So apparently it’s lame to write a post about how much I love the Boston commuter rail. They have wifi now, and even though it’s pretty spotty,  playing Facebook games is far superior to driving. Instead I’ll tell you about where I went when I took the commuter train!

I’ve been working at a Middle Eastern restaurant in North Carolina that used to be a Pizza Hut. When my cousins were visiting me, I dragged them in to see those signature trapezoid windows and brick walls, now decorated with sitars and hookah pipes. It was partly so they could eat some kebabs, and partly so they can back me up at future Christmas dinners when I’m accused of blog hyperbole.

Turns out there’s another ex-Pizza Hut that now serves korma and chicken tandoori,  because my friends introduced me to Monsoon in Acton. I knew I was going to like it because Tom is a curry connoisseur, and Eric is a foodie in general. It was pretty delicious, but it didn’t really matter where we ate, because I was so happy to see my friends and decompress after a couple interviews with possible schools.

After a lot of dinner and a lot of chatting, Tom and Tricia headed home, and Eric and I met up with some more of my second family, the Hoffmanns. Carolyn’s getting married in a few weeks, so she had a some pre-wedding advice for any brides-to-be: Elope while you still can! She also said something about hiring an Elvis impersonator, but I think she may have been exaggerating.

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

Hyperbole and Exaggeration

Tweet this!

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

Tweet this!

Passionfruit Games‘ first title, Tiger Eye Curse Of The Riddle Box> is out this week. This new game blends casual adventure gameplay with the paranormal romance novel Tiger Eye by Majorie M. Liu. I was in the beta last month, so I was excited to see the finished game.

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.

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

Tiger Eye: Curse Of The Riddle Box

Tweet this!

The first minute I arrived in Denver, Diana pulled me aside to tell me there was a surprise happening at Hugo’s citizenship party the next day. I tried to keep a straight face, because, well, there IS a big surprise happening at Hugo’s citizenship party, but I didn’t know Diana was in on it…

Diana whispered quickly that they were throwing a Mexican-themed party as a joke, and that their friends had already started preparing Mexican food, drinks and decor, and man, wasn’t Hugo going to be surprised when he saw it?

Hugo’s surprise for Diana involved a ring. (And wow, it was incredibly hard to keep that quiet. Stick and I could never be Secretkeepers. Stick would forget and just let it slip in conversation, and I’d post the Order of the Phoenix’s secret address on my blog.)

On the morning of the party, Diana left to help the friends hosting Hugo’s citizenship party prepare Mexican food and hang up the pinata.  Meanwhile, back at Hugo and Diana’s house, Hugo was getting ready for something else:

After a bit of maneuvering with Karena, the hostess of Hugo’s “citizenship party”, Diana was inside waiting to surprise him with a sombrero and a margarita, and Hugo was at the door, waiting to surprise Diana with a ring and a bouquet of roses.

I guess she likes roses.

Skyping the family (PS: More photos here, Silvana!)

Obligatory Ring Photo

Oh, and Diana’s surprise? Turns out Hugo thought the Mexican theme was pretty good too!

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

Mile-High Romance

Tweet this!

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, begins by introducing the protagonist, Susie Salmon (like the fish, she reminds us), who is dead, murdered by a neighbor who’s made smalltalk with her parents a few times. As her community searches for her killer, and finally come to terms with her death, Susie watches from heaven.

Heaven, in The Lovely Bones, is a non-religious afterlife where everything is just as you want. Susie encounters a heavenly intake counselor, a former non-profit caseworker whose heaven is working for people who thank and appreciate her, and a heavenly roommate, a Vietnamese girl whose heaven includes speaking accentless English and having an American name. Unfortunately for me, Susie’s own heaven was the least appealing one described, involving a townful of dogs (I think this proves I have no heart but I can’t really get into all the maintenance required for slobber machines), but the details here, like the 14-year-old reading of Seventeen or the smells she most loved on earth, make any reader imagine their own heaven, without harps and angels, but perhaps the smell of new plastic and endless brand-new scenes in the Harry Potter movies. At least for me.

Susie leaves heaven to watch her friends and family. She watches her sister learn of her death, and grow up as dead Susie’s younger sister in school and around town. She visits her siblings, parents and school friends, watching them live their lives for years, and appearing, now and then, in a reflection or for a second at the corner of their eyes.

She also watches her high-school crush, Ray Singh. The relationship between Susie and Ray is absolutely perfect. High school relationships in books and movies tend to appear as whirlwind perfection or unwatchable awkwardness. (I do pull the embarrassment pillow over my face when this happens, but this isn’t always effective, since my father and my boyfriend both like to narrate movies as they unfold.) The Lonely Bones perfectly captures the awkward beauty of teenage connection without turning either Ray or Susie into a caricature.

Susie also watches the man who killed her. She learns his habits, and his history, even meeting in heaven a collection of other girls and women murdered by this man.  Descriptions of him are almost sympathetic, which is the most disturbing part of the book, far creepier than Susie’s rape and murder. As Susie is almost omniscient in heaven, she looks through his life. In a book like this, with characters that are so fully developed, it seemed weird to track the killer’s life back to his mother’s abandonment, transferring the blame for all the deaths (and Susie is one of a long line) not on the killer, but on his mother.

Without giving too much away, Susie’s father and sister determine her killer,  but readers are brought not to revenge or retribution, but to healing. The story ends with a satisfying conclusion, a conclusion that’s more of a beginning than a resolution.

I have to wonder how this story will translate to a film. I can read about Susie’s death and be moved by it, but I don’t think I want to see it. This is entirely different from my usual skittishness towards movies based on books I enjoyed, I’m not worried that the filmmakers won’t show it the way I pictured it in my head, I’m worried that the filmmakers will show it at all. Tragedy and violence are moving on the page, but usually gratuitous and messy on the screen.

I also wonder how Susie’s appearances to her family and friends will translate to a movie. I’m reminded of the topiaries in The Shining, which terrified me in the book, tickling that creepy sense that something is moving just beyond our field of vision, but somehow killer shrubs just looked goofy on film. I found The Lovely Bones gentle and disturbing by turns, and it will be interesting to see how it appears in a movie.

The folks at Ology asked me to write a book review as part of their Lovely Bones Book Club, and, once I was assured that I could bash it if I hated it (What? I’ve been known to trash a bad book), I agreed happily.

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

The Lovely Bones

Tweet this!

My childhood Christmases always involved playing Monopoly on the family room floor, and if that doesn’t sound enough like an idyllic Dylan Thomas evening (A Child’s Christmas in Wales, people, not “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”), I have no memories of ever squabbling with my cousins over who got to be the shoe or the boat, just sheer excitement that we could fill out a boardgame, and endless hopes that the adults would keep talking over their sherry just a little bit longer.

So Stick and I went looking for a good Christmas game for our first-grade niece (since she wasn’t going to get her dreidel), a good Useless Present that we could play with her on Christmas, and Ron from the Game Connection recommended Labrynth.

Labyrinth is marked as ages 8 and up, but because Isabelle is so smart, we thought we’d give it a try. It’s very hard to put an age designation on the difficulty; there’s no reading involved, but players need a good sense of  spacial relationships, and they must able to plan ahead and anticipate future moves. This fits Isabelle — she’s a lethal Connect Four player when she remembers to plan her moves ahead.

The object of the game is to move your token through a constantly-shifting maze, collecting treasure and  hoping that the other players don’t ruin your planned path (either accidentally or on purpose!).  Izzy’s Nana joined us to make up four players, and, even if it’s a bit strange to me to be one of the adults playing, it’s still exciting to get a full boardgame going on Christmas.

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

Labyrinth (Muppets and David Bowie Not Included)

Tweet this!

I have a new review of Cake Mania 3 up over at Casual Gamer Chick.

Cake Mania 3 is an adorable time-management game for the Nintendo DS. Jill, our heroine from Sandlot Games’ PC versions of the Cake Mania imprint, is cheerfully preparing for her wedding day when she accidentally breaks a time-bender (I suppose it was wedding decor), and sends herself and her loved ones off through space and time, only to be saved through extensive cake baking! Jill must rescue her displaced friends and family, repair the time-bender and make it back for her wedding – all by making and decorating cakes.

Once Jill lands in a new location and sets up her bakery (“Oh look,“ Jill notices, “My oven works in ancient China! That’s not weird at all!”), the top screen is used for progress stats, like time spent and money earned, and icons of waiting customers. The bottom screen is Jill’s bakery. Players send Jill rushing from oven to customer with a tap of the stylus. A checkmark appears over the future actions in Jill’s queue so you can easily keep track of what she’s doing. Tap the checkmark to remove a planned action from Jill’s to-do list.

Read the rest of my Cake Mania 3 review over on Casual Gamer Chick.

I didn’t mention how excited I was to receive this review copy, because professional reviewers do not share when they do the idiotic happy dance. Yeah. This is me, not sharing.

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

Cake Mania 3

Tweet this!

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?

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

Still Lost In Blue

Tweet this!

Last weekend, Stick and I went out to pick strawberries.  We ended up at Buckwheat Farm, where we filled a tray and our mouths with hot red berries. It was summer-day perfection.  After half a tray, we started to get hot and sweaty, and the Nintendo games back home in the air-conditioning were starting to look better and better. We were about to pack up and go when we overheard that family next to us, who happened to have brought along the International Strawberry Expert.

The International Strawberry Expert scolded his kids for not picking carefully enough, for leaving properly-red berries on the vine, for failing to spread out, for letting pinkish berries get into the picking basket, for not treating the leaves with enough delicacy. Hilarious! (Unless, of course, your dad happens to be the International Strawberry Expert, in which case, it’s probably not so funny.)

We got home, still laughing over the International Strawberry Expert, and inspired by our day out in the country, we looked at our own potted plants. Contrary to expectations, Stick and I haven’t killed our plants yet. We have noticed a new flaw in our gardening plan. We’ve planted carrots, radishes and spring onions, mostly based on the belief that these will be easy to grow, but all three of our balcony-pot crops grow underground.

“How will we know when they’re radishes?” I asked Stick.

“Don’t they pop up over the soil?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, they do on Harvest Moon!”

Hmm…. looks like a job for the an International Radish Expert!

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

Harvest Moonlighting

Tweet this!

In a move that sounds like a joke, Microsoft is offering $10,000 as a prize for using IE8. They specify that Firefox users need to switch, or get lost! I’ve been accused of blog hyperbole once or twice, but that’s a direct quote from the contest site:

We’ve buried $10,000 somewhere on the Internet and if you’re the first one to find it, you get to keep it.
But you’ll never find it using old Firefox.
(So get rid of it, or get lost.)

It seems as if the big M is paying users to risk giving up the convenience and stability of FireFox, but if the choice is between a distant shot at a $10,000 prize, or using a stable browser with virus protection everyday, well, that’s not much of a choice.

I’m not a big fan of the new Word or the old Internet Explorer (I do use it from time to time to check if my sites work in IE), so as much as I love trying new programs, I don’t think I’ll try IE8.

The new Word was such a disappointment. I know that a new version of a familiar product can be a bit like when Stick reorganizes the cabinets. I look for sugar with the salt and the spices, but he’s put it next to coffee and tea. There’s nothing wrong with putting sugar by the tea bags and electric kettle, it may even be more efficient to keep it there, it’ll just take me a few confused openings of the spice cabinet to remember. I expect a bit of learning curve, but the new Word was a bit like hiding the sugar (and other essentials, like the beer and yogurt staples) in a drawer marked only with the Windows logo.

Even though there’s a $10,000 prize that can only be seen with IE8, I’ll be staying with FireFox. So, Microsoft, since you put it that way, I think I’ll get lost.

Info from Ten Grand is Buried Here | Microsoft, thanks to @mercurywaxing for the tip.

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

Microsoft Says To Give Up FireFox, Or Get Lost

Tweet this!