unwiredben

Here's what's taking up my occasional gaming time these days:

• Geometry Wars Galaxies (Nintendo DS) - Robotron-style stylized shooter with great controls and lots of variety.  I got this last week and it's quickly become my "got five minutes" game.
• Rock Band (XBox 360) - Annelies has been helping me with this, playing the drums and occasionally singing in our online band "The Pizza Dragons".  I'm enjoying the downloadable tracks for The Police and Weezer too.
• The Simpsons Game (Xbox 360) - I started this while Annelies was in Africa, and I picked it up again tonight to try to find more secrets on the early levels.  I really like the game's use of humor, original animation, and the series voice actors.
• Guitar Hero III (Xbox 360) - I found a good deal on this and a wireless guitar, so I figured I'd get an extra guitar to allow both guitar and bass in Rock Band.  I finally booted this today, and it's OK, although I don't like the classic rock emphasis in the track selection so far. Buying the No Doubt pack for this helps.
• World of Solitaire (web browser) - this is a full set of well-implemented solitare games that runs entirely in Javascript in your web browser. I'm very impressed with the technical skill shown here, and since I'm spending a lot of time in Javascript these days learning more about AJAX development, it's really neat to see these techniques applied here.
• Six Differences (Flash) - a really nice "spot what's different" game that you can play in your browser.  The pictures have nice animations, and I love how the designer includes the "remaining items" count in the scene.

I'm hoping to dig into the Wlliams Pinball Hall of Fame collection for the PS2 soon.  I love good video game recreations of pinball tables, and people say this disc is one of the best.  The Wii version is supposed to be even more fun, but I'm resisting getting another console anytime soon with the pending move to New York and resulting space downsizing.

First, I still don't know how to pronounce the name. Is it ee-ee-ee or just ee or maybe eeze. Don't know. Doesn't matter.

I spent some time last night looking through the UI. I like the device, but it lacks polish. For example, the most important tab on its interface is Play/Games, right. Of the several included:

Frozen Bubble, a Bust-a-Move/Puzzle Bobble clone, played fine, but the music playback was a bit choppy, making me think there was an issue with CPU scheduling or that it was just a little too-much for the hardware. It does run full-screen, a very good idea given the limited area.

Planet Penguin Racer is a 3D downhill racer based on the older TuxRacer game. It played nicely, although the frame rate made me wonder if it was using the 3D capabilities of the chipset or was just doing software rendering.

Solitaire is the version from KDE and has nice animation and lots of variations. However, it suffered a lot from the limited screen area, and there were no smaller sized cards available to let games like Spider and Yukon fit on the screen without needing to scroll.

LTris is a Tetris clone, but it suffered from being too tall for the screen, making it difficult to see what's going on. They should have done more QA on this one and found a better version.

Potato Guy is Mr. Potato Head in software. It also lets you dress up Tux the Penguin and an aquarium. Cute.

Crack Attack is a version of Tetris Attack, a timed block swapping game. It suffered from screen size issues, but it didn't look like any gameplay was obscured.

The final pre-installed game is Sudoku from the Gnome desktop. It does have a full screen mode and plays OK, but it doesn't seem to support pencilmarks, something I used in a lot in the Astraware version on the Treo and Foleo devices.

More on more serious uses of the device later.

I Heart GameTap. Earlier this month, I finally finished the first episode of Sam and Max and started on number two, and now I've finally found the quirky wonder of Typing of the Dead. I could have gotten this years ago for my Sega Dreamcast, but I never got the keyboard peripheral for it. However, playing it in high-res on a PC monitor with my ergonomic keyboard isn't too shabby, and it's about the most fun I've ever had with a typing game. The genre's been around forever (see Typo Attack for an early example), but it never was done with zombies. I think something like this would have been an awesome game for the Foleo. Astraware did a typing/Graffiti game called T-Blaster back in 2002... it's not as much of a challenge with the Treo and Centro keyboards, but add zombies, and you've got something special.

The other games that have taken a bit of my time are Picross DS (puzzle-solving crack that I've been working on since August) and the Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass (awesome touch-screen action-adventure that continues to introduce new and interesting kinds of interaction even 2/3rds of the way through the story). I Heart the Nintendo DS too.

BTW, it's not been all game playing... but I can't write about work right now, and I've been covering my travels through Twitter (and the repostings here). I'll have some pictures from my trip to Colorado up soon too.

One of my favorite casual strategy games of the last few years is Oasis by Mind Control Games. It plays like a cross between Mine Sweeper, Civilization, and Tower Defense. You have to explore a small board, link together cities, figure out from where the barbarian attackers will arrive, find a glyph, and research new technology all with a limited number of moves. A single round lasts a few minutes, but the game links multiple rounds together to form a complete game session where you're trying to collect all of the Glyphs and make your desert civilization prosper.

I bring this up because I had it installed on my laptop, then when I updated to a newer Dell a few months ago, I wasn't able to run it anymore because of the DRM on the downloaded copy. I couldn't find my receipt or any registration info, so I assumed I'd be without. Then, at lunch today, I stopped by the local Big Lots! store looking for some shipping supplies, and I found several boxed copies for $6 each. I picked up one and it installed and worked without any problems.

I'm a big fan of the Carcassonne games, and I particularly like the Hunters and Gatherers version; you can get through a game fairly quickly, and scoring is easier than the standard version.

Last night, I created my own solitaire version of the game that I played while Annelies was working on schoolwork. It's based on some variants I saw on BoardGameGeek for the main game.

Start with the standard set. Go ahead and pull out your color of meeples and put one on the scoring card. Also, play the standard starting tile. Now, draw 32 tiles from the normal tile pool. These will be your supply. If you want a shorter game, you can draw less, but I found this number to last around twenty minutes of play. You should also shuffle and put aside the bonus tiles.

At this time, you start a normal game, pulling one tile at a time. However, if you have any valid move after placing the tile, you must take it. This means that sometimes, you won't complete something immediately because it would mean that you'd have to put a meeple down in an unproductive meadow or sacrifice one of your huts, but it adds some challenge to the game.

Play as normal, including the playing of bonus tiles, until you've gone through all of your initial stack. At this point, do the final scoring of the game. I did three rounds of this last night and ended up with scores around 110, 125, and 145.

I could think of some other variations. You could use two colors and setup some kind of scoring where you get double points for completing items which have both colors in use.

I just saw a link to the new Tetris Zone game for Windows, and the system requirements threw me for a major loop:

• Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• 512MB RAM
• 64MB Video Card
• OpenGL 1.4 or Better
• 65MB Disk Space

You need half-a-gig of RAM to run Tetris? That's over 32,000 times the amount of memory that came on the original Game Boy. I guess color takes up a lot of space. :)

I read the news about a mobile version of Guitar Hero with some trepidation.  How can this work?  Since it's being designed for cell phones, it's probably just going to be some sort of game where you have to press the four-way pad on the phone in time with the music.  However, if some developer was interested in doing it for the Palm Treo, I've got a different idea.

Divide the screen into three or four horizontal lanes.  These represent the frets.  Have the notes come from left-to-right across the screen, perhaps with some sort of 3-D effect to give them more time on the left side.  Use your finger to move up and down the right side of the screen, then use your other hand to press the space bar or hit the five-way navigator to strum the guitar.  Effectively, you're using the finger movement to emulate the multi-finger fret board on the console 's guitar controller.  You couldn't do chords with this, but I bet you could do hammer-ons and hammer-offs with this kind of interface.

You could invert this control scheme by using the four app buttons as the frets and strumming with the stylus, but I think that wouldn't feel as nice, as it would be harder to work with; it might also suffer from multiple button detection woes.

I've got no time to try to implement this right now, but if anyone wants to steal this idea (all I want is a little credit), feel free.

Over the weekend, while Annelies was away working on her law school musical, I had a chance to finally try out a bunch of NEW Atari 2600 games that I've been gathering over the last year.  These were all homebrew games programmed by amateur developer all over the world and released by the AtariAge website (which is based here in Austin, Texas!)

The Great Ones

I'm really impressed by a few of the games in the pile.  These were the ones that were fun to play and had interesting graphics (at least for a 30-year old video game system).

Allia Quest - it's a shooter with detailed enemies flying in dangerous patterns.  I liked the details of the various attack waves here and the need to both dodge and shoot.  If you miss some of the attackers, they come back and give you a chance to shoot them down again.

Lady Bug - a very nice recreation of the arcade game which gets the sound right, includes the color changing bonus dots and turnstiles, and even has the floating bug death animation.  This would have sold a million if it were released in 1982.

This Planet Sucks - a variation on Taito's Lunar Rescue arcade game where you have dodge asteroids to land on one of three tiny platforms, then navigate through a sea of alien ships to dock with your command module.  This is a frustratingly hard game, especially when the guys you're trying to save run directly under you ship as you're trying to land, causing them to be splattered by your lander's exhaust.

Oystron - I've actually had this one for a few years, and I love it!  It's a horizontally-scrolling shooter like Defender, and it's very fast.  In addition to all the destruction, there's a collecting aspect, as you also need to pick up blocks left behind by some of the attackers and deposit them in rows where they will turn into bombs that you can use against the aggressive boss at the end of each level.

Toyshop Trouble - this was a limited edition 2006 holiday cart and is no longer for sale.  That's too bad, as it's one of the best 2600 games I've played.  You're an elf, and you've got to gather paint from pans on the side of the screen and apply it in various ways to the toys in Santa's workshop.  Sometimes you'll have a toy like a candy cane where you have to apply multiple colors, sometimes you'll have to apply colors in the right order.  Plus, there's a time limit.  It's frantic, but also really great, and it even has cool Christmas music between screens.

Star Fire is another arcade port, this time of a first-person space shooter.  Graphics are Star Wars inspired with lots ot TIE Fighters, and an occasional appearance by Boba Fett's Slave-1.  I think I also saw the TARDIS go by once... at least until I blew it into pieces with a dozen blasts of my constantly overheating laser beams.

Those That Are Just OK

A-VCS-tec Challenge had pretty graphics, but the gameplay was boring. 
AStar was an interesting puzzle game, but it got hard really quickly.
Pesco was a decent clone of Pac-Man, but with fish and crabs in the place of the Pac-Man and ghosts, but I didn't want to keep playing it.
Power Off was fun for a few minutes, but it's also pretty unforgiving.
Reindeer Rescue was the holiday cart from 2005, and while the chase idea was well done, it's the kind of game where you just have to die over and over to figure out what patterns to follow.
Vault Assault resembles with four-way laser battles in Cosmic Ark, but even more hectic, and while it had some fun moments, it didn't wow me.

The Ones That Would Cause a Second Video Game Crash

Backfire was just confusing to play, but the problem could be with my TV -- the shots might be flickering in such a way that I can't see them on the digital set.
Merlin's Walls required me to turn my head sideways in order to be correctly oriented, but it just made me dizzy.
Alfred Challenge was disappointing, reminding me of a slow version of Fast Eddie, but without the item collecting.

One of the way's I've spent my time in this cold spell where I've been trapped at home by the waves of nordic ice has been playing a Nintendo DS game that I picked up a few months ago. the one portrayed in this Penny Arcade comic. It reminds me of the amazing things you can do with a touch screen that don't t require making colored gems disappear.

vs.

After a few years of playing online fairly frequently, I've finally won a tournament at the Button Men website.  #9040, Match of the Day.  OK, so it was a 8 person tourney, and I did win two of the matches by forfeit because the other player hadn't moved for 14 days, but it's still a win.  The final match was my button, Cheese Weasel, versus the evil Pikathulhu.  The first round was tense with us tying on points, but with some luck, I went on to win the next three matches.  Hopefully, this win won't be my last.

(Technically, I won a tournament early in my playing career with a forfeit in the championship match, but a long-standing bug on the BM website has prevented that tournament from finishing, so it's never shown up on my record.)

Yesterday's first film was the 6:45 showing of "Darkon", a documentary about a live action role playing campaign in Maryland. The team behind the film was doing a demonstration of their padded sword fighting techniques outside the Convention Center when my group was coming back from lunch, so we all got mini-posters and got to see a News 8 Austin reporter right it out with a guy in armor and a guy on stilts.

The film was fairly well done and quite entertaining. While it's a documentary, it's a doc about a fictional story, this alternate reality that a bunch of Maryland LARPers have created. It's clear that many of the shots were inspired by Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, and there's plenty of majestic battle. Also fun were the personal moments where we follow some of the main role players into their personal lives and see how they interact with their families and kids. The scene where a 7-year old kid dresses as a knight and does a full battle drill for a few minutes was very cute and the audience clapped twice during it.

They had several of the LARPers up on stage with the directors for the Q&A, and in addition to the usual questions about how the film was shot and financed, we also found out about what happened in the Darkon campaign after the tumultous events.

If you like D&D or hitting people with padded sticks, you should really try to get down here for one of the two remaining screenings. It's at Alamo Downtown Monday at 1:30pm and back at the Austin Convention Center on Friday the 17th at 9pm.

Literally, OMG. I saw this earlier today on X-Play, my favorite video game review/juvenile humor/political commentary show. Seriously, they did a whole episode devoted to balls that had a long Howard Zinn ("A People's History of the United States") reference in the middle of a review of Pac-Man World 3.

Here's the link to today's disturbing video:
X-Play presents "The Passion of the Christ 2: Judgement Day".

Oh, so I've also been playing some video games lately...

Oasis is a strategy game that's best described as "5-minute Civilization". Very addictive and quite worth the $20 registration fee. It was named Game of the Year for 2005 by the GameTunnel indie-gaming site.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a Game Boy Advance game that I got at a Toys 'R' Us clearance last year. When I first started playing with it, I found it to be pretty dull, but I picked it up again a few nights ago and have started enjoying it. The game is about elaborate missions where you pick a set of your characters to do turn-based combat against monsters and foes. At first, it seems like there are too many variables to manage in setting up your party, but once you realize that you're getting plenty of money to buy new equipment and that you need to let characters stick with a class for a while in order to master skills, it starts to be more manageable.

Jak II is frustrating, but it looks gorgeous in widescreen and it's got some really funny moments while being more substantial than the first Jak & Daxter game. The platforming and shooting sections are really good, but the in-game races have the most appeal. It is hard to not throw your controller across the room during the tenth time you just barely miss finishing before time runs out, but that does make the one time you do complete it so much sweeter. I don't like the large amounts of travel you have to do to go from mission to mission, but the intense game play makes up for those deficiencies.

Sitting near the top of my "to be played" queue: Psychonauts (PS2), The Movies (PC), Civilization IV (now with patches, PC), EyeToy: Antigrav (PS2), and Sly Cooper (PS2).

Last night, I finally picked up a couple of Nintendo GameCube games to go with the bongo controller I'd gotten on clearance at Target back in October. Specifically, I picked up "Donkey Konga" and "Donkey Kong Jungle Beat". The first is a music game where you play along to various songs, while the second is a platformer game where the drum beats control your motion on the screen.

I like both games, but after a half hour of play, I started getting a sharp pain in my left hand, and it's still there in a much dulled version four hours later. The big problem with the games isn't the drums; I found that motion to be fairly easy. It's the clapping. In the games, clapping at the right moment is an essential part of play -- they are part of the rhythm for Donkey Konga, and they're used to activate combos and defeat bosses in Jungle Beat. I think I made an early mistake of clapping too hard; I later learned that the microphone was pretty sensitive, and I only needed a soft clap to activate the games. However, by that time I was already aching.

Grrr. I'll probably try them again after I've given my hands some rest, but if this keeps up, the bongo drum and games are going to be put up for sale to someone who can appreciate them without hurting.

Here are a few pointers to some podcasts that I've found to be really interesting in the last couple of months. Load up your MP3 player and enjoy your travels!

Bob Hanner at Pop!Tech 2005 - Bob talks about how we can use a specific gene sequence as a "barcode" to identify the species of an animal. He thinks that a combination of cheaper sequencing and better databases can help all of us become more "bio-literate" about the species that are around us, and that can lead to better conservation efforts.

David Borstein interview - David had an idea about "social entrepreneurs", a class of people that want to drive innovation in the civic sector, with the drive to get people to invest in the long-term future of their communities.

Brewster Kahle at SDForum - he talks about how the Internet Archive got started and the big problems they've been working on in their efforts to preserve all this ephemeral knowledge from the web and other media.

John Markoff at SDForum - talk about how personal computing really got started in the counterculture of 1960's California, especially around Stanford University. Part 2 of the talk is a Q&A with John and many of the people he profiled.

Episodes #12 and #13 of the Bobby Blackwolf Show - a video gaming podcast that featured a long interview with Curt Vendel, Atari historian and producer of the Atari Flashback 2.0 console -- a recreated Atari 2600 all-in-one unit that's just been released for the holiday season.

So, I just found out that there's an eBook version of the book based on the movie that's based on the video game "Doom". That's at least two steps from the original material too many. While I've not seen "Doom" the movie, I hear that ten minutes of the film is shot in the first-person shooter perspective that the game made famous. In the novel, is this whole section written in second person? "You move down the hall, reloading your shotgun. Turning to the right, you spot an imp in the distance. You pull the trigger on the gun, strafing to the left to avoid the imp's fireball."

Of course, I don't want to be the guy that's having to explain that rather than playing "Doom" on my handheld, I'm reading the book version of the movie of the game. "I've got Doom on here, and I just passed the fourth chapter. I had to read that one three times to make it to the end!"

I just found out about the 2005 Texas Pinball Expo. Anyone want to drive up to Irving, Texas (right around the DFW airport) with me on Saturday to play a whole bunch of pinball and classic video games? Details are online right here.

I'm sorta serious. There was a time when I'd drive to Dallas for far sillier things.

(Update: I've found a friend to go with me, so I'm heading up early Saturday morning. There was also talk of IKEA!)

Well, I've just got all my travel booked. Next Saturday, I get up very early, catch a 6:20AM flight to San Jose, drive up to the San Francisco Hyatt, and get to spend two days in the past at Classic Gaming Expo 2005! It's going to be a tough schedule, with me returning at midnight on Sunday, but if I'd stayed on for a training class at Palm on Thursday, I would have missed three things I'd scheduled to do in Austin that week, and that would suck.

I'd already gotten my CGExpo pass last month, but I hadn't decided if I was going to use it. I was going to try to coordinate with work, but I decided to just go it alone instead. I really enjoyed my previous three visits to CGExpo in 2000, 2001, and 2002 when it was in Las Vegas, but I'd skipped the last two years. When I saw that they were skipping 2006, I decided I had to make this one. While there's no Steve Wozniak keynote this year, there will be panels featuring lots of arcade and console programmers, including a great lineup from Activision and Imagic. I'm also looking forward to the vendor area, which proved very dangerous to my wallet during past events.

In making my plans, I discovered that American is about to change their Austin/San Jose flight schedule. When I was looking for a return flight during the week, flight 502, the one I normally take to return home, was leaving at 4:55PM instead of the 6:32PM it's been for the last few months. That's a pretty major change; for a work trip, that means I have to cut out around 3PM instead of 4:30PM to make my flight home. I guess I shouldn't complain too much, as it will be nice to get home before midnight.

I went to bed on Saturday night not knowing what I'd be doing on Sunday. Thanks to ocyn and satyric, I ended up having quite a fun afternoon.

First was a visit to Taj Palace. Good company, not that great food for me, the spice-loving vegetarian. I did get to tell my "Spock is my vegetarian prototype" story again, and I finally had an occasion to use one of the puns that I had stored away for years:

ocyn: You've really got to try their naan, it's amazing?
me: Would you describe it as heavenly?
ocyn: That would be fit.
me: Then, I guess it's naan of the above!

Then, we saw a screening of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", a film I had not originaly planned on seeing. I'm glad I went; it's Hollywood popcorn fluff, but their's a lot of dark humor about relationships and marriage combined with well choreographed over-the-top gunplay. Jolie and Pitt had good chemistry, and only occasionally was I thrown out of the film. Not much for the thinking, although having a minor character get interrogated by Brad while wearing a "Fight Club" t-shirt was a nice touch. Tim from the gaming group joined us for this.

That was followed by board gaming, specifically Alhambra, a German game where you compete to build your own city, trying to gain points by controlling the most tiles of each type. This was my second time playing the game, and so far, I've really enjoyed it. Dane, another gamer, showed up right as we were finishing the game, and he came along to dinner at ZuZu.