Category Archives: Games

May 05 2009
Games

Plants vs. Zombies (PvZ)

Popcap has combined two of my favorite gaming past times:

  1. Tower Defense
  2. Zombie Killin’

And added a little bit of their own Popcap spin on the genre.  They even added a bit of “card collecting” to the mix, although thankfully that’s only a limited implementation.  (Because it would end me.)  Essentially, you can only take a certain number of “units” into the next stage.  You have to pick and choose from your seed packet collection, which gets larger the more stages you progress through.

There are zombies attacking your yard from the right hand side of the screen.  Your job is to plant different kinds of. . .  plants. . . that prevent them from getting to the left hand side of the screen, which is your house.  They plants basically replace the towers of Tower Defense, and perform many of the same functions, such as shoot zombies, slow zombies, eat them, etc.  Zombies are limited to single rows, and there are five rows.  Think spreadsheet.

Essentially, I think someone with a bit more excel knowledge can probably hack some sort of PvZ action for some clandestine gaming at the office.

The graphics are incredibly cute, and it’s rockin’ the whole Saturday Morning Cartoon vibe from the designs.  Certain zombies are wearing buckets over their heads.  Which means they’re nigh invulnerable until the bucket is knocked off with enough damage.  Other zombies are wearing traffic cones.  It looks like there are about thirty different zombie types and nearly fifty plant types.  Which sounds like enough depth that I wouldn’t mind the purchase price.

The end result: Plants vs. Zombies is an incredible time sink.  My limited time demo came and went without me noticing so now I’m left with only one, surprisingly difficult question to answer.

Which platform to buy it for.

Update: I’m thinking Steam.

Apr 30 2009
Games

Zombies

I’ve been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead and really itching to play Call of Duty: World at War’s Nazi Zombies mode.  Also looking forward to Dead Rising 2, which appears to be zombies in Las Vegas.  Dead Space was essentially zombies in, well, in space.

I don’t actually know what the appeal is.  I’m not what you would call a hardcore zombie enthusiast, although I have read World War Z and I enjoyed Bruce Campbell versus the Army of Darkness.  I’m not a huge fan (although I have watched) the Romero movies.  I know about the zombie flash mobs in San Francisco but I’ve never participated in any sort of zombie themed get together.

I’m trying to figure out the appeal.  It may be the general fascination with Robots, Pirates, Ninjas and Zombies, the four internet food groups.  The great rivalry, the debate over which apocalypse is the most likely scenario is just so hard to avoid.

It may be the “camp” factor, although neither Left 4 Dead nor Nazi Zombies is very campy.

Ultimately, it may just be the gameplay in those games that’s appealing.  Cooperative gameplay at its most fun.  The idea of people coming together and failing repeatedly and trying again against an unfeeling tide of undead.  What’s interesting is that you canot “win” or beat either of these games.

You can only survive longer than last time.  So people are, in short, returning to games where they lose repeatedly against the undead.

Apr 22 2009
Games

Mission Architect: City of Heroes

I had some time to kill the other day so I cranked up the old gaming rig and patched up City of Heroes to see how long it would take to whip out a custom mission.

Really, not that long.  After taking the grand tour, I pretty much dove straight in to the Mission Creator.  It’s pretty cool.  Setting up a story, and setting objectives is really simple.  You can also create your own enemy groups, with minions, lieutenants, bosses, elite bosses.  You can even create NPCs and the mission contact.

I whipped up a story about “transporter buffers” going amok after a “power surge.”  This if course, occurs in the Synergy Gestalt’s base, “The Workshop.”  As a result, every member of that supergroup now has imperfect clones running around.  Additionally, the least imperfect of the clones (the first copies) got the idea to steal the transporter components and use them to create an army of clones to take over Paragon City. I think for the finale I’ll have the heroes defend a transporter while a technician reverses the polarity.

So right there, that’s a mission with a lot of fighting, bosses to fight, and components to destroy.  I created various designs of the clones, for minions, lieutenants and bosses.  I found that the clone angle was really a “cheat” since I could just reuse the character designs over and over again.  Then I could tweak various aspects, like skin tones or add goatees to make the variations of the clones.  The bosses of course, were just character designs from the characters in my Super Group on Virtue.

Which really only has four active characters in it, so that made it easy as well.

I added some flavor text, dialogue and then saved the Arc title and I was off and running testing the new mission.  It was that easy.  I think concept to execution was about 45 minutes total.  After playtesting it for a while I’ll publish it to the main servers and then people can play through it.

Overall, it was very cool seeing something I had written become a part of a video game.

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Apr 15 2009
Games

Board Games

We never had a family board game night.  There just wasn’t enough people to have a decent game of Monopoly.  Not that I ever had a truly fun game of Monopoly.  Most games I play turn into the slow bleeding elimination of the other players.  If I ever get roped into it, I usually try to get eliminated first and get back to socializing with the other people that didn’t get roped into playing Monopoly.  So, the family night board games don’t interest me as much.

There’s just no desire.

On the other hand, I do have a desire to play the really nerdy, geeky board games.  Games like Ghost Stories.  I’m not going to do the game justice by describing it, so I’ll just quote the copy.

“Wu-Feng, the Lord of the Nine Hells has found where the funeral urn containing his ashes is kept. His hordes are already marching upon the small village of the Middle Kingdom hiding them.”

You play as a Taoist ghost hunter that defends the small town from the undead.  Eventually, Wu-Feng gets his ashes and reincarnates.  Then you have to defeat his reincarnation.  What’s nice is that it’s a cooperative sort of game, and while it is still zombies, there’s an interesting twist on it.  Apparently, Wu-Feng can have any one of ten incarnations and you don’t know which one you’ll be fighting.  Additionally, he only shows up at the end of the game, when your players are already worn out from exorcising the rest of his ghost army.

Sounds like good odds, although I’d be hard pressed to play this without quoting lots of Big Trouble in Little China.

“It will never come again.”

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Apr 08 2009
Games

Alone

I’m playing Rune Factory Frontier right now and I’m really enjoying it.  Or I’m finding it compelling.  It’s a very thin line between the two.  World of WarCraft was compelling, but eventually it turned into something that felt more like a second job.  Not fun.  While enjoyment was still to be found playing it, I was finding it harder and harder to have fun playing the game.

Yet it was still compelling.  Eventually I knew that I had to just let it go.  I beat the final boss (Protip:  It’s your credit card!)  Then, I just let my account lapse.

I found something interesting about my playing habits with Rune Factory, how I have changed my habits over the years.

It used to be that when I found out something interesting, or exciting about a game I was playing, it really felt like a discovery.  That in this game, I did something that’s a singular experience, that event is something that was on the edge of a great frontier.  This was before the internet.

Now before I do anything I feel like I have to check for a FAQ or a guide to find out if it’s the “right” decision.

I was considering an expansion for the house in Rune Factory, but then I was presented with a couple of choices.  I then went to the forums and looked up pictures of the possible themes.  Then I almost posted something to twitter to ask about which one I should go with.

Then I stopped myself after I realized what I was doing.

I decided from that point on, I was just going to forge ahead and make the decisions and live with them.  That’s the beauty of Rune Factory.  There’s no “wrong” decision to make.  If a path gets closed to me, oh well, the game is huge, there are tons of things to do.

I just need to make my peace with that.

I need to make peace with a game about farming, dating, monster fighting, and returning balance to the land.

Oh, and I went with an unseen extension to my house in the game.  And it turns out to have been the steampunk styled expansion.

Score.

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