'll ruin the fun of suddenly getting that light bulb moment!

If you've played it before... well actually I wouldn't recommend it if you don't have someone to it to share it with. It really is exactly the same game. Monkey Island veterans wont find any new challenges, and you'll get diminishing returns on the laughs. Pair that with the fact that we managed to finish it in less than 6 and a half hours with Cat doing the vast majority of the puzzle solving for the first time, and you don't get that much for you moneys. We also came across a couple of weird bugs where dialogue seemed to be left out, and we solved a puzzle without really knowing how it worked or what happened.

Playing it with someone new to the game is where the fun's at, especially if you're patient and let them solve the puzzles. Overall I really enjoyed it and really hope they do a special edition of the sequel as I never managed to finish that when I was younger!

GiftTRAP - a brilliant game for friends!

As usual had a fantastic day at Beyond Monopoly in York today, played plenty of interesting and varying games.

Finally though I've visited enough to be able to borrow a game, so grabbed the one I've had my eyes on for ages: GiftTRAP. The reason I've had my eyes on this for ages, yet haven't played it at Beyond Monopoly is it's very much a social game and only really works with people you know.

The whole thing revolves around how well you know people, you have to pick out gifts from the available gifts that round for every player, then rate the gifts, then scoring is done based on how well matched the gifts are with the person.

As you need to both give gifts other players want, and receive gifts you do want to win the game this is a game that totally will not work with people you don't know, and will drag on as you receive heavy penalties if you give presents people don't want.

Amongst friends this game was fantastic. There were plenty of laughs as you can't give everyone everything they want every round, and it leads to some very strange pairings :D. It's a shame it's impossible to get hold of now, and the reprint they're doing has the adult content removed (night with an escort / year supplies of condoms / chocolate boobs - that sort of thing), as those presents probably caused the biggest laughs..

Even with those cards removed though I'm sure it will still be well worth getting. You can do far worse if you want a new party game!

Passage - proof for me that games can be art

Passage is a 5 minute long game (if that) that produced more emotional response from me than 95% of the media I've read, watched, played or listened to.

Firstly go here, download the game, and play it. You might need to press B a few times to reduce (increase?) the resolution of it as today's monitors blow it up a bit too big and make it a little blocky to see whats going on.

After playing it, if you didn't really get it, try playing it again.

Then and only then read what I thought:

This is an incredible piece of art that takes a theme and explores it in a way that wouldn't be possible in any other media. At first it's confusing as the graphical style just looks a mess and you can't tell what's going on. Then you notice it. You see the way the character's position has moved relative to the passage. You notice how the the compression of the pixels has subtly shifted.

Seriously, if you haven't played it yet, play it before you carry on reading this.

At first you start near the left of the screen at the beginning of your journey. Ahead of you is everything you will experience, compressed together in a tight pattern. Gradually as you move through the passage, you encounter these things & events. You might meet someone that will accompany you through this passageway. As time goes by your position on the screen has moved further right, and the things you have encountered have become compressed in a tight pattern behind you.

The passageway represents life. This is you travelling through life. Behind you are your memories, ahead of you is your future.

Eventually you notice the characters starting to age, soon you notice that there are more past events behind you than there are future ones in front of you. That's when I started feeling a little apprehension but there was nothing to do but carry on. Older and older, less and less to encounter ahead. The girl I was travelling through the passage way changes into a gravestone. My character can do nothing but carry on down the passageway, now travelling in a much slower way until he does the same.

I cried. I started crying again when I wrote this. I think I need a drink.

Beautiful short art "game" - Today I die

Today I die is another interesting little art game from Daniel Benmergui.

Daniel's games tend to revolve around how small changes in position or context can completely change a scene or story. I can't really say anything more about it without spoiling the experience, so dive in and have a play. They're very short so you've got nothing to lose!

Also be sure to check out some of his other games: I wish I were the moon and Storyteller.

And along the same lines Gregory Weir's amazing (I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors

Got any recommendations for games along these sort of lines? Please post them below!

Erfworld - a comic for tabletop gamers

Erfworld is a fantasy web comic which takes the conventions of tabletop gaming (hexes, turns, leveling etc.) and applies them to a world with narrative and characters.

The absurdity of these rules in a real-world context is well noted by the protagonist of this story, "Parson" who has somehow ended up transported into this world from ours, finding himself in-charge of commanding the power-mad Stanley's troops.

Throw in troop types assembled from a mix of pop culture such as children's TV characters, marshmallow sweets, and Internet memes and you've got yourself a very odd-sounding cocktail that somehow works.

One of the things that really makes the story work is that the characters never break the fundamental rules of the world, however absurd they are, and this somehow gives everything a sound continuity, and makes the twists all the more clever.

Definite recommended reading, and they've just come to the end of Book 1 so there's no better time to start catching up!

Sims 3 - The odd couple

Got a request to share my sims online so people can get a copy of the Nick & Bytey experience.

So here you go

Recently Bytey-sim has took up gardening. In this picture he hadn't had a chance to change from his mad scientist job, I guess the wig is compulsory.


And Nick-sim's took up painting. Though despite me giving him a brilliant landscape view, he insists on drawing stick figures:


*sigh*

Multiplayer games are great. Shame most people aren't.

It's so frustrating. I love multiplayer online games like Halo, Gears of War, Left 4 dead. I was into a MMORPG for a while too.

Unfortunately at the moment I can't stand 90% of the people playing them. This wasn't always the case, I don't know whether it's got worse due to the technical barrier being lifted, or maybe my tolerance has dropped dramatically in the last couple of years.

Here's my main frustrations:

Problem 1: Kids

Can't we have some kind of adults only tickbox when we're joining games? I don't want to have to put up with someone filling my headset with random high pitched screeching sounds, or shouts for their mum to bring their favourite E-number filled snack treat.

Why are these parents letting their young children play these murder simulators anyway? ;)

Problem 2: Bad losers

Almost every time I play a game online I seem to be put on the same team as the guy who has to flood the chat with the latest injustice that caused him to die. Only a combination of lag, hacks, camping, and glitching can kill the bad loser. It's never because the other guy did something right. Face it guys, unless you're in your teens and unemployed or a student, 90% of the people out there are going to better than you. I've accepted this, you should too. No-one likes a whinger.

Problem 3: Bad winners

You won, congratulations is in order. It doesn't give you the right to really insult everyone in the lobby afterwards. Chances are they're just gonna give you negative feedback. It's just a game so enjoy playing it rather than bragging about it afterwards. Incidently bad winners and bad losers tend to be the same people a lot of the time.

Problem 4: The silent loner

If you like playing online games pretty much solo that's fine, there's plenty of deathmatch based games designed for that. Just don't join objective-based games like Left 4 Dead, and Halo's objective based game types. If you're going to play a team game plug your damn mic in!!!!

I think this is probably my rantiest post yet :D

Ben There, Dan That

An English point and click adventure.

An English point and click adventure that's funny & has good puzzles.

An English point and click adventure that's funny & has good puzzles and is FREE.

Why are you still reading this? Go play it!

Then go and buy the sequel for a measly £2.99!


WARNING (Or recommendation, depending on how childish you are):- Contains swears and fart jokes.

Auditorium

This extended break has given me a chance to trawl through the hundreds and hundreds of starred news posts in google reader that I didn't have time to read when they first hit. Most of them weren't worth the time, the item well out of date, or the items just plain boring. Hidden amongst those however are several gems.

Auditorium is one of those gems.

A decidedly minimalist game, all you're presented with when you start playing is a thin stream of light, a circle, and what looks like a bar from a graphic equalizer. Quickly you realise you can move the circle, and dragging it into the stream of light affects the direction of the light. Experimenting further a few beams of light hit the equalizer bar, and a haunting piano melody starts to play.

OK, it's got my attention.



Next level, I have two circles, but with different direction arrows. No problem. Next level I learn that you can affect the power of your circles by dragging the edges. Oh and more equalizers for more instruments, nice. It starts to get a bit samey, I guess to make sure that people are comfortable, but I began to lose interest. Eventually they throw in some additional gameplay elements and my interest piqued again. Didn't take long before I'd finished the levels in the free flash game, and a teaser level from the levels available in the full version clearly shows the developers have more tricks up there sleeves.

I'm going to pick up Auditorium when I have the time to play it, it's a really beautiful game both visually & aurally and is a perfect puzzler for spare moments where you fancy a chill-out. Helps that the price is a very reasonable $10.99 too.

Garforth Tabletop Gamers pt2

So Saturday I went to Garforth TableTop Gamers for the 2nd time and had a blast. Didn't really write much about it on Saturday as got home very beer'd up thanks to going out for a curry afterwards with a couple of friends.

First game played was the strangely titled O Zoo le Mio. Fun little game based around blind-bidding for titles to help you create a better zoo theme park than the opponent. My "Gorilla Villa" lagged behind as I paid out way too much early on leaving me in quite a weak position for the rest of the rounds, but I still enjoyed it. Be warned this game does punish you blowing your cash early!

Following that a quick round of No Thanks, a fiendish card game you definitely need to play more than once to really enjoy (you get trounced the first time), unfortunately we only had time for one game before other tables finished their games, giving us the opportunity to get into something a bit heavier, my first game of Imperial.

Imperial is a war game that isn't really a war game. You take the role of a financial investor out to make as much money as you can by influencing countries actions and movements to make yourself as much money as possible. The player with the most shares in a country gets to control it's actions (building factories, raising armies, maneuvering armies), but as other investor's invest money in the country they may get enough shares to take control themselves. In the space of one game at one point or another I had controlled the actions of Italy, Britain, and France (but rarely at the same time). It's pretty mind-bending to play a game where you have to get out of the mindset of "being" a country, and I constantly found myself thinking what I will do next with Italy well after I lost control of it! Definitely a game I'd recommend if you have a few hours to play as it's far simpler than it looks and very interesting to play!

Nearly time for curry by this point, but time for one more game. The bluffer's game Vabanque. The game is set at a casino, where you need to get as much money from the tables by the end of the 4th round. Each round the players determine how much the tables are worth by placing chips on them, place their action tokens on the tables, and move to a table to play at. The trick is the players action cards. One is a bluff and does nothing, one raises the value the of the table, one steals any players winners at that table. The catch is that you don't know which a player has played, making this a fantastic game of bluff and psychology. Great fun!

Looking forward to the next one :).

Booze, Games & Curry

Great games, great company, great booze, great curry.

All in all an ideal day. :)

More tomorrow ;)

The Sims 3 - another dose of digital crack

So I caved and got myself a copy of Sims 3 after reading that wonderful blog the other day.

I have to say I'm very impressed with the improvements and as you can see by the timestamp on this post I'm completely addicted. The world is a lot more convincing now with no loading screens between locations as the game engine now encompasses a complete town you can zoom in and out of. The Sims have real personality and the Sims I created based on me and a friend started off very convincingly. The interface is good, although a little strangely structured at times. The Sims are quite a bit better at generally looking after themselves and will general keep themselves alive quite happily.

Here's the problem though: The developers didn't want to take the risk of upsetting any of the players of the game. Even with the Sims set at the highest level of free will they will never do anything situation changing. They'll repeatedly freak out at a broken appliance but won't try to repair it or call a repairman in without your say so lest the spend some of your precious money. They'll never take on or leave a job unless you give the go ahead. Hell they wont even let someone into their house as far as I can tell!

Half the appeal in this sort of game for me is watching the unexpected, and it first I was pleasantly surprised with the minor day-to-day actions the Sims were performing matching their chosen traits. However it's only the minor stuff that's automated. Everything else seems to be up to you to do.

Fair enough, this sort of micromanagement is what the existing user base is used to, and what they probably want. Me, I really want to just wind them up and watch them go. It disappoints me that the developers didn't add an option for true free will for people like me that primarily want to see things unfold. Also why the hell isn't the purchasing of extra content integrated directly into the build menu instead of a ruddy website? That's so 90s ;).

Still, that's complaining about the game for what it isn't. What it is,is by far the best version of the Sims so far, which I will no doubt lose weeks of my life playing with. I just can't help the niggling feeling that the developers took the safe route and it isn't quite the game it could have been.

Don't listen to salespeople about pre-orders!

Heard a massive load of garbage coming from the mouths of the staff at Gamestation about how necessary it is to pre-order.

A dad was in there buying a game for his kid, and was asked if they were planning on getting the next "Modern Warfare" game in November. The dad made the mistake of saying they were, which prompted the doom & gloom warnings from the member of staff about how hard copies of the previous modern warfare game were to get at launch, and how every big game sells out and needs to be pre-ordered, and how they should put a deposit down there and then and then they would "hopefully" get a copy.

What utter crap. Other than the Wii & Nintendo DS consoles, I can't remember the last time anything to do with gaming sold-out. ESPECIALLY the big released like Modern Warfare and GTA! If anything it's the games that sell less that are harder to get (try finding a copy of fire emblem on the DS, or valkyria chronicles on PS3). Shops like Game & Gamestation buy in shed-loads of these blockbuster games knowing that they will sell, and will make sure they don't run out of copies as they don't want to miss out on sales. Pre-ordering is all a big con to stop you shopping around for the best price when the game is out. Disc-based media is NEVER in short supply as the manufacturing process is so fast & cheap, and scarcity in supply is not a good thing for the publisher like it is in the case of hardware like the Wii & DS.

So in short: Don't listen to these people, don't put down a deposit on a game that they won't even tell you how much it'll cost. If you do really want to have something on the release day use a good online retailer like www.shopto.net who guarantee delivery on release date or they'll give you money back!

Brain.... So close to exploding

Today was another Beyond Monopoly meeting, and I arrived just in time to make up the numbers in a game of Struggle of Empires. Didn't really realise what I was getting myself in for, this was by far the most strategic and long running game I've played in a long while clocking in at nearly 4 hours and had a very large number of rules and different concepts to take in. Regardless, it was definitely very enjoyable and made a nice change from the relatively quick games I usually play. It was definitely good to play a game where I had to really think about things and could achieve some kind of world domination. ;)

Straight after that I got involved in a game of Tigris & Euphrates, which despite having a very small rule set is still a difficult game to learn due to the concepts & strategy being very unusual and not really intuitive. Lost pitifully but still enjoyed it and am looking forward to playing it again now I've seen the tactics involved.

By this time my brain was semi-fried, so took on some more casual fare in the shape of Tutankhamen, and Bananagram, followed by the traditional club game of PitchCar.

I feel like I need to watch a dumb action film to clear my mind now, lest I strain something! :)

Alice & Kev

I was resisting getting the Sims 3, having got enough timesinks in my life already. :)

Then I came across this blog : http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com.

This guy's experiment with taking a couple of sims and trying to apply real-life poverty & health problems has resulted in a very captivating story. By just using a relatively simple game framework and applying an expanded & implied narrative to the events, a couple of characters far more interesting than you'll find on many TV dramas have evolved.

Makes me want to get a copy and see what other surprises this game holds.