Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Games
The next big thing
I love it when the creeps look creepy.
This guy must be the town dentist.
With dragons like these, who needs blow dryers?
Kill this bad boy and you’ll feel like you’ve really accomplished something. Something more than, say, killed another 120 hours playing video games.
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What are you playing?
Not like I need more distractions . . .
I bought a little black book. It’s for writing down ideas pertinent to a particular story I have in mind. I’ve lost track of how many such little books I have lying about, each with a few handwritten pages, stories I’ve long since forgotten. It’s fun to reread these (not) and wonder what on earth I was thinking about that made me think it was worth 2 to 5 dollars to buy that book.
Anyway, I keep meaning to write the word nephilim down in my little black book, but I am distracted.
I am distracted by Bubble Spinner. It’s at the top of my frequently visited list, beating out gmail and even xHamster. Yes, I would rather toss colored bubbles around than watch xHamster. Where are my priorities?
So what distracts you?
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Enraptured
I’m playing through Bioshock. Again. Bioshock 2 comes out in February, so I want to relive the experience before it’s old news.
For those of you unacquainted with Bioshock, here’s a quick intro.
Aftermath of the project & a new game
The kids had to do two-minute presentations on their projects. As I predicted, some of the kids had scrapbookers in the family. There were some interesting developments, though; one student constructed all of his pages on paper plates, and another took the Maximal Ingratiation approach, tailoring all of his answers to please the teacher. For, “If I could do something to make the world a better place . . .” he wrote, “I would make our Theology teacher President of the United States.” Or words to that effect.
Kinda undermines the introspective point of the assignment, but I give him props for good humor intuition: he had his class in stitches during his presentation.
Jake thinks his project had the only pop-up (and certainly the only pop-up Colbert). Go pop-ups!
In other news: got a great premise for an SF novel, or at least a short story. I’m pretty sure this hasn’t been done yet. But it’s just a premise (and a few features of the main character) but no story. It’s one of those “thaw out a frozen 21st Century guy in an unusual future” premises, and the unusual future is the kicker, of course. I have a good idea what the first two or three chapters would look like, but after that, I have no idea. Should I trust in the muse? It worked for my romance, but that’s romance. Everyone knows how that’s supposed to end.
New game: Osmos. You control this entity which looks a bit like a moon jellyfish; you propel yourself by farting out bits of your mass opposite to your direction of movement. Encounter something smaller than yourself and you absorb it, gaining mass; run into something bigger than yourself, and you lose mass (or die altogether if you don’t move real fast). Starts simple, rapidly becomes wicked hard.
Osmos is an indie game, downloadable for the low low price of ten dollars. In recent years, some of our best gaming experiences have been with indie games. I’ve previously blogged World of Goo, but I should have mentioned Braid, too. Neat stuff. And sooo addictive.
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I miss Bioshock
The disks are buried in a box. Somewhere in Santa Rosa.
What a game.
And now it’s a movie . . .
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Braided
This morning, I bought Braid online, and of course Jake’s the one who’s playing right now. Truly the mark of incipient old age: whether it’s chess or Braid or some tower game (Defense Grid the Awakening, to be exact), I’d rather watch my son play than get involved myself.
Braid is a Super Mario-style game with fiendishly clever puzzles all based upon the main character’s ability to manipulate time. His time-shifting abilities differ from one world to the next; for example, in the first world he only has a rewind function, while in a subsequent world, his motion (left versus right) controls time’s arrow. The result is that the exact same puzzle map in one world has a wildly different solution in the next.
There is a certain amount of arcade-style coordination-intensive keypunching which I dislike, but this seems to be unavoidable in scrollers like this (Oddworld, which I love dearly, has a similar flaw). I wish my puzzle games were puzzles and nothing more. Still, I prefer Braid to the Myst/Riven/Uru games, where you bang your head up against a wall trying to figure out how this lever makes that doowhizzle spin in order to make a gearbox door open, thus allowing you to let the light from Keyhole A hit Lens B just so, opening a door to Engine Room C . . . you get the idea.
Braid’s music is great, too. Unfortunately, you’ll be screwing with time so much (and thus, screwing with the soundtrack) that you’ll feel like a 1960s teenager searching for secret messages on Abbey Road.
The main character wants to find his girlfriend the Princess. Their relationship has hit the skids and has somehow wandered off into the realm of the hopeless. Hell, he can’t even find her (she’s been kidnapped by a monster, I think — don’t you hate it when that happens?) But he has learned from his mistakes, and now, wiser, he wants to go back in time to make things right.
This story is told in brief snatches between worlds (levels). The writing is alternately impressive and annoying, possibly the work of someone with a lot of raw but unpolished talent. Sometimes the author tries a little too hard.
I predict that when the little guy in the dress jacket finally finds his princess, no combination of time-shifting abilities will make things right again. Or at least, that’s how I would end things.
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When did that happen?
We only use one TV, Karen’s big flat screen TV which we keep in the master bedroom; and the only time Jake ever watches TV is either (A) when Mythbusters is on, (B) there’s some educational program Karen wants him to watch, or (C) there’s something on MSNBC or Comedy Central appealing enough to pull him away from the internet.
Last night, Countdown had footage of four lion cubs, so we hollered out for Jake to come see (since he’s a feline fanatic). Karen was brushing her teeth or some such and when she came out, she and Jake were briefly standing side by side. And good lord, he’s almost as tall as she is!
You always hear people say, “Enjoy them when they’re young, it’s over faster than you think,” but it’s stuff like this which drives it home.
Off topic, but: I asked him if he would mind if we sold the downstairs TV. It weighs a ton and we rarely use it. Correction: I’m the only one who uses it, and I think I’ve watched it three times in the last six months. It’s ridiculous to keep shlepping it around with every move.
It used to be Jake’s playroom TV, but if I remember correctly he stopped watching videotapes about the time we bought it. He’d watch his old Battlebots tapes, and that’s about it. He doesn’t even do that anymore.
So I think I have a name for his generation: it should be called the post-TV generation. I guess you might call it the internet generation, but so many of us are internet-fixated, the label is too general. But my generation grew up with TV-as-babysitter, and TV as primary source of entertainment all through my childhood and teenage years. I suspect many of today’s kids are weaned from TV and hooked on the net by the time they reach their 7th or 8th birthdays. Maybe sooner.
I think this is a good thing. The net is far more interactive, and, I would argue, challenging. If you don’t believe me, check out Closure, an odd black-and-white game which requires a great deal of outside-the-box thinking. I bogged down on level four; Jake finished it. (Oh, and yesterday he played a net game in which the goal was to psychoanalyze and cure various neurotic animals. He cured the sheep straight away, but the turtle was very troubled indeed.)
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Yeah, I’m bad
I get bored easily, which is why I rarely finish my games. Oblivion, Beyond Divinity, The Witcher, and so many more . . . all lie moldering on their virtual shelves. I’ve finished a few games, like Diablo and Diablo 2, Fallout 2, and Oddworld (about a dozen times), but so many more remain untouched. Waiting. You know, like those lonely toys in Toy Story.
I suppose I could reinstall Oblivion, but naaaah. I want to be this dude.
I remember playing the original Prince of Persia back in ’90, my internship year. Best I can recall, it was a linear scroller, heavy on the button-mashing, an exercise in eye-fingertip coordination. Lots of jumping and grabbing and leaping and hacking and smashing. I’ve been meaning to check out the newer versions of the franchise, but only got around to it today when I found the Sands of Time trilogy for twenty bucks.
A trilogy, a whole trilogy. Probably 60 hours of gameplay! Never mind that I’ll probably tire of it after two hours; for now, I’m a sword-wielding wall-walking somersaulting Prince of Persia.
I wish Diablo 3 would come out.
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Cuz it’s like secret
All I want to know is: what’s the release date for Diablo 3?
There are all kinds of nifty things on the official Blizzard site, like a cool cinematic and a map that finally puts Lut Gholein and Tristram — well, on the map. I mean, what kind of doofuses must ye be to not realize fantasy lovers like MAPS? (Note to Tammy: next book needs a map.)
There’s a gameplay video, too. I see that the Barbarian has a new skill: he can stomp his enemies into blood pudding. Cool!
But no word as to the release date. Blizzard, don’t you understand I really need more games I have no time to play?
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Squealing balls
For all you parents with young kids (protected static, Dean, I’m talkin’ to you guys):
a wonderful physics game. You can download a shorter version for free, but the full length game will cost ya $20.
If Tim Burton and Danny Elfman got together to create a physics game, this is what they would make. The artwork and music are that good. Check out this review, if you like, but I have to warn you: there be spoilers here. Half the fun of World of Goo is figuring out what things do and how they interact. The video tells way too much.
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