Finally. Finally the Mac will be getting some gaming love. Steam will be coming to the Mac in April and apparently all the major Valve titles (for example, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead) with it: Valve Brings Hit Games, Steam Service to Mac
I’ve always thought the apps that turn your iPhone/iPod Touch into a lighter, shotgun, lightsaber, etc. were pretty silly and this one is sillier than all of them. Nevertheless, I have to say it is probably the best one ever. I might even buy it myself.
If you’re already someone playing the latest designer games from around the world or you live on BoardGameGeek.com, move right along there’s nothing to see here. But if you’re like so many people who think, “Let’s play a board game,” and then proceed to whip out Monopoly, Life, Candyland, Trivial Pursuit, etc. then let me bend your ear for a minute.
Board games have changed a lot in the last 15-20 years. Especially in the last decade or so as tons of cool new games have been released. Here are a few favorites of mine. Most of them are considered staples of the new generation.
Settlers Of Catan – The best known of the bunch with over 600,000 copies sold in the United States according to this recent Wired magazine article. This one pretty much defines how you can still have a competitive game yet not have it be the kind of zero-sum relationship destroyer that Monopoly is. With Monopoly I can’t win unless I first make you lose. With Catan, I can’t win without trading with you (especially in the early game), and we both gain points from stuff we do, but I don’t win by taking points away from you, I win by just being the first one to ten points. You might have scored nine points yourself and the fact that you did can cushion losing and give you encouragement to try again.
For me the only downside to this game is that it doesn’t play well with less than three people and the playtime is the longest of all the games listed here (it can easily be a couple of hours).
Animal Upon Animal – First of all, Candyland and Chutes and Ladders have a place. They are teaching games for colors and counting for little kids. However, once you know your colors and numbers to 100, you are past both of those games and you never ever need to come back to them. If you’re looking for a fun game for a little kid that can also be enjoyed by adults, look no further than Animal Upon Animal. It’s a dexterity game where you stack oddly shaped wooden animals on top of other wooden animals in a big pyramid. First player to get rid of all seven of his/her animals wins.
Little hands are sometimes a bonus rather than a hindrance and even if you knock over the entire pile adding a piece, you only take two pieces back into your collection. The rest go into the box. That keeps it from getting too frustrating for little kids. If you need to further even the odds it’s easy to have a player start with six pieces or five instead of the normal seven so they can more easily win.
Ticket To Ride – There are multiple versions of this train game with maps for different countries and even some slightly different rules. I’m used to the Ticket To Ride Europe version with it’s train stations (an additional piece that I don’t believe was in the original Ticket to Ride). It’s fun, it can be played in an hour or so (maybe 90 minutes at the longest) and it’s a simple game to teach to new players because you only have four things you can do in a turn and most of the time you’re going to only be choosing between two things to do.
Gather up the colored cards you need to claim routes between major cities (using super nifty plastic trains to mark your route) and try to keep the secret the longer routes you are trying to complete to score extra points.
Dominion – An awesomely great card game in a big box. Seemingly endless variety thanks to the fact that in any given game you’re picking a set of ten cards to use out of 25 available cards and different choices can completely change the feel of the game. Easy to teach, reasonably short playtime (often less than an hour), and expansions like Dominion Seaside can give you more variation than you can even imagine.
Carcassonne – You’ll notice a theme to the entries in this list. They’re very easy to explain to new players and they tend to have pretty short playtimes. This one is no exception. The mechanic is a simple one. Draw a tile from a set of tiles and see how you can place it by matching its edges to tiles already played. That part of it only takes a second. Then you decide whether or not you want to put one of your small stock of pieces (seven little wooden people) on the board in order to try to score some points.
There are probably a dozen expansions for this game if you find you like it (as I do) so you can really expand the array of tiles, pieces for scoring, and methods for scoring points to increase the strategy or complexity of the game.
I was lucky enough to get to play all of these except Carcassonne with family over the holidays and everybody had a great time. I finally went to bed at 3am but people kept playing for hours more after that!
As I’ve said before, the best feature of the Nintendo DS Lite is its adult-with-other-responsibilities friendly ability to pause a game at any point. But having a feature like that is only good if there are good games and I would call Professor Layton and the Curious Village
I really wasn’t sure if I would enjoy a game that was based upon completing puzzles, but by the time I finished it I had played for about 12 hours and completed approximately 100 out of the 120 or so puzzles that are available in the game and had definitely enjoyed it. It doesn’t seem like a tedious slog of solving one puzzle after another because it’s wrapped up in an adventure game where you travel from place to place, talk to other characters, search for hint coins, watch videos, etc. In other words there’s lots of meta-game on top of the puzzles so they don’t comprise the whole experience.
I didn’t end up going back to try and track down the last few puzzles I had missed once I finished the game. I definitely felt like it ended at the right time, because I didn’t end up burned out or wanting lots more. If you can, give this game a try and see if it’s for you.
The contest to create a complete PBBG in two months has concluded and unfortunately Big Villain is just not ready yet. It’s a shame it wasn’t ready in time, but after about a month I was already getting pretty doubtful. It’s just too big a game for me to complete by myself in that timeframe with all the other stuff I have to do in my life. Nevertheless I’ve had a ton of fun working on it and absolutely nothing is going to stop me from completing it. I was working on the design of the site just last night to try and get it to something that doesn’t make your eyes bleed when you look at it. Hopefully by next week I’ll have accomplished that.
Anyway, some people did finish their games in the allotted time. Here are the final entries (though I’m not sure you can get into all of them yet, I think some authors were only planning on letting in the judges at this point):
I’m planning to take a look at each one I can and see what others were able to accomplish since October 11th when the contest started. I’m alternately impressed and disappointed with what I myself was able to accomplish in the same period of time. I figure I’ve got at least another six weeks or so of part time work before I’ll be ready for a beta of my game.
The documentary filmmaker who made BBS: The Documentary a few years ago about the BBS culture is making a new documentary about classic adventure games like Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, etc. It’s called Get Lamp and after I heard about it a long time ago I periodically remembered to go to its website only to find that nothing had happened. I figured that it was a promising project that would never get finished.
But just recently the author started up a blog called Taking Inventory to say, “Hey, my project really isn’t dead. Look, I’m working actively on it!” Some of the recent postings show some awesome photos of the research material Jason Scott has gleaned for this documentary including tons of material about Infocom and even scans of an original manual for Zork on the PDP-11.
If the topic interests you, start tracking the RSS feed for this blog. I look forward to seeing the final product.
The Browser-Based Game Zone is holding a game contest. If you build a PBBG between now and December 11th, 2008 you could win a lot of promotion on various sites around the web. Because I already have one designed that I really need to get serious about, I've decided to enter the game Big Villain (designed by myself and Darin Clark) into the contest.
If you follow my blog for any reason at all, you know that I started rewriting a series of tutorials on building a PBBG from PHP into Ruby on Rails. I've been posting those tutorials over at the BuildingBrowsergames.com website and hopefully they will be helpful to others. For me it has been helpful because it forced me to improve my Ruby on Rails skills and the fact that I'm nearly done (I did an outline of the last few entries it would take me to catch up with Luke the other day) gives me a boost because it reinforces the idea that I can start a project and finish it.
Part of what I'm fighting here is my own nature. I design something I think is going to be fun to build and interesting to use (or play in this case). Then, I procrastinate... a lot. After all, if I never built it, I can still imagine how great it is, but if I build it and people don't think it's fun or I can't get enough people to come to make it a success, that's failure. And failure is completely different from never having tried. Eventually I come up with some other super cool new idea and I can abandon the old one in the name of pursuing the "better idea".
So by saying, "I'm joining, I'm going to compete too," I'm hoping that it will serve as motivation for me to not only start this seriously but finish it as well. I've got a deadline that I've got to meet and I've said publicly that I'm going to meet it. OK, enough self revelation, what's the game?
You play as a mad scientist trying to take over the world. You gather parts for your world domination schemes, build lairs, hire minions and secret agents and launch operation after operation to build up your evil empire or defeat your opponents. None of this is ever taken very seriously though. When you first start out, your secret lair is your Mom's basement. You can install death traps in your lair like sharks with friggin' laser beams and you can secretly control quasi-legal companies like the RIAA and an inkjet ink manufacturer. The parts to world domination schemes are as varied as duct tape and a George Foreman Grill.
If I do it right, it'll be a fun game to play with a healthy dose of the ridiculous.
When I started playing games, it was an exciting time. I started with the old Basic Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) set that had the blue dragon on the cover and graduated to Advanced D&D but quickly resold the books because I didn't like the ruleset. After that I tried a lot of different role playing games (RPGs) like Top Secret, Tunnels and Trolls, etc. though the one I usually played was a space role-playing game called Traveller.
Anyway, back to the excitement factor. D&D was well established in a hurry, after all, it had kicked off the whole genre. But it wasn't completely unstoppable back then. New RPGs seemed to be rolling out on a weekly basis, microgames like those from Metagaming and Steve Jackson games were giving you fun boardgame and wargame experiences without being very expensive and they were easy to take to school or a friend's house. Then there were cool magazines (Space Gamer, Dragon, The Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society, etc.), miniatures, dice, and other products. If you took a whole month off from going to the store, by the time you went back it almost seemed like everything had changed. By contrast computer games were pretty much pathetic, lacking the massively multiplayer, gorgeous graphics, and huge elaborate environments that characterize the whole genre today.
Today computer games are cool and, at least to me, it seems the years have not been kind to boardgames, RPGs, and card games. After all, Hasbro has managed to purchase Avalon Hill and Wizards of the Coast (which had in turn purchased TSR to get Dungeons and Dragons). That means that when they aren't tending to the new version of Mr. Potato Head or G.I. Joe, they're thinking about Diplomacy, Dungeons and Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering. To me, that doesn't seem like a good thing.
But lately I've started to realize that I don't see the whole picture. Because one thing you never saw in the early 1980's was the word "free". Even if you did take the time to create a RPG or a game yourself, how would you distribute such a thing? Who would you give it to outside of your direct circle of friends and how would anyone else ever hear of it? A few simple RPGs and games made their way into the previously mentioned game magazines as supplements but then, buying a magazine isn't exactly "free" is it?
But today... Today is different. Now there's a whole category of games known as "print and play". In fact, the fabrication machine for many parts of a game has managed to sneak into our homes without many of us being aware of it at all. It disguises itself in the form of the color ink jet printer you likely have sitting no more than a few feet from you right this minute. If I send you a PDF file, that inkjet printer sitting beside you is practically a game manufacturing site. It will make boards, chits and other pieces, rules, reference cards, etc. and the whole thing will look better than the game materials we got with small games in the 80's or even the last few years. Here are some examples to make my point:
Typical "microgames" of the early 80's. The Car Wars is a premium example of the genre because it features a plastic box with enough room for dice and full color counters.
A typical inexpensive game of the late 90's early 2000's. No dice, no tokens, just cards and map pieces printed on the same cardstock you can buy cheaply for your own printed games.
Examples of recent "print and play" games Valor and Victory and Zombie In My Pocket. Note that the pieces and cards are all full color as is the V&V manual.
If you're the kind of person who isn't inclined to print out a lot of stuff and assemble it, then at least rulebooks can be sent to a print-on-demand publisher like Lulu.com and they'll print out a bound copy that is indistinguishable from a commercially produced book. Thus, for an RPG rules set you're already on par with what commercial game companies can produce in terms of quality. The only advantage they have anymore is the cost of goods (e.g. a book comparable to the full-color 224 page Dungeons and Dragons 4th ed Dungeon Masters Guide that sells for $24 at Amazon would be about $50 through Lulu, or $9 for a black and white only edition).
So both microgames and RPGs should see an influx of new games and new ideas from individuals who create and distribute everything online. For board games though, there's more to it. There are the pieces, dice, and often unique parts just for a given game. Until I can give you a file of information and have you manufacture a file of plastic pieces from a replicator on your desk or send you to a commercial site that fabricate them on demand, the amount of competitive pressure individuals can exert on Milton Bradley, Wizards of the Coast, and WizKids is limited.
Still, that's not to say that there aren't people trying to do more sophisticated game materials. Hour of Glory can be purchased as a boxed game or you can buy it as a PDF for about a 1/3rd of the price. It has good reviews and looks to be a fun game. You're just expected to do more printing and more mounting, cutting, etc. than you would have to do normally for a little microgame. And if you're a miniatures fan, you can buy paper miniatures and complete environments like towns or dungeons in PDF form. You supply the paper, the printer, and the time to assemble it.
Lately I've been very interested in persistent browser based games (PBBGs) and while I've been working on the tutorial for how to build one using Ruby on Rails (see this post for details), I've also been trying to learn more about different ones. So logically I wanted to play some of the most popular ones out there. Lists exist on site after site of "top ten", "hot", and "most popular" PBBGs but the problem is, each and every list on every site devoted to ranking them is different. Often completely different. It's not hard to pick two so-called top sites and find that there's not a single game in their top ten in common.
So I went to 14(!) different game ranking lists for PBBGs and wrote down the top ten at each site. Then I tallied up the results looking across all of them rather than just one site or another. Each and every site typically featured several obscure games not mentioned anywhere else but quite a few games kept popping up over and over again.
The following are ranked according to how many different top ten lists each appeared in. All the ones listed at the same rank appeared equally often and are in no particular order at all.
1st Place: Omerta
2nd Place: Eternal Duel, Crimson Moon
3rd Place: World of Dungeons, The Mobster Game
4th Place: Bulfleet, Tycoon Online, Tropical Terror, Earthly Endeavours, Rogue Vampires, Eternal Wars, Magic Duel Adventures
While hardly a scientific survey, I think it's safe to say that this is a list of some of the most popular browser games on the Internet.
When I started reading the series of blog posts on the site Building Browsergames, I thought it was cool that somebody had started a project to build a persistent browser based game (PBBG) and shared the code. But it has gone a great deal further than that. Every post that features code is done first in PHP and then repeated again with Perl. Beyond that is the frequency of posts. Having worked on XPlus, DevGames.com, and finally GameDev.net I've heard about hundreds of game projects started by enthusiasts. I can tell you that the vast majority of them have grandiose ideas and then reality intrudes. After a while it gets hard or boring and they stop.
But not this time. Dozens of entries later, you can actually see a bunch of the pieces that make up a simple PBBG sitting there and there's lots of interesting design advice to go with it.
Now it's my chance to participate in the creation of this Rosetta Stone of programming, because that's what it is. The original Rosetta Stone was a tablet carved with bureaucratic proclamations about taxes and statues, it's value lay in the fact that it had the same text in both Greek and Egyptian languages and it gave us a key to begin decrypting hieroglyphics. Maybe this one isn't quite up to that level, but it gives us a place to start discussing PBBG design and it gives us that in both Perl and PHP. My contribution is a simple one. I've gone back and started rewriting all the same code again, this time in Ruby on Rails.
Perhaps someone else will add Python with Django versions of everything or Java and some mix of technologies. I don't know. But whatever happens, this might prove helpful to someone looking for a language to learn, looking to learn about PBBG building, looking to learn programming, or looking to move from one language to another. For me personally it was an attempt to both improve my own basic skills at Ruby and Rails as well as hopefully adding to something that might prove helpful to others.
The entries as they stand today:
| Designing Your Game's Database | |||
| The Registration Page | |||
| Why You Should Be Hashing Sensitive Data | |||
| Using Configuration Files | |||
| The Login Page | |||
| Cross Site Scripting: What It Is And How To Prevent It | |||
| A Flexible Stats System | |||
| Implementing A Flexible Stats System | |||
| Implementing An Email Confirmation System | rails |
||
| Getting Started With A Templating System | |||
| Making Your Forms Auto-Focus | |||
| Making Your Forms Remember Their Values | |||
| A Brief Design Document | |||
| Putting It All Together | |||
| Adding Stats | |||
| Displaying A User's Stats | |||
| A Simple Combat System | |||
| Creating The Bank | |||
| Healing Your Players | |||
| Forcing Users To Log In | |||
| Designing A Flexible Items System | |||
| Retrieving Items | rails |
||
| Reducing Repetition | rails |
||
| DRYing Out Our Database Connections | N/A |
||
| DRYing Out Our Stats | N/A |
||
| Securing Our Hashes | N/A |
||
| Simple Cron | |||
| Using The "On-View" Method Instead Of Cron | |||
| Buying Weapons | rails |
||
| Swapping Weapons | rails |
||
| Integrating Weapons Into Our Combat System | rails |
||
| Buying Armor | rails |
||
| Integrating Armor Into Our Combat System | rails |
||
It's a good online game where you play through trying to hack various forums around the web. It's wall-to-wall goofy obscene humor and fun gameplay that only takes a few minutes a day.
Sign up and play here for free: http://www.forumwarz.com/
Consider this my first follow up to my Online Games posting where I talked about both Travian and Urban Dead.
It's just a simple comparison between two images dressed up in Flash with automatic acknowledgment of the changes when you click on them and moving elements. But, it's fun and it will take you a while to go through all the pictures and find five differences in each and every one of them: Five Differences
I hardly ever play any online games so the fact that I went all the way to the end on this one should tell you it was enjoyable and well done.
Wii outsold the PS3 four to one in Japan in April. Then five to one in May and six to one in June. Sense a trend there?
Of course, Sony has it good in Japan compared to Microsoft. Wii outsold Xbox 360 by 15 to 1. Ow.
I don't really have much to add to this article. It's just a good one covering anticipated upcoming titles for the Nintendo DS Lite. As a big fan of the platform (currently the best selling game system in the world) it mentioned some games I hadn't heard about that I may tackle after I finish Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time.
Article - Eye on '07: DS // DS /// Eurogamer
If you're interested in getting a DS Lite or Mario & Luigi to play yourself you might consider purchasing them through these links to Amazon and I'll get a small stipend for advising you:
Nintendo DS Lite - Polar White
Nintendo DS Lite - Onyx Black
Nintendo DS Lite - Coral Pink
Mario & Luigi Partners In Time
I bought Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney for Rockelle's birthday thinking that she liked both games on the Nintendo DS Lite (esp. Animal Crossing) and she liked shows about lawyers (esp. Boston Legal). Add to that the fact that it's one of the highest rated games for the DS and I thought I had a sure thing. I swear I didn't buy it because I thought I would like it.
Unfortunately, it's all about logic and figuring out that the witness just made a statement that contradicts some piece of evidence in a perhaps subtle way and it was a recipe for a game she didn't like. Meanwhile, she continues to play complex puzzle games that would make me tear my hair out, so go figure. Anyway, when I saw it, I realized that it was my childhood ambition come true. When I was a little kid I watched Perry Mason like it was my job. When adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said lawyer. Years passed though, and I discovered that many lawyers weren't exactly like Perry Mason. On the show Perry could not only free the innocent, he could investigate the crime and elicit a witness stand confession from the actual murderer. But in Phoenix Wright, you get to do exactly that! You get to question witnesses, raise objections, do some investigation, free the innocent, and even trap the real murderer in his or her web of lies.
The original version in Japan had four cases but when it was brought over to the US it was moved from an older version of the Gameboy to the DS. I guess they felt they had to have at least one case which used the touch screen and other capabilities of the DS so they added one new case. It's definitely the weakest of the bunch though. They were caught up in gadget fever so they made sure you could spray Luminol spray to find blood, sprinkle powder and blow it off to find fingerprints, and even watch and rewind video to look for clues. Suddenly you're Phoenix Wright: Crime Scene Investigator in the last case! Oh well, even though you kind of drown in evidence and the last case is overly complicated, the game would be fun even if all you got was the first four cases.
If you want to join in the fun, you can click here to buy Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
If you find yourself getting stuck on one of the cases, be sure to consult the spoiler free walkthrough on this page for some help.
In the past I've plugged the Democracy Player. It's a little piece of software that acts kind of like a TV with specific channels of content. You subscribe to a channel and when someone posts new video to that channel the player uses Bittorrent to go and get it for you to watch whenever you feel like it. It's the video equivalent to podcasting but it's about where podcasting was a couple of years ago. There aren't a lot of big name shows that everybody is watching yet.
While we're waiting for the super popular channels, I'd like to throw in a quick plug for a cool channel that you should add if the subject interests you. It's Board Games with Scott. Every couple of weeks he takes a new board game and reviews it. He lets you see the box and what is inside and then he describes who the game might appeal to before demonstrating what the actual play is like. I like it and I particularly like that he doesn't have an obsessive focus for any one type of game. He's done party games for groups, games for two. Games that take hours and games that take minutes. With what he tells you in a short show, you can immediately tell if the game is something that would interest you or the people you might play it with.
Here are a few examples of episodes he did which I found interesting:
http://www.boardgameswithscott.com/?p=5 Board Games 101
http://www.boardgameswithscott.com/?p=9 Hoity Toity
http://www.boardgameswithscott.com/?p=29 The Fury of Dracula
http://www.boardgameswithscott.com/?p=43 GiftTRAP
He has a website, so you can download any of his shows from there if you don't want to use the Democracy Player to get it. However, if you do, you get a couple of advantages. One is that Scott doesn't pay as much for bandwidth. Bittorrent spreads out the uploading of a video file to everybody who has already downloaded it. So you get some from the main server but you may get just as much from other Democracy Player users who also grabbed that same show. Secondly, it comes to you automatically. You don't have to remember to go get it. It's just sitting there in the player when you look and you click to play.
Updated: You can ignore this now. Instead you want to go over to the DominionRules.org website where they are hard at work on v3.0 of the rules.
A long time ago (back when GameDev.net was still new) I interviewed the developers at a site called Dominion Games. They had developed a set of rules for a fantasy role-playing game called, naturally enough, Dominion Rules. They put an open source license on it and encouraged others to write more rules, expansions, character sheets, etc. Keep in mind this was even before Wizards was considering using the D20 license to open up parts of D&D.
Everything was on their website for free as downloadable PDF files. But, there's a problem, they went away. The site is gone and when someone asked me about downloading the rules recently, neither of us could find anyone with a copy. He expanded his search based on some suggestions I made and eventually tracked down copies of a few of the rule books. Here they are from my site so they won't go missing again: The Dominion Rules Digest (the core rules for Dominion Rules 2.0), The Armoury (also for Rules 2.0), and The Spell Books (1.0 version, I don't know if there was ever a 2.0 version)
The Nintendo DS Lite is an incredible piece of hardware. Though, as always with console and handheld games it all comes down to the games. Fortunately the games seem to be excellent so far. Super Mario DS is the one I've been playing the most and it's lots of fun. My son got his DS Lite first as a very late birthday present. His birthday was actually the second of June but the DS Lite wasn't going to be available until the 11th. At first he wanted to just get a regular DS but I convinced him to hold out and wait for what seemed like it was going to be better based on the descriptions I had read.
Neither of us was prepared for just how much better it was than a regular DS. It's smaller, much better looking (in fact, with it's translucent white plastic it looks more like Apple designed it than Nintendo), it has better battery life (but I haven't got an old one to compare it to), and the screen is much brighter than the old DS they had in the store.
That's on top of an already excellent feature set of the DS itself. You've got a microphone for input (used in Nintendogs and WarioWare Touched!), wireless gameplay between units and for many games like Animal Crossing, Super Mariocart, etc. you can even play through your wireless router against other players on the Internet, two easy to view screens (did I mention they are bright), one of the screens doubles as a touch screen and that gets used in lots of games like Animal Crossing, WarioWare Touched!, and BrainAge.
But all of those features as cool as they are still would not have sold me on buying a DS Lite. I just don't have as much time to play games as I did when I was much younger and it prevents me from picking up a game and putting hours into it the way I once did. But on the DS I can simply close the lid and it'll hibernate.
It may not sound like much for those of you used to a laptop computer but handheld games and console games don't normally do that. Most of the games for them seem to require that you reach a special save-point before you can save your game. When those save points are dozens of minutes or even hours apart it can be darn near impossible to game much in little 10 and 15 minute increments when they are available as they are for most adults. But close and hibernate? I can defintely do that, and it means that I can really enjoy gaming again as I haven't been able to for a long time.
Game recommendations: Super Mario DS, Animal Crossing, there are lots of other fun ones but start with those and you won't be disappointed.
P.S. There are rumors that you'll be able to use your DS Lite as a controller for some Nintendo Wii games as well, giving you a touch screen interface to the game and two extra screens to display information that could be secret to each player. If so, that makes me just that much more enthused about the release of the Wii console.
I'm not going to claim you'll be playing any of these games for months and months on end. Likely you will get bored with either of them in a month or three. But in the meantime they're free, they're fun, and you can play either of them from anywhere you've got a browser available. Perhaps most importantly neither one involves any big time commitment. They can easily be picked up and started but the total time needed to play either one is literally just a few minutes per day.
This is a fun game that gained a lot of popularity in a hurry a few months back. In it you play a single human or zombie character. There has been an outbreak of some disease that causes zombies (see Sean of the Dead or 28 Days Later for details) and the humans are in a fight for survival against zombies looking to turn all the living humans into shambling zombies.
There is no "death" in the game as you turn into a zombie if you are a human character and you take enough damage to die. Even if you are a zombie though, there's always the chance you can be re-vivified by some technology available to some of the human characters. A fun game with exploration, skills to acquire, combat, equipment (when you are human), and no real reason to quit until you get bored. Total time to play all your moves per day is no more than 10 minutes.
I'm still playing this one myself. If you are already a big game player I can probably best liken it to a real-time strategy game (RTS) like Warcraft, Starcraft, or Age of Empires. Except that it is browser based so there are graphics but no animations. You don't get to watch a little person walk over and build your new structure but after a certain amount of time has elapsed off the clock, the construction will finish in exactly the same way. So it's like the standard RTS experience, just distilled a little bit.
The total time to play this one is greater than Urban Dead. I don't think there is any way you could possibly play it for ten minutes a day and get very far. But it's still probably not more than 30 minutes total and you can spread it throughout the day with just a minute or two here and there.
Since the Atari 2600 represented not only the first real console game that was a mega-seller and also thousands of hours of gameplay for me personally, I jumped at the chance to buy an Atari Flashback 2 recently (under $30 retail). It has two original looking joysticks, the feel and weight don't seem quite the same but they look right, and the new console is much smaller and replaces the old metal toggles with plastic buttons but it even incorporates the small strip of faux wood that was on the original! In general it resembles a 2600 which went through a shrinking machine.
It comes with 40 games built in (20 old and 20 new) and even though the various paddle games were some of the best, there's no paddles or paddle games. Why we needed 20 new games rather than 20 more classics to try and improve the overall selection is my first problem with the console. More Activision titles and some more 2600 classics would have boosted the quality. As it is though, you can play Combat, Missle Command, Pitfall, Asteroids, Adventure and many others. They don't include a full manual in the box, just a few pages to tell you how to plug it in and get started, but Atari has a full manual in PDF form on their web page that describes each game individually.
Now, before I say what I'm about to say, I want you to know that there are lots of old games which are just as much fun today as they were 20+ years ago. Galaga, Ms. Pac-man, Donkey Kong, etc. are still great games so just age alone doesn't make a game bad. But most of the games on the 2600 are just bad. The console had such profound limitations in the size of game programs that gameplay really suffered. It's not the crude sound capability or the even cruder graphics which hold it back, it's the games themselves which are weak.
I played Sonic The Hedgehog recently and it was just as much fun today as when it came out. Most of the 2600 games I played were not. I guess we were far more desperate for entertainment then and we saw more of the potential in the medium than we saw what was actually produced.
Sometimes something is just much better in your memory than in really was... My Flashback 2 went back to the store and I got my money back. I guess I'll have to wait for the Super Nintendo in a box instead.
You get jaded. You think, "I've seen all there is to see on the world wide web," or "I know pretty much all the stuff in the areas that interest me that are out there." Then it's like you find a whole lost tribe of people and they are living in your attic!
That's how I felt when somebody asked about creating browser based games and then reeled off a set of names, none of which was familiar. The site MPOGD was mighty helpful though in helping show me just how much I was missing.
They have links, reviews, etc. for hundreds of turn based, text based, or otherwise just different multiplayer games out there. Lots of which sound really really cool. In the end I think I was able to help the person who wanted to know about how to write one, but first I needed a lesson of my own.
