The WotC social network for gamers, Gleemax, launched the alpha version of its online games page. The games are all free to play for a limited time (no clue when that time will be up, or what sort of charges will apply later). Right now, the games they have are Axis & Allies, RoboRally, Acquire, Guillotine, Desktop Tower Defense, Vegas Showdown, and Magic the Gathering: Online. And it looks like they have AI for each of them except MtG:O. I haven't played any of them yet. Free registration required.
Hello! I'm Denis Moskowitz, an occasional player on the Gameshelf. I'm a fan of board games and video games.
If you are both a) a fan of the game Lunar Rails and b) able to read Japanese katakana, you may enjoy this. (I know at least two other people like that, so it's not just me.) The Japanese lunar orbiter Kaguya has been taking some beautiful pictures of the moon, and on this NHK page there is a map of the Moon which links crater names (in Japanese) to pictures Kaguya has taken of them. Lunar Rails cities that are listed include Hertzsprung, Mare Moscoviense, Tsiolkovsky, Copernicus, Archimedes, Aristarchus, Orientale, Mendeleev... (There are some craters and locations whose names are given in kanji, so they may also be LR locations and I wouldn't know.)
Or anyway, most of them; I roll my eyes every time someone puts forth the argument that you only kill hookers and run over little old ladies if you want to play the game that way.
This statement is literally true, but it carries the false implication that the game offers you alternative interactions with these non-player characters. Lookie, here are your two options for communicating with any of the random people walking around the game world:
• Ignore them
• Beat / maim / kill them
That's it. The controller doesn't have a "talk" button, but it has an array of buttons dedicated to punching, shooting, and breaking into things.
Your character in GTA is Frankenstein's monster. He wants to talk to the little girl with the flower, but ends up drowning her instead, because his action-range is so limited. Sad.
(No, this game isn't a very Gameshelfy topic, but I can't recall seeing anyone raise this particular critical angle regarding a game that engenders a vast amount of discussion (and blowhardiness), and I felt it's a point that really needed making.)
Screenwriter Todd Alcott looks at the difference between Doom and Half-Life, two first-person shooters from the 1990s with nearly identical plot setups, and yet one tells a so much more compelling story than the other. He argues, basically, that while the former game contains a series of thematically consistent levels, the latter game uses the tried-and-true three-act narrative structure that's supported countless films and television episodes - applying it with great success to a series of thematically consistent game levels. Recommended reading to all interested in writing interactive adventures of any sort.
Kynn Bartlett alerted me to Game Chef, an annual role-playing game deign competition. (Kynn's one of the entrants, with his game Awesome Women Kicking Ass.) As its name suggests, it's inspired by the TV show "Iron Chef", insofar as each year's competition stipulates a "secret ingredient"-style restriction on its entrants, who then have only have a week or so to create an entire, playable game.
This year, the contest was split into two parts; artist-entrants had a week to sumbit sets of black-and-white illustrations for RPGs that didn't exist, and the following week the designer-entrants picked up those sets and designed games around them. The competition closed a few days ago, and is currently in a judging phase - I look forward to reviewing the entries myself!
I know about the existence of indie RPG design culture from listening to the Ogre Cave Audio Report, a podcast involving Gameshelf friend Mike Sugarbaker. It's turned me on to fascinating games I'd really like to try playing sometime, including Dogs in the Vineyard (which puts players in the role of heavily armed clerics in alt-universe frontier America) and the Shab-al-Hiri Roach (where academic politicking and the schemes of ancient insect gods collide in an early-1900s New England university).
I'd love to put a short session on the show somehow, but even a short one would probably be too long to film with a full crew. Which isn't to say we can't do it anyway...
David McDonough recently posted his 20th "Simple Sunday" Game Design. Every week, he posts a design for a new game that adheres to the following rules:
- The entire description and ruleset must fit on one page (more or less).
- No extravagant or custom objects, including cards, tokens, boards, or other devices.
- Try to be original; keep it simple.
Chris Armstrong has started up a "planet" aggregator for interactive fiction news: Planet IF.
This is simply a site which automatically distributes a whole range of IF-related blogs and news sites, including Brass Lantern, Emily Short's blog, Grand Text Auto, and many others. Bookmark Planet IF, or drop your favorite RSS reader onto it, for regular updates on the text adventure world.
(Nothing directly from me, but that's my fault; I don't have any IF-specific feeds.)
Don’t be fooled be the simplistic black and white vector shapes. Cursor*10 is a very quick unique and challenging puzzle game that can be played in any web browser as long as it has Adobe Flash installed.
Cursor*10 is a flash game made by Yoshio Ishii, who has made numerous games for Nekogames, using a simple point-and-click control scheme and a simple visual style that reminds me of old DOS and Atari games. Even though the website is Japanese, the game is in English and doesn’t require anyone to learn button combinations or advanced tactics. All the player needs is quick reflexes and a basic understanding of the game’s objectives.
The object of every level in Cursor*10 is to click on the staircase that goes to the floor above, eventually reaching the 16th floor. There is no main character to speak of; however your own mouse cursor could be considered a character in this game. When you start a level, there is a timer at the bottom-right corner that starts at 650 and continues to fall down towards 0 increasingly faster as the player tries to move through each floor. When the timer reaches 0, the first cursor explodes, the message “Cursor No. 2 ready” is showed, and the player restarts the entire game from the beginning. However, this time, Cursor No. 1’s movements and clicks are being replayed as Cursor No. 2 continues to move around, and when No. 3 is ready, its predecessors will be replayed and this continues throughout all 10 cursors. This gameplay mechanic is first used where there is a button on the ground that reveals a set of stairs when the button is pressed and disappears when that same button is released. This forces the player to use Cursor No. 1 to hold that button down until it explodes, then Cursor No. 2 repeats those floors, but this time, Cursor No. 1’s movements are being replayed, which includes holding that button down, giving Cursor No. 2 the chance to go up that flight of stairs and get closer to the 16th floor. The multiplicity strategy is used multiple times, such as another situation where a box needs to be clicked 99 times for the next staircase to be shown but there’s not enough time for 1 cursor to do it, so another cursor must sacrifice its life so the next cursor can make it through.
Out of all the games I’ve ever played in my life, I don’t remember a single one that uses this concept of the player dying and as they use replay the game, their previous actions are replayed in real time in such a way that they help themselves out. It’s a very short game that can be finished in less than 15 minutes once you understand what needs to be done to get to the staircase to the next level.
This makes me wonder if this concept of multiplicity can be implemented in future games; there’s been many interesting puzzle games involving changing your visual perspective of objects (e.g. EchoChrome, Crush, Super Paper Mario), matching specific color blocks (e.g. Audiosurf, Lumines, Dr. Mario) and even blending adventure with puzzles (e.g. Zack & Wiki, Professor Layton). Whatever happens, I’m glad that the puzzle genre is no longer limited to jig-saw puzzles, crosswords and Tetris-clones.
Cursor*10 is a short, fun and original flash puzzle game that is easy on the mind and can be easily played from beginning to end once the player remembers where the stairs are and where the buttons are.
Link: Cursor*10
For folks with access to cable TV in Somerville, MA, I'll be appearing on an upcoming episode of Inside SCAT, a new show about stuff going on around the community access TV station that helps me produce The Gameshelf. The show airs Tuesday evenings at 7:30 on channel 3. I'm on either next Tuesday or the week after, depending upon how quickly stuff gets edited. Hurrah for community access TV!
I also got a chance to meet Danny Martinez, a Somerville High student who produces a weekly live TV show about video games called S'Ville Games. It airs every Tuesday at 3:30, and features call-in segments. Give it a watch, if you're in town!
According to the game's official mailing list, Looney Labs is letting Aquarius drift out of print for the time being, so that they can concentrate more on their core products, like Fluxx and Icehouse Treehouse.
This is kind of a bummer; when I first became a Looney fan around 1999, the game was their most recent release, and so it's always been closely tied to the company itself in my mind. It's the single game that best visually personifies the Looneys' "Hippie Game Company" self-image, with its colorful, Peter Max-esque artwork. And, while a lot of hobbyist-gamers I know roll their eyes at its many random factors, it's definintely the only Looney game that I can consistently get anyone in my family to play!
But, business is business, and I totally understand their decision. In the meantime, you can take Aquarius for a spin online at Volity.net, or via Kory Heath's Javaquarius. If you dig it enough to want your own real-life deck, your best bet is to grab one from the Labs' online store, since they've stopped distributing it to retailers.
Not so much with the posting lately; a new (game-related!) project that I can't talk much about yet has sprouted in my middle of my life like a delicious and fecund springtime mushroom. You see what it's done to my sense of metaphor? You don't want to see my writing right now, anyway.
But for now, it's time to close some tabs!
The Waxy.org fellow got his hands on an ancient hard drive from the offices of Infocom, the long-defunct (but Cambridge-based!) publishers of the most well-known text adventure games in the 1980s. He shares some details from "the best parts", including design notes and swirling, dramatic internal emails regarding a never-released sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Because this received so many links from more timely game-news blogs (cough), a lot of the Infocom alums mentioned in the story showed up in the attached comment thread to flesh out the details personally, and one of them's apparently been move to pen his own view of the saga for Wired magazine. (See? There is an advantage in waiting a week to link to it. Mm-hmm.)
Lost Cities is out for XBox 360 now (as a US$10 download), and here's a video (using some whackjob MS-proprietary format, sorry) about the team adapting the tabletop party game Wits & Wagers for the platform. Word on the street that the numba-one game on Microsoft's "Live Arcade" downloadable-game service is not any sort of action-fighty game, but Uno, which has put away around 1.5 million copies through it.
So, yes, Microsoft has thrown down and put forward this console as embracing the world of tabletop games that are more obscure to American audiences than Risk. The examples I've gotten to see so far have been fairly decent and faithful adaptations, so I cautiously salute this.
Archaeologists in Iran have indentified some grid-shaped rock carvings on Khark Island as being the play surface of a millenia-old board game. No word on what kind of game it was, though the article seems to imply that it could be some relative of Backgammon. No additional commentary from the original designers this time, sadly. Anyway, an interesting antidote to the last time Iran showed up in this blog.
Andrew at Grand Text Auto describes another interesting never-was game from the 1980s, an Atari VCS game where you had to program an on-screen robot to complete tasks, such as navigating a maze. Yes, it looks like a totally bomb-ass cool version of Secret Collect. I would have loved this. Apparently the original designer is releasing some homemade cartridges with the game software on it; see article for details.
Via Play This Thing, we see that several of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf pick-a-path adventure game books from the 1980s have become free downloads. I played and enjoyed these as a kid, and as Greg notes in that post, they're an important evolutionary step in the development of single-player role-playing experiences, even though nobody(?) is publishing books like them nowadays.
As promised, the content of my April 22 presentation:
Game Genre and Game Interaction
Thanks to Joe Gilbert of the Scholars' Lab for inviting me to speak at UVA.
Do you remember the game Battletoads? It is one of the most difficult games I ever played in my life, and like Contra, you need a second player if you want to get through it without cheating or dying excessively.
The reason why I am mentioning it is because there has been a sudden explosion of rumors regarding a new Battletoads game for the Wii. The second I saw the YouTube trailer, I immediately suspected it was false. At first, I noticed that their fake trailer is simply composed of other Wii-related video clips and stolen 3D videos slapped together, with a announcer talking as if he was a monster truck derby. Also, they took clips from a Red Steel trailer, so a player is slashing the Wii remote like a sword, then they show a clip of one of the Battletoads jumping in the air. This makes no sense. They even mentioned that Battletoads would be on Virtual Console soon, which also made it seem more like a scam.
Battletoads was developed by Rare, who has left Nintendo, and is now making games for Microsoft! There was talk of having GoldenEye 007 on Virtual Console some time ago, however there are many legal rights between Microsoft owning Rare, Nintendo owning the game made by Rare, and Activision now owning the James Bond franchise itself. So in order for Nintendo to get GoldenEye 007 on Virtual Console, Microsoft, Rare, Nintendo and Activision must come to an agreement which they must all abide to. This is no different than if it was the Battletoads game, or even Banjo-Kazooie or Perfect Dark. They even made Perfect Dark Zero and currently working on a new Banjo-Kazooie game for Xbox 360 with no legal issues since Rare owns all the characters and they are both new games and not remakes or ports.
On the fake preorder website, there is a phone number that changes randomly every time it is refreshed. Each number is a Church of Scientology in multiple cities. The idea is that the unsuspecting person calls their church, and when they say "Thank you for calling the Church of Scientology", the person would say "Scientology? I thought this is the number for preordering Battletoads" Can Scientology still operate if they get all these calls about Battletoads? Yes they can! Scientology.org survived a wave of Denial of Service attacks and they'll survive this wave of annoying calls.
I decided to write about this because this actually brought back good memories of when I used to play Battletoads & Double Dragon on SNES. I loved the soundtrack and it was cool to have more players to choose in this one. The giant toad fist that finishes off an enemy is always entertaining and never gets boring. The beat-em-up style and weird punk-style characters made the game stand out very well in an already-crowded video game market.
In summary, I don't believe a single word until Nintendo or Rare makes a statement proving otherwise.
Quick pointer to an audio interview with Rand Miller, conducted by Julian Murdoch of Gamers With Jobs, the day after Uru Live shut down.
Here's a text transcript by Uru players Generator, CrisGer, and Mara.
Not a lot of new specifics, but it's the best braindump we've gotten recently from behind Cyan's magic curtain.
Here's the top half of a banner ad for the latest edition of Diplomacy that I just spotted on BoardGameGeek. It's unclear whether this was designed by the BGG folks, or by Avalon Hill / Hasbro themselves, though there's no reason to think it isn't the latter case.
Even if that's so, I'm guessing it's a custom-produced ad for BGG, a very popular site with a huge slate of semi-apocryphal group-knowledge; all BGG fans know that Diplomacy's a great game that you should never play with anyone you care about. Even so, "buy this game because it will make you sad and alone" still seems an odd message to make so overt in your ad copy. It'd be like seeing an ad for Fluxx on BGG using the site's general attitude about that title: "Everyone in the world hates this game! How the hell have we sold almost 400,000 copies! Get yours today!"
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