15 posts tagged “games”
The world needs a MMORPG all about Robert's Rules of Order. No, really, it does! Gameplay would look something like this:
I woke up in the morning, I looked behind the wall
I like to ask Snark, "What country am I from today?" meaning: so, given what I'm wearing, where might you think I was a tourist from? The answer today was Canada.
"Your outfit is practical, and your shirt is dark green," he explained. I don't know, man.
The skeeters and the bedbugs were having a game of ball
I have a super cute umbrella that I bought in Italy, though I think it was actually made in France. It's a kid's umbrella, green (and kid-sized small), with a green wooden handle ending in a green wooden frog's head. It's a great umbrella. However, I am starting to think that I need a second umbrella, of the collapsible variety. (Great story! Tell us more!) Further, I feel that this second umbrella should be fuchsia. Maybe this one. I hear it's "translucent for easy carrying." Opacity is awkward to tote around all day.
The score was six to nothing, the skeeters were ahead
You know that space under your desk? The one that can be so terribly inviting when you contemplate how easy it would be just to slide off your chair and curl up under there, and sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep? Mm. Stop coming on to me, space under my desk. You know it wouldn't work out between us. Plus, how long has it been since the maintenance guy vacuumed you? Too long, too long.
The bedbugs hit a home run and knocked me out of bed.
Our friend Rose and her law school friends introduced us to a very entertaining party game called "Celebrities" (I think). Here's how it works. Everyone gets five or six slips of paper and writes the name of a famous person, or fictional character, on each slip. The slips go into a bowl. The group is divided into two teams. Then the game itself is played in three rounds. Each round is made of one-minute turns, in which a player picks slips out of the bowl and tries to get her team to guess as many as possible in a minute. You go back and forth between the teams, rotating through so each player takes a turn being the clue-er, until you've used up all the slips.
Here's the fun part: In the first round, you can say and act out whatever you like, other than the actual name, to get your teammates to guess the name. In the second round, you get only one word (though you can say it as many times, and in many ways as you like) plus charades, and in the third round you have to be completely silent. So as you go, you often wind up doing as much to remind other players of how a name was clued in earlier rounds as actually coming up with your own clue. I really liked it -- it was a lot more fun, even, than I'd expected. Recommended!
I finally got around to playing Andrew Plotkin's "Delightful Wallpaper," which comes closer than any other IF I know of to approximating the mechanics of the charming game Chronon. (The possibility of doing this is something I was wondering about a while ago.) It doesn't really get all that close, when you get right down to it, but it's at least in the general vicinity. Unfortunately, I think the bits where it gestures in a Chronon-ward direction are not at all the most successful parts of the game, but I do think it suggests possible interesting avenues for game design of that sort.
Delightful Wallpaper has two parts. In the first half, you are armed with nothing but a notepad, and have no ability to affect your surroundings directly. You can go from room to room, and you can read your notes. As you move around, your movements affect the house -- going through one doorway will open a door somewhere else, and so on. As you investigate these affordances, the PC faithfully makes notes of what you've discovered. This is implemented very well, with partial discoveries noted and revised appropriately as you test and explore. (You, the real player, must draw the map by hand, if you need one, which I did.) I found this part of the game to be surprisingly satisfying, and the notepad worked perfectly for me to keep everything moving along satisfactorily.
While it seems that lots of people preferred the second part -- which was the more Chrononesque -- it was not so for me. I've seen other reviewers say that the first half made them anxious, and that they weren't at all sure that it wasn't possible to put the game into an unwinnable state. I'm pretty sure it isn't. But then I have the advantage of knowing who wrote the game, while people who reviewed it as they were judging the 2006 comp didn't.
Anyhow, in the second half of the game, you go from mapping out the house to setting up interactions among the characters who now people it. Your notebook now has partially drafted Goreyesque (though not, alas, with the real Gorey bite, but that would be asking a bit much) verses about each character's demise. As you go through the house, you find "intentions". These are the one sort of thing you can pick up and manipulate. Characters appear in more than one room, and as you pick up each intention, you learn a little something about what they "will" do there. Then you're off to find the correct object of each intention. When you put the intention on an acceptable object -- often, but not always, another character -- the state of the room changes to tell you what "will" happen when the intention is carried out. The verses in your notebook are completed accordingly. Additional intentions are doled out as you go.
The trouble with this part was that it didn't have much in the way of entertaining machinery and novel wrong-way, partial, or dead-end consequences to keep things lively as I toyed around with different arrangements. The trial and error portion of this part wasn't terribly interesting or engaging -- and actually, come to think of it, neither was the success part. The demises weren't surprising or fun, they were just... there. Still, I appreciated the general sort of puzzle design Plotkin was playing with here. It seems as if you could take something like this and achieve more of the kind of effect I was talking about in my previous post. Doesn't it?
Mamafox has been safely dispatched, and the holiday was good. Fuckwad dinner was tasty, very much including the Christmas pudding my mother brought (and let behind a huge portion of for many breakfasts to come) and we felt perfectly festive enough even though I completely forgot to bring out the Christmas crackers. Now we can save them for New Year's. Everyone (meaning, really, my mother and I) got along shockingly well, with only the tiniest bit of frayed patience right at the end.
Gifts were all a success, though I am sorry that I didn't get Snark anything more exciting than I did. My own presents were really great, indeed far better than I deserve, including many excellent children's books, a beautiful necklace (as you can see), some Serge Lutens perfume that I had been pining after for a very long time, and -- AND -- a DS Lite with Animal Crossing: Wild World. Hooray! It is so great that I woke up early this morning to play in bed. It seems that everyone in the world is now mostly interested in their Wiis, but if you want to be my Animal Crossing friend, let me know.
S. and I often like to contemplate the following question: What animal would you like to have in a tame, one- to two-inch version, hanging out on your desk today? You can have a little habitat for it, too, if you like. You might choose, for example, a little puddle-pond for your desk hippo or a patch of sod for your desk sheep.
Recently I have found myself often opting for capybaras; they're so noble. They are also apparently quite good-natured. (While we generally assume that desk animals are tame, they are not completely domesticated; a desk rhino, for example, is going to be a little bit on the aggressive side and a desk squirrel is going to be kind of... squirrelly.) It might seem a little deranged to select a miniature version of an animal that is mainly famous for being the largest species of its order, but the capybara clearly has much more to offer than mere size.
Just look at that appealing posture! Not to mention the impressive symmetry of eyes and nostrils. Also, sometimes they hang out in the bottom of canoes.
You know that I have copious lashings of free time, what with my dissertation and the nasty old job market. That is why I have just paid for a subscription to the New York Times premium crosswords, and have been tearing through the archives in the evenings. Oh well, as these things go, it's more managable than Dice Wars or Webboggle, and I like to hope that it will also prevent Alzheimer's.
I'm also finally teaching myself how to do cryptic crosswords. I got my way through a couple from Games magazine with a fair amount of cheating, and just now did two of the babiest bunniest easy ones from the NY Times with no cheating at all -- the first one, S. and I did together (he's learning too, and is much quicker with an anagram than I am) and the second I did all myself aside from treating S. like my own personal anagram generator on a couple of clues ("Okay, now do 'us clear,' meaning 'layperson'").
Meanwhile, last Friday, when I was thwarted from my plan of doing some journal reading by a lack of internet in our chosen study spot, I spent a little time back with Inform. I'm still working my way through the documentation/tutorial, and making a wonderfully useless hobbled-together scratch game, with various working examples lightly retooled and hacked up to fit in a vague "everything's edible" plotless Wonkaland setting. I was pleased to make my buttercream incline look different from above and below, and also depending on whether you've visited the other side yet. Then I played around with generic rooms, and I am here to tell you that no matter what the manual and sample code might say,
A closet is a kind of room with printed name "Broom Closet" and description "This is just a storage closet. You'll have to pick your way out through the [closet contents]."
A closet has a property called closet contents. The closet contents of a closet is usually "odds and ends and cleaning supplies". The Pantry has closet contents "pots and pans".
East of the Confectionary Workshop is a closet.
does NOT yield a room calling itself "Broom Closet", but rather one titled "closet". As far as I can tell, you have to call out the printed name on each instance of your whatever kind of room, at which point it seems to me that you may as well just say it's "called" whatever. Curious.
I still wish for "code" formatting here, by the way.
The death, also, of jouissance. (Thank god, at least, I didn't have to kill the roadrunner.)
Trinity is killing me! So much terrible tiny animal death.
S. has reminded me that Goose, Egg, Badger is a fine example of charm in modern IF. (Not so much sweetness,
still, but hey.) It is in large part a gimmick game, but the gimmick is
clever and charming. It's been a while since I played it -- I do
remember finding it a little... un-immersive, but I found it witty and
a pleasure to play. And it hinges on wordplay, nicely. It did much less well in the IF Comp ratings that
year than I thought it deserved. This was in part because, it seems, a ton of people utterly failed
to notice its main clever feature. Or for some other reason, I don't know. I guess that's
not why Zarf disliked it,
though I can't tell for sure. My luck was such that I didn't pick up on the gimmick right away but rather had it dawn on me at pretty much the optimal
aesthetically enjoyable point in my progression through the game.
Once again, I wish I had spoiler tags at my disposal. Alas.
A certain someone presented me with a copy of the Infocom classic Trinity. I'm not done yet, but I'm enjoying it a great deal. I realized on starting it that I actually had played it when it first came out but got deeply stuck in the opening sequence and eventually gave up. This time around I have a better idea of what I'm doing and had no trouble getting on my way. Also, I found the Invisiclues online much later on when I was stymied by a guess-the-verb problem (the verb in question was "empty").
I've had to get back in the habit of saving all the time -- so many modern games make that far less necessary -- and am apparently fundamentally incapable of remembering that "x" for "examine" won't work, but overall it lacks most of the frustrations I am used to running into when I go back to older games, and the atmosphere and puzzles are great. I'm finding it interesting, too, how evocative and emotionally engaging it is while leaving the PC essentially a cipher.
Perhaps next I'll find a way to play A Mind Forever Voyaging.
