I took my own picture of the Guitar Hero: On Tour controller for the DS, but let me assure you – it sucked. I went to Gamestop hoping to get their free, not-available-elsewhere Pokemon, but they require that you have the National Pokedex – and I haven’t yet finished the game or beaten the Elite Four… so no go for me. I saw that they had the Guitar Hero: On Tour for the DS with its funky wrap-around controller, so, what the heck, I bought it instead. ...
Ooooo…. Diablo III looks so cool…. Oh, I know this is the millionth blog to announce it, but whatever :) But it seems Diablo 3 is real! My kids and I all played D1 and D2 back in the day, though I’m not sure we ever played it together, this being before we got that whole LAN thing worked out. With D3 on its way, the people over at Flagship Studios (many of whom worked on Diablo II) must be wondering how D3 will impact the forthcoming Mythos and the already-out Hellgate: London. ...
I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and have had a lot less time to sit in front of a computer and game for any length of time. Luckily, I have my Asus Eee – the latest electronic device to beg its way into my heart – and Dungeon Crawl. Way way WAY back in 1980 or so, there was a game on UNH’s DEC-10 server called “rogue”. It was resplendent in glorious 80x24 text graphics, but was buggy and crashed a lot. Still, there was something lurking in those randomly created dungeons that I wanted to play more. After I moved out to California, I discovered Hack, a re-imagining of Rogue, and Net-Hack, an open source, collaborative version of Hack; and I played that for years and made some minor contributions of my own (mostly new traps, IIRC). ...
Ground out level 5 doing team coin missions. Instead of racing, you see who can gather the most good coins while avoiding bad coins. When I got 5 and went to get my new licenses, the whole license board just hung the game. A GM was trying to get an event of some sort going, but the room kept being disconnected. So I went shopping, got some new pants, gloves, and some earmuffs, then tried out the one new license I was able to get in a few quick races. ...
It looked like it might have been an MMO, and I wrote up a quick article thinking it might be, but Project Powder really isn’t. What it is, is a helluva fun online snowboarding sim with chat channels, guilds/clans/crews, levels, more tricks than you can handle, and an item shop. Here’s a really terrible video I took from one of my first runs through the game. Yeah, I don’t win and I fall a lot, but I was still learning, and this video covers the entire action, from the snowball-throwing lobby to the finish line. For some reason, Fraps didn’t catch the hp-hop soundtrack, so I replaced it with selections from the .hack//sign sound track, Ayreon, and Phish. Sorry, no ear-killing death metal. I can feel your disappointment from here. Also contributing to the terribleness of this video is the fact that it is squashed horribly. This was widescreen, hi-def and looked fine on my PS3 when I uploaded it, folks. ...
DM Osbon over at Sweetflag, to commemorate the first anniversary of his blog, is gonna be giving the presents to us. He’s got UEFA Euro 2008 for the PS3 – world football action – there’s even a cheat mode where you can let England win, from what I understand – and Boom Blox for the Wii, that Jenga-on-steroids-and-with-exploding-stuff game which is the first result of the collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Electronic Arts. Both have gotten rave reviews. ...
Because my son’s domination of the television and, indeed, the entire living room by his 24/7, non-stop playing of Call of Duty 4, and his loud, loud, continual swearing, homophobia and racially-tinged epithets which is, of course, your standard Xbox Live experience really made it impossible to get anything done that required thought, I consigned him, the 360 and the TV to his bedroom, where he could belittle strangers with some doors between him and I. ...
I’m really sorry. Don’t click on the link. It is safe for work, and I feel I HAVE to post this but… you won’t like me much after you see Super Pii Pii Brothers for the Wii.
I really suck at these exploration-conquest games. I don’t know why I like them so much! I’m just glad, at least, that I don’t play against other people. That would be really humliating. (Don’t send me email insisting you suck too, and we should play together sometime. I suck more. It wouldn’t be pretty.) So I started a regular game with three computer players vs little ol’ me with some trepidation. Almost immediately, my scout ships reported an enemy close by. It turns out that, in this three star system, my system was shared by one enemy and, of course, the pirates. I had my first capital ship built before long and had taken over a couple of adjoining systems and started along the research trees for support craft and colonization – the volcanic planet you can see a little of in the upper left was my second conquest, and I needed the skills to exploit it. What that picture mostly shows, though, is a couple dozen planetary defense platforms and hanger stations. ...
Some of you might remember a little bit of Neopets mania last summer. There was this one puzzle that just seemed so hard, that I had to write a program to solve it. It took over my life for months. I finally gave up trying to solve it entirely. In February, I took it up again, and given some algorithmic help by a past champion, finally beat Shapeshifter. It’s all very Karate-kid-ish. ...