This week’s friday fun link: Imagine the original quake, played from a top-down perspective. If that appeals to you, go check out Bloodmasters, a freeware multiplayer action game. You’ll pick up the controls in 2 seconds, the graphics are decent, and there are a variety of gameplay modes to choose from. About the only downside is the limited number of servers. Check it out for your friday fun fix.
Category: Gaming
One shelving system collapse later, I am pissed
I have a fairly extensive collection of boardgames, many of them from the 1970’s and some, especially the ones published by Avalon Hill, are somewhat valuable (Titan, for example, regularly sells for over $100 on ebay and I’ve seen it go for over $200). It’s an impractical hobby in that boardgames take up quite a lot of space, and in fact until last weekend it had been over two years since I had seen most of them, because ever since I moved to Saratoga they had been sitting in boxes, first in the attic of a barn in Greenfield and then more recently in a spare room in my current house.
When I visited family over Thanksgiving holiday we went to Ikea and I bought dressers, which allowed me to disassemble the ramshackle milk crate and board shelving system I had been using for my clothes. I transferred this to the spare room, unpacked all the games, fawning over some of them as one might fawn over long absent treasures, then closed up the spare room. I’m not heating it this winter to save on the heating bill.
Yesterday I went into the spare room to retrieve one of the games and discovered the whole assemblage had collapsed for reasons unknown. Things could have been much much worse than they ended up being but still, games and parts of games were scattered everywhere. Most of the 1970’s era games, with their hundreds of cardboard chits, survived intact and boxes closed, but some of them vomited forth a stream of cardboard bits it will take me a month to sort. At first I thought to take a picture of the carnage but the whole thing was so depressing I couldn’t bring myself to do it – in fact, after gathering together the still closed games and stacking them together I fled the room and left the mess intact, to be dealt with another day.
The best thing I can say about it all is that most of the really valuable games seem to have survived, boxes uncrushed. The whole episode has tempted me to sell off the majority of the collection. It’s a bit of a burden to keep around and though I do get to drag out some of the games several times a year for play, the vast majority are neither valuable nor ones I would play. They are individually notable for their rule system, or the designer, or their heritage, or their theme, but in aggregate they’re a great bulk of relatively delicate historical gamestuff that would be better stored in a collector more inclined to make use of them than I am.
Solved: Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime
I beat the Nintendo DS game Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime over the short vacation I took surrounding Thanksgiving this year. It’s a charming, slightly flawed but very fun little action adventure game. Think ‘simple portable zelda,’ and you have some notion of what the gameplay is all about. It has a couple of novel elements – your character is the equivalent of a rubber band in terms of mechanics, so you spend a good bit of the game bounding about the levels spranging into and off of things, which is more fun than it sounds. It also features ridiculously silly giant tank battle sequences which pit you and your crew against an enemy crew. You can spend your time loading the tanks guns, defending against enemy assaults on your tank, or you can try and infiltrate the enemy tank and take the battle to them, sprangy rubber band style.
The game’s intended for kids but is still great fun. It has a few flaws – it’s way to easy, it’s on the short side, it’s easy to exploit the enemy ai during the tank battles, and the general ease of play means you don’t have to interact with some of the gameplay systems, like collecting items and formulas that allow you to develop better ammunition for your tank. Despite all this, it’s still a great little game and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes the zelda action adventure school of gaming and can tolerate the kiddie aesthetic.
The definitive zombie games list
I’ve posted occasionally about many things zombie. In honor of Halloween, I’ll link to a great post covering a ton of different zombie games that first appears in mid-august on metafilter. In case you haven’t seen it, and like me you have an interest in zombie games, check out the list and discussion thread on metafilter, then get busy with some zombie bashing action.
Note that many of these are flash or otherwise browser-based and thus available to any platform that can run flash and a recent vintage browser with competent JS support. Many are also PC specific, but the central point is that one should be able to find a zombie game that both appeals and that can run on your machine from this extensive list.
Cross platform zombie blasting goodness
In the spirit of the season, I offer up another zombie link – this one to the free, open source Win32/OSX zombie blasting action game ‘Zombies.’ It’s not going to win any awards, but it’s a reasonably fun turn based zombie game – think Daleks for those of you who’ve been gaming for a while, only with hordes of zombies, priests, shotgun wielding badasses, and lots of brain munching.
So you want to be a hero…
…if so, check out Marvel Ultimate Alliance. MUA is a fantastic old school beat em up with a dash of diablo rpg-lite mechanics. It’s available on pretty much every platform under the sun, but to my great surprise the PC port is really well done and so I picked it up for PC. Make no mistake, this is a mindless button mashing slugfest, but it’s got all those comic book heroes you grew up with to play with, it has reasonably good graphics and a very solid combat engine. This is the third Superhero game by Raven Software, the old FPS engine masters, and the third time is definitely the charm. I own both of the previous X-Men-focused games and they’ve gotten successively better. The notable improvements this time around include no more healing potions, a much broader selection of heroes to play with, better networking play, less complicated level up systems, and an actual playable PC port. It’s also on sale this week at Best Buy for PC – anyone want to team up to take down Dr. Doom?
Stay far away from Dark Messiah
I did something uncharacteristic and pre-ordered Ubisoft’s new Might and Magic game, Dark Messiah, after playing the demo. The demo ran fine on my system, I love this style of game, and I was looking forward to it. Its retail release is a pile of steaming crap, however, and this post is a warning to anyone considering buying it – don’t. Wait until they patch it such that it works as it was intended. Right now it appears it’s a crap shoot in terms of whether the game will run on your system, and I’m one of the folks who simply cannot get it to run without crashing after the start of the first level. In the last 3 days, I’ve:
* Reinstalled directx9.0c, october edition (and thanks so very much for abandoning version numbers for Directx, Microsoft. You suck)
* Reinstalled the video drivers for my video card. Anyone who’s been through this with an ATI card knows what a time consuming pain in the ass that is.
* Reinstalled the MS audio framework and audio drivers for my sound card.
* used Valve’s Steam interface to rebuild my installed game files, repeatedly.
* Tinkered endlessly with the video and audio settings inside the game in an effort to get it running. I do not exaggerate, I have launched the game at least 20-30 times.
* Tried every tweak and setting suggestion found in Valve and in Ubisoft’s forums.
Despite all this, at the conclusion of the in-game cinematic at the beginning of chapter 1, the game locks up, most of the time locking up my entire system, something which very rarely happens. Ubisoft and the developers should be ashamed of themselves for releasing a game in such a buggy state. I know this isn’t true but it feels at this point like I’ve done more testing on their damned game than they have. I’m also not alone with this problem – not everyone is having it, but a significant number of players are, as well as a host of additional issues.
I’ve asked Valve for a refund since I bought it on Steam and since from my perspective it reflects badly on Steam. I doubt I’ll get it though since their terms of service are that no refunds will be granted. This in itself seems unfair to me. If I bought it at retail, I understand why I can’t return it because once I’ve installed it on my computer the retailer has no idea whether I’ve removed it before returning the game. Valve absolutely knows because of how Steam works, and they should grant refunds for helplessly buggy games like this.
The greatest shame is that the game shows promise. The in-game cinematic that happens right before the crash is excellent. I can’t think of the last time I’ve had such a promising tease from a game I can’t actually play. I’m pissed.
Anyway you’ve been warned – stay away until Ubisoft addresses this with substantive patches.
Download gaming history
Now this is cool. Computer Gaming World has offered up its first 100 issues for free to download. This is a great bit of nostalgia for me as CGW was for years one of my favorite magazines, back in the days before the internet especially. It’s refreshing to see a company treat their intellectual property this way and is in sharp contrast to most publisher’s treatment of their material.
Game over man – Company of Heroes
Yesterday’s lackluster NFL games (3 of the 3 games broadcast in my area were complete blowouts – only the first half of the colts game was interesting) led to some free time for me, so I played Company of Heroes and beat the last two levels. My opinion remains the same – this is one of the best games I played in 2006. The simple fact that I finished it speaks to that, since I play tons of games yet finish very few. Anyone interested in WWII strategy gaming is well advised to consider picking it up. gogamer.com is running a ~$30 sale on it periodically so if you watch their site or sign up for their email notifications chances are good you can pick it up on the cheap. I liked it so much I bought the developer’s previous games, the Warhammer 40k series. They produced 3 expansion packs for that series so there’s a great chance we will see expansions to Company of Heroes as well. Here’s hoping – I can’t wait for more.
Try anno 1701
A complete surprise – Anno 1701, a city builder, is fantastic, at least based on the demo. It’s the third or fourth in a series. I played the original one years ago and thought it was just ok. On the one hand, it had lots of depth to it, but on the other it was pretty dry and the graphics were uninspiring. This sequel seems to have addressed all that – superb graphics, great depth but this time more easily understood, and a very well executed user interface. Check out the demo if the genre interests you – you can get the demo from gamershell.com. Mind that it’s PC only. The demo is deep enough to give you a real taste of the game (it times out after 90 minutes) and has some great tutorials. I liked it so much that when the demo timed out I was so bummed that I jumped over to gogamer.com and preordered it.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 