Tea Leaves

It was around this time last winter that I made my brief foray into World of Warcraft, buying a two-month card and playing it deeply, 5 years after everyone else had gotten around to it. At the end of that two month period, I had too much work to do, so I never bothered to renew.

This January, I had the same urge to play something “big” again. I can pinpoint the thought process that led me there: I was enjoying Torchlight, which made me try Titan Quest and then Borderlands, and that last game was sufficiently MMO-like to reawaken the hunger. Some people will tell you that they like MMOs for the large, persistent world, or for working together with their friends to vanquish a common foe. But I know what MMO’s are really all about: the ability to pick up a limitless number of objects whose titles are rendered in green, yellow, blue, or purple text. I can never get enough of that.

And when there’s no sunshine, collecting objects with colored text is a pretty good way of waiting for winter to end. (more…)

I’m sort of coming to the conclusion that the iPhone is where some of the most interesting games are being developed.

“Interesting” has a few meanings in this context. First off, the various hardware features of the platform (multitouch, the directional sensor, and so on) have led to certain game interactions that you just don’t see on other platforms. Second, the ubiquitous networking makes multiplayer games, especially turn-based strategy games like Uniwar a pleasure to play, instead of a chore. Thirdly, the massive competition in iPhone games has led to a price war, leading to a market where consumers can buy scores of games, many of them excellent, for a few dollars. Or sometimes less.

Bee Spelled is in the third category. It’s at heart an iPhone translation of many of the mechanics from Popcap’s awesome game Bookworm Adventures. If Popcap had published BWA on the iPhone, I’d have bought it. But they didn’t. So I bought this instead. (more…)

This winter, as I believe I’ve alluded to in other articles, I’ve begun to ease back into boardgaming as a hobby. This is difficult, as you might imagine, since the other Pete is my only friend, and he doesn’t play boardgames. But I can at least think about playing them, and I actually managed to press-gang some of my relatives into playing Combat Commander and Conflict of Heroes at Christmas. (more…)

Tonight I installed the Europa Universalis III demo and played it, and tried really, really hard to care about the game.

Same results as with EU II. Beautiful map, and gameplay more stultifying than Sominex. I just don’t get it.

Let’s review what I ended up buying in December.

On Steam: Not counting Dragon Age, which I purchased before the sale started, I ended up with: Borderlands, Bioshock, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Counter-Strike, Titan Quest, and The Witcher.

On Good Old Games: Myst, Riven, and Jagged Alliance 1 and 2.

A few more sales like this, and I’m gonna be broke.

To be fair, I probably only ended up spending about $70, at least half of which was just for Borderlands. But as I read accounts from people who one-clicked their way through $300 worth of games because “the deals were so good”, there is a sad recognition.

No retarded “friendly fire” on the major league fireball spell. So you can incinerate your enemies with appropriate abandon. That is all.

I haven’t had a lot to write about lately, for several reasons: first, and most importantly, I tend to prioritize work over my hobbies, but then in addition I’ve developed several new hobbies that don’t lend themselves as much to this weblog (”And then, when I painted the 1/72 scale Carthaginian infantry, I used turquoise as the dominant accent color!”) (more…)

Having given up on Dragon Age I jumped into arguably the second epic production of the Fall Season: Assasin’s Creed 2. You might remember that Assassin’s Creed was a fantastic running, jumping, climbing, stabbing engine wrapped up in a overall game that sucked your very will to live. In a lot of ways, AC2 is better. But in a lot of ways, it’s just more of the same.
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Here’s the thing, game developers: I don’t want to buy your game if it isn’t on Steam.

I’m exaggerating, of course. When I say “on Steam,” what I really mean is “I don’t want to buy your game if I can’t buy it and immediately download it to my hard drive, on any number of arbitrary desktops and laptops that I own, via a service that keeps track of whether or not I bought the game forever.” (more…)

I decided to quit playing Dragon Age today. Actually that’s not right. I really decided to stop playing on Sunday. After three fourths of a day at work, I had come home to unwind for a couple of hours and throw fireballs at creatures from the great below. I was in the Dwarf city of Moria… no wait, it was called something else. Anyway, having run across the map about a dozen times to talk to all the anonymous people with sketchy British accents that I had to talk to in order to actually trigger the opportunity for fireballing, I was making my way through the dungeon. The trip was going pretty well, and in due time I had burned, frozen, shocked and otherwise pummeled several dozen criminals into submission. I went back to my quest giver to get my reward, and he told me to walk back across the map to fetch the next in what had become an nearly endless series of macguffins.

Dutifully, I soldiered on and passing through the next door to the next area I found … another dungeon 15 times larger than the one I had just left. At this point, the depth of my quest stack ™ had just been pushed to about 5 or 6 before I could escape the clutches of the Dwarves and get on with my life. It was too much. At this point that I decided to stop.
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