Tea Leaves

Long time readers will recall my distaste for the standard Zelda save system. My main complaint, you will recall, is that when you save the game from the middle of a dungeon, you have to trudge through the whole dungeon over again when you restore the game. Why, I opined, can’t the game just come up with a way to save my position in the dungeon and save me from this boring grunt work?

Well, the new Zelda game does fix this and yet again proves that you should be careful what you wish for.
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When I told him about the blue-nippled chicken-woman in Zelda, psu thought I was exaggerating.

But now he has to suffer through it himself.

Tea Leaves has learned that PR Games’ new title, Hype V: Revenge of Hypenos, has gone pre-gold. Hype V, the fifth entry in the ground-breaking Hype series, has been eagerly awaited by gamers everywhere. In an interview, included in the press release, PR Games president Barry Womble said “I am pleased to make a statement that will make sure that all news coverage of Hype V will be ‘on message’: Bump mapping. Online multiplayer. Exciting downloadable content.” (more…)

I found myself awake on Sunday morning at 6am. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I did what everyone else is doing these days. I went to the Target to see if there was a line of people waiting to get a Wii. It was cold on Sunday, so there were only about 10 people there. I waited about ten minutes, got a ticket and then 45 minutes later walked into the store and picked up the machine. Since I got there before the store opened, this breaks the letter of my usual rule, which is to never buy anything during a fake shortage. But, since the Target did not sell out before I left, I think I maintained the spirit of the rule.

So here is a first impression: the machine is not quite magical, and Madden sucks. I might get rid of it.
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We here at Tea Leaves don’t rate things that we review. In particular, we don’t rate the video games that we review. After all, we are self-absorbed wankers with an inflated opinion of the quality of our own writing. We would like to think that we provide insightful, almost literary commentary rather than a simple consumerist analysis. We want to tell you what it’s like to play the game, and maybe a little bit about what the game means. Of course this is all just pretentious nonsense. We play the games and then we write down the first random thought that pops into our heads.

In this spirit, today I present a new ratings system for the video games that we write about. I call it the “Ebay” rating system. The principle is pretty simple. I buy a game. I rate the game according to the number of times I play the game before I give up on it and sell it on Ebay. The scale is from 1 to 5. If I make it to 5, then the game is at least worth keeping. These days, that’s about the highest praise that I can muster.
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Next up in my Huge Pile Of Wargames is AGEOD’s Birth of America, published by Matrix Games.

Google informs me, although I find it hard to believe, that I have not written any articles on Tea Leaves that use the word “grognard.” Grognard, as I’ve heard it used, is a word to describe a hardcore player of “board” wargames. The sort of person for whom a night without calculating the percentage chance that an assaulting tank will overrun dug-in infantry is like a day without sunshine.

Birth of America is a game that could have been written by a grognard, yet it’s playable by the casual gamer. That, in my mind, is a bit of an achievement.
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