Stick is on the phone with his stepmom Char, telling her his pre-Christmas plans. “Tomorrow I’m going to bring Meg to work, and then I’m going to take the car to finish shopping and get her Christmas present.” He pauses while Char says something. “You mean, am I getting her a disco ball?” Another pause. “What? Disco balls are sparkly and round too, you know!”
Ancient Secrets
I recently heard about Ancient Secrets over on GameHouse. You play as Kate, a young archeologist, who is following her father’s footsteps in the search for the lost key of the Tekka. Kate needs to gather solves puzzles to gather clues to find pieces of the key. I kind of wish my dad would get some ancient artifacts and leave an worldwide treasure hunt, but, Dad, you probably shouldn’t rely on my Latin skills.
Lots of Ancient Secrets was, annoyingly, the kind of hidden object game that I don’t like. The good kind is the cluttered room sort of hidden objects, where the edge of a dagger might be visible where the area rug meets the hardwood floor, or a piece of a treasure map between two books.
The annoying kind is the same search only you’ll find the outline of some unrelated object, in beige in the sand or in green in the jungle. I don’t know the terminology for the difference, or even if there is terminology. Maybe other people don’t differenciate between searching for clues in a cluttered room, and the annoying Highlights For Children object find.
This was even more of a letdown because some of the settings would have been perfect for clue-finding hidden objects, and some of the puzzles even had a few clues in with the Highlights ones. I was excited every time Kate traveled to a new location because the settings were just so pretty. And I was even more of a kleptomaniac that usual because the stylized inventory icons were so cute.
The various minigames kept me entertained without ever frustrating me. They tended towards too easy, instead of too hard, fortunately the variety of game types kept it from becoming repetitive.
The story is engaging, but once I was pulled into the story of young Kate trying to complete her father’s life work, the collection missions and searches seemed a bit anti-climactic.
The NPCs were all good characters, with interesting accents or speech patterns or personality quirks. The conversations were forced, as Kate never gets to choose what to say. Talking to NPCs, where the conversational choice has some sort of effect on the outcome, really makes a good game to me. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t like where there is only one option possible in order for the game to progress, and I liked Ancient Secrets even less because Kate didn’t get any choices. I’m not interested in clicking OK and going on with the missions, I even read the quest test in World Of WarCraft. Probably a holdover from years of text-based games.
Ancient Secrets was the Applebee’s of casual games. Applebee’s is solid, there’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s nothing to make it stand out amid all the competition. I was left a bit disappointed, because I thought the backstory could have lent itself to something even better.
Posted in Books, Game Reviews, Gaming Culture
Tagged Ancient Secrets, Books, casual games, China, Game Reviews, games, hidden object, latin, LOST, mac, text-based, text-based games, travel, WarCraft, World of WarCraft, Young
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Rated E For Everyone (but especially me)
Guess what I got in the mail today? A review copy of a new game! It’s an actual hard copy, on a CD, in a case with a picture on it and everything! It’s a game you can buy in stores, and you may even have heard of it! Especially if you’re into PC games or the Princess Bride! I’m going to play it just as soon as I stop staring at the box.
Posted in Gaming Culture, Raleigh
Tagged casual games, games, mail, my other writing, new game, Princess Bride Game, Raleigh
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Fail
I wasn’t going to post about this — actually, I was just going to clean up, throw away all the evidence and pretend that we’d never had a kettle, but I couldn’t get the fumes out of the house before Stick got home. Just a little whiff of noxious gas in our home, and that boy starts asking awkward questions.
It all started when I tried to boil water. Apparently, if you don’t close the whistle on a tea kettle, it never whistles, and all the water boils away and you can actually burn a hole though the metal. To add insult to injury, the useless plastic whistle melted down the side of the kettle, and started smoking and bubbling on the burner, sending licks of odd-colored flames up the side of my poor kettle. That part set off the smoke alarm, which works a bit like a whistling kettle in the attention-getting department.
Good thing I wasn’t trying anything really difficult, like toast.
Water, metal, fire… now I just need to stupidly destroy something with earth and wood, and all my life elements will be in balance.
Victory Milk
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.
Posted in Beijing, Raleigh, Yantai
Tagged Beijing:Raleigh, China, cooking, Jenny Lou, mail, melamine, Raleigh, Stick, travel, Vanguard, why I love Stick, wo ai xi can, Yantai
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My Tribe
MyTribe, by Grubby Games, is a happy Lost-ish sim, with all the mysteries and none of that annoying Others soap opera. I downloaded the game mostly because Casualicious.com’s recent post made it sound like a civilization-advancement sim without that annoying war and bloodshed part.
Your people, survivors of a shipwrecked colonizing vessel, must find a way to survive on their island. They start out without any resources, and begin to fish, gather wood, build huts, and so forth. The tribespeople are happy to work, they love their island and enjoy what they’ve built, but they suffer from Age of Empires-style autonomy. You may find a hungry person looking at a fish or a farm, waiting to be told what to do next.
The interface is an intuitive, grab-and-drag sandbox style (with the odd side effect that your tribespeople reproduce when you drop a man on a woman). Selected tribespeople share a one-line thought, whether it’s something useful like a hint about coming weather, a clue to their mood or just a random thought about enjoying island life. Unlike Lost, they aren’t all thinking about double-crossing each other.
MyTribe had a perfect level of difficulty. Tribespeople stay alive and content with very little effort, and when you want a challenge, you can experiment with mixing potions, try to win achievement trophies or unlock your island’s mysteries. There are three different “mysteries” on each island, and your tribespeople have to figure out what they are and how to use them. Once solved, they each give your island a little boost in something, like more stardust falling. I enjoyed having tribespeople will different skills investigate the mysteries, although I’m sure a little googling would yield instructions to solve.
I was very pleased that little girls could go grow up to be rock-smashers or legendary researchers or any other profession track.
The graphics are cartoon sweet without a lot of flashy effects. All the menus and sidebars follow the tiki theme, too, Kind of makes me want a fruity drink. My major problem was being frustrated by the lack of zoom. I wanted to zoom in because the tribespeople all have cute facial expressions, and zoom out to see how the island as a whole was doing, but I couldn’t do either. There is a stats screen to keep overall tabs on your tribepeople’s progress, but I still found myself useless scrolling the mousewheel, trying to get in or out.
When you aren’t playing MyTribe, your tribespeople are still going about their island lives. They’ll build, research new advances, improve their skills and grow older while your computer is turned off. Without a player, they’ll miss any random events, like gathering fallen stardust (a magical substance for potion and, um, magic) or salvage, though. And if you haven’t assigned someone to get food, you’ll find a tribe of hungry people standing around thinking about eating! It’s like an island Tamagotchi, which makes it a perfect game to play on short breaks.
Edit 1/30/09: I have finally unlocked all the MyTribe mysterious objects! My new post on ThumbGods tells you how to solve all the MyTribe mysteries.
This post is about the Grubby Games single-player game, go here for my post on the Facebook version of MyTribe.
Posted in Game Reviews, Gaming Culture, Raleigh
Tagged casual games, Civilization, Facebook, Game Reviews, games, Grubby Games, LOST, My Tribe, MyTribe, mytribe mysteries, Raleigh, random, ThumbGods
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Secret Ingredient
I was making cranberry relish yesterday when Stick came into the kitchen and looked hungrily at the jars I was filling.
“You can eat the one on the left, ’cause I screwed up the seal.” I told him, hoping to deter him from sticking a spoon in the boiling cranberry-orange goo.
“Great,” he said. “You make jam and save the botulism for me.”
Cartoon Network Rickroll
We don’t have cable (we wouldn’t have a TV if Stick didn’t need it for his console games) so I had to find out about the national rickroll through Twitter.
It is so awesome to see a nerd joke make its way into the Thanksgiving Day parade.
Customer Service
“Hi!” I said, after a short wait spent wondering when hold-music went out of fashion and enforced advertising came in. “I have a new phone and I’m calling to set up a password for online bill pay!”
“Ok, what’s your account number? Phone number? Mother’s maiden name? Paternal grandfather’s place of birth? Blood type? And what would you like your password to be?”
“*famous historical year*” (Note to Mom and Stick: NOT the one I usually use, sometimes I like to mix up my nerdiness. I’m wild and unpredictable like that.)
“Ok, it’s set. Try it now.”
“It’s not accepting that.”
“Refresh the page and try again.”
“It’s still not working.”
“Please return to the main page, follow the instructions, and try again.”
“Now I’m locked out for too many attempts.”
“Ok, I’m going to connect you to someone from technical support. Thank you for choosing Verizon Wireless.”
“I didn’t! I totally wouldn’t have if I’d known — oh, hello?”
“Hi, this is technical support. As a security feature, Verizon Wireless freezes your account after too many invalid attempts. To prevent this situation in the future, write your password down and store it in a safe place. May I have your billing password?”
“Um… I suppose there’s a chance it could be *historical year*”
“Ma’am, without your billing password, I won’t be able to assist you.”
“You’re just screwing with me, aren’t you?”
Posted in Raleigh
Tagged nerd, NPR, Raleigh, Stick, tech, telephone, things I'm not good at
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Tropical Nightmare
I recently got the chance to beta Tropical Dream: Underwater Odyssey by Digital Chocolate. I usually love betatesting new games, I get a sneak preview and the chance to run my mouth to the developers. Before I say anything else, I should make it clear that I played the beta, and things may change for the final version.
I thought the premise of Underwater Odyssey was perfect: Young Megan leaves her boring job for expat adventures in exotic locations! But things are not quite as advertised, and she must rely on her wits and creativity to survive! Could it be any better?
At the end of the introductory sequence, Megan decides to become an underwater photographer, which is when the game starts to go downhill.
It’s about as fun as watching the old Windows fishtank screensaver, and taking a screen capture of pretty fish. No, really. That’s the game. If you get it right, the fish smile at you. Then you come up for air. If you got the right fishy photos, you can hang up your best pictures in your house, and then do it all over again. I almost cried when I saw space on my wall for seventy-odd photos. If you didn’t get the right photos before you ran out of air, you go back down and try again. (You can’t drown yourself. I tried.)
I started to think it was a joke, like you play this repetitive “game” for a few moments and then you surface and realize that aliens have landed! And Megan has to save the world!
But that didn’t happen. The break in the fish-photo action was a Bejeweled-type minigame with Roman and Chinese coins. Sounds like a recipe for an awesome Meggish minigame, but it was completely overdone which went from cute to annoying in about three musically-accompanied, over-animated clicks.
I’d been wondering what I’d do if I played a game I really didn’t like. Not write about it? Take, for once in my life, the old advice about what to do if you can’t say anything nice? Say something politely bland about it not being quite my style? And then I remembered that I’m the editor and publisher here, so I assigned myself to write an honest editorial. Simpson’s Paradox: Your source for hard-hitting journalism in the world of casual games.
Posted in Game Reviews, Raleigh
Tagged awesome, beta, casual games, chinese, Digital Chocolate, Game Reviews, games, new game, Raleigh, Tropical Dream, Tropical Dream: Underwater Odyssey, Young
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