I found this a surprisingly affecting, if unsubtle, casual game.
It’s not a good sign that despite discerning the correct course of action early on, I had trouble actually doing it—even symbolic letting go is problematic for me, apparently.
Probably a geeks-only taste, this, but I quite enjoy it: a play-through of Half-Life with a narration of Gordon Freeman’s thoughts. Silly, but fun. I think it’s worth going through from the beginning, but the episode I watched first, and which drew me in, was 29:
(The people I was out with today might enjoy Episode 11, too.)
This is a pretty cool platformer from PixelJam. It’s fairly brief, and while it’s no Dino Run, it’s still quite fun:
I played Team Fortress 2 for a while and had a lot of fun with it, which may be why I really like this video:
It’s way too short, but there’s quite a lot going on—it’s worth going through a few times paying attention to each character.
I’ve mostly ignored Christine O’Donnell up to this point, as it doesn’t surprise me much that a highly active group of Republican Christian paranoiacs could propel one of their own to a Senate candidacy. I also think that she has no chance of winning the seat and as such will fade back into obscurity—unlike, for example, Sarah Palin, who despite everything else seems to have an excellent sense of opportunistic timing. My feelings about O’Donnell were broadly similar to, although less developed than, those outlined in Chris Floyd’s “Circle Jerks: Delaware Distraction Obscures Oval Office Atrocities”.
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“8BITS” is a strange but pretty fun movie that seems to be about computer game characters fighting over the shift to better technologies. I think I missed a lot of the references, but I enjoyed it anyway. (I’m particularly confused by what’s driving the aesthetic of the main protagonist.)
One of the minor irritations in running my roleplaying campaign is that I can’t blog about a lot of it. Blogging about the things I find most interesting would give away too much to the players, who must perforce toil in ignorance. I’ll probably post some of the “encyclopedia entries” I’m working on for the world, but that’s much less dynamic than what arises out of game interactions.
I did recently come up with some ideas for opening game sessions that I think are worth sharing, however.
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One more loss would end my tournament. I had won the first game in this match, a long and drawn-out battle, and now in the second game I had reduced my opponent from 20 to six life and had six power on the board. I had more threats in my hand, and was sure he had only one card that would save him. I just had to hope he wouldn’t draw it.
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Near the start of July I mentioned the idea of keeping a “gratitude journal”. I’ve been doing that, more or less, since then.
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SteamBirds is a rather cool turn-based steampunk air combat Flash game. If that sounds like a weird combination to you, I’d have to agree. It’s very simple, and is extremely easy to get into, while not being actually easy. In addition, I came across it via a very interesting presentation on the Flash games industry by its creator Andy Moore.
Aptly-named Yankees blog It’s About the Money has an excellent post up about luck and competitive balance in the baseball post-season. One of its key points concerns how likely a given team is to win a particular series, and how that translates into their odds of winning the whole thing.
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I’m not a big fan of shopping, and more or less loathe the idea of it as an entertainment activity. That didn’t stop me from coming up with a scoring system for it, one which could conceivably be useful in restraining spending.
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The intelligence characteristic in roleplaying games is problematic. The advantages it confers are often mechanical—more spells, more languages—and it’s hard to have it work for players in ways that the physical characteristics do. A player checking against their strength score to break something is fine, but a player checking against their intelligence score to solve a puzzle—or a plot point, something my players have contemplated trying—just isn’t. Even less fine is a player requesting combat action suggestions on the basis that their character’s high intelligence would mean that they’d come up with something clever.
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This is old but good: a five-part animated tragedy set in the Mushroom Kingdom.
I was impressed by this article on marginal advantage by Sean Plott, who among other things is a high-level competitive Starcraft player. It discusses some more general points, suggesting that “a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the element of chance”, which I agree with, despite my long interest in Magic: The Gathering.
I also agree with his corollary that in a good competitive game, “the probability of a weak player defeating a good player should be as close to zero as possible”. Notions of “weak” and “good” players here should be as diverse as possible.
I’m not sure how this applies to tennis, the game I’m currently most interested in, but the winner of the match is often not the player with superior strokes.
I’m impressed and fascinated by this interview with Vincent Ocasla, who essentially “beat” Sim City 3000 as an art piece commenting on modern life, economics, and social engineering.
(I do think this counts as an art piece. While I think that video games can be art, no matter what Roger Ebert says, I also wonder about whether it means anything that they can be used to create art in this manner.)
After a highly enjoyable, productive, and extended period, it’s time for me to return to the world of paid work.
I’m quite happy with the things I’ve done during my time off. Many of them are important only to me, but then, it’s been my time off.
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An exploration, using 134 attempts to get Mario to finish a level, of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. Using custom emulator software and a fan-produced ROM hack of Super Mario World, naturally.
“A Heavy’s 2fort Adventure”: Choose Your Own Adventure crossed with Team Fortress 2 crossed with YouTube.
At the beginning of March I kicked off a roleplaying campaign, the first I’ve run since early 1995. The setting is essentially the one I laid out last year in my fantasy world sketch, which now as the name “Q’Rith”.
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Yes, clearly my progress (or lack thereof) needs quarterly reports. And here’s the first one for this year.
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Today I ran for the second time the roleplaying one-shot I did in December, with a completely different group of players. Last time the new:experienced ratio among the players was 1:4, while this time it was 3:1 (also, last time the female:male ratio among the players was 2:3, while this time it was 3:1).
Because of the number of new players, I prepared a little introduction to roleplaying to give before starting play, and I thought that it was worth sharing more widely.
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