Sunday, June 20, 2010

Northwest Pinball and Gameroom Show

Last week I went to the NW Pinball adn Gameroom show in the Seattle Center. Wow, what an amazing time. Emulators cannot capture the magic of the black box surrounding your face as you stare into laser lights reflecting off your face. You grasp the wheel, steering wheel, rollerball, stick, or trigger, press the button and get ready for the fight!!

photos of the games here!

Saturday, June 19, 2010

The Game of Life

In honor of summer I've been doing less video gaming and more IRL gaming. This week I played dominion with Ben (the board game poster on this blog) and Micah, which was great! Very fun card game with a flexible system, so you can design each game for how many players and their skill levels.

A few weeks ago I went to a baby shower in Portland and played the card game Fluxx and the board/card game Cosmic Encounter, both of which were super fun, hopefully I will talk more in depth about them at a later point.

The main swing of my post is, Golf! I've never been a very sporty person in IRL, the highlight of my bench-warming, team-letting-down career was being asked to please just 'pass on the ball' in my college pickup soccer team. But golf is much more my speed, and my friends were much more encouraging than most schoolmates had been. We played 9 holes and by the end of the game I got a really awesome stroke in, that lobbed the ball all the way to the intended green. YESSS, and what a wonderful, lesiurely yet healthy way to spend a sunny or semi-sunny day.

Golf photos

Dominion Photos

Cosmic Encounter Photos

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

"Red Dead Redemption has the Production Quality of an HBO Show"

Said my friend Eric, who is a video game producer, to me today, about 25 minutes after he put in his new disc.

My friend Titus posted this to FB:

Red Dead Redemption is the pinnacle of all humanity's achievements.

When he posted that, I found his statement to be a bit over the top, but. After watching the beginning of the game again with Eric, I realized I had dismissed the production at the beginning of the game as a Deadwood knock off...but it IS A VIDEO GAME. It can shamelessly knock off a TV show because it's a different art form.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1756-Alan-Wake

Here he goes off about the shamelessness of Stephen King worshipping...again I say to you, it is A VIDEO GAME. Since when are ANY writers worshipped in console games? That used to be territory exclusively for Casual Games' Agatha Christie Mysteries. As my friend Craig teased me for not being a TRUE Alan Wake fan as I keep waffling between it and RDR, I realized he and I both have the longterm fantasy of being famous writers - now thats some roleplaying I can get behind.

Real Games

I think I'll start calling posts about Board and Card games "Real Games."

New games recently (several unplayed, as I've not had any chance to play them recently - too busy with life.

Two player game kick. One of my pet peeves is games designed for more players that claim to be playable with two. So often these games work so poorly with two players, that they ruin the game for me once I've played them too frequently with only one opponent.

Jaipur - Buy it here
Bought on a whim (and a quick check to BGG from my phone) and not regretted at all. Reviews are accurate - this is a beautiful game with quality components. Quick to pick up and play, and with a good amount of strategy. It is a basic race-for-resources game, with 'utility resource' component - a resource that needs to be used during the game to get other resources, but is itself worthless at end game.

Dungeon Twister 2 Prison - Buy it here
I couldn't resist. An old-school dungeon crawl with solo play option. Good looking figures (once un-twisted in boiling water), cool board and mechanics. Reserving a review until I play it more.

Mr. Jack - Buy it here
A nicely themed logic puzzle. Once player plays Jack the Ripper (the game is illustrated in an almost comic style, and I don't have any reservations playing it with kids - they are unlikely to ask about Jack), and the other plays the "investigator." Characters are placed on a board with gaslights, and each player gets to move various numbers of characters around each turn. At the beginning of the game, one character is randomly selected to be Jack the Ripper. At the end of each turn, if Jack is by a gaslight, or near another character, he becomes "seen" and is otherwise in shadows. Using this mechanic and manipulating character movement, the investigator's job is to build a logic table of characters and eliminate each until Jack is found. Jack is trying to hide, and escape out one corner of the board or the other. I think this has potential to be a better Clue, and good for the family and kids.

Roll Through the Ages - Buy it here
Ah, another Matt Leacock (of Pandemic fame) game! Not strictly a two player game (1-4), think of this as Civilization with dice. Each turn you roll a number of special dice that grows as your civilization grows. The dice provide you with goods, food, people, or badness. Avoid badness, gather enough food to feed your people, enough people to build your civilization, and enough goods to sell for technological and social developments. Nice wooden components (dice and goods pegboard for each player) and easy to play out in the world. There is already a free print-and-play expansion on Mr. Leacock's website.