Learning Games

I went to grade school in the early years of VGA graphics. Oregon Trail, Where in (whatever iteration it may be) is Carmen San Diego, even 7th Guest and Return to Zork were all introduced to me at school. While these games use intellect, they can hardly be labeled "educational." I played Math Blaster, even thought I would have preferred Master Blaster.

Recently, I got to thinking. Educational games have to have become better over the years, right?

I want to introduce a couple of educational games that have managed to catch my attention.

Typing Games:

Z-Type - Control a ship constantly bombarded with oncoming asteroids and ships that can only be destroyed by typing out corresponding words. It's like missile command, if instead of a track ball, the game had a keyboard for a missile defense system. Score is determined by the number of items destroyed and a combo meter is reset for even a single mistake. The difficulty ramps up quickly and I have found it to be as entertaining as it is re-playable (read: infinitely).

Typing of The Dead - This was released on the Sega Dreamcast. We can still hope that one day it will be made compatible with modern machines and re-released, but don't hold your breath; Sega seems perfectly happy releasing the same pack of Genesis classics on every new system and never dipping into long lost treasures like this one and Power Stone. Typing of the Dead is a light gun game, but instead of the light gun, you have a keyboard that murders zombies with every correct keystroke. It's bloody, violent and an absolutely fantastic typing game. It's hard, if not impossible to find legally.

Typeracer - Think you have mastered typing at high velocity? Nope, like all other games on the internet, some guy in a country you can't find on a map is going to show you just how bad you suck. Typeracer give you a paragraph and a bar that shows your progress in relation to the people, represented by cars on a track. It's fun to get flustered as you see a competitor pull ahead. Winning can be more satisfying than a kill streak in the best shooter as it comes with some real bragging rights. Do yourself a favor, get some friends together, and have a great race in Typeracer.

I will be honest, I haven't done enough research to recommend too many other games. From my Steam collection, I would argue for World of Goo and to a significantly lesser extent, Worms. I suggest that both teach physics. Worms does so with rockets and propulsion and World of Goo does so with building structures of goo.

On a final note, I recently backed a Kickstarter project that promises to teach me programming through a game. I have my doubts, but if it works, great.

Hopefully everyone can find a game to their liking, I personally cannot say enough about Z-type.

Playing Dad

No, not Octodad (which I can't wait to get my hands on), I have been being a real dad. That's just an excuse. I have been playing a copious amount of games, but just haven't been able to will myself to write about them.

League of Legends continues to spread it's addiction like a tsunami (too soon?) in a Michael Bay movie. Every time I lose, I swear I am going to uninstall the game and switch to DoTA 2, but every time I win I forget about my anger. It is so incredibly satisfying to completely dominate a team of 5 people. The community seems to be in a bit of a rough spot right now. I haven't been able to be in a single game recently in which chat wasn't completely filled with players blaming and calling each other names. I am an adult and no longer feel I should be have to put up with bullies, but alas, the internet. I doubt the DoTA 2 community would be any better (as a matter of fact, I have heard it's much worse) but at least I would feel like the verbal abuse was justified.

I have been following Legend of Grimrock since I first saw it on Rock Paper Shotgun in August of 2011. I love throwbacks, even when I wasn't the biggest fan of the original. I tried to play a couple of like Dungeon Master and Shining in the Darkness which eventually lead to one of my favorite games of all time, Shining Force II. I tried Shining in the Darkness in my early teens and was just not interested in mapping out dungeons. I had not been sufficiently introduced to CRPGs at that time to be prepared for the amount of work involved in playing a dungeon crawler. Bard's Tale for the NES at my friends house was described as, "my dad's game that we aren't allowed to touch."

Now that I am a bit older I like the idea of getting some graph paper and making a map while I play, but, on the flip side, I appreciate that in the love letter to dungeon crawlers of years long passed that is Legend of Grimrock, I don't have to. While there are some modernizations to the game, such as the map, Legend of Grimrock did not settle for anything but the highest homage. The game can be tough as nails (I have already lost scores of companions to skeletal warriors and giant spiders).

The puzzles are intuitive and unique. It's really high praise to say that I feel mentally rewarded (and most of the time with loot too) when I finish a puzzle. One puzzle in particular had me stumped for several minutes and finally on the third trip back to the spot of my confounding, I figured it out. It was a moment of triumph as opposed to thinking, "how in the world did I miss something so obvious) as many other game "puzzles" are.

I haven't played enough to give a full review, and that's not really what I do anyway, but if you have a few dollars and are even a little nostalgic for (or have even ever wanted to get into) a dungeon crawler, Legend of Grimrock is the perfect game for you.

104 hours later, I finished up Skyrim and while I never got married (I never found that stupid dog in Fallout 3 either) I think I am done. I will re-install of course as more significant mods are released, but Skyrim has been explored for now. I have been really disappointed with main stories in RPGs recently. There is so much great content around the main story in games like Skyrim and Mass Effect, but then the story is over before you know it and it's all just so anticlimactic. I make myself into a god among vikings, space saviors, or what have you. Then I spend 4 hours traveling to a couple of places to talk to people, fight one big bad guy and then it's over.

I finished up Assassin's Creed Brotherhood while at work. At work, I can play, but I don't have sound and that was fine for everything except for the first 2 hours and the last 15-30 minutes, which play out like an episode of the X-filed.

1. Big build up (they are finally going to prove the existence of extra terrestrials in this one)

2. A lot of chasing and killing

3. Nothing, absolutely nothing. Mulder, Scully, and Desmond are no closer to the answers they seek.

I am going to skip Revelations because I have heard that there aren't any, and Assassin's Creed has become so formulaic that... well, I can play without sound at work. It is also incredibly easy. I sold insurance while beating that game, and did both activities with relative ease. I beat Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, never having died in combat (sure I fell off a couple of roofs, but who didn't?).

I played and finished Wizorb (a lot of throwbacks over the last few months, and with Kickstarter projects pandering in that direction, I foresee many more. Wizorb is to breakout what Puzzle Quest is to Bejeweled. If you like Arkanoid, Shatter (if you don't own Shatter already, why the hell don't you own Shatter?), or anything in between, Wizorb is a perfect fit in your library. Some of the music feels straight up lifted from Adventure Island which is more of a selling point to me than anything.

just listen to that beauty.

There are many more, but can't be discussed at this late hour. I have recommitted myself to this thing I call writing, and you can look forward to more in depth coverage of all things that I have been playing.

Pirates Cheaters, and Reddit

*Things I would like to get out of my life*

Here's an interesting conversation I had:

I used to play World of Warcraft quite a bit, but stopped before my son was born a little over two years ago. I finally realized that I hated everything about the game. I hated raiding the same content over and over and over and over and over again. I hated the barrier of entry into arena play. I hated the drama in guild chat. I hated waiting hours for things to start only to have them come to an abrupt end when someone would rage or disconnect or just flat out give up. I could no longer think of any reason I enjoyed playing WoW so I quit and while I was overtaken by old feelings of nostalgia once in the last two years, I reinstalled and played for a couple of weeks only to find all of my complaints still completely prevalent.

That was just a really long way to introduce the main character in the story I actually wanted to tell. A guy who I used to play WoW with text me (yes that's right, on the telephone.) I am not entirely sure where he got my phone number, but he said he wanted to see how I was and so on. I gave him my Steam name and we started chatting. As soon as I saw his first message I felt that uneasy sensation when you know that someone is going to ask you for something, but they feel obligated to make small talk before they get to their sales pitch. (You don't give a crap how I am doing today, door to door carpet cleaning guy, so just get down to it so I can say no thank you and go back to obsessively refreshing "r/gaming."

Anyway, so he finally gets to the point and lets me know that his WoW account was banned because he downloaded a bot that would make him money while he did other stuff, like play Starcraft II. I thought about it for a while and eventually just thought, "why the hell not?"

Since then, this person has continued to message me on Steam from time to time when he thinks I am playing something interesting. Most recently he interrupted my game of Recettear to ask me how I like it (I didn't know because I was still reading tutorials). I told him it seemed pretty awesome (as I will tell anyone about almost every indie game, unless they are truly terrible). He said that he would have to pirate it and give it a try.

Now, I am no saint; I have, in the past, pirated things before: movies, music and the requisite 8 and 16-bit emulators, but I have a real problem with people who pirate from independent developers. I told him that it was only $20, there was a free demo, and if he wants it, he should really pony up the money to support the developer. He attested that he was poor and I didn't push the issue because in reality, I don't know this person, so it's not really my place to be their mom, but bad, bad pirate.

Weeks later and a week ago I had the chance to sink some time into Recettear and really discover that it's an awesome game and not just because it's independent. The game can be hard as I found out after playing for a couple of hours I was confronted with a very definitive "Game Over" on my screen with no option to rout me to a save that could help me prevent my untimely end. The game was over. While I was disappointed that I had failed, I was so proud of little Recettear for having the balls to do something that modern games have forgotten, let me fail. Thank you Recettear for not being a hand held, barely interaction video story.

I started over only to have my former WoW companion interrupt me to ask me if I had a hard time with Recettear. I answered in the affirmative and let him know that I had literally just failed. He responded with something that made me laugh. "I had to cheat to get past the deadlines." So here is a game that he pirated that he has to cheat to be able to win. The duality of stealing something and then cheating his way through it just to get through it made me smile in an odd sense of awe and disappointment. Maybe I am the guy who has to smell his wine and swish it around his mouth before ingesting it, but it just seems like that's what you do with something you want to appreciate and savor. But he went through Recettear like a gallon of Thunderbird he tucked under his shirt at the local liquor store. Drank it to get drunk and wake up in the morning with a headache and no recollection of the previous days events. I won't go so far as to call Recettear a masterpiece, but people, if you have a game worth enjoying... enjoy it.

On a positive side note: You may have noticed that I have been writing more consistently in my blogs. This is because I made a rule for myself: I am not allowed to look at Reddit on my office computer (at which I spend most of my computer time). I can look at Reddit at PC in my bedroom, which significantly limits the amount of time I spend (see: waste) on Reddit.

Relearning Learned Lessons

Admit it, we have all been the victim of great marketing for a not great game.

I bought Homefront day one and really really wanted to like it, but a short and ultimately incomplete single player and an unplayable multiplayer. I was taken by the promise of a PC focus and large player counts on dedicated servers, but just because food is catered doesn't mean that the food it edible. I was duped. The commitment was made to forego any day one purchases. I could always wait for reviews and my backlog is so full that I can wait for sales and still play a new game from now until oblivion (that's the end of the world, not the game). I would love to talk more about the awful failure that was Homefront, but this post is about Dead Island.

My buddy is really looking forward to the new game mode in League of Legends, Dominion, and to be fair, who isn't? Dominion looks great.

Riot Games is taking the large cast of characters they have created and putting them in a whole new game type. With so many new DOTA clones coming out it's nice to see something other than three lanes, eleven towers, three inhibitors, and a nexus. Anyway, back to my buddy... He is really looking forward to Dominion but what to play in the meantime? Well, Dead Island just came out why not play through that? Being a coop focused game he asked me if I would be interested in joining him on his island vacation zombie apocalypse. If I have a weakness it is being stabbed in the face and if I have two weaknesses the other is the fact that if someone wants to play a game with me, I am forced by some unknown power to say yes.

So I bought Dead Island even though there are 47 other games sitting on my Steam wishlist, most of which are less than half the price and all of which I would have rather played. Bad games are bad and great games are great, but Dead Island is meh. That is the best description I can give. The scenery is beautiful, the melee is satisfying, the gunplay (which I wholly expected to be terrible) was competent, and the game is an appropriate length for a full retail game.

The worst condemnation I can give Dead Island is that through most of the campaign I was bored. The side-quests are either fetch quests or escort missions and become tedious far too early. The commercials tout an emotionally gripping experience, but the game has none of the music that is used to such effect. It's also nearly impossible to care about any of the characters who either seem too stupid or douchey to connect with. When one of the main characters dies towards the end of the game, my friend (who I played the whole game with) and I felt more joy that the whiny pouting Patsy had died than the melancholy that the game wanted us to feel.

When Aeris died (SPOILERS!) in Final Fantasy 7, it hit home because I had spent several hours leveling her up and thinking that she may be the main love interest in the story.

When the character in Dead Island had her brains removed, I felt nothing. Some double crossing whiny character died? Meh.

"Meh" was the feeling I had more than any other while playing. Dead Island failed to engage me and was a relief when it was over so I could go onto better games.

If you have some friends, nothing else to play, and a great sale, go ahead and take a trip to Dead Island, but it's more of a game to fill a lazy afternoon than an engaging hyper emotional zombie vacation.

I have also been playing:

Dungeons of Dredmor

Limbo

Rusty Hearts

(Which I may discuss next time.)

More Like OLD Vegas, Amiright?... guys?...

I checked my Steam profile and I may have lied yesterday. I have spent a little over 10 hours of my life wandering the wastes of Fallout: New Vegas and for most of those 10 hours, I was not having fun, no sir, no fun at all.

I played a lot of Fallout 3. I discovered every single location and did every quest that I came across. I deactivated the bomb in Megaton, I helped a group of subway dwelling vampires find a blood replacement, I even came across the happiest town in The Waste, only to find out that their basements hid a dark dark secret (I will give you a hint, they are cannibals). I loved Fallout 3 with all it's flaws. Every computer terminal, every locked door, and every dialogue option was a window into the world of Fallout.

Don't get me wrong, Fallout 3 had problems. The main story could be finished in just a few hours, some bugs made a necessity of saving regularly so that when the game trapped you, there was always a save point to go back to, and V.A.T.S was the only viable way to get through combat.

New Vegas fixes a lot of the problems with Fallout 3, but it feels like too little too late.

The main thing I loved about Fallout 3 was going off the beaten path and exploring. I loved meeting new people in The Waste and learning their story. When I finally found out the dark secret of the happiest town in Fallout, I felt an enormous responsibility to cleanse the town, and I did, right down to the pets. I was so appalled at their behavior. So when I found the cannibal in New Vegas, I just let him go because I didn't care enough about him. I had already purged an entire town.

New Vegas just didn't offer me any incentive for exploration. Going to a random cave would not net me an amazing gun or other piece of loot and more than anything else, I had already seen those caves in the previous game. I already knew what the buildings looked like on the inside. I knew how sewers were constructed and I knew that the only thing in those large metal boxes are spare parts and other merchant trash. In playing through New Vegas I couldn't help but feel, I have already explored all this game has to offer before I even inst

alled it. It felt too much like an expansion to a game in which I had already suck 50+ hours. I was done with Fallout 3 and all New Vegas seemed to want to offer me was more Fallout 3.

The second main gripe I have with New Vegas is how I decided to play. I know that speech is always the way to go, but I decided to do something that I have yet been able to do in any moral decision based RPG. I was going to be evil. and I don't mean Chaotic good, I mean straight up, murder parents in front of their children and leave the kids to starve to death evil. The choice of good or evil should not be the equivalent of choosing paint colors. Black or white, it's still the same wall with the same paint. Moral choices should be like choosing a flavor of ice cream. Chocolate should be very distinct from Vanilla and provide a wholly different experience, not just an aesthetic change. Sure there were gangs of law enforcement officials out for me, but those could have easily been re-skinned thugs out for the life of a law man.

Playing evil may have destroyed the experience for me, but I just wasn't interested in exploring something that looked exactly the same as a world I had already gone over with a magnifying glass.

I bought New Vegas for 8.00 on some ridiculous Steam promotion, so I don't feel cheated, just disinterested and disappointed.

Stanley and His Fantastic Parable

Sometimes we like games because they get the impact of a bullet just right or because we want to see what the next skeleton will drop for us. I played an hour of Chime last night because it's just so damned relaxing.

Before we get into today's featured presentation, here's a short rundown of what has been going on in my gaming. I played about 20 hours of Fallout: New Vegas before uninstalling it both begrudgingly and in disappointment, but that is a conversation for my next post. I have been playing League of Legends as always and middling around in Starcraft 2. I played through Dead Island with a buddy and could not feel more "meh" about it.

Today is not the day to discuss sequels that feel more like an expansion or games that are bugged to hell. Today is the day to discuss the only game that made me explore every single possible decision. Thank goodness The Stanley Parable is short or that would have been quite the task. As it stands I played through The Stanley Parable about 10 times and I enjoyed each consecutive play-through no less than the previous.

Imagine for a moment an interactive story in which the main character has free will and doesn't have to do what the story has written. There are essentially two main characters in the parable of Stanley. The first character is the narrator who attempts to tell Stanley's story and the other is Stanley (you), the main character. Now, acting as Stanley, you have the choice to follow the narrator's story, or dismiss it and make choices that contradict the story and in turn may upset the narrator.

The experience the player will have throughout The Stanley Parable will vary drastically based on one simple decision: Will you obey? The Stanley Parable also discusses (in a way) game design and the fallacy of player choice, but you will have to experience that for yourself. The Stanley Parable can be found on Desura and only requires that you own Half Life 2.

Go now, or don't, the choice is yours.

Delayed

No, not a game, my writing. I will pick up soon, but playing real father has taken over for a bit. I welcomed my second child and first daughter into the world yesterday. I will get back to neglecting her for video games shortly. See you then.