Springtime fo' Fitty

A breaking news flash regarding 50 Cent's new game.

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is... good?

Apparently the game has solid gunplay, sound AI, decent controls, and an entertaining story.

All I can ask is... what the hell went wrong?

They had everything so perfect: A crappy predecessor; a story about a "gangsta[sic]" rapper fighting terrorists in the Middle-East to retrieve a priceless skull-McGuffin (which clearly worked so well for the Indiana Jones franchise). The whole thing was clearly destined for the bargain bin. Yet somehow they managed to screw it up and produce a good game.

I highly suggest Max and Leo get outta town before all the bling-sporting little old ladies come to collect.

With Lyrics

I find this song endlessly entertaining. Whether you remember the old Final Fantasy games or not (I'm only old enough to have grown up with VII), I think we can all appreciate poking a little fun at the sadistic nature of the average videogame protagonist. I mean, look at Kirby. He's senselessly devoured countless hapless creatures and stolen their essences. This seems, frankly, kinda evil; and all King Dedede ever did was take his little wand thingy.

But ultimately I guess a protagonist is only as good as his player.

...I'm looking at you, ya sickos.

Office Story

Here's a short story I wrote recently. It doesn't really have anything to do with games, but is that a crime I ask? (That's really a rhetorical question more than anything.)

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Office Story

By Orin Bishop

Jim and Brad crossed the threshold separating the light-rail and the platform as several car alarms went off.

“Did you see that guy back there?” Brad asked, “He had, like, a bun in his hair. Doesn’t that seem weird to you?”

Jim thought about it for a moment.

“It seems okay to me,” he concluded. “ I mean, it’s the 21^st century. I think in this day and age we can reevaluate the traditional gender roles we’ve previously seen ourselves cast in, you know?”

Brad looked confused.

“Wh- no. No, I mean like a hotdog bun.”

They were silent for a while as they crossed out to join the downtown crowd on its way to do the morning’s business.

“Maybe he was going to eat it later” Jim finally offered.

“What, his hair?”

“No, the bun, I mean.”

“Mm.”

Brad seemed somewhat satisfied.

They rounded the last corner and pushed their way into the cool lobby of IndustraCorp, pausing for a moment to watch the old woman who seemed to be caught up in the revolving glass doors. Jim briefly contemplated trying to aid her, but she didn’t look to be in any particular distress. He waved hello to the security guard, and Brad did some kind of friendly fist-poundy thing which the fellow seemed to regard as slightly offensive.

“Any hopes for the day,” Brad asked as they made their way to their cubicles.

“Only that Trent doesn’t need me for anything,” replied Jim, “that guy drives me nuts. He’s got that whole fake-o British accent and everything. Gack.”

“He’s British.”

“Well he’s a jerk!”

“Agreed, but, I mean, it’s not really ‘fake-o’ if he’s British, is it?”

“It is when he does it.”

“Hey look, there’s a note here from Stan the overlord.”

Jim pulled off the sticky and read it aloud.

“ ‘Jim, I need you to deliver the Stevenson account. Tube thingy isn’t working today. –Stan’… Well that’s alright then; we don’t hate Stan.”

“No,” said Brad,” we just think he’s clinically insane.”

“Shh, he’ll be listening through the carpet.”

They both had a good laugh until Brad spotted the second note.

“Hey, Stan left you another one below that.”

“ ‘P.S. – the Stevenson account is with Trent.’ Dammit!”

He cursed loudly enough that several people looked up reproachfully from the water coolers.

“And I think he also did this other one with a t-rex fighting a robot,” said Brad.

        

*  *  *

 

Trent was holding a meeting when Jim reluctantly slipped into the room, awkwardly knocking aside the projector which had inexplicably been placed in front of the door. The room was silent so he cautiously spoke.

         “Uh, Trent, can I talk to you for a m-“

         “Epepep,” Trent stammered, looking up irritably, “Jim, we’re in a meeting right now, and we don’t really… like you all that much. Jeffrey, you were reading the minutes.”

         “Eight forty-five, Jim waked in. He was being annoying.”

         Jeffrey emphasized this last bit by pausing to stare balefully at Jim. He looked back at his computer and continued.

         “Eight forty-six, Jim left.”

         Both he and Trent stared balefully at him.

         “Probably in a huff,” Jeffrey concluded, apparently reading off his monitor. Then he gazed at Jim some more, and when this didn’t seem to be working, he began making encouraging circles with his hand.

         “Look, would you stop reading the min-“ began Jim

         “Continue reading the minutes!” screamed Trent.

         Jeffrey glanced briefly at his enraged supervisor, then looked back at Jim and, failing to think of anything else, began moving his hand again.

         “Look, I just need the bloody Stevenson account.”

         “Yes yes,” said Trent, “it’s in your desk. Somebody around here actually reads the notes you get.”

         “What?” Jim said, taken aback, “why do you think I’m in here?”

         “Out!” yelled Trent, “and put that projector back the way it was.”

         “I don’t think both of those tasks are physically possible, sir,” said Jim.

         “And that is why you are not management material, Chris.”

         “It’s Jim, actually,” he said, mostly to himself, as he awkwardly closed the door while positioning the projector by its cord and gratefully headed off down the hall. “It was in the minutes.”

The meeting resumed its silence.

 

*  *  *

 

Jim returned to his cubicle in a less than jovial mood, but the Stevenson account was in his desk just as Trent had promised, along with several fliers advertising some sort of Lithuanian cruise. It seemed Trent wanted him to leave the country.

He hurried out through the lobby past the revolving doors in which several more elderly ladies appeared to have congregated. The Stevenson account felt inordinately heavy under his arm, and though he was unsure of the contents of the bulging manila envelope, he had a peculiar feeling that his task held great importance. Spotting the InnovaTech building (with which the package was addressed), he hurriedly bustled his way through the downtown crowd, and collided with something short and loud.

“Blaaa!” said the old gentlemen he had just knocked over.

“I’m terribly sorry!” said Jim as he helped the man back onto his little stool. “Er, why are you sitting on a stool in the middle of the road?”

“Because you kindly helped me back up, young man,” said the fellow in a voice that reminded Jim of pemmican. “Otherwise I would be lying beside my stool.”

Jim couldn’t really argue with this conclusion. He was about to bid the fellow a good day and take his leave when the man spotted the envelope tucked under his arm.

“Could I see that?” asked the old man.

Jim felt rather bad about knocking the man off his stool and embarrassing him (though in truth no one in the surrounding crowd seemed to be paying them any attention), so he reluctantly ceded the package. The fellow tilted it this way and that, held it up to his ear and shook it, and then began trying to wrap it about his knee.

“Er, could I have that back now,” said Jim, “I need to-“

“It’s a good envelope,” interrupted the gentleman, “I’ll give ya that,”

He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said “I’ll give ye four magic beans for it.”

Jim was taken aback. “It’s not for- uh, beans, did you say?”

“Fine, five beans, but you drive a hard bargain, son.”

“Look,” explained Jim carefully, “I can’t just go around selling important documents. I’d be fired from my job, and… uh, magic beans?”

“Well they ain’t Tijuana beans,” said the man, taking five lima-bean-esque objects out of his coat pocket and holding them out for Jim to examine.

“Er, how do I know they’re magic?” asked Jim.

“Are you kidding?” said the man, “these are the most magical beans I’ve ever owned, and they’re guaranteed to make your dreams come true.”

“Ah,” said Jim, “and I suppose that’s why you’re sitting on a stool in the middle of mainstreet?”

“Exactly,” smiled the man softly, an enigmatic glint in his eye.

“Uh huh…” said Jim, “well okay then.”

He handed over the Stevenson account and took the beans.

 

*  *  *

 

Jim experienced the first pangs of buyer’s remorse about half way to InnovaTech. Then he stopped walking.

“Why did I sell the Stevenson account for beans?” he said out loud to himself, taking them out of his breast pocket to examine.

‘And why am I still walking this way?’ he thought. ‘Am I going to deliver these beans instead?’

He half considered it, just to get the accursed things out of his possession, but then he realized that perhaps the old man would let him trade back. After all, what use would a bunch of papers be to him anyway? Unless he were some sort of corporate spy… with beans.

Jostling his way through the crowd, he came to the place he thought the man had been, but there was no trace of him or the stool. Maybe he had imagined the whole thing. He looked down at the beans in his hand and discarded this theory. Beginning to panic a little, Jim frantically wandered around for a while, and then gave up and decided to go back to his office. Perhaps Brad would have a suggestion. He dashed into the lobby past the revolving doors. The old ladies were gone now, but they had left behind a surprising amount of graffiti.

“You gotta help me,” Jim pleaded when he reached Brad’s cubicle. “I traded the Stevenson report to an old guy for some beans!”

“Why?” asked Brad.

“The guy said they were magic!”

“Are they?”

“I severely doubt it!” Jim leaned in close. “Look, you gotta help me. What should I do?”

         “Well, my wife sometimes makes a nice stew, and we-“

Jim shook him by the collar,“I’m not asking you what I should do with the beans!”

 “What’s all this then?” demanded Trent as he rounded the corner with Stan. “Did you manage to deliver the Stevenson account?”

“Who do you think would win in a fight?” interrupted Stan, “A t-rex or a robot?”

“Err,” responded Jim, “I suppose it would depend on what sort of robot.”

“Hmm,” said Stan pensively, “I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

“The account!” Trent cried exasperatedly.

“Ah yes,” said Stan, “did you deliver it?”

Jim looked awkwardly at the floor, and Brad looked awkwardly down his own shirt. Finally Jim decided to come clean.

“I was going to deliver the Stevenson account,” he began, “but...”

“But what?” demanded Trent, “You instead spontaneously decided to wallow in your own incompetence as usual? Is that it?

“I sold it to a man on the street.”

Trent said nothing. He looked as though he had been slapped with a wet fish. Finally he turned to Stan.

“I assure you, I did not tell him to do that. I gave him specific instructions-“

“So the Stevenson account is currently in the hands of some random fellow you met in the street?” Stan asked slowly.

“Yes,” said Jim ashamedly.

“And you don’t suppose this fellow has any intention of delivering it himself?”

“No, sir. I’m very sorry, sir.” Jim looked away.

For a moment, no one said anything. Then Stan gave a huge sigh of relief.

“Thank god. I’ve been terribly worried. I realized there were all sorts of errors and typos in that report just after you left, and I had feared the worst.”

“What kinds of typos?” asked Brad.

“I accidentally called the CEO’s son a persimmon,” said Stan.

“What did you mean to say?” asked Jim, feeling greatly relieved.

“I meant to call his son a terrorist,” said Stan, laughing at his own ineptitude.

Trent was reeling. He said nothing, and looked ready to vomit.

“You did well, my boy,” said Stan, clapping Jim on the shoulder. “Now if I could just find something to eat around here, everything would be perfect.”

“I think Jim has some beans,” said Brad.

“Shut up!” said Jim.

“Yes,” said Stan, “it’s impolite to offer another man’s beans, when that man might want them for himself later on.”

Trent looked as though he were in a strange fantasyland and couldn’t understand the local dialect.

Jim took the beans from his pocket and presented them to Stan. “I just have these five here. If you want them, please feel free, sir.”

“Excellent job, my boy. You save me from both embarrassment and hunger in a single day, and all before ten-o’-clock in the morning. I’m promoting you to manager.” And with that, Stan took the beans and strode off.

Trent fainted. Behind him, Jim spotted the old man waving to him from outside the window. Jim regarded this as odd since they were currently on the 32^nd floor.

Your Ammo Upgrade is in Another Castle...

So I just watched The Good The Bad and The Ugly for the first time (I know I know, I'm an uncultured plebeian). It's a near-perfect film, with one of the best musical scores of all time, and it got me thinking about storylines and suspense. At the confrontation at the end of the film, it isn't clear exactly which men are going to walk away from the gunfight. With the level of formula that we have come to expect, a film has to go a long way to achieve this level of uncertainty, where anything might happen.

With games, we have this uncertainty in abundance, and yet we squander it. Sure, I may or may not survive this level, but if I don't, I'm just going to try again until I do. The plot is still going to end the same way. Sure, some games go for multiple endings, and I think this is a step in the right direction, but it always feels a little tacked on. Games like The Sims have plenty of emergence and unpredictability, but they don't feel, to me anyway, like they have much of a plot. When games do have a plot, it always feels separate from the actually gameplay mechanics because I'm almost never concerned with the same things as the protagonist. He's bent on trying to find the princess or save the world, and I'm trying to get that ammo upgrade or make sure I don't run out of lives.

I feel that if a game is going to have a storyline, it needs to match up more closely with the game's mechanics. Players are sad in a very personal way if they permanently lose a good item, so why not make that item a person? Instead, the people in games usually seem totally irrelevant, and are only important when we have to keep their stupid butt alive in an insipid escort mission. If we fail in our task, that should be that. The character is dead. We shouldn't have to play it again because we didn't conform to the plot that the game had in mind. Can you imagine if, in a game of D&D, the DM said "I'm sorry, but you weren't supposed to let that character die. We're going to have to start over from the staircase again. Jim, erase that battle-ax you picked up, you haven't found that yet."

[upcoming spoiler for anyone who knows nothing about Final Fantasy VII yet intends to play it in future; all three of you may wish to leave the room now.]

Many gamers were deeply affected by the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII, and I think this is largely due to the fact that she was a good healer. She healed you party. And then she was dead. I don't mean to sound callous here. I just think people are particularly sad about things that are gone if they once contributed to our happiness in some way. I mean, sure it's sad when a random person in Peru is hit by a bus (unless, perhaps, they were a supervillain?), but we are sadder when the person who died personally contributed something to our lives which is now missing, whether it be companionship, snappy dialogue, or in the case of Aeris, nice healing. It would be nice to miss someone for their love, compassion and strength of character, but there's only so much that you can do to make someone care about a 2-inch tall, 32-bit sprite with a bad hairdo.

If a game is going to have a plot that we are supposed to care about, that plot needs to be part of the game and not just something running parallel to it, like a television in another room that someone has neglected to turn off.

We also have the potential to create things which could be virtually spoiler-proof. I can tell you about some awesome thing that happened to me in FarCry (it involved some dangerous serum and a lack of familiarity with the controls), and it doesn't ruin your experience of the game one bit. It's true that we cannot design a branching storyline to accommodate everything that a player might do, which is why we need to work towards making more of the storyline emergent and procedurally generated like the gameplay. You may say that this can't be done, but all I really ask is that the game's plot and dialogue acknowledge its gameplay in some way.

For example, in his recent review of Thief: The Dark Project, Yahtzee expresses how impressed he was when, after hopping back into the shadows after being spotted by a guard, the guard yelled "Don't think you can just hop back into the shadows, boy!" This sort of thing shows that the game is acknowledge you as the protagonist and not merely as the audience. If I'm playing a first-person-shooter and decide to search the level for machine gun ammo before facing the boss because I'm running low, I want one of the characters to say "maybe we should find some more machine gun ammo before we go in there." This makes what I'm doing feel like part of the storyline and not just part of the gameplay.

If we as designers and developers can tap into this power of uncertainty and agency, we can redefine the whole concept of a hero's journey, and potentially reinvent the story. "Are games art?" Psshaw.

(I do believe that games could one day make spoilers obsolete, but to be fair gaming does open up the potential for a whole new type of spoilers, namely "strategy" spoilers, but we'll talk about that one another day.)

"A Beautiful Animal..."

Wow, it's been a while.

I haven't posted for a bit as over the non-denominational holiday season I was frantically attempting to finish designing, playtesting and prototyping a new game, which I did actually manage to do about an hour before I had to leave and catch the plane back to Ontario.

It's a cardgame. With zombies. Pretty much sells itself I think.

Anyway I don't really have anything to say gamewise at the moment, but I stumbled upon a couple of comic gems in this malignant cesspool we call the internet (some people call it the blogosphere, but those people are stupid).

The first is a fabulous show that everyone should watch. It's called SPACED, and involves most of the Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz crew before they did those slices of fried gold. Contrary to the title, it is not in fact Sci-Fi, but it is definitely for geeks. I just watched it on YouTube but you should all go out and buy the DVD box set ya cheap bastards.

The second thing is this. It must be watched to be fathomed. Er, ... I'll get back to you.

(Disclaimer: some profanity and a whole lot of peculiarity.)

Betrayal at House on the Hill Review: Very Nearly Great...

This isn't so much a review, as an exploration of what I think is "off" with this game. Don't get me wrong though, I actually really like this game. (I tend not to play games dozens of times if I don't.)

I'll get back to the vaguely similar Arkham Horror in a future post.

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This isn’t going to be a detailed exploration of how this game works, or even why I think it’s good. I simply wish to explain why I feel it has the potential to be really fantastic, and why I think it falls short of this.

All things considered, I think BaHotH (worst acronym I have ever seen) is a very good game that definitely deserves a reprint, and if you have a chance to snag it for cheap, I’d go for it. There’s a lot of "game" in here, not in the sense that there is any real depth to the gameplay, but that you will have many very different experiences, and two games will virtually never play out the same way. That said, I feel that the game was designed in a rather silly way, which I think needs to be addressed for any potential reprint. Allow me to explain...

For the uninitiated, the way the game works is that, after exploring a creepy old mansion for a while, a "haunt" (scenario) will start, at which point one player will automatically and titularly betray everyone, and the remaining players will frantically work together to fight against some threat ranging from zombies, a giant spider, or even the whole house slowly sinking underwater.

Some scenarios are definitely more balanced than others, and the revised scenario booklet seems to be a bit better than what you get in the box, but as long as you are into the story and theme, and don’t take this sort of game too seriously, this shouldn’t be a problem. Personally I like being thrust up against impossible odds and desperately trying to prevail, though I did run into one scenario (with an alternate dimension and a lot of poisonous gas) which, if I read everything correctly, seems utterly broken.

The problem, for me anyway, is not in the game’s balance. Because the way that the game unfolds is always a little (or sometimes a lot) different, it would be basically impossible to make every scenario balanced for every setup, and I think this variability is a large part of the game’s appeal. The problem I have with the game is this: There are 50 different scenarios, yet only 45 event cards. For most games, the number of cards would be more than sufficient. The problem here is that, while you will only see one scenario, in each game you will see at least a dozen events.

I’ve probably played this game about 20 times, and I’ve never been bored by the scenario itself, but the buildup, where you explore the house drawing cards, begins to feel extremely stale. For example, in at least one out of three games you are likely to be menaced by the ghost of a gardener. When he’s already menaced you in five previous games, he ceases to be particularly threatening or interesting.

From a gameplay perspective, there isn’t all that much variation in the events, and adding more would be a bit redundant, but from a thematic standpoint, the limited number really begin to make the game feel all too familiar. The first 2/3rds or so of the game really isn’t about gameplay anyway; by exploring the house and drawing cards, you are basically randomizing and determining the layout of the house, and the items and stats every player will have when the "real" game starts. This could be done in a far less time consuming manner with some sort initial rolling and shuffling, but the point of it is that it is thematic. You are warily creeping around a house as the tension builds, waiting for the haunt to be triggered. It’s actually a lot of fun... the first couple of times. By the twentieth time it feels like playing a game of Candyland in order to randomize the map for Settlers.

Despite some balance issues, I congratulate them on managing to pack in 50 scenarios, but frankly the game just doesn’t need this many. I’ve played a couple of scenarios more than once, and I can say that they definitely didn’t play out the same way each time. (In fact, I think there’s a lot more variability between two games of Betrayal with the zombie haunt, than two games of Zombies!!!) As I said, I’ve played this game about twenty times, which means that I’ve only seen about a third of the scenarios in the book. Granted if the book were smaller I would have seen more of the same scenarios multiple times, but as I said I don’t see this as a problem. I’d love to face off against Crimson Jack again, but it’s very unlikely that I’ll end up with that scenario a second time. Sure I could simply choose to play that one, but my point is that less time should have been put into making scenarios, and more of it should have been put into making cards. Perhaps the cards were significantly more expensive to produce than pages, but then I say that more events could have been fit onto each event card, and you would have only one of them based on which floor your character happened to be in, like in Arkham Horror.

Personally I much prefer this game to Arkham Horror because it scratches roughly the same itch for me and is far shorter (about 45 minutes), but I say you should go even further. The rules state that the haunt starts after you roll under the number of revealed omens with 6 dice, but I say make it 5, 4 or even 3 dice. You may have to do something to help the good guys out in some way, as they won’t have as much time to beef up, but this will really cut down the tedious early game and get things moving along, and it is how I intend to play from now on. If a new edition is ever released, I hope it either has more event cards (and perhaps fewer and more playtested scenarios), or at least does something to accelerates the early game in some way.

All in all, I really believe that this game deserves a reprint. It has produced very memorable gaming sessions, and I’m very glad I decided to pick up a copy. The way the scenarios work, where the traitor goes off and reads a different set of rules from the good guys, feels very different from anything else I have played. The heroes might need to get a particular item and perform a ritual in a particular room, and the traitor likely has no idea. Maybe the zombies can be killed with the gun, but you won’t know until you try.

This aspect of the game is fun, but the concept of hidden rules has a lot of potential that isn’t fully utilized here, as anyone who has played Mao knows. You could have all kinds of stuff like maybe a witch who curses any player who says a certain word or who has their character pawn facing a certain direction. The possibilities with hidden rules are practically limitless, but the concept is utilized in fairly repetitive ways here. Generally the heroes have to perform one or more skill checks in one or more secret rooms, and the monsters have some stat or item weakness that is unknown to the heroes or the traitor. One of the reasons that there are so many scenarios is so that players won’t remember how to kill zombies, or in what room a ghost must be exercised, but I feel that if the concept of hidden rules isn’t going to be utilized to its fullest potential, these hidden factors might as well be determined through a separate deck of cards denoting particular items or rooms as being important. In this way, the scenario could simply be read aloud by everybody, and only the heroes or the traitor would be allowed to view the cards with the pertinent information such as which rooms were important. I’m not saying that it should have been done this way, I merely wish to reinforce my point that the huge number of scenarios is unnecessary.

Another area in which the game simultaneously succeeds and fails is in the components. They are rather nicely done, and quite durable and nice to handle, but there are also far too many little tokens. In fact, nearly every scenario utilizes a different set of tokens, so there are literally hundreds of little tokens to hunt through when you need twelve of the little round ones that say "Bat." There is nothing particularly thematic or menacing about a little cardboard chit with a word on it, and they all could have been easily replaced with two-dozen generic tokens of some sort. Instead of a scenario asking for some bats, it could simply ask for some of the generic purple triangles, and I assure you that this would be no less thematic. (Bats do not wear little "Bat" nametags in the same way that Radioactive Man does not wear a T-Shirt with his picture on it.)

By shortening the early game, and generifying your tokens so that you don’t have to hunt for the correct ones (or even have to bag them all in the first place), you can cut at least 10 or 15 minutes of fat from what is already an agreeably short meal.

All things considered, if you at least like the concept of B-Horror, and don’t take your lightweight gaming too seriously, BaHotH is almost certainly worth adding to your collection. I’m fairly tired of it now, but it was definitely a fun ride while it lasted, and easily worth the 40 bucks or so CDN I paid for it. There’s really nothing quite like it that I have ever played, and I hope that it or something similar once again sees the light of day in future. But now I have to go. As it turns out, I’m the traitor. Bwahahahaha...

Happy Haunting!

Thesis and the Minotaur

I'm finally finishing up the first draft of my undergraduate thesis. There's definitely a different set of skills associate with writing a long document, specifically one which is non-fiction. A few times I've found myself explaining something which I then realized that I had covered in a previous section, and the question arises whether to take out or shorten one of the descriptions, or whether to go ahead and explain the same thing twice. Most books seem to go for the latter, which irritates me a bit. I don't need you to tell me the same thing five times, particularly if it's in the same chapter.

And if you are going to go ahead and state things multiple times, should the things stated more often be the things that are more important and/or confusing? I've encountered the same dilemma when writing rules. If one adopts a policy to restate everything until the ratio of concept-statement to concept-difficulty is achieved, the whole thing begins to resemble that Marx Brothers routine in which one side of a mustache is trimmed a bit too much, and then the other, until finally there is no mustache. I want my thesis to retain its mustache, damn it!

Oh, and I hadn't come across this game before, and found it rather interesting, though I mostly just wanted a pun in my title.

Gnome Man's Land - Explaining Das Book

I recently purchased a game called Red November about a group of drunken, communist gnomes on a flaming submarine. (You can go ahead and reread that last sentence.)

It's co-designed by Bruno Faidutti, one of my absolute favorite designers who also gave us Citadels and Mission: Red Planet, as well as many others. The theme for this one is great, and so far the gameplay seems top-notch as well, but sadly the rulebook is a little lacking.

Fantasy Flight Games does this a lot. They put out a good game with high production values, and then they apparently get a roomful of monkeys with staplers to organize the rules. I mean, I can see not wanting to hang around supervising the monkeys when there are staples and feces flying about, but when your rulebook is 40, or 80! pages long, it needs a friggin' index and table of contents, not a bunch of advertisements!

Luckily Red November's rulebook is only 23 very small pages, but sadly these pages appear to have been combined in a seemingly arbitrary order, making the learning of this otherwise fine game unnecessarily difficult. Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to basically rewrite the rulebook, and I have posted my extended explanation here. I didn't include it in this post because it's frackin' long and I don't particularly suggest reading through it unless you want to learn how to play the game or you suffer from insomnia and an excess of time. Instead I recommend silently making puns to yourself about gnomes for the next few minutes if you gnome what I mean...

Mini Games: Unwarranted Experiments in Timesaving

I've started a geeklist with the intention of compiling a collection of variants for reducing the playing times of various boardgames. You won't get some of the in-jokes if you only play videogames, but lucky for you those never drag on.

iPhod

So I got an iPod touch (2nd Gen. 8Gig), and after using it for about a week, I have to say that it is perhaps one of the greatest things ever created by man. I may be somewhat biased towards Apple, what with their products not constantly crashing, but this thing is an absolute joy to use.

The main thing is the touchscreen interface. When I think touchscreen, I think irritating bank machines that hassle me and beep a lot, but the touchscreen on the iPod and iPhone are a whole different animal. The thing always seems to know what I want it to do, and the touch keyboard is in a totally different universe than the awkward graffiti feature of oldschool PDAs. My personal favorite feature of the interface is that when you scroll past the bottom of a list, rather than just stopping, the thing carries on and then bounces back, as if to say "oop, that's the end of the list, but I cheerfully acknowledge your request to scroll farther and can fully understand why you might want to do so. Please have a pleasant day." Apple understands that controlling something directly feels inherently different than controlling it with a mouse wheel, which is something Wii developers need to learn one of these days.

When I do something like press a button or move a joystick or a scroll wheel, I know that I've done so and if I get no other feedback, I just assume that nothing is supposed to happen. But when I do something more vague like move my finger or swing a Wiimote, I need some sort of aknowledgement that I entered the command and that it didn't do anything. There is almost nothing more frustrating in videogames (and realize that I grew up in the days of Battletoads) than continually waving your arm to no effect and then finally realizing that either you're not doing it right, or that you can't do that action there. (But I'll have plenty to say about bad (and good) Wii controls in another post.)

Anyway, iPods and iPhones are all the rage right now, despite the questionable phone plan Rogers has for us in Canada, which led me to opt of the iPod. New games and apps are constantly flooding onto the device, and I am actually working on a game myself with some fellas in my dorm. I'll keep you posted when we get further along in development.

As with anything, 90% of all of these apps are presumably completely terrible, but luckily some of them are quite interesting, and a surprising number are completely free. There's also a handy ratings system to help sift through the muck and find the gems, and personally I think ratings systems should become a mandatory feature on every product. Like if you go to a restaurant, and look at the menu, and think 'maybe I'll get the clam risoto,' but then you look at some of the ratings, and one guy says 'was like eeting poo :p' and another says, 'CLAMB BIT ME!!!1!!' Maybe you want to consider something else, I mean sure, people who post comments on the internet are clearly morons who can't talk, but if you've got enough of them, they've got to add up to at least one functioning brain. That's right, I said it: the internet is like a hive mind of idiots. "We r teh borgz... u wil be asimalated tottaly pwnd... resistins is fewtilz ftw lol :D"

...um, soz aniwayz [cough] anyway. Being the nerd that I am, my favorite app so far is the amazing lightsaber app. Using the built in accelerometer, it turns your iPod/iPhone into a Jedi weapon of death. This thing is extremely cool. It just buzzes menacingly when you wave it slowly, and then makes clashing sounds when moved quickly, and features include optional Star Wars battle music. Plus, if you are using it with earbuds in, the buzzing and crackling actually plays louder out of one earbud or the other depending on which direction the thing is tilted in. This means that if you swing the lightsaber to the left, you actually hear the sounds coming from your left. I quality feature to be sure, but honestly I don't think I'll be using this thing with earbuds in very much. Some guy with earbuds swinging his phone around just looks like an idiot, whereas if everyone can hear why I'm swinging it around and grimacing fiercely, I come across as the suave gentleman that I am.

There's also a character creation option which I fully abused by creating the famous Jedi "Harry Potter." You see, when I was younger, I used to look frighteningly like Harry Potter, to the point where everyone would call me Harry and small children would ask me to lift up my hair in hopes of seeing a scar (oh, the state of today's youth). I actually won a copy of the fifth book for free in a look-alike contest. So I cut the face from an old Halloween picture (okay, first year), and voila! I also gave my Jedi a nice pumpkin-juice colored lightsaber, as well as a character bio:

"Working as an Auror for the Ministry of Magic, he rides across the galaxy on his Mellenium Firebolt, seeking out Sitherins wherever they may be and battling them with the lightsaber that once belonged to Godric Gryffindor himself." (that's "Sitherin," by the way. I realize that not all Slytherins are evil and need to be hunted down, but all Sitherins do.)

I would have made it longer, but I was worried that I was stretching the joke to the point of hemorrhaging. I also didn’t want to inadvertently spoil anything for the people who still haven’t read the last book as I’m sure they’d both be very upset with me. Of course, Star Wars is explicitly stated to take place “a long time ago” so none of the adventures of Jedi Potter necessarily have to take place after the end of book seven. He’d just have to use a time turner at some point. I’m not sure whether the wizarding world has any magic/technology capable of sending him to a galaxy “far, far away” though. By the way, I may have given this waaay too much thought.

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Okay, so how are the actual games on the iPhod, seeing as that is what this blog is allegedly about? Actually, they seem to be quite good. The accelerometer and the touchscreen open up a lot of new control options, and the complete lack of physical buttons force some much-needed innovation on the part of game developers. If you're one of those inconsistent people like me who is both cheap and also bought an iPhod, the best free game so far is probably Tap Tap Revenge, a rhythm game in the vein of Guitar Hero where you physically poke the notes as the reach the bottom of the screen.

The first minor gripe I have with this game is that you are supposed to touch the notes when they are too close to the bottom of the screen, so it is a bit awkward to hold the Phod and you are in danger of poking somewhere below the touchscreen (which, as you might guess, doesn't do a lot). You can poke farther up the string/fret, but then you end up obscuring the notes with your own fingers. I've found this is one thing developers are still learning with the iPhod, that you shouldn't have players doing things with the touchscreen that force them to hide the game from themselves with their own fingers. Sounds obvious but is more of an issue than one might think.

The other minor gripe I have with TTR is that some of the 'notes' require you to shake the Phod in one direction or another. You're gonna want to disable this as soon as possibly with the merciful options menu, because this feature just doesn't work very well, at least form me. It's not so bad on the easier settings, but if you want an actual challenge, you'll quickly lose that combo when the game asks you to shake the Phod left and then decides 'meh, that wasn't really left enough for me, not enough tilting. I'll just reset your combo there and -oh, was that supposed to be left again. That... I'm sorry, that was just dreadful.' If there was the option of just one 'shake' command, it would be fine, but the diections just make it far too picky. Luckily, you can turn it off and go back to being the pokeyman. Aside from these very minor complaints, the game is really a lot of fun. I'm not even sure why, but I just can't help grinning and bopping my head while I play it, and I don't even like most of the music. If it could somehow auto-generate notes for any song in your library, or had a built in level creator so you could make them yourself, this game would be frickin' epic.

I think racing and piloting games also have a good home on the iPhod. They use the accelerometer the way they are meant to be used, namely as a sophisticated detector of subtle movements rather than as an extra button (I'm still looking at you, third-party Wii developers). I bought Moto Chaser (upgrade to Moto Racer) at 99 cents, and it was worth every penny. Not really much to say about this game except that you ride a motorcycle really fast and hilariously punch people off of theirs, and that you are apparently trying to rescue a cat. Um, why not?

The third game I've been playing a lot is the fabulous Enigmo (I got it for 1.99 and I've just completed level 40). When I first started playing this game, the experience was absolutely sublime, somewhat vaguely akin to my first playthrough of Portal. I've really played nothing quite like Enigmo, and that's rare these days. Sadly, the novelty wears off after a while, but what you're left with is still a very solid game. I don't really want to say puzzler, because though there is certainly a puzzle element, there is also a large element of simply trying to rig up everything so that it works the way you've envisioned. I like this, because rather than in most puzzle game where there is only one correct solution, this game offers you a fair bit of creativity. It lets you use whatever crude or harebrained solution you want to so long you can actually get it to work.

This brings me to my only major complaint, which is that the touch controls are awkward. I don't care what anyone says, they could have been vastly improved if the rotation area for the objects was a bit larger. What often ends up happening is that you are trying to rotate a carefully placed object and end up dragging it across the screen instead. I've managed to cut down on this by zooming in on objects when I need to fiddle with them, but you shouldn't have to do that. Oddly, you can make the circles bigger, but this requires putting your finger on the circle (which is the hard part) and dragging it outwards, and after you let go, the circle returns to normal size. What's the point of that? The rotation circle pops up only when you select an object, so the game knows you are trying to manipulate that particular object, so why couldn't the circles be larger? For that matter, why do they need to get smaller when you zoom out? It's like if I zoom out on a page of text and the elevator bar shrinks too.

On the topic of object rotation, one place where this game really wins is by having real-time feedback as to whether you have the object rotated correctly. You see, the object of the game is to guide a stream of water to a destination, except that the water behaves like a bunch of little ping pong balls. Because there is a constant stream of these little guys, rather than having to estimate angles, you can simply place an object and then watch as the path of the 'water' dynamically changes with its movement or rotation.

The game is very good, but after a while the levels don't feel like they're throwing anything new at you. I think they could be using the temporal element a lot more, such as requiring more elaborate multi-step solution, rather than mostly just having puzzles that can be solved by plunking each object in a particular place. The somewhat awkward controls also hold the game back from being as relaxing and sublime experience as it should, though in all honesty they are quite good, and I am being fairly picky. It's just that when a game is this good and original, I really want it to go that extra ten percent and reach legendary status. As it stands, I don't think this game holds the meaning of life anymore, but then I haven't quite gotten to level 42 yet.