Moonbase Alpha is described as multiplayer, but it’s actually for small cooperative groups, either public or passworded, not an MMO. Players work cooperatively to repair damaged life support systems to bring oxygen to save the trapped NPC astronauts. You have 25 minutes before oxygen runs out for a dramatic race against the clock, or you can turn off the timer for a low-stress version.

The game is a gorgeous grey moonscape, and it’s surprisingly fun to hop around in your spacesuit. If you get too interested in bouncing around and looking at the tiny earth in the sky,  you’ll be reminded of your goal by desperate cries from your oxygen-needing crew members.  Not that I did that. I’m just saying.

I found parts of the UI pretty frustrating. The radial menus were a nice stylistic choice, but I was frustrated when options were greyed out with no explanation. I often knew how to solve a puzzle but didn’t know how to use the interface to make that happen. For example, if you’re using a coupler to join two hoses, you need to be holding the hose, and activating the coupler, NOT the other way around. If you drop an item, you may need to wiggle your avatar around for a while to get into position to pick it up. I’m not sure if the goal was low-gravity, heavy suit realism or if the UI was wonky. I’ve said this before, about certain indie games, but it’s never a good thing when design choices can be mistaken for technical glitches.

And, seriously, why add frustration to an edu game about space? Was the goal to convince boys and girls that being an astronaut isn’t that cool after all, and they should be accountants instead?

The game is quite short, although there’s replay value on larger or smaller maps, and the pre-launch press release says that Moonbase Alpha is a proof of concept for a potential NASA educational game.  Moonbase Alpha shows a lot of potential for a cooperative game, especially if it’s the rumored MMO.

The game is out today, and available free on Steam.

Also, if you ever forget to call your parents, tell them you were really busy all weekend, and mumble something about “NDA… NASA…tell you as soon as I can.” It works great!

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Moonbase Alpha

I checked out Choice of Dragon, a free text-based adventure game  for a web browser or iToy.  The multiple-choice interaction gave me the opened-ended storyline I loved in text games, without the turn-key-in-lock frustrations of a game that parses text entry. (Hey, I wasn’t THAT nostalgic) You play as a dragon in a generic fantasy land, full of princesses to capture (or princes, your dragon can be an equal-opportunity kidnapper), adventuring parties to torment, and treasure to steal.

CoD is a solid IF game. Engaging descriptions of scenes and character never become long-winded. The story uses fun fantasy stereotypes, without going into the complete parody in Fantasy University or Kingdom of Loathing, and uses light sarcasm, but never takes on the unhelpful DM’s tone from Zork or Adventure. The game is fairly short, but reading the game is such a delight, it’s practically impossible not to play through a few times for different stories.

Each decision players choose has an in-game effect. You can fight or flee, split the booty or turn on your ally for the whole thing. Burning the village increases your infamy and treasure hoard, while letting the villagers live as your vassals increases your honor. Your stats continue to affect your abilities and choices, giving you more story options and personalization.

The game could be improved with a way to save the game. At several interesting crossroads,  I was sorry I could not travel both / and be one traveler, long I stood / and looked down one as far as I could. What works in poetry could be greatly improved with a saveslot. Right now, an incomplete game is stored for further progress next time, but there’s no way to return to a particular place besides restarting the game and trying to make all the same choices to lead back to that point. Knowing how way leads on to way, it’s a poor solution that could be solved with an option to save the game.

Choice of Broadsides, another similar game from Choice of Games, won my love with a choice of gender. Some games give you a female avatar, or swap some pronouns around to make the ladies feel at home, but CoB creates a world when young ladies sail the high seas and young gentlemen are sweet domestic angels. You encounter mutinous sailors, brave enemies and honorable sea captains, all female. Later, when one of your salty companions suggests you marry, and give yourself an attractive mate and the comforts of home life, you can choose a husband from an array of accomplished young gentlemen.

I didn’t enjoy the naval adventure quite as much the fantasy one, partly because I’m more of a princess-capturer than a vessel-seizer. I also felt like there were some choices that could be made in CoBroadsides that were just wrong, that in certain crossroads there was a distinctly correct and incorrect choice to be made, while in CoDragon I felt like different dragons and different choices led to different but equally valid stories.

If you also have fond memories of text-based games, both games are available online here or on the App store.

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Choice of Dragon

I finally built the Great Ark and got off the island. Oh, hi, I’m talking about MyTribe again, not LOST.

When your tribe completes the Ark and sails to a new island, they’ll bring everything from the first island’s storehouse, even if that’s more than the tribe’s new storehouses can hold.  Making sure your stocks are full before leaving seems like a good idea, but it can create a small problem because if your tribe already has more rocks and wood than your starter storehouses can hold, you can’t clear any trees or rocks.  I arrived with lots of skilled people and lots of supplies, and no places to build all the housing my tribe needed. Oops!

Your tribe also retains everything they’ve found, harvested and made (under Supplies and then Raw Resources)

When you choose a new island, you can also choose three new mysteries. (Details on unlocking all of them are in my MyTribe mysteries walkthrough, if you’re stuck) The fountain of youth is probably the most valuable island mystery. It wasn’t so important in the old single-player version, but keeping your tribespeople young is essential in the Facebook MyTribe. Adding to your tribe becomes prohibitively expensive in stork feathers, so you need to keep your tribespeople young and fit. A drink from the fountain of youth makes your over-forty crowd feel 40, and your under-forty crowd feel 24, permanently.

The mysterious stump may be the worst possible mystery. The resulting Ever Tree is pretty useless, since you can replenish your wood source by planting saplings at any time. A sapling doesn’t cost any resources, just a tribesperson to tend it, and there’s also a MyTribe achievement for planting 20 saplings.

I knew I didn’t want a star rock or moon rock, since I already have more stardust and moondust than I can use.  I also didn’t need the Cornicopia Bush, because I kept all the stored harvests of berries and the ability to plant all the seeds gained from having a Cornicopia Bush on my previous island.

I picked a new island with a fountain of youth, the tiki head, and the fossil rock. The science bonus for the fossil rock is pretty helpful, but it would probably have been more beneficial on my first island, when I had fewer people and they were producing science more slowly.

The tiki head, well, I should just admit that I picked it because it was pretty. The powerup for any new babies is good too, but I won’t be using it all that often, since it costs me over sixty (!!!) stork feathers for a new tribesperson, and by the time I finish unlocking the tiki head, it’ll be even more expensive.

Collecting stork feathers is where MyTribe turns into a typical Facebook game. To accumulate stork feathers, you’ll need to visit your friends’ islands. Since players will more friends will progress faster, it only encourages the annoying friend-spam cycle. For maximum progress, players need to sign in daily to collect the feathers, but at least MyTribe doesn’t actively punish players for not checking in. (I’m looking at you, Farmville, Island Paradise, and the rest.) I’ve never had a problem telling my friends to play a game I enjoy – I blogged about enjoying the original MyTribe without the possibility of stork feather benefits from newly converted players – and I don’t want a game that requires players to participate in chain letter invitations.

Fortunately, most of MyTribe is a light strategy game on a cute tropical island, without the constant requests to exchange gifts or sign up for email updates.

What do you think are the most helpful mysteries? What would you pick for your second island?

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MyTribe’s Second Island

Players begin by choosing a character class, either Dodgebrawler, Emomancer, Slackninja, Cheermonger or Mathemagician. Player classes are based on everyone’s favorite RPG stereotypes, crossed with everyone’s favorite college stereotypes. Next, players select hair and face options from an equally-recognizable list of options, and enroll in classes at FU.I picked a Slackninja (What can I say? I shrug at the idea of combat.), prettied up my hair, and set off to explore campus.

Players stats are Beefiosity, Zip, Loathing (like Willpower, only you despise instead of overcoming), Smarts, Charms (looking adorable always helps in difficult situations) and Durability. As you run round fighting hilariously-named bad guys and carefully choosing your side in the Juice Wars, you’ll increase your stats, and earn the local currency, Fubars.

The game is geared for adults, specifically adults who grew up playing Roger Wilco and Leisure Suit Larry. Every bit of flavortext  is worth reading — the place names, NPC names, the captions, the item descriptions — for pop cultures references, riffs on the classic hack-and-slack RPG, and the kind of snark that made text-based MUDs great.

(He vants to suhk your juice.)

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Fantasy University Preview

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Osmos Reviewed

Players take on the role of Dela, a psychic metalsmith who’s visiting Beijing when she stumbles upon a magical puzzle box with an enslaved tiger-man inside. (Sorry, family, all I brought you from Beijing was scarves and pajamas.) As players solve the mysteries as Dela, Tiger Eye blends hidden object environments with puzzles. I’m not enthralled with HO gameplay in general — there are only so many times you can find and reassemble a note or pry open a door with a conveniently-placed crowbar — but the hidden object scenes do follow the story.

I think this shop sells DVD in the back.

The puzzles really shine, blending match-three,  spacial relations puzzles, codebreaking, and other minigames for engaging gameplay. Tiger Eye adds to the usual simplistic jigsaw puzzle. The puzzles here aren’t square, so no looking for corners and edge pieces, and the edges of the pieces don’t follow a regular grid or jigsaw pattern, so you can’t see if you’ve left a decent shape between pieces. There’s also an ideogram-matching puzzle, using some of the basic radicals and stylized pictures of the definition.

Someone was supposed to fix the shower? Hey, that happened to me in Beijing, too!

I’m always impressed when real Chinese characters are used any place that pretty red squiggles would have done just as well. I couldn’t read everything in the environments, but it was great to see “dragon woman” written over a shop doorway and recognize other words throughout the games. My hours upon hours with ChinesePod (Tip: Don’t ask me what level I am now. It’s quite sad.) brought in-game foreshadowing and huge excitement!

The setting was gorgeous, the puzzles were varied and engaging, the HO scenes and minigames followed the story logically, and the protagonist had clear motivations. Tiger Eye had everything I’d ask for in a HO adventure.  Unfortunately, I was disappointed by a couple of the usual romance-novel cliches and a shovel-faced heartthrob in what’s otherwise a great game.

This is Passionfruit Games’ first release, so I’m really interested in seeing what comes next.  You can check out the demo of Tiger Eye or buy the game here.

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Tiger Eye: Curse Of The Riddle Box

FarmVille’s genius is turning our contract with society into a game. The addictive side of play is not so much the virtual sheep or farm improvements, but because we have social expectations surrounding favors and gifts (even if they’re pretend ones).

I really like farming sims, I’m having fun with MyTribe on Facebook, and I love the idea of a casual MMO game, so I was expecting to enjoy a recent assignment on FarmVille. But as I played, I saw less of the pretend raspberries and coffee beans, and more of a social currency.

Sure, I noticed the addictive powers of game mechanics like limited-time availability of items, the slot-machine draw of random gifts, the timing and variety of in-game achievements, and the pull of FarmVille status updates, but what fascinated me most is the gifting system.

We have social expectations around gifts and favors, but FarmVille turns the guanxi network into a game. FarmVille encourages you to send free virtual gifts to your friends!  Who wouldn’t spend a couple mouseclicks on a gift to a friend? You do have friends, right? You aren’t some kind of friendless pariah, are you? And you’re not some horrible jerk who won’t share, right? Look at this poor homeless calf! You’ve got to find a home for it!

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Virtual Mooncake Exchange

Not since I first discovered Civ2 has a game made me late for so many things. Eufloria offers two of the same addictive qualities as the Civilization series, both the empire-spreading and the need to play just a few more minutes until the next mini-milestone. Eufloria simplifies the unit selection and improvement add-ons of the real-time strategy genre, presenting mystical space lifeforms in a surprisingly vibrant universe. You play not as a general or political leader, but as a collection of seedlings, and your goal is to grow, and spread, take over neighboring asteroids, and make the growers proud.

Read the rest on Bytten.com

So, yes. I like a game with flowers. Deathray flowers.

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Eufloria Reviewed

I had a great time talking with Karen about iPhone game development, and I also went to hear her at the Triangle All-Stars iPhone panel, which might make me a BeeAppi fangirl. (Oh, and Karen? That part where I call your boyfriend a booth babe? I meant that in a good way!)

(click for fullsize version)

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BeeAppi Interview

But it was awful.

The game opens with you and your best friend arriving at a resort full of  fun activities and hot guys! Unfortunately, the dialogue is stilted, partly because it’s EFL, and partly because I hoped for witty banter. There’s a lot of clicking ok, only “ok” is an awkward agreement. The dialogue was so awkward that I couldn’t always tell who was supposed to be an attractive possible friend and who was a mean girl to be thwarted with my killer wits. I could tell which guys were potential boyfriends, though, because the minor NPCs only had one line to say. Over and over.

As you walk around the resort, white stars appear over activatable items, and you have the option to participate in different resort activities. Whether you choose to relax in the sun, rent waterskiis, or swim in the pool, you don’t play a minigame or even watch a little cutscene animation. You watch a clock tick. I’m not exaggerating. You watch a pink clock tick. Um, when does the fun start?

Other activities do involve minigames. These are activated by talking to an NPC. I’m usually a big fan of minigames (see also: all my recent hidden objects game reviews), but these minigames were awful. AWFUL. We’re talking incomprehensible directions, repetitive gameplay and bizarrely uneven difficultly levels. For Step Aerobics, you need to click the right color in the right order five times to complete level one. For Kareoke, you need to click the right color at the right time FORTY EIGHT times to complete level one. Wait, one is more difficult than the next by a factor of ten?

Your character can also experiment with makeup, but the extremely limited choices forbade either adorable looks or hilarious fashion trainwrecks. (If you think makeup doesn’t lend itself well to a videogame, check out the facial minigame in Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger for a makeup game done right, or Sims 3 for recreational avatar decoration.)

I really wanted to like My Boyfriend, but we have to break up. This just isn’t working out.

Originally posted on ThumbGods, November ‘09

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Game Review: My Boyfriend