Static Zombie

Rocking the Paradise

I don't like racing games. They bore me, whether they're on the table or on the television. There are exceptions-- Daytona 500's system is very clever, and Project Gotham Racing's kudos system, focusing on jumps, drifts, and tricks, gave me a really fun way to avoid the whole "racing" angle. "Serious" or "pure" racing games, like the Forza series or even Formula De, leave me cold. So I wasn't expecting to have any interest in Burnout Paradise, a driving game on the 360. Even after friends bought the game and told me how awesome it was, I remained unmoved. I tried the demo, but wasn't sold.

Then we started using Burnout Paradise as a demo for Project Natal, and I played quite a bit of it as we tuned the experience. I was surprised by how much fun I was having, even when we switched Natal off and I used a controller. Eventually I took home the team's copy, and I've been hooked ever since.

It's a brilliant piece of game design. Instead of a series of racing circuits, Burnout Paradise drops you into Paradise City and its environs, a sprawling network of highways, dirt roads, railroad tracks, city streets, and back alleys that you're free to drive through however you like. Sprinkled-- no, poured-- throughout the map are various flavors of collectibles: billboards to break, fences to drive through, and jumps to land. You could spend dozens of hours just finding all of them, and in many cases figuring out how to actually collect them. And collecting them feels good. Flying off a ramp and through a billboard is yee-ha thrilling thanks to the game's breezy controls and forgiving driving model.

If you want some more structure, just pull up to a traffic light. Every single one in the game hosts an event you can opt into. They come in a few different flavors-- straightforward races, Marked Man races where you need to reach a destination before enemy cars run you off the road, Stunt Runs, and timed runs. My favorite is Road Rage, where there is no destination, merely a goal-- run the required number of cars off the road before they do the same to you. There are records for the fastest time on each stretch of road, and Showtime mode lets you set up absurd chains of point-gathering crashes anywhere, anytime.

Crashes in Burnout, whether your own or your victims', are spectacular affairs rendered in slow motion so you can appreciate every shard of twisted, broken metal. Cars fly through the air, tumble end over end, and shatter in viscerally satisfying ferrotechnic displays.

As you complete events, new car models get released into the city. If you take them down (run them off the road), you gain possession of them and can drive them yourself. As you play deeper into the game, the cars become faster, stronger, and more performant. The game keeps rewarding you and dangling more carrots in front of you.

Burnout Paradise is bursting with cool places to drive, whether it's over the top of a railroad trestle, around the bowl of a rock quarry, careening through hidden tunnels or jumping over the dam. You can complete events to collect cars, or you can drive at your own pace to find all the fences and billboards. You can beat the fastest times on every road in Paradise. You can perform other fun tricks for achievements.

And then... you can go online.

Last night I played multiplayer for the first time with 3 friends, and we spent hours playing through a bunch of 4-player challenges. The game offers 500 challenges for 2-8 players, ranging from "everyone meet up at the wind farm" to "collectively drive against the flow of traffic for 10000 yards at the same time" to "collide in mid-air at the drawbridge". Tackling those challenges cooperatively was a blast. If one of you is forced off the road by another player, the camera takes your picture and sends it to the driver that beat you-- a great opportunity for funny moments. There was a lot of laughter. If the other players in the group hadn't had more willpower than I and signed off in favor of sleeping, I'd have played through the night.

Burnout makes getting into a multiplayer game super-easy. You don't need to use the klunky default 360 invitation system-- instead, they built a custom interface directly into the game that lets you invite friends without plucking you out of the driving experience. Every element of the game has been polished to a glistening shine.

A sequel is inevitable, and I'll be lining up to play it.

And So Our Story Becomes An Entirely Different Game

I've been playing Fable II slowly, and a little late to the party. I've enjoyed the game's palette and lighting. Wandering the world at sunrise can reward you with some breathtaking vistas. The world has an almost campy, super-saturated, medieval-England-by-way-of-Maxfield-Parrish look that invites play. Even the W, who gets motion sick at the merest mention of 3D movement, watched for a while and commented on the pretty look.

Last night I accepted the Spire quest and went to the docks, where I promptly boarded the H.M.S. Ennui and disembarked into a completely different game. It was as if a bondage flick got spliced into my Care Bears cartoon. Suddenly I'm being yelled at to submit and obey, the game controller is throbbing to an everpresent foreboding heartbeat in a citadel of evil, I'm forced to choose between letting captives starve to death or losing experience points when my obedience collar shocks me. The game makes me run from point A to point B in a monotonous citadel for no apparent reason. The W pauses from her online sudoku puzzle long enough to give me a sidelong look and ask disgustedly, "What kind of game are you playing?" And when the sequence finally ends and I return to the game I wanted to play, ten years were stolen from my character's life (but I received no commensurate income boost from my various retail properties).

Boooooooooooooooo.

Aside from the heavyhandedness of the entire sequence, I think what I most object to is the notion that my character was in that hellhole for ten years. It took control away from me, when the whole essence of Fable is that you're in control-- your actions have consequences, you can be good or evil, who are you going to become? So it gave me two choices-- feed or starve the captives, kill or don't kill a friend (but when I spared him, an NPC killed him anyway)-- but otherwise, the arc of my character's story was removed from me. And in those ten years, the rest of the world hasn't really changed. The story jumped forward in time, but the world isn't selling that time shift to me.

And so our story continues.

Side Attractions

In a private discussion group I'm part of, a thread today involved the recent Jedi's Path: A Game of Life game. The issue was that the spinner in the game apparently doesn't work very well-- so much so that one of the game's own designers handed out ten-sided dice to his kids when he tried it recently.

This boggles the mind.

The spinner is The Game of Life. I'm 40. I haven't played Life in over 30 years. But I can still vividly hear the whizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz of that spinner. It's a sound of visceral joy. Grabbing hold of that white knob, giving it a hearty twirl, listening to that sound and watching the wheel come to rest with a gentle bounce of the flap between two posts was the only reason to play the game. I loved getting my hands on that thing. It is the shining exemplar of all game spinners. That one simple hunk of plastic sustained the entire game experience.

How could they possibly have gotten that wrong?

But that got me to wondering about other experiences we enjoy not for the experience itself, but for some subsidiary component. Have you ever gone to see a movie just so you could get a bucket of popcorn? Bought a box of cereal to get at the prize on the bottom? Gone to a major sporting event just to be part of the energy of the crowd, without caring about the event itself? Do you hate fruity drinks, but love those little cocktail umbrellas?

What other experiences are appealing more for a side attraction than the main event?

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Video gamers are about to be flooded by a tsunami of highly-anticipated AAA titles: Dead Space, Fable II, Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, Mirror's Edge, and Prince of Persia all drop this holiday season, not to mention Scene It? 2, Lips, Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero World Tour, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, You're in the Movies... and that's just on the 360. So many games, so little time.

I recently had a lot of fun playing through Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, a game that puts you in the role of Darth Vader's secret apprentice between the events of Episodes 3 and 4, at the formation of the Rebel Alliance. The game accomplishes twp things remarkably well: making you feel like a Force-wielding bad-ass, and delivering a compelling story with engaging characters.

The game starts you off with a taste of what's to come, letting you play one level as Darth Vader himself. On Kashyyyk! For those of you without a George Lucas Fanboy Decoder Ring, that's the Wookiee homeworld. You know, Chewbacca? Big furball, bandolier he never uses, growls a lot? Of course Vader is (almost) fully-loaded with Force abilities, and you can't make him run-- he just strides toward his goal, flinging attacking Wookiees off elevated walkways like rag dolls. Utterly made of awesome. Once you become the Apprentice you begin with simple abilities like Force Push and Force Grab, then upgrade those and gain combo attacks as you play. By the end of the game you can zap people with lightning, fling your lightsaber like a boomerang, perform aerial combat maneuvers, and generally strut around the galaxy like you own the place. The environments are designed to maximize your feeling of power-- there's plenty of stuff lying around to deform, fling, shatter, and otherwise mess with. Shatter a window on a space station and everything nearby gets sucked out into the vacuum until a blast door slams shut over it. Nice! And of course, the sound design oozes Star Wars from the moment your lightsaber powers up. For people of a certain age, something within us stirs when we hear the fssssssshhht of a lighsaber activating, the telltale zap of Imperial blaster fire, the bloops and bleeps of a droid, or the unmistakable strains of John Williams' score. The sounds of Star Wars have a magical, transportive power, and this game utilizes them well.

What really surprised me about the game was the effectiveness of the storytelling. This is the only game I can remember actually looking forward to cutscenes, eager to see how the story developed. There are some great touches, such as the Apprentice's 3PO-like droid being programmed to try to kill him and being politely apologetic to him about repeatedly failing to do so. I thought they handled the Apprentice's conflict between the Light and Dark sides of the Force well, and especially appreciated getting a piece of this universe's history-- the origin of the Rebel Alliance-- filled in. It all felt... right. It felt like Star Wars.

I have quibbles. The targeting controls are a bit touchy. The "quicktime events"-- climactic fight sequences in which you're prompted to push the right buttons at the right time-- weren't satisfying to me as a player, and I blame God of War for popularlizing that particular trope. But on the whole, The Force Unleased delivered what it promised: getting Empiric on people's asses with the Force.

Agricola

I first played Agricola at last year's Board Game Geek convention. Back then the game was only available in German, but some people had taken the time-- the considerable time-- to make English translations of the 300+ text-heavy cards and then either paste those translations onto the originals or slip both into card sleeves so the game was playable in English. Any game that inspired that amount of dedication seemed worth trying.

The subject matter certainly doesn't sell the game. Agricola is a game about farming. Each player begins with a 2-room wooden house on a larger plot of land. As the game progresses you can extend your house and upgrade it to something sturdier, have babies and put them to work on the farm, plow fields, gather, sow, and harvest grain and vegetables, fence in pastures, gather, breed, and slaughter farm animals, build ovens, hearths, and other improvements to the farm, feed your family, and somehow find time to learn an assortment of other occupations that will assist you in your subsistence lifestyle. Thematically, it sounds like a total snooze.

In practice, it's one of the most engaging games to come along in a very long time. Those 300 cards I mentioned? Each player gets 14 of them at the start of the game, and no more. That initial allotment influences your strategy throughout the game. Cards that make it easier to extend your house, or reward you for upgrading its materials, encourage you to be a builder. Cards that increase farming efficiency steer you towards having a green thumb. You get the idea. The pool of possible cards is deep, so no two games are ever alike.

Even without the cards, however, the base mechanics work well. Agricola is a worker placement game-- the board offers a bunch of actions (collect building materials, take food, plow a field, etc), each of which can only be selected by one player. Each member of your family-- you start with only two-- gets one action each turn, and that's never enough. So right away there's a feeling of "So much to do, so little time!" To make things more interesting, most of the "take <something>" actions accumulate-- each turn that nobody selects them, more <somethings> get added to the pile until someone selects that action and collects them all.

At the root of it all are two imperatives. First, you have to feed your family. Every few rounds there's a harvest, and after the harvest each member of your family consumes two food. The penalty for having insufficient food is severe, so the first order of business is securing a reliable and sustainable food source for your family. That is, if you don't get distracted by shiny, accumulated objects along the way. Once you know you can feed your people, the second imperative is the long-term goal of having a balanced farm. At the end of the game, players are measured in several categories-- grain, vegetables, fields, pastures, animals-- earning up to four points in each based on how many of that category they own. Having nothing in a category earns a one point penalty, so the game strongly encourages players to generalize rather than making a single super-efficient engine. This makes everything in the game valuable to everyone, increasing competition and tension.

I suspect one reason Agricola has proven popular is because it's purely constructive. There's competition for the action spaces, but there's no direct way to harm another player or beat him down. Each player is focused on sustaining and improving their own farm, and there's a certain amount of satisfaction in that process. Just getting enough food to feed your family feels really good and rewarding. Likewise for planting in time for a harvest, or putting breeding pairs of animals in pastures. Figuring out what your engines will be and making them work is rewarding. Though players are focused on their own farms, it's not multi-player solitaire. It's important to watch other players and assess which actions they'll want to take, so you can plan ahead and prioritize your own actions.

The cards aren't well balanced-- there are cards that are just flat-out better than others-- but in a set of over 300, that's not surprising. And with fewer than 25% in play in any given game, I'm not sure it matters. We've taken to drafting our cards (first the occupations, then the minor improvements) by dealing out 7 to each player, keeping one, and passing the rest clockwise until all have been taken. It adds a tiny bit of time up front, but it's fun time.

I'm still finding myself looking forward to each 2-hour game, convinced that this time I'll stay on target and get some fields or pastures running early. And then an attractive occupation will come along to steer me some other way, or some shiny accumulated action space will pull me off course, and suddenly my game is going much differently than planned. That need to adapt to circumstances and make the best of what you're dealt is part of what makes Agricola compelling.

My Precious...

And so it begins. Again.

Braid: The Ending

As the title suggests, here be spoilers if you haven't finished the XBox Live Arcade game Braid.

Best ending ever? If so, that speaks more to video games' Monty Pythonesque track record of crappy endings than to any transcendental quality of Braid. As great as the game is, it doesn't really come together in the end. The problem is that the story is both too obscure and too disconnected from the gameplay. You're never really sure what the story is about, nor how it relates (except allegorically) to what you're doing in the game. So when the rug gets pulled out from under you and you discover that Tim's actually the bad guy, it lacks the impact it could have had with a bit more connection of story and game.

Now that it's all over, I subscribe to the atomic bomb theory. But I can't say that I really care. Plenty of people are falling over themselves to praise Braid as high art. The gameplay and puzzle design deserve every accolade, but as for the story... it's unclear if the author himself really knew what the heck it was about. Which at least puts him on par with J.J. Abrams.

In summary... I recommend Braid be played, not read.

Summer of Arcade

XBox Live Arcade has published a pair of truly excellent games in the past month. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is stellar. I enjoyed the original game, but it was just too hard for me. I think I only managed to unlock one or two achievements, and my games just never lasted all that long. The sequel keeps the same basic mechanics and look-- think Robotron meets Vectrex-- but offers six different modes of play which keep things fresh and exciting. Best of all, many of the games are designed not to last long. The Deadline mode even imposes a three minute time limit and gives you unlimited lives. Perfect! Now instead of feeling like a spaz because I can't stay alive, I can merely feel inadequate as I see friends achieving absurd scores on the leaderboards.

Speaking of which, the design of the leaderboards is genius. The game select screen shows you six leaderboards at once, displaying the top six scores for all of the game modes. But only from among your friends. This is how it should be-- just as with politics, all gaming rivalry is local. I don't care where I rank in the universe, but seeing friends overtake my scores motivates me to try harder. The game even goes a step further. During gameplay, the upper-right corner of the screen always shows the name and score of the person just above you on the leaderboard, essentially showing you the target you need to hit to go up a rank. Brilliant! "Curse you and your third thumb, Tabasq-- I'll catch you yet!" *

My favorite mode is called Pacifism. No guns, just you, a horde of blue diamonds that swarm towards you in mesmerizing schooling formations, and gates you can fly through to destroy the beasties that follow you. It's a Zen slalom as you become your ship, deftly riding the collapsing pipeline between two colliding waves of diamonds on the way to a gate that is slowly rotating away from you. The ends of the gates are deadly, so the game is all about precision and timing, and it's far more compelling than it has any right to be.

The other breakout release is Braid, a puzzle platform game with literary aspirations (some might say "pretentions"). The game sports a unique watercolor look and innovative mechanics. Each of the game's six worlds offers a different take on reversing the flow of time. In one world, doing so creates a shadow image of yourself that repeats all the actions you just rewound, while your "real" self is free to do other things. In another world moving to the right advances time, but moving to the left rewinds time-- which can be maddening when you need to go left and want time to advance normally! There's very little filler here-- all the levels display an economy of design wherein everything serves a purpose. If a potential solution seems complex, it's probably not the intended approach. Finding the simple, elegant solutions is marvelously rewarding.

After solving words 2, 3, and 5, I'm stuck in world 4 but refuse to search You Tube for the solution. Braid harkens back to the age of Infocom text adventures, when I'd spend all day in school working a puzzle over in my head and then anxiously watch the clock, eager to hurry home and try out the ideas I'd come up with. The internet has killed the joy of these kinds of games by putting all the answers at your fingertips. It's so very hard to resist the temptation for instant gratification, and most players can't. The days of being stuck in a game for days, possibly even weeks, are long gone-- and with them, the satisfaction and triumph of finally figuring out the solution for yourself. I'm determined to recapture that feeling with Braid which is exactly what the author intended, as illustrated by his official walkthrough.

The W and I have enjoyed playing the game together-- usually with me on the controller, and she making the brilliant insight needed to solve the level.

Both games are well worth your hard-earned Microsoft points.

* No, actually, I probably never will.

The Wall

Sorry I've been inactive lately. Moving into a new house, unpacking, and generally making the place livable and homey has left little spare time for blogging. I've been too busy at work to slack off and write entries there, either-- a situation likely to be the norm for a while (which, frankly, isn't a bad thing). But I figure loyal Zombies deserve something, so here's a photo of the new Wall O' Games in the new game room. The other three walls are almost entirely windows, from two feet off the ground to a foot from the 9' high ceiling. Big windows = great light, but not a lot of room for storage. So all the games have to go on the front wall, as does the brand-spanking-new 52" HD LCD screen (we considered a projector, but then we'd have to mount a drop-down screen to the ceiling, and did I mention all the windows?). That's seventeen of the wall's eighteen feet, solid games from the floor right up to the ceiling, except for the space in the middle carved out for the television.

The shelving is one of the ubiquitous mount-a-rail-to-the-drywall-then-hang-uprights-from-it systems, in this case from Storables, custom cut to our measurements. We actually have two extra shelves, because we thought we'd space them closer together and fit another one on each side of the TV, but in practice it made more sense to make each shelf taller. We originally thought we'd also hang a track in front of the shelves and put up sliding doors, fabric panels, or shoji panels, but I have to admit I like the open display of gaming goodness-- it makes the room feel comfortably casual to me. We'll see how the fiancee feels over time.

And yes, that's all my games. Well, except for one small box of party games that are in my office right now. When those come back, they'll simply replace a few games whose borrowed time would have long ago expired if I didn't hate the hassle of selling and trading crap online. I'm looking at you, Proverbial Wisdom. And all the small-box card games, which are in an Ikea CD tower across the room which, its former purpose now obsolete in the age of MP3s, has been repurposed to a higher calling.

The room also holds my Addams Family pinball machine, Boccerball set, a couch and a game table, and the ceiling has built-in Dolby 7.1 surround speakers. It's a vast improvement on the old gaming space. We had our first game night here this week, and I can't speak for the rest of the group but I really dug it. The vibe was just much cosier and more adult, whereas the previous space was definitely collegiate / early bachelor. Unfortunately it's a longer commute for everyone-- only time will tell if they stick with it or if we break up the band.

Going to Eleven

Christmas arrived a little late at our house last night, in the form of the fiancee's gift to me: Rock Band: Special Edition for the 360. Having saved no money for presents in the wake of our pact, however, I'd been forced to sell the 360 to get her a hair comb. An ironic chuckle was had by all, you can be sure.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game (hi, Mom!), a brief explanation is in order. Rock Band is the successor to a series of games called Guitar Hero which allowed players to simulate the experience of being a rock guitarist in much the same way as Dance Dance Revolution simulates dancing. Equipped with a special controller the size and shape of a real electric guitar, players pushed colored buttons on the neck of the guitar to "play" notes that moved down the screen. When a note reached the bottom, players had to press the corresponding button and "strum" a lever on the body of the guitar. By doing so in rhythm to the song, players scored points and were ultimately rated on their accuracy and consistency. The game used rock songs from the 60's through the modern era, so many players had emotional connections to the music and were able to immerse themselves in the fantasy of being a rock star. Guitar Hero became something of a phenomenon and a remarkably successful party game, with many people as content to watch others play as to play themselves. Players could purchase a second guitar for two-player play, with one playing lead and the other bass.

Rock Band, by the original creators of Guitar Hero, ups the ante by enabling not just guitar and bass, but also drums and vocals. The game ships with a guitar (only one-- you still need to buy a second guitar separately), a drum kit with four "drums" and a foot pedal, and a hand-held vocalist microphone. And all four of these instruments can be played simultaneously, supporting up to 4-player experiences. Players create avatars for themselves and, with "money" earned by playing successful gigs, can purchase for their avatars new hairstyles, tattoos, clothing, and make-up to customize their look. It's way more fun than it has any right to be, and it's supplemented by a very smart marketing plan which releases new songs for purchase every week, so there's a constant flow of new material to keep things fresh.

So. Rock Band arrived in my living room last night, and I can see that this game will figure prominently in my recreational schedule for quite some time. Having played both Guitar Hero and Karaoke Revolution before, I was most curious about the drums. It turns out that playing them is super fun. As long as you're on EASY. Bumping up to medium demanded a level of coordination that I don't profess to possess, and I was soundly trounced by the game for my hubris. The source of my downfall is the foot pedal.

The first order of business is figuring out how to position myself so that the foot pedal becomes part of a musical instrument and not a cruel medieval instrument of torture. I have a similar problem with the gas and brake pedals in my car-- holding my foot off the pedal is painful. The proper rest position involves a delicate balance where my foot muscles are relaxed and supported, yet not exerting sufficient downward pressure to activate the pedal. I'm still working out that balance in my living room. I can already see why bands don't put a comfy couch on stage for their drummer. I don't think I need to go so far as some players have and purchase a drum stooI-- an adjustable office chair should do the trick nicely-- but clearly the furniture currently deployed for TV-viewing and conversation is inadequate.

I can handle 4 drum pads easily. I can handle using the foot pedal. I get flummoxed when simultaneous foot pedal / drum pad combos start popping up. Isolated combos aren't a problem-- it's when they come in groups, and the color of the pad changes, that I get into trouble. Or the walk-and-chew-gum sensation of RED-and-YELLOW, YELLOW-and-PEDAL, YELLOW, repeat. Ack! In seconds I go from drum impresario to utter spaz.

I'll also be testing out Electronic Arts' free guitar replacement program, since about three songs into my ownership of the game the tilt sensor in the guitar stopped working. That doesn't render the guitar useless-- you can still activate the overdrive function with the BACK button-- but tilting the guitar is both easier and more fun, and there's no excuse for the guitar not working as expected from the get-go. Supposedly a new guitar is on its way via second day air, so bully for EA. In the interim I will embark on a solo tour until the next time members of my band, Contestants' Row, get together.

Japanimosity

I've been playing computer and video games for ages, but I never owned a console other than the XBox. So in all that time, I managed to bypass most of the Japanese game phenomenon. And make no mistake, games produced in Japan are an entirely different animal from their American counterparts. U.S. games go directly for the gameplay and the Hollywood visuals. As befits a culture that put a name to a previously unknown fifth taste (umami), Japanese games careen madly in directions you never thought existed. They appeal to a sensibility that is completely alien to me. The demo for Beautiful Katamari, with its incongruous dream-wizard and rainbow text, was like being led by a small child's hand into a mysterious village whose society was based on some fundamental principle or value beyond my ken.

One thing, however, is abundantly clear-- the Japanese have far more patience than I do. When I pick up a game, I want to play. Judging from two Japanese titles I've played recently-- Zack and Wiki: The Legend of Barbados' Treasure on the Wii and Blue Dragon on the 360-- the Japanese like to be told a story. A very long, slow-moving story. Skipping the story and moving on to the game would apparently be an insult to the artists who crafted the story, and is therefore not allowed. This is the best I can figure, because both games feature an interminable and mandatory introductory sequence. Both attempt to break them up a bit with fleeting tastes of interactivity, as if holding a glistening slice of cake in front of your mouth and then, Lucy to your Charlie Brown, tauntingly yanking it away in the moment you attempt to bite.

Both games are fun once you actually reach the gameplay, if you haven't lost interest before getting there. Zack and Wiki takes a full 15 minutes to bring you to the main gameplay screen. Want to show the game to a friend? If you start from the beginning, you'll have to sit through that 15 minutes all over again. No skip for you! Blue Dragon's intro is more cinematic and pretty, and also more interactive, but yegads can those kids talk! It's like the Japanese enjoy lines and lines of meaningless dialogue. Blue Dragon is an RPG, so at least it has an excuse-- the story is part of the point. But Big Brain Academy? When I finish a game, do I really need to endure screen after screen of pre-canned platitudes before getting to my score? Are the Japanese so starved for positive reinforcement that they need to get it from an algorithm?

I'm led to believe that this talky, cutesy-for-no-reason, we-interrupt-your-game-to-bring-you-a-few-screens-of-gobbledygook school of game design is quintessentially Japanese, and I'm at a loss to understand how an entire civilization's taste can be so different from mine. Ok, I can understand the cute. I've watched enough Star Blazers and Battle of the Planets in my day to be down with the doe-eyed, all-the-adults-look-like-they're-twelve aesthetic, and cute probably skews broader than gritty and real. And in the end, that's art direction. But the rest just feels like bad game design to me. It's a wedge between the player and the gameplay. Is this, like vegemite, something you have to grow up with to appreciate? Or do the Japanese just have a longer attention span than we do, and less desire for instant gratification?

Bioshock

One of the coolest features of the XBox 360 is the ability to download free game demos via Live. It's an easy and convenient way to sample new releases. I downloaded the Bioshock demo somewhere around 11 PM, and I decided to take a look at it before I went to bed. I finally staggered into bed around 4 AM, and I might have stayed up all night had I not reached the end of the demo. Lying in bed my thoughts still swirled around the game, and there was no question in my mind that I'd be going in search of a copy the next day.

Bioshock operates on multiple levels. The surface level is a first person shooter with some spiffy special effects in the form of "plasmids"-- modifications to your DNA that give you special weapons like electric bolts, incineration, or freezing enemies. Telekinesis becomes available fairly early, which effectively gives you the gravity gun from Half Life-- and that alone is fun to play with. Mix in all the other plasmids and you've got a shooter with a very entertaining array of choices for dealing damage and manipulating the environment. The enemies are somewhat limited-- stationary gun turrets, flying security bots, and mutated humans of various stripes-- and if the game was just a shooter, that might be a problem. There's enough going on in Bioshock, however, that you're not likely to get bored.

For starters, the art direction in Bioshock is phenomenal. The underwater city of Rapture looks like an art deco paradise where Something Has Gone Horribly Awry. Giant bronze statues loom over floors with inlaid official seals. Advertisements juxtapose a retro thirties aesthetic with DNA-altering products. Weaponry choices harken back to Al Capone. Everything fits.

Rapture is a fully-conceived city, and a good deal of the fun of Bioshock lies in exploring its wonders. As you do, you'll begin to ask yourself what happened there. The answers come in a number of forms-- there are clues in the environment, in broadcasts made over the radio, in overheard conversations and snippets of dialogue-- but most of the story gets advanced via 122 radio diaries you find throughout the game. These are remarkably well written and acted, and bit by bit they fill in the pieces of Rapture's story. You get to know many of Rapture's most prominent citizens through their diaries, which are surprisingly effective means of character development. Late in the game, when I found a brutally slaughtered body (a fairly common occurrance-- Bioshock is definitely for mature audiences only, and not for the squeamish) and realized who it was and how he'd died, it was one of the most satisfying moments in the game. That's a testament to great storytelling and game design.

There's plenty of eye candy in Bioshock, from incredible water and fire effects to gruesome tableaus of creatively dispatched corpses. This is a game you don't so much PLAY as you EXPERIENCE. Other games, like the Half Life series, also create a consistent, believable world, but none approach Bioshock's level of detail. The game shines in its details, and shines brightly. This is a landmark achievement in gaming not to be missed.

Achievement?

Tonight, for the first time, I unlocked all the achievements in a 360 game. OK, so it's a Live Arcade game, meaning there are only 12 achievements worth 200 points, but I've been playing far more Arcade titles than CD-based games. The game in question is Pac-Man Championship Edition, a dynamite variant on dot-eating classic created especially for the 360. The twists in this game are a) only parts of each maze have dots, often very small parts, and b) when you've eaten all the dots on either the left or right half of the screen, a fruit appears which, when eaten, restocks that half of the maze with more dots in a new configuration, often rearranging the maze as well, and c) the game is timed, so you're trying to bag as many points as possible in 5 or 10 minutes. Some dot sets have no power dots, so you've got to manage them smartly or evade the ghosts deftly. And if you keep chomping on power dots before the previous one expires, ghosts can ratchet up to a max of 3200 points each-- encouraging marathon chains of power dots and ghost munching. This is a very addictive game, far more compelling to me than any of the authentic arcade versions-- well worth the download.

A Tale of Two Consoles

When it comes to home electronics, I'm used to surfing the technological tail instead of racing out along the bleeding edge. It's all a matter of perceived value. I'm frugal, and it irks me to spend $40-60 on a new video or computer game that might give me fewer than 20 hours of enjoyment. Dollar for dollar better than a movie? Sure, but don't get me started on movie ticket (and concession) prices. I've read that our idea of what things "should" cost gets fixed around the time we get our first job. In my case, that means bagels should cost a quarter (35 cents for cinnamon raisin), comic books should be "still only 35 cents!" (they'd reached 75 cents by the time I stopped buying them), and computer games should top out at $29.95. Those days are long gone, and I'm doomed to be the crotchety old man griping about how in my day, ordering a "tall" drink got you the largest size and you could actually "drop a dime" on someone.

When I finally got an XBox, it was second-hand for $100. I only bought one title-- Dance Dance Revolution. The rest I borrowed from friends who had long since turned them into dust collectors. That's the advantage of surfing the tail. And like NBC tried to remind us, all those games were new to me. Win!

But now I work in the video game industry. In fact, after our recent reorganization, I'm in the XBox group-- the very belly of the beast itself. And while I can't talk about what I actually do, it's important for me to be fluent in the current state of the art. The tail is no longer good enough. The XBox has been banished to the closet, its land in the living room expropriated by the state for the greater good.

My living room now hosts two consoles. I got them by stepping through some kind of Bizarro world where my team provided the Wii, but I had to purchase the 360 Elite myself. I half expect everyone to eat with forked tongues while donuts rain from the sky. The value proposition for the 360, however, was just too good to ignore. One of the perks of the job, y'see, is free access to all titles published by Microsoft. Halo 3, Gears of War, Project Gotham Racing 4, the upcoming Mass Effect, etc-- all mine for nothing. Even better, that includes all first-party content on XBox Live Arcade (about 65 titles right now). It's as if I purchased a Sub-Zero refrigerator with a magical drawer that dispensed fresh organic produce on command. You have to suck it up on the razor, but they're giving away the blades. So the decision was a no-brainer. It would have been crazy not to get a 360.

I've got to know the competition, however, so it was important to also get a Wii. This pleased the f, who was hooked the first time we bowled at a friend's house and she beat me (important tip to guys out there-- let your sig other win the first time!) (not that I let the f win, she won fair and square) (which I'd say even if it wasn't true, because I know what's good for me) (but it's true).

So far, the 360 wins. I'm still exploring Wii titles, but so far I've found only 2 that are worth buying-- Wii Sports (for the bowling, which has got to be the least likely killer app in history), and Big Brain Academy. The latter doesn't even use the Wiimote as anything other than a pointer-- it's just got really fun activities and good game design (except for the excessive text that must be clicked through between games). The 360, on the other hand, has tons of great content on Live Arcade. I'm even playing through Zuma again, despite having finished it on the PC when it was first released (the f is also completely obsessed with it). Why?

Achievements.

The genius of the 360 is that Microsoft requires ALL titles released for the platform to include 1000 points (or 200 for Arcade titles) of achievements that can be earned by accomplishing various in-game feats. The poorest designs just reward you for things you'd do anyway in the normal course of play, like beating the first boss or finishing chapter 1. Far more entertaining are the things that you'd never otherwise attempt if it weren't for the achievement points, like surviving a shoot-em-up for 60 seconds without using your weapon. Achievements are tied to your identity, so the more you play 360 games, the higher your overall "gamer score." And with Xbox Live built into the console, you can compare your gamer score against your friends'. Genius. And for anal-retentive sorts like me and the f, utterly compelling.

If you've got a 360 and want to friend me, I'm "psarrett". I know, I know-- but through a freak accident involving a gamma ray explosion, lightning striking volatile chemicals at my top-secret research lab, and a radioactive spider's teething pains, I accidentally tied that gamertag to my Passport account and now I'm stuck with it (at least, until I pony up the 800 points to change it-- which, sadly, I don't get for free).

Meanwhile, what are the killer Wii titles I've got to check out?

King Me! Oh, Don't Bother

You now have an iron-clad excuse to get out of playing checkers with your little brother. The game has been solved after 20 years of non-stop computing by University of Alberta games expert Jonathan Schaeffer. Gluttons for punishment can bash their heads against Chinook and try for the best possible outcome: a draw.

Checkers joins Connect Four, Tic-Tac-Toe, and Quarto in the pantheon of solved games. The mathematical solution for Candy Land, meanwhile, remains elusive. "Most importantly," said Schaeffer, "and I cannot stress this enough-- I am not a werewolf."

If Wishes Were Fishes

SarrettAdams is proud to announce the release of our newest game, If Wishes Were Fishes, a family game for 2-5 players (best with 3-4).

The central idea of this game-- a card drafting game in which cards provided resources of some kind if you kept them, but did something else if you discarded them-- percolated in my head for months, refusing to gel into a game. Then one morning I woke up and thought of the Grimm fairy tale about the fisherman who catches an enchanted fish who grants him wishes in exchange for setting him free, and it seemed like the perfect theme for that card mechanism. From there the game unfolded almost on its own. Earlier versions of the marketplace worked differently: instead of buyers that moved around, the values of fish exchanged places on a fixed scale. This wasn't as fluid as we wanted, so we scrapped it and devised the roving buyer system which works much better.

In If Wishes Were Fishes, players take turns fishing from an ocean of four fish, either keeping the fish in one of his fishing boats for sale later at market, or throwing it back into the ocean and using the wish granted by that fish. The deeper in the ocean the player goes, the more worms he must use to catch a fish. Wishes allow players to get extra boats, move buyers to different market stalls to change fish values, sell fish in various ways, turn worms into money, and so forth. When markets reach a certain number of fish they close and award a bonus to the fisherman who sold the most fish there. Fish can also spoil, and if the garbage heap overflows the game ends and a penalty is assessed. The player with the most money after four markets close (or the garbage overflows) is the winner.

We sold the game to the publisher in April of 2005, so we've been looking forward to seeing it in print for quite some time. The box art may make it look like a kid's game, but it's actually a fairly light and mostly tactical game aimed at the family market rather than either children or hard-core gamers. Kids will love the awesome purple squidgy worms Rio Grande chose instead of the dull plastic chips we used in the prototype, though! Games should clock in at 30-45 minutes once players know the rules. Most exciting for us, this is the first SarrettAdams game that is being sold at game stores nationwide. We hope you buy and enjoy it!

Fishes Preview

Boardgamenews.com has posted a preview of If Wishes Were Fishes, the next SarrettAdams game release due later this month. This is our first German-style family game (as opposed to children's game or party game). Read the preview, then buy the game. Then buy some more for friends...

Ode to Joy

Victory is mine!

Tonight I achieved 100% on the two remaining levels, earning the title of Extreme Peggle Master. I'm certain my light saber will be arriving shortly, and even now I can see the mysteries of the universe opening to me at last. Or is that just my life returning? Dang.

Ultra Extreme Fever

I have now completed all 75 Peggle challenges, which was actually much easier than I expected. Spooky Ball is your friend. Here's another tip: On the level with "FEVER" spelled out in bricks, aim the gun as far to the right as it will go, then hit the left arrow key six times, then fire.

You're welcome.

Now, only the ultimate challenge-- 100% on every level-- remains. It will be mine.

Time's Almost Up!

My game Time's Up! is due to be reprinted, and the publisher wants to update the game with fresh names. Problem is, I'm fried. Eighteen hundred names in, I've already used all the best ones I've got and now I'm scraping the Rodney Allen Rippeys and William Katts from the barrel.

That's where you come in, gentle readers. Got any suggestions for famous people that I may have missed in the existing editions? The ideal name will be familiar to 75% of players or more, and will not become dated a year or two from now (Scooter LIbby and Kenneth Lay need not apply). I'd be particularly keen on names that resonate with college students, since I'm a bit out of that age range now and don't know the Pussycat Dolls from Josie and the Pussycats.

Space Dealer

I think I've got a piece of my life back now.

For the past three weeks or so, most of my spare time has gone into writing presentation software to run a large, massively-multiplayer game of Family Feud at live events. This is actually the second time I've written such software. The first iteration was about five years ago, when I wrote something in DHTML and Javascript. I didn't know how to make text dynamically scale (to simulate flipping the answers over), but I knew how to scale images-- so I reluctantly made bitmaps for every single answer in the game. That was a pretty horrible solution-- certainly one that made me less excited about running the game again with different questions. So I rewrote the software, using it as a chance to learn how to use the Windows Presentation Foundation-- the product I've been working on for the past five years. And while I was at it, I improved the interface to automate the scoreboard and utilize two monitors, letting me set up a control panel on a laptop to run the game and a display window on a data projector. It turned out great, and I ran the game at an event this weekend with about 20 teams of 4 players each. The program worked without a hitch, and the game itself ended with a single point separating the top two teams. Best of all, it'll be a snap to reuse the program in the future with new data. Sweet!

Also this weekend, I got to play Space Dealer-- an innovative but flawed new board game. Players build mines and other tech, advance their tech tree to gain access to better stuff, and deliver resources to neighboring planets to satisfy demands. The big twist to the game is the unusual use of sand timers. There are no turns in the game-- everyone plays simultaneously. Doing anything-- build, produce resources, move your ship, etc-- takes time, measured by flipping one of a player's two sand timers. When the timer runs out, the action is completed and the timer is freed up to be used for something else. Players must therefore plan ahead and optimize the use of their timers, quickly harvesting and redeploying a depleted timer. The game takes exactly 30 minutes (an audio CD with trippy synth music is provided as a timer).

The timer schtick is fresh and clever, but a bit of a one trick pony. Once the novelty wears off-- which for me was after just two games-- the game itself fails to hold interest. It seemed to me to have three big problems. First, the English rules (provided with the game) appear to have gotten a rule wrong (they say the fusion mines produce 4 goods at once, when the card's iconography and common sense suggest they only produce 2). Second, it feels like there's only one main strategy-- advance as quickly as possible to the highest tech level and only build things from that level, ignoring everything else. The advanced stuff is much better than the basics and take the same timer-flip to produce, making the basics pointless. Third, the game is just too fiddly. Everyone's reaching across the table to move cubes and timers around, inevitably knocking things over and just generally making a mess. Space Dealer wants to be a computer game, which would make all that fiddliness go away. Moreover, players can easily forget to advance scoring markers for opponents or otherwise make mistakes (which happened in both games I played), and odds are such errors will go unnoticed and uncorrected.

The idea of an economy based on time, played in real time, is intriguing, but ultimately I don't think Space Dealer's development of the concept is successful. With luck, however, it will inspire someone to evolve the timer mechanism into a better, stronger game.

Buy Tie One On Online

A number of you have griped that the only way to get Tie One On requires you to darken the doorstep of your local Wal-Mart. Now, we think that a game of thinkable, linkable fun is well worth a smidgen of your soul, but we understand laziness. We get that you're down with a Faustian bargain as long as you don't need to brush elbows with the hoi polloi. We know that the siren song of rolled-back prices isn't enough to hoist you from the naugahyde crater in your easy chair.

Well, the fine folks at Wal-Mart have got your number. So put on your fuzzy slippers, open up a bag of pork rinds, and head over to Wal-Mart's web site where you can order yourself a case of party game fun, satisfying all your holiday gift-giving needs. Operators are standing by.

Temperature of the Room: Geeky

A little setup for the Password-impaired. When giving clues in Password, you can convey some extra information by modifying your inflection. For example, drawing out one of the sounds and stretching the word's pronunciation(e.g. "Cowwwwwwwwwwwwch...") means "The password is a word that commonly follows COUCH".

So we're playing Password. It's my turn to give clues first. I peek at the password, think about if for a couple of seconds, and come up with a money clue for which there is only one possible answer-- if my partner is geeky enough to get the reference. Knowing his television viewing habits, I decide to go for it.

My clue: "Picarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd..."

My partner looks at me quizzically, asks me to repeat it, and then gives me the correct answer. And as it turned out, both of our opponents also knew it. Even sweeter, it was the last clue of the game and sealed our victory, 11-9. A very satisfying finish.

Answer in the comments.

Tie One On Now Available

The gf has just told me that she purchased a copy of Tie One On at a Bay area Wal-Mart, so the legions of hopefuls sending me plaintive emails can finally visit their local stores and buy out their supplies. The game still doesn't show up on Wal-Mart's web site, however, so you'll have to let your legs do the walking. The price is reportedly around $18. Buy an even dozen and get all your holiday shopping finished early this year.

The Crazy Mixed-Up Zoo Game

SarrettAdams is pleased to announce the release of our latest game, The Crazy Mixed-Up Zoo Game from Simply Fun. This is a memory game for kids ages 4 and up. An array of oversized animal shapes are spread on the table or floor, and while everyone else closes their eyes, one player exchanges the positions of two of them. Everyone else opens their eyes and races to figure out which two animals have moved using their magnetic score cards. One of the things that excites us about this game is that the artwork was done by our friend and gaming group member, Damon Brown. The Crazy Mixed-Up Zoo Game is only available directly from Simply Fun or through their in-home consultants.

Tie One On

Remember last August, when I said I had some great news but couldn't talk about it? Well, now I can talk about it.

SarrettAdams will have a game in Hasbro's 2006-2007 line.

We're super-excited, of course. The game is going to be exclusively available at Wal-Mart for the first year, and if successful it'll go into wide release after that. Hasbro tried this last year with a game called Boxers or Briefs. Their success with that title led them to change the name of our game from Train of Thought (complete with locomotive pieces, railroad scoring track, etc) to Tie One On, on the theory that a more risque title might sell better than a train theme. Ironically, when they originally bought the game one of the things we were told Hasbro really liked about it was the name and theming. Go figure!

If you like $20,000 Pyramid, you'll like Tie One On. It's a game with changing partnerships, meaning that each time it's your turn you're paired up with a different player, one to give clues and the other to guess. Partners have a limited amount of time to get up to 7 terms from a game card. All the terms on the card are related in one of four ways: sharing a word in common (BOX OFFICE, THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX), rhyming, linked phonemes (CENTER, TERMITE, MIGHTY MOUSE), and word association (SHEET, MUSIC, JAZZ). That's it. Simple, straighforward, and fun to play.

Hasbro changed the scoring rules in the published version, which is probably best for the mass market. Advanced players may find that they're getting perfect scores a lot and might prefer the original rules: if you get all seven items on the card, stop the timer immediately and score one bonus point for every 4 seconds remaining on the clock, rounding up (so 5 seconds = 2 points). This means you'll want to use an electronic timer instead of the included sand timer. You might also want to play through the entire turn tracker list instead of playing to a fixed score, to eliminate any kind of sabotage or kingmaking.

Tie One On just shipped, so I imagine it will be available sometime this month (but only at Wal-Mart). I don't know what it will be selling for, but I urge you to run out and buy five-- they'll make great gifts.

Trailing Edge

I'm not a game fanatic anymore.

Truth be told, I haven't been one for years now. Don't get me wrong, I'm still an enthusiast. But the maniacal drive I used to have is long gone. I maintain an interest in what's coming down the pike, but it's more that of an informed consumer than a rabid devotee. It's been years since I've tracked what games I play. I don't keep a database of my collection. I read the Boardgame News RSS feed and scan BoardGameGeek a few times a week, but I don't trawl the forums daily looking for morsels to pick over and discuss. I've jumped from the leading to the trailing edge.

I don't need to have the newest, greatest thing Right Now. There was a time when every gaming session would see a new game unwrapped, but the number of titles I've picked up in the past year could be counted on two hands-- perhaps even one. The joy of exploring something new has been replaced by the joy of savoring something old. Just as I don't write much about games anymore because I feel like I've said everything I have to say, it feels like new games are mostly more of the same. There are seldom real surprises anymore, few genuine delights. In contrast, the satisfaction of revisiting familiar games repeatedly and the camaraderie of doing so with a familiar group of people has increased. Over the past year I've played quite a lot of Tichu, Big Boss, Puerto Rico, Mü, and Password (and Lost Cities online). These days, they're the gaming equivalent of comfort food-- games to which I'll never say no. The experience of these games for me is so much more than the game itself. It's the in-jokes that have arisen from repeated play, the shorthand banter bred by familiarity, the relaxed socialization that becomes possible when everyone not only knows the rules, but how to play.

I'd like to think this is a sign of maturity. Though considering my gray hairs-- and all my missing ones-- I'm not sure I need any more signs. I've come to view my gaming time as too valuable a commodity to squander on games that aren't up to snuff. Let other people snap up every new release hot off the boat. Let other people race the wind. I'll just be here in my rocking chair, sipping lemonade on the porch, waiting for the Wells Fargo wagon to deliver the handful of must-haves. And liking it.

My Life is a Game

Or The Game, to be more precise. For the past couple of weeks I've been consumed by preparations for the Mooncurser's Handbook beta, which we ran this past weekend. Now comes prep for beta 2 in a couple of weeks, and the Game itself in a month. The beta was tremendously helpful in identifying problem spots, most of which involved timing. Now we need to tweak some clues and revise some segments of the route to try to improve the experience. Response to our biggest gambles was uniformly positive, which is a huge relief-- if they didn't work, we'd have been in big trouble. Even with an imperfect Game, with timing/difficulty issues and with some things missing for logistical reasons, participants had fun and said a lot of positive things about the experience. The real thing will be even better thanks to the lessons learned in this beta and the one yet to come. I'm eagerly looking forward to the day of the event... and to the day AFTER the event when I start to get my life back.

Riding the Tail

You may have noticed that a couple of weeks went by without any Static Zombie updates. There's a perfectly good explanation for that.

I'm seeing someone else.

She's black, plays games, loves spending nights in front of the TV, and... ok, it's an Xbox. Used, off Craig's List. I finally got one of the darn things, and discovered I was so very right to have resisted for so long.

The good thing about arriving late to the party is that lots of friends have games that are just gathering dust now, so I'm able to moochborrow lots of goodies to try. The three that have been sucking away my sleep time are Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, The Simpsons Hit & Run, and Project Gotham Racing 2.

Prince of Persia is gorgeous and very well-designed. The time-rewind gimmick is a brilliant way to thematically remove frustration at missing jumps or accidentally triggering one of the damn spike traps. The level design has been top-notch, and the enormous chambers that require you to criss-cross them in various ways are very satisfying to complete. I'm about 65% of the way through, and I'll be sad to finally finish. I understand the sequel, Warrior Within, goes overboard on the combat.

Hit & Run is essentially Grand Theft Auto: Springfield. The best thing about it is that it features all-- and I mean, all-- of the Simpsons characters voiced by the genuine television cast. The levels are big, varied, and fun to explore, and the script and voice performances consistently make me smile.

Project Gotham 2 is, surprisingly, less fun to me than the original. I think this is mainly because the UI downplays the acquisition of Kudos, and watching them mount was a big part of the fun. In PGR2, the Kudo count is too small for me to track with my peripheral vision. I haven't been able to finaglefind a copy of the original yet, but when I do I'll likely switch.

All three of the above titles are going on hold for a while, though, since today my copy of Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2 and a pair of dance pads arrived. I got 'em for a song off EBay-- $75 shipped, new, for the whole set, and these are good quality pads with hard foam inserts. I expect to be burning calories like a madman. I didn't expect to like DDR, but after playing it at a friend's house I got hooked. It's addictive, and a great party game. Hmm. I guess this means I need to throw a party...

Au Jeux

Well, knock me over with a fleur. I just learned that Time's Up, a game I developed about 5 years ago, just won the French As D'or (Golden Ace) award for best game of the year (it's eligible because the French edition was first published this year). Now, given that the award is announced in Cannes, you might expect I got flown to attend a lavish red carpet gala with fine foods, tuxedos and sequined gowns. If you're more down to earth, you might think I was notified via an excited transatlantic phone call from the French publisher, or perhaps an equally gushing call from my American publisher.

No.

I found out via a little pop-up from my RSS aggregator, courtesy of Rick Thornquist and Gamefest. Welcome to the glamorous world of board games.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I have no idea how the As D'or gets awarded, or what the criteria are. Is it a jury, a magazine editorial board, a popular vote? I dunno. Nor do I know what kind of significance it has, although I'm sure it's nothing like the Spiel des Jahres in Germany.

I am relieved to note, however, that it has quite the spiffy logo, indicating they're at least a big enough deal to hire a professional designer to craft their public image.

Frankly, *I* would have voted for Puerto Rico. But thanks-- er, merci-- to everyone who didn't.

SarrettAdams

For a couple of years, Michael and I kept saying that we should get together and make some games. But life kinda got in the way. He was already working at a game design company, making virtually every game Cranium's released since the original, and I had a full time job also. We tried to meet every week and put something together in time to bring to The Gathering, but we wound up cancelling our meetings more often than not. It just wasn't happening.

Early last year, Michael's employment situation changed and we got serious. We not only kept our meetings, we increased their frequency. We brought a couple of prototypes to last year's Gathering (neither of which panned out). We created an LLC and got ourselves a Washington state business license. And we sold our first game. This week the first production copies arrived, and last night I played the real thing for the first time.

It's called Tunebaya, it's a singalong party game, and it's available from a new publisher named SimplyFun. They're using the Tupperware business model of in-home sales, so you won't find Tunebaya or other SimplyFun games in stores. Instead, a consultant will offer to throw a SimplyFun game party at your home, where you and your friends can try all the SimplyFun games and buy any that you like. If there are no consultants in your area, you can purchase directly from the SimplyFun web site.

As for Tunebaya, I'm pretty happy with it. Many people recoil when you bring a singing game to the table, but then wind up having fun despite themselves. With Tunebaya, the whole idea is to create a singalong, so it's not about what obscure songs you know-- you'll be singing the songs you think everyone else can join in on. Your bad singing just blends in with everyone else's. The fun isn't in singing on-key, it's in singing off-key with gusto. And the game is short, so it doesn't wear out its welcome. If people are having too much fun to stop, they can always just play again.

We may get a couple more games in the Simply Fun pipeline-- their HQ is ten minutes away, so pitching to them is convenient. And we're psyched about a family game we're developing that more or less sprang to life from whole cloth. Midway through the first playtest we smiled at each other because we knew we had a game. We have little doubt we'll find a publisher for it. It's just a matter of dialing all the variables to the right settings first. The fact that the game worked from day one excites us, because that kind of instant gelling isn't common. Usually we grapple with an idea for a while, folding it this way and that before it finally stands up straight.

The creation of SarrettAdams helps explain why The Game Report has been MIA this year. I'd rather be creating new games than writing about existing ones, so the magazine has stalled out. I'm trying to think of ways to restructure it to get myself jazzed about it again, but it may be a while.

Details, People

I picked up four new games this week, and when I cracked the shrinkwrap I found that three out of the four were missing pieces. Buyword was missing a Wild tile, Zendo was missing the entire bag of white stones, and Carcassonne: The City was missing two wall pieces. The latter problem is apparently widespread, as I've heard of at least three other copies that were missing the same pieces. I know that every now and then these things happen, but a more superstitious man would view this kind of shoddy convergence as a Sign of Ill Portent. Though it would probably get lost in the shadow of the whole Bush winning reelection thing.

Max Payne

I haven't played a computer game in a while, so to scratch the itch I picked up the full version of a game for which I'd previously enjoyed the demo: Max Payne. It's a first-person shooter with the twist that you can enter "bullet-time"-- a slow motion mode where you move a little faster than your enemies and can see (and perhaps dodge) their bullets. You can't do a slow-motion Limbo like Neo, but the effect is terrific and wonderfully enhanced by slo-mo cutaway shots of the last enemy in a scene getting knocked backward by your kill shot. In fact, it's the theatrical touches which make Max Payne sing. The story is told via a graphic novel format with gritty painted artwork and gloriously purple prose. The sounds come at you from the right directions. But what prompted me to write this entry was the most creative use of a first-person engine I've ever seen: a dream sequence.

In the game's prologue, Max's wife and baby are killed in his own home. Rather than reading about it in a graphic novel sequence, we play through it in-game. At the end of Part I, Max is slipped a mickey. He falls unconscious and relives those events in a dream. And again, we don't just read it-- we play it. It's brilliant. The rooms of the house are in a gray fog of memory. Corridors extend to infinity. Cries for help echo from nowhere. A door is mysteriously boarded up before our eyes as we try to open it. A trail of blood extends into space. It's a psychadelic nightmare and one of the freshest first-person-shooter experiences I've ever had. Bravo.