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.