Got my awesome backer rewards for Choice:Texas! #blog
Got my awesome backer rewards for Choice:Texas! #blog
Not Quite Legendary ‘Legend Online’
Cleavage and Typos Are Rarely a Good Combination
Legend Online is the second game I’ve reviewed over at GiN. My editor, Marie, assigned me the game and also sent me a very generous credit in Diamonds, the game’s premium currency, from the game’s publicist. But when I looked at the game, it was one of my more awkward moments in game reviewing.
“Is there any possibility,” I had to ask her, “that maybe this isn’t actually the game? Like, maybe Legend Online is a great game, but I accidentally downloaded a ripoff reskin called Online Legends? Also I can’t seem to spend this my virtual currency, and their customer service says they don’t have a diamond shop.” Spoiler: No, I was playing the right game.
Legend Online: New Era is made up of a spreadsheet RPG, where your hero and sidekicks battle fantasy villains to win loot and glory, and a city builder, where you level up your City Hall in order to level up your Barracks in order to level up your sidekicks. After a while, players can battle other players and join guilds for larger battles. The game does what it says on the tin, but barely.
The game opens with a choice of hero and character class. I first chose the female spellcaster, because girl. She’s wearing calf-high boots, and an open coat over her thong, but I figured I could find her some pants once we entered the magic land.
I was mistaken. This is a pants-free kingdom.
Good game design is often described as a series of meaningful choices, but it was hard to find either meaning or choice in Legends Online. I was level 7 or 8 before I got to do something besides tap where the blinking arrow pointed in a tutorial. Although, with player instructions like VIP can CD for Free and Click the Army button (while pointing to a button labeled ‘Troops’), plus loads of different loot, I needed all the typo-ridden explanation I could get.
Posted in Chapel Hill, Game Reviews, Gaming Culture
Tagged game design, Game Industry News, GiN, Legend Online, Marie Flanigan
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Go Miss Your Flight, Because You Need A Time Machine
There’s kind of a trend for writing and talking about how great events used to be, because the only thing cooler than being at an event is being in the middle of things while being unimpressed by it. Like being disaffected at E3 because it used to be swaggier, or being at SXSW saying the only worthwhile events were the unpublished, exclusive, celebs-only events in the good old days. VentureBeat ran one of these posts, entitled How to Survive SXSW, with useful tips like Don’t Go, Really Don’t Go, Miss Your Flight So You Don’t Have To Go, and Don’t Talk To Anyone. Parts of it are a human-hating giggle:
Don’t hook up with strangers. Sure, lots of people will be doing it. But break this rule, and it may haunt you for life. You have no idea who that other person is. S/he could be a social media expert. Eww.
Ok, so that’s valuable and hilarious advice, both on the risk:reward ratio of colleague hookups and on how anyone with an ego and a couple Twitter followers can be a social media expert. But it’s hard to ignore the snarky subtext of pieces like this. Remember — the author is reminding readers — that even if you’re at the event, or going to go next year, or thinking about maybe going sometime in the future, you can’t have the elusive good experience without a time machine back to exclusive SXSW (or swaggier E3, or whatever. I think I’ve been reading Is This The End of E3? columns since college.)
The authors of these pieces remind us that THEY would only go if they were “roped, tricked, or coerced” into attending, but others might attend if “you’re a cock-eyed, optimistic noob who thinks it will be a geeky love-fest full of valuable content and networking with your peers.” It’s particularly weird to find this in tech outlets. like VentureBeat, who send staff to cover events like this, presumably so the poor plebs who can’t attend can read about the event (and all the lame things their staff is too cool to enjoy, I guess?).
Turns out that when given such a clear choice between being too cool for SXSW or being the optimistic noob, I’m unashamedly an optimistic noob.
Looking forward to the geeky love-fest next week!
Quote from VentureBeat’s post whining about SXSW isn’t what it used to be.
Book Review: ‘The Wives of Los Alamos’
The Wives of Los Alamos is out today, and I’ve reviewed it over at Yahoo.
TaraShea Nesbit’s novel The Wives of Los Alamos is told in first-person plural, and yet it never seems like an experiment in a creative writing workshop. By describing how we came to Los Alamos by train, and car, and airplane, or how the water shortage left us unable to wash our hair, the narration is simultaneously small and large. It’s a chorus of individual experiences, telling one story. Throughout the book, she blends details of daily life, like a husband tired and cranky after a long day at work, with the work going on all around, creating the bombs that killed millions.
Posted in Books, Chapel Hill
Tagged Book review, Books, Chapel Hill, historical fiction, TaraShea Nesbit, The Wives of Los Alamos, yahoo!
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Winter Garden #blog
Winter Garden #blog
Revisited Game Review: Women’s Murder Club
Originally written for ThumbGods, a coupe years ago, but I recently dug out my DS for visiting some old favorites.
WMC follows the usual pattern of story cutscenes, hidden objects and minigames. The hidden objects casual adventure game is a pretty crowded genre, so it’s hard for a new game to really stand out. Probably the most unique characteristic was the James Patterson characters. Players solve crimes and meet with the WMC ladies as Patterson’s detective Lindsay Boxer, and supporting characters with solid personalities made this more that just a reskinned HO game.
The story progresses via cutscenes and dialogue options. Players have some choices for what to say, but it was more of a quiz on recent plot events. Believable banter makes the cutscenes worth reading, and the linear storyline makes it feel like reading a novel, not being hemmed
Random side note: The mysterious Chinese markings found on the victim actually do say bu zhong, Not Loyal. My Chinese literacy is just good enough to be completely thrilled with the developers for using real words when dramatic red scribbles would have acceptable. (It always cracks me up when I see upside-down characters or random other words.) Thanks, THQ.
A lot of the game was hidden objects, whether it was tidying a crime scene or looking for clues, but this was a particularly bad HO. The small DS screen doesn’t really lend itself to searching, and players search a picture that’s larger than the screen, for maximum squinting-at-the-screen annoyance. It was also the Highlights magazine type of hidden objects, instead of the cluttered-room HO. It felt oddly childish to look for giant peace signs and lightning bolts, especially on crime scenes with mysterious dead bodies. The game does mix up the hidden objects a bit by giving players a clue instead of a list of items, but still gives the feel of an activity book more than an adventure game.
The story leads to several minigames, which were much more engaging than the picture finding bit. I was pretty excited to see the game included a science lab minigame, and the puzzle’s gameplay didn’t disappoint. You guys, I love pretending I’m in a lab solving mysteries. I would play about a thousand of these games.
One of the minigames was a mah-jong game, which is also accessible under an icon that says China (This character is a different zhong than the one for loyal, an object lesson on why I am not so good at Chinese!). I usually consider mah-jong games to be computer solitaire 2.0, but I found something charming in the tiny tiles and stylus interface, and ended up playing this minigame more than I’d expected.
Women’s Murder Club: Crimes of Passion offers a solid storyline and characters from the popular novels to fans of the hidden objects mystery.
Posted in Chapel Hill, Game Reviews, Gaming Culture
Tagged games, James Patterson, nintendo DS, Women’s Murder Club
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Failing The Turing Test
A copy-paste of my chat with Delta Airlines
It went on like that for a while, while I tried to handle my frustration by imagining the conversation as a moment in text-based Adventure, trying endless variations on Open door and Turn Key and Put Key In Lock because I knew there would be something great on the other side. Eventually, I would be able to use these airline credits for free flights on a free flight, right? That’s what’s behind this door, if I can just find the way to get is open.
I thought about that old chat-game Eliza, that would parse text entries, and seize on one word, and then make a sentence using that word. It was pretty exciting at the time, and brought to mind the science-fiction possibility of someday having artificial intelligence completely indistinguishable from a real human being! I don’t think the intention was customer service failing a Turing test, though.
Well, you asked.
Posted in Austin, Chapel Hill, Gaming Culture
Tagged Adventure, Chapel Hill, SxSW, text-based games
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Games & Capitalism
IndieCade was surrounded with snow-related disasters, but one of the nice effects of that is Paolo Pedercini’s (from Molleindustria) talk was given remotely, and it’s available to watch online here:
Videogames and the Spirit of Capitalism from paolo pedercini on Vimeo.
And if you are old like me, and learn by reading, the full text is here.
Posted in Chapel Hill, Gaming Culture, New York City
Tagged games, indiecade, Molleindustria, Paolo Pedercini
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The Wife, The Maid, and The Mistress
Justice Joseph Crater disappeared in 1930, leaving behind debts, bribery allegations, and powerful “friends” in high and low places, an angry society wife and a pregnant showgirl mistress,
investigators weren’t looking for someone who might have a motive to do away with the corrupt judge, as much as wondering who didn’t want the guy dead. Lawhon’s fictional account imagines yet another possibility in this historical whodunit, set in the glamorous and scandalous speakeasies of Prohibition-era New York City. Historical figures and landmarks give this novel even more realism, connecting Coney Island attractions and Broadway shows of the day with invented speakeasies. Neckless mob henchmen, Tammany Hall fat cats and their society wives, classic mob boss Owney Madden, a backalley doctor and a callous newspaperman complete the pulp novel scene. A bit heavy on the New Yawk dialect, but a rich setting.
Layered, connecting arcs reveal the stories and secrets of three women connected to the missing justice: his wife Stella, his showgirl/callgirl girlfriend “Ritzi”, and his maid, Maria. Each woman is keeping her own secrets from her husband, from police investigators, and we realize in the final scenes, even from the reader. Society wife Stella enjoys the prosperity that her husband’s promotion has brought them, but she’s not crazy about his new friends and his increasing secrecy. Hardworking Maria is not just the Crater’s maid, but also the skilled seamstress with mob boss Madden as a new client. With such nuance and character development in Stella and Maria, Ritzi’s background, a farmgirl turned New York showgirl and mob moll, feels a bit generic, and her softhearted-hooker narrative has been done many times.
While some of the narrative jumps between years and protagonist are disorienting, it becomes worthwhile in the final scenes, when an aging Stella reveals just how the lives of the smart-mouthed showgirl / callgirl, the brittle trophy wife, and the hardworking maid have connected.
Glamorous, vibrant settings and layered secrets in this pulpy historical fiction.
Posted in Books, Chapel Hill
Tagged Ariel Lawhon, Book review, Books, Chapel Hill, The Wife The Maid And The Mistress
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