Other Games

I just want to start right out with a warning: Sins of a Solar Empire and sleep are incompatible. You can have one or the other; not both. Sins is three games rolled into a yummy package. It’s a 4X game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate) where you start out in control of a single planet and grow until the galaxy is yours. It’s an RTS in that you have to mine resources and increase your population. And it’s a standard level-based RPG, with tanks, healers and mages and stuff. ...

Back in the early 80s, I was too totally proud of my roguelike, real-time dungeon crawl game imaginatively named TG (The Game, clever, huh?), which had some all-time design wins like being real time, fast-paced, and required you to type all your actions out in Zork-like sentences. When a dragon is tracking you down, typing “TAKE SWORD FROM STONE” without any spelling errors probably isn’t as fun as I thought it was back then. ...

A throwaway comment in a Wired.com article led me to Giant Bomb, a new game review blog started by Jeff Gerstmann, the Gamespot editor who was rumored to have been canned when he gave a poor review to a game that advertised heavily on Gamespot. They don’t cover MMOs, but I think those of us who love MMOs also spend a fair amount of our time with our Xboxes, Playstations and Wiis want to read reviews where the reviewer isn’t shy about admitting that maybe “at one point I thought about vomiting while playing this game”. ...

Audiosurf scoreboard alert - Dethroned! You used to have the worldwide best score for: i dont like mondays by the boomtown rats Now the Audiosurf player ‘Baldrick’ has beaten you. Get back in the game and reclaim the top spot! BRB, gotta get my WORLDWIDE BEST SCORE back! There. Took a couple hours, but top score in all three ladders – casual, pro and elite. NOBODY hates Mondays like we do.

I had nothing better to do last night, so I popped Marvel Ultimate Alliance, a game that came with the Xbox 360, in last night to see how REAL superheroes mixed things up. You’re thrown right into the mix of things; Dr. Doom and his legions of supervillains are attacking a giant airborne aircraft carrier commanded by Nick Fury, a WWII NCO who has been given life extension treatments that have led him into an odd taste for cigars, biting one-liners and skintight electric blue leotards. ...

I saw yesterday that a Swedish researcher at Umeå University VRlab had released the latest version of “Phun”. This is software that takes anything you can draw… and animates it with real world physics. This kind of reminds me of Crayon Physics, which does the physics, but makes it into a puzzle game. Phun gives you a blank screen and your mouse. What you do then is up to you. ...

When I listen to music, and close my eyes, I see blocks whizzing at me at the speed of sound. It didn’t used to be that way. Audiosurf did that. I have over three thousand eight hundred and eight songs ripped and on my computer. That’s nearly four thousand ways Audiosurf can rip my mind apart. Each game is generated from the music. Quiet bits have few blocks. Turn up the energy a little, and low scoring blue blocks flood down. Turn it up a notch more, and it’s a blizzard of blue, with occasional streaks of yellow and red and MAN…. You are FEELING the music. ...

Scurvsnicker’s Xbox - 2/13/2008 Scurvsnicker showed up yesterday and we were like a superhero team together. I make a great sidekick! Gamerscore stands at 770. Up up and away right? She played Rock Band, Call of Duty 4, Marvel Ult. Alliance, LOST PLANET, and then… oh wait… no and then!! See what your 360 has to say about you at http://www.360voice.com/…

Monster’s Den is a nice enough little Flash game – you assemble a party, and go on to wtfpwn a randomly generated dungeon a la Rogue/Nethack/Moria and other similar games. Each room can contain nothing, treasure, a healing altar, or an encounter. One “boss” encounter per level can drop epic gear. The challenge to this game continues only until you realize that the secret to winning battles is using AEs. Since your power grows geometrically while monster power increases arithmetically, eventually you become unbeatable. Higher difficulty levels increase the monster power, but inevitably, sooner or later, you will entirely overmatch every encounter – when everyone has 100% poison and stun resistance, 100%+ damage reflection and 20% to kill a mob outright on any attack (and remember, we’re AEing) – well, you’re ready to rock. ...

Once a month, the Buzzkillaz come together from their solo gigs to rock the world. And the world is rocked and it is rolled. Today they formed, for perhaps the last time, to do a benefit concert, one legendary evening, one endless setlist. 58 songs. No stopping. No intermissions. No replacements. Janet, lead guitar, played by Genjer. Punk sensibility mixed with old-school style. Her guitar is a holy relic. ...