When I wasn’t teaching or running around Manhattan with packs of teenagers, I checked out The Daring Game For Girls on the DS. I know this is the girl-player stereotype, but I just can’t overstate how important a customizable avatar is for making me feel connected to the game. I felt a bit guilty playing demos at E3 and, as the demonstrator told me about system reqs and combat styles, I’d ask if I could change my battle bikini, but The Daring Game For Girls is, well, for girls.

So I was pleased to see a variety of coloring in the four choices for your avatar, but disappointed that race seemed to be the only distinguishing characteristic. I’d have liked to choose my hair and my clothes, or just been given some differing accessories, so I didn’t feel like I was choosing between Blonde, Hispanic, Asian or Black, but between, say, Artist, Tomboy, Bookworm, etc. This disappointing start set the tone for a well-intentioned but ultimately flat game.

Regardless of which ‘toon you choose, your character has recently moved to a new town, and you parents promise to take you on a super exciting trip, if you can achieve Girl Scout-style badges in different areas, like life skills, arts & literature, world knowledge, sports & games, adventure and ‘girl lore’, and make enough money to fund your trip.

To do this, you’ll play a bunch of minigames based on summertime activities and friendly interactions. You might plant seeds (and you won’t even have to harass your friends to water them) or help a friend find missing homework or jump rope. You can make and sell lemonade and craft projects to earn money. There’s enough variety in the items that the game avoided the awful cycle of making money to buy materials to craft items to make money to buy materials…

Crafting puzzles were a slightly less sadistic version of building in Lost in Blue 2. (I guess Cooking Mama has ruined me for games that are essentially tracing a stylus along a dotted line.) The items for the collection missions respawned fast enough to avoid frustration, but there wasn’t much difference between walking back and forth looking for feathers, or between walking back and forth looking for science homework. Overall, the minigames lived up to the game’s promises of female protagonists and family-friendly activities, but they weren’t particularly challenging, innovative or even fun. They felt more like phoned-in mini-versions of other popular DS puzzles.  I think it takes more than the absence of boobs and beer to make a really good game for preteen girls.

If the female-empowerment message is supposed to validate a pretty underwhelming collection of minigames, what about the other messages in the game? What about the stereotypes in the game, the shy glasses-wearing girl who does literature trivia or the black girl who only wants to play double-dutch? What about the in-game warnings that caving and fire-starting are dangerous should not be tried at home, which seems to defeat the whole girl-power theme of the game? Be daring with your stylus only!

And what is up with the friendship bracelets? Throughout the game, you’ll meet shy or suspicious girls who don’t automatically warm to your friendly overtures, and the solution is to give them a bracelet and automatically become friends. I don’t know if the message here is trust people who give you stuff or maybe gifts are the same thing as affection or just girls are shallow, but either way, I don’t like it.  I’m confused that we should read realism into girls starting campfires or exploring, but not into little girls trading trust and affection for jewelry.

Overall, The Daring Game of Girls gets close to success on gameplay and close on theme, but ultimately falls flat on both.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

The Daring Game For Girls

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One day, you’re standing on the dock, waving goodbye to a friend, when you slip and fall and land in a crate, which is sealed and loaded onto a cargo ship, which is caught up in a storm and your Sim is shipwrecked on a deserted island! Your poor shipwrecked Sim must survive on this island, at first by finding food, building a shelter and starting a fire.

The zaniness we love about the Sims arrives in Castaway once you’ve gotten a handle on sleeping and not-starving. Your Sim can build an SOS sign for Dharma initiative-style airdrops of random things, like a victrola or a candy bar.  As you collect island items, you can cook tasty dinners (your Sim was getting tired of bugs and raw fish), make new clothes, make tools or decorations, build a new house, make a canoe and just create all kind of island crafts. You can even make and play an ocarina! And, as you explore more, you’ll also befriend the other island refugees, and check out the ancient temple. All tropical islands have an ancient temple, don’t you know?

I’ve written such angry things about sparkly pink shopping games as “girls’ games”, that I hate to admit when I fall into a traditional girl pattern, but, well, I love pretend cooking. I like it in World of WarCraft, too, if that make me sound any less like an eight-year-old girl. I also like making Sim clothes and playing dress-up. Castaway avoids being an unappealingly feminine game by also having survival puzzles and mini-games about fish-catching and fire-building. Oh, and the game’s not pink, which is always good in my book.

Sims 2: Castaway seemed to make much better use of the DS interface than Sims 2. In the regular Sims 2, you’re forced to ignore the stylus, and use the clumsy buttons to navigate, but you can’t put the stylus away completely, because you need it to select menu options that really should be hotkeys or at least accessible by arrow keys. Sims 2: Castaway takes better advantage of the DS-specific interface, using either the stylus to move, and even creating minigames that require use of the microphone. The top screen is used to display the meters that are very familiar to Sims players.

One interface annoyance is the crafting book. When crafting, your Sim cannot create multiples of the same item. You need to select the crafting spot, tap Craft Things, then click the item you want to make,which leads to a screen showing you what materials will be reguired. On this screen, you must click Make. Then you’ll see a picture of what you’re making, and you must click OK. Then you see a picture of what you made, and you’re forced to click OK one more time. If you want to make a duplicate (or a second item), you’re back at the crafting book, and you need to do it all over again. And if your item is on the second or third page of the crafting book, it can be even longer. And if you need three of one item to make something special, well, seems like EA figured out how to most of the suck the fun from a crafting game.

I was a big fan of Sims 2 for the computer, so I expected to like Castaway. It was even better than I expected, with the exotic island theme, a zany but cohesive storyline, and all the adorably realistic animations we expect from the Sims.

Sims 2: Castaway on the DS was originally published June ’09 on Thumb Gods

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Game Review: Sims 2: Castaway

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I’m reviewing Cooking Mama 3 for ThumbGods right now. I was expecting more of the chopping and frying fun of Cooking Mama 2, but a new shopping game has me hungry for melon popcorn, drinking yogurt and hawthorne strips.

Cooking Mama 3′s shopping game is uncannily like shopping in a Chinese supermarket. Mama sends you out to find 4 pieces of unwrapped, unrefridgerated meat, but as you search the store to fill your reusable carrier bag, you’ve got to avoid oddly familiar  store characters — shouting shop assistants in pastel uniform aprons or a girl with a basket of  squid, shellfish and other distinctly Yantai seafood — who’ll slow your shopping progress by trapping you into minigames. Higher levels add loose eggs, heads-on fish and mushrooms to your shopping list, and more people to the store. I keep trying for the elusive perfect score, since I imagine it’ll unlock a “Sunday In The Auchan” extreme challenge level.

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Extreme Shopping

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The other day I was googling for “I’m stuck on an island with a total moron,” er, I mean, reading a bit about Lost in Blue 2, and I stumbled upon this Guide 2 Games review of Jack and Amy’s adventures.

Sexual Content
At one point, the two teens discover a hot spring, and there’s the option to have them bathe together. Amy responds to this by telling you she’s a little shy. However, both are shown with their clothes still on even in the water. Still, at first the implication is there that this was not the case, especially if you choose one of them to go in alone. The other one will look away.

Also worth noting is that Amy and Jack live together while on the island. Now, both are shown sleeping in separate beds, but it’s still worth noting in this day and age.

My first reaction was giggles, because the hot springs cutscene takes about 15 seconds, compared to the HOURS AND HOURS OF MY LIFE I’ve spent repetitively spear-fishing, picking fruit, cooking food, walking Jack to the stream to drink, and trying to get Jack to eat the lunchboxes in his bag instead of STARVING TO DEATH.

Where was I going with this? Oh, right, Lost in Blue 2 is so open-ended that you need to have a certain relationship level been Jack and Amy, go visit the hot springs, and pick a certain dialogue option, and then the kids relax in the hot spring together, fully clothed, with space between them.  (But the famed Hot Coffee mod in Grand Theft Auto was much harder to access, and I don’t think being less-than-obvious makes content unimportant.) Also the kids sleep on separate piles of leaves when they take shelter in the same cave after a shipwreck, it’s hardly steamy cohabitating romance.

This type of rating review seems to have a checklist of what the writer or publication thinks may cause offense, so the review becomes a boob, booze and blood alert. One of the first computer games I played was the original Monkey Island, a game that would earn a Teen rating —  and some of the ire that Nancy Drew Dosser: Lights, Camera, Curses received – for existing in a universe that also involves alcohol. The problem with the checklist type of review is that it doesn’t address how that element is incorporated into the game. A pirate drinking grog is different from, say, a struggling, recovering alcoholic as an NPC.   Review ratings often cite Princess Maker — an awesome game — for showing your princess’ paper-doll panties as she changes her dress, and more rarely mention the assumptions in the game’s goal of helping your princess to be pretty, cook, look after children and marry rich.  There’s no blood when Grandpa Sim dies, but seeing his grieving family is much more emotionally affecting than a huge, bloody bodycount in a shooter.  I could go on and on with examples of disservices the hotbutton checklist does to games and to potential players.

But we read reviews because we really want to know what’s in the game. It’s important let players and game shoppers know what they’re getting into, whether it’s a parent choosing a game for a child, or just a player of any age  looking for a suitable, enjoyable game.  I don’t need a rating to protect me from so-called objectionable themes, but I don’t really enjoy running through corridors splattering guts.  I recently focus-tested the new Shutter Island game, but I spent most of the session asking the publisher to please please warn me if there were going to be any body parts or dead people or icky things. The lines between an adventure game, a RPG with combat, a RPG with bloody combat, and a total gorefest can be fluid, and I’d like to know what I’m going to play.

I wonder if there’s any way to talk about game content without condemning games with certain elements or slapping on an age rating. Can reviewers talk about what a game contains, without jumping to decide who should play it? Can we let potential players know what they’ll find in the game without putting our own biases into a rating review? Or is what’s acceptable on the screen too closely linked with what we find acceptable in real life?

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Still Lost In Blue

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I’ve been playing Lost in Blue 2 on the DS for a while now, and while I always love games about island survival, like MyTribe, Sims 2: Castaway, etc., there’s a lot of room for improvement in Lost in Blue.

Cool minigames make use of the the DS’s capabilities, but the hundredth time you have to light a fire, it stops being fun. The same can be said for cooking, fishing, catching animals, and every other repetitive action. I’m a big fan of Cooking Mama 2, but this is no Cooking Mama. Also, the actions you need to perform repeatedly are hidden in sub-menus or are only available after a chain of choices, instead of being accessible, one-click actions.

The story begins as two high-schoolers are washed up on a beach after a shipwreck. Players can choose Jack or Amy as their primary character, but they are responsible for the survival of both. I choose Amy, and before I complain any more, I should mention how much I enjoyed playing a sweet teenager protagonist, a girl with a cute haircut and school clothes (did I mention how not-pink they were?), neatly pretty without defaulting to videogame sexy.

Jack, Amy’s companion on the island, is not the brightest bulb in the box. You need to feed him, making him more like a rather dim pet than a boyfriend. (If you choose to play as Jack, Amy becomes similarly dull-witted.)  Every time he gets hungry, you need to let go of his hand (one click), target Jack (varies), select Talk (one click), tell him you have something for him (one click), wait for him to ask what it is, tell him it’s something to eat (one click), wait for him to ask what he’s eating, and then select the item from your backpack to feed him (varies, but you select, choose ‘give’ and confirm), he says it’s delicious (one click to confirm). Early items, like raspberries and coconuts, fill his meter between 3 and 5 percent, out of a possible hundred percent, so even if he doesn’t perform any physical labor — like a million walks to the stream to quench his inexhaustible thirst — which makes the hunger meter empty faster, you’ll need to do this series of actions between 20 and 33 times in a day to get him full.

Also, items must be fed from Amy’s backpack to Jack. You cannot feed him items that he’s carrying, and he will literally die of starvation with a backpack full of lunchboxes and fruit. To exchange items between backpack, you need to let go of his hand (one click), target Jack (varies), select Talk (one click), tell him you have something for him (one click), wait for him to ask what it is, select give (one click), wait for him to ask what you’re giving him, and then exchange items between the backpacks. So. Not. Fun.

A lot of the game involves learning about the island, for better or for worse. Discovering new environments is inherently rewarding, and the combination of exotic jungle life and retro platformer right angles was charming. Sweet animations, which Amy looks down over a steep cliff or when she looks over her shoulder to make sure Jack has jumped across the stepping-stones safely, make exploring ever better, although, like everything else in the game, what’s fun the first time is annoying the twentieth time.

Much of the game is based on discovery, but unfortunately the rate of success is skewed so that I felt like I was always thwarted by doing things at the wrong time, in the wrong order. I could solve this by printing out a map, or recipes, or a fishing timetable, but that feels a lot like getting a walkthrough. I’ve used internet hint when I’ve gotten stuck (That would be every puzzle that requires me to distinguish between musical notes…), but I don’t like playing game that require a strategy guide hints to complete.

Certain events trigger cutscene stories, which advance the story but cause their own frustrations. At one point, the characters took themselves home and slept, waking up nearly dead of hunger and thirst. Another story had Jack disappearing, unfortunately with our food in his backpack. While Jack was away, Amy refused to go away from the cave-home to collect food or water because she was waiting for Jack. Another time, Amy wouldn’t go in the cave to cook… You get the picture. This is horribly flawed — a cutscene should not be able to kill me. I was unable to enjoy the stories because I was afraid they would go on too long and Jack and Amy would die of hunger and thirst while they talked about making ropes. (I also disliked the cutscenes because the story seems to be leading to a romance between the two characters, but I like to think that Amy has standards, even if Jack is literally the only guy around!)

I’m having trouble summing up because I can’t recommend that others buy it or even rent it because it’s so flawed in so many ways… but at the same time, although I do turn it off in frustration, I put the game down for later instead of selling it back. Even when I’m frustrated with tools that keep breaking and bored of running to the spring to slake our unquenchable thirst, I keep picking it back up to play a few more days trapped on an island with my dimwit boyfriend.I can’t explain it — I think I have a dysfunctional relationship with Lost in Blue 2.

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Lost in Blue 2

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No matter how obscure an activity is, you can find other people on the internet who do it too.

Saw this in my Google analytics today:

I guess I’m not the only person to battle the artichokes, and lose.

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Revenge Of The Artichokes

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Bosphorus Restaurant
329 North Harrison Ave
Cary, NC

I drive past Bosphorus restaurant every week on my way to teach at Chinese school, but it was our first time eating there. Inside, Bosphorus is decorated with posters of Turkish landscapes and artwork, painted pottery and blue-and-white glass evil eye medallions. (Being classicists, we joked about how to warn off the evil eye.) The coffeemaker and a silverware caddy are visible to patrons, like a diner’s prep station, and you can also also peek into the spotless kitchen.

Our area of North Carolina is mostly chains, convenient at times, but facelessly interchangable with everywhere else. Bosphorus, with its mix of diner efficiency and cheerful exotic decor, stands out with of character and warmth, amid mandatory flair and planograms from corporate office.

We ordered a mezze platter,which came with delicious warm bread. It reminded me so much of the grilled bread from Muslim Noodles. The main difference was that Muslim Noodles bastes the bread with a tasty spicy oil concoction, but Bosphorus serves a tasty spiced oil as a dipping sauce.  I spent so much time in China cooking Western food, but there are a few Chinese dishes I miss, and grilled bread is one of them.

I really like vegetarian choices that are filling meals, not token salads or the old replace-meat-with-a-portabello-mushroom standby. Also, there were no stupid artichokes on the menu!

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Bosphorus

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It’s been years since I ruined dinner badly enough to scrap it and order take out. Look, I’m not saying I’ve never had trouble boiling water, and there was that time in college when I set off Eric’s smoke detector, but my cooking mistakes are usually minor, food that’s a touch overdone or needs a bit more salt.  Not a disaster.

My recipe said that if you don’t have a steamer, you can boil artichokes, placed upright and arranged snugly in saucepan with a few inches of water. I think there was a typo, and what it meant was if you don’t have a steamer, don’t even think about boiling artichokes, placed upright and arranged snugly in saucepan with a few inches of water!

First my artichokes turned brown, which was a little odd, and then they spectacularly failed to get soft enough to eat. Then the water turned brown, and somehow began to smell of blanching citrus peels,  while the artichoke leaves were still hard. Also the leaves never opened up and out. I pulled a leaf off to taste, just in case I’d picked up that rare African Brown Artichoke, that looks bizarre and tastes good, but it had the consistency of bark. Bark with the smell of toxic vegetable matter. Sadly, the extremely rare oak-artichoke crossbreed is inedible.

Once it was clear that my artichokes were more science project than delicacy, I thought I’d cut one in half. I tried with a paring knife, an awesome culinary knife and finally a serrated bread knife, which shredded the artichoke, into a mass of unmarinated artichoke heart and tree bark. Some of the leaves managed to be both over- and under-cooked, which defies all logic.

I’d been thwarted by an artichoke.

I decided to be thrifty and not order a pizza, although it was definitely warranted. Stick is awesome, he didn’t complain about the thrown-together replacement dinner, and he even offered to clean up the kitchen. Possible because if I saw the artichoke debris, I would cry.

Stick thought it would be a good idea to put the artichoke bits in the garbage disposal.  Remember that part where none of my knives could cut through the leaves? Yeah, he didn’t remember. Again, the smell of toxic vegetable matter, only this time, it was rising up from the clogged sink.

Good thing we didn’t order in last night, because we’re definitely eating out tonight.

Update 3/31: Any chance I bought Hurley’s cherimoya instead of the artichoke-oak hybrid?

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All Artichoked Up

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Coupons depress me. If you summed up everything I loved about our expat adventures, clipping supermarket coupons would be the opposite. It seems to sum up the repetitive mundane side of life in the US, which is of course made worse by how I’m constantly thwarted by my attempts to use coupons and promos.

Stick and I aren’t coupon people. Buy one, get one often turns into buy one, throw away the other when it goes bad. Sometimes we miss coupons because the fine print catches us up. Oh, it’s not fifty cents off, it’s 50 cents off when you buy 2 gallons of Gatorade, a loaf of pumpernickel bread and a pineapple. And still more often, coupons languish on the mail board, or in my other purse, or in the reusable grocery bag I remember to bring about half the time.

We also ought to be banned from buying avocados, as I can never catch that minute between green, alligator-skinned rocks and smooshy mess, and I feel ridiculously wasteful every time I throw them away. We were better off in China, when we would carry our avocados and gouda back from Jenny Lou’s, and then wait, checking the avocados for that perfect sandwich ripeness each time before we went out for dumplings.

But the local grocery store finally had a promotion we could use. Buy 6 gallons of milk, get the 7th one free. This is a particularly good promo because all we had to do was not lose the milk tickets, plus, we had a couple months to go through 6 gallons. I always drank milk but that year in Yantai without any really made me appreciate cold skim milk. I was so pleased to see milk in the Vanguard in Beijing (um, before we knew about melamine, obviously). Anyway, going through six gallons in a couple months isn’t hard.

The other night, mere hours before the promotion expired, we got our seventh free gallon, and since then, Stick has been inordinately proud of our free milk. He might have even done a little dance of success in the supermarket.  When I’m cooking, he wants to know if my recipe requires any Victory Milk. He can’t walk past the kitchen without asking if I’d like a glass of Victory Milk.

I would rather be traveling again, but life with Stick is good everywhere.

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Victory Milk

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I flew up to New Jersey yesterday to see my family. The upside to the visa hassles and life upheaval is that I get to visit my folks! It’s been just under a year since I’ve seen my family. Now I can eat my mom’s cooking, read Cosmo, speak English all the time, get on Wikipedia and the other banned sites, and drink milk.

While I’m home and in job limbo, an editor/friend sent me a little blogging work. It’s mostly short assignments for a blog network, including some ghost work for a wedding site. Now that I’m based in the US, I can receive review samples, for some reason no one wanted to ship freebies to our hutong!

Anyway, I’m settling down to eating delicious American food and catching up with my folks. It feels like being home on college break again. I was chatting with my mom as she flipped through the mail.

“We got some wedding invitation samples for you!!!” she announced.

“Calm down, Mom, they’re for work. Really.”

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Jersey Girl

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