Alan Wake. I’ve been playing it this weekend and have gotten to the end of Episode 4. I feel the need to tell you about an NPC you find because you may not go back to talk to him. If you abhor all spoilers, then skip this post, go to Facebook and complain about Lost some more.

Eventually, you will find yourself in a nuthouse. The doctor there introduces you to the patients and one of them “makes videogames” and is a poorly veiled avatar of some Remedy employee since he is obsessed with being scary.

Come back later after the tour and the game developer will be ranting, quite poignantly to this observer,  about his publisher. How that got through MS’ fun censors I’ll never know, but it was absolutely brilliant, along with some fun play-on-words for those who were caught in the Max Payne bullet-time-a-thon of the 2000s.

It’s a fantastic game, but why did it take four years again?

Something about the Splinter Cell series got its hooks into me. I had never played a sneaking game before – the press coined it a “third person sneaker” even though Thief had beat it to market. It really put you into a super spy role, whereas previous games like Goldeneye were just running around going pew, pew in comparison. It was cerebral but it was still action. So this brings me to Splinter Cell: Conviction, which I preordered despite there being no real logical reason to do so beyond the three dollars off Amazon offered. I played through it this past weekend.

But there was a problem.

The problem wasn’t in the level design or the art. The game wasn’t buggy or broken. In fact, it was fun.

But it wasn’t Splinter Cell.

As I hid behind cover and took out handfuls of foot soldiers before dashing to my next cover and seeing a truck pull up with a half-dozen more, I thought: “This is the best Call of Duty I’ve ever played.” Because the game was not about espionage. Sure, the story was about it, but the mechanics were not. These mechanics I’d seen in Modern Warfare, in Rainbow Six: Vegas, in Gears of War, in Mass Effect 2 even. Yes, there were segments that reminded me of Splinter Cells of old, but these were punctuation marks to an experience that was mostly about running around kicking ass.

I fully understand why the game went in this direction. First, the creative director was the creative director of Rainbow Six: Vegas. Second, he says in this article was that the idea from the outset before he arrived was to make an anti-Splinter Cell game. The article goes onto to say how large parts of the game were scrapped and others had to be retrofitted in a short amount of time to bring it back to a more Splinter Cell-type vision. I know from experience how difficult it can be to craft a consistent vision from table scraps.

So here we have a question: was the story (which relies heavily on Sam opening cans of whoop-ass versus sneaking around finding secrets) what was re-conceived first or did the story come from the more “panther-y” (to use the article’s words) gameplay? Traditional Splinter Cell gameplay trademarks simply wouldn’t work in the story – so which is more important? The story vision or the gameplay vision? And from that which is more important – the vision of the title or the vision of the franchise?

The above linked article seems to show a bit of contempt for the previous iterations of the franchise, which is a real shame because those put the studio and the publisher on the map.

Perhaps I am being an old man, pining for those good old days. If I asked you to explain the original Splinter Cell, you might say it was about “Sneaking around, using cool weapons, hiding from bad guys, and uncovering huge geopolitical espionage.” Sneaking would be the first word. But if you’ve played through Conviction and I asked you what it was about, how many words would it take for you to get to “sneaking”?

All of the late 80s-early 90s era RPG fun in about ten minutes: Synopsis Quest Deluxe. It’s a homage/parody/copy of the RPG tropes of old and really makes one think about where the fun was concentrated in those forty hour games of yore. Maybe they could be distilled down forty-fold?

(And I beat it. Woo!)

I’ve been really digging board games lately as some of my last few posts can attest. Just when I’m getting sick and tired of the same old mechanics day in and day out from digital games, I discover this world with a lot of fresh ideas. It’s a new source of inspiration. One of the greatest games of all time is based on a board game. Add to that the results in digital form from Dungeons and Dragons and the entire genre of wargames and you pretty much have 80% of the video game market, but you haven’t scratched the surface of the board game market.

So I’ve been going to these New York City Boardgame Meetups to get my game on and learn about some new stuff. You’ll see more reports from me as time goes on based on these events.

Last night, I got to play two games:

The first was Hansa Teutonica. I don’t know why the Germans have a love affair with feudal daily minutiae but so many of their games seem to be based on merchants or trading or land disputes. This game is based on the former. After a long, complex rules briefing, we were into the game which (one you get over the heavy load of info up front) is really quite digestible.

Actually, this brings me to my first aside. On the player skills board is a summary of the five things a player can do on his turn:

See them there on the bottom? Tell me what they mean. You can’t. I can barely interpret the icons and I’ve played the game. If the purpose of the icons was to teach me what I can do, they clearly failed. If the icons serve to remind me what I can do, they have also failed.

They could have had a player card that said:

On your turn you can use an action to:
- Move cubes from your storage to your usable supply. (See bag for amount)
- Place a piece on a road.
- Displace an opponent’s piece from a road.
- Move pieces. (See book for amount.)
- Establish an office or use a special ability from a full road.

There you go. Now the game is about filling up roads to either increase the skills on your skill list (above image) or claim offices that gain you points. There are some fiddly rules about office ownership and scoring but that is pretty much it. There are five cities on the board with special abilities where instead of claiming an office, you can upgrade the skill on your skill list. These grant things like additional actions per turn, additional cities where one can set offices, the ability to move more pieces per trun, &c., These are useful and integral, which leads me to an issue.

The cities that have the special abilities are so important that the rest of the game seems less so. What is ostensibly a game about building a trade network quickly becomes a game to control the roads nearest these cities, especially the city that provides additional actions per turn. This isn’t an amazingly huge problem in our first game, but since there is next to no randomness in the game (there are randomly dealt special effect tiles, but that is it), it seems like every game is going to play out similarly as all the players battle for the special abilities cities.

The game board itself is ugly. If you don’t want your eyes to melt, don’t look at the image below. For some reason the artist decided that serif-y white text on a grey background was essentially readable. The board is unnecessarily busy and it distracts from the game and makes it seem harder than it is. Maybe that was the point.

If I was redesigning the game, it would be re-themed and the board would be cleaner and clearer. I’d likely simplify the scoring system and make it so that the locations of the special cities moved and/or that there was some mechanic that stopped the game from focusing solely on those cities. Even though it is anathema to the hardest of the hardcore board game nerds, I would add some card mechanic or something more easily parsed than the current tile bonus system. That card mechanic could tie into the moving cities idea. The game needs the pruning shears badly. Mechanics need to be simplified, consolidated or let go.

On the plus side, it was easy to see your opponent’s tactical ideas. Play certainly didn’t seem to be randomly evolving. Since I could tell what they were going to do, I could plan for it. This is the strategic meat of the game and it is excellent. Because of this, the game moves quickly unless someone’s plans are foiled. And if that’s the case, something interesting probably happened so the interruption in game flow is not unwelcome (to use a double negative).

Overall, I had a great time. I had thought I won only to be eclipsed by three points in the final tally because I didn’t fully understand the eight-part scoring system. Again, either needlessly complex or simply presented poorly. I’ll play this again if folks bring it back as I am interested in how repeated plays hold up, but I probably wouldn’t buy it.

I tried so hard to get people to play Agricola with me so that I could play a cube pushing game that I knew, but I got railroaded into a game of Acquire. Never again. The less said the better, but Acquire is a lot of sitting around waiting for someone else to move and then a lot of counting the board and cross-referencing a card. I found it chaotic. It was tough to plan any kind of strategy at all with the board changing. The first player to be acquired seems to have a huge advantage if he plays it well since he will have more resources than anyone else for the longest time. I came in last because I just wanted the game to be over and the winner wasn’t really paying attention the whole game. Since it is an older game, I’m sure there is a lot of nostalgia around it. I still play Monopoly, but by today’s standards, it has similar issues.

Agricola is a board game, but calling it that is like calling the Burj al Dubai (or whatever they call it now) a tall building. The Spiel des Jahres, the German board-game equivalent of the Academy Awards, had to implement a special category for complex games just to give Agricola some laurels. So it is impressive looking with all its little fiddly wooden pieces and rulebook with the six-point font. But it has been in the Top 2 games on BoardGameGeek since I started being interested in board games again, so I figured there must be something to the complexity.

Since I’m alone in my apartment for the next month and had the day off, I figured I would try to learn the game and see what all the fuss was about.

First, a disclaimer. The game is about 17th century farming. So a complex game about farming should just set your loins ablaze, right? Moving on.

If you are planning on learning Agricola, it is probably best to have someone who already knows how to play the game teach you. Why? The rule book is not entirely helpful for learning the game. It runs fast and loose with terminology and takes important mechanics and puts them in an aside. I had the board all set up and ready to go when I realized I had no idea what it meant to “go”. Since a game is a series of meaningful decisions, I needed to put some meaning behind the bevy of options available.

Luckily, I found this video which cheerfully explains the game, if you can get through the cringingly embarrassing stuff in the intro. In fact, i found his presentation so helpful that I just may watch his other videos just to check out some heretofore unnoticed games. Super-major kudos to this Scott fellow as I may have never shifted out of first gear without his presentation.

I chose to play a three-player game by myself, because I like to test games as they were designed to be played and also it’s lonely here so having a split personality helps. You will need a very large table to contain everything you need to play. Here’s my coffee table as I was setting up. I have an additional game mat on my couch just to fit everything.

Once you get into the game, it is surprisingly fun and I believe that fun comes from the wide array (and increasing as the game unfolds) number of actions you can take. There’s a sensation of trying to keep spinning plates balanced in that there are a number of categories in which you are scored, but only so many actions in which to build in those categories. I want to be able to expand my farm’s family but I can’t because I’ll need to feed them and I need to be in a better position with my resources to do so. Well, shit, that fits the theme of starving farmers pretty well.

I have the feeling that unlike Dominion, there won’t be a particularly dominant strategy given any particular setup. This isn’t a big problem in Dominion, yet there are certain setups that scream out for a particular strategy (Chapel decks, for instance). Here, it seems like there are so many things to manage, that each game will provide unique ways to expand and settle. Time will tell, I’ve only played one game and I am certain I have made at least one rules mistake. The rules sheet, as mentioned, is simply not very good unless you already understand what is going on – which makes the whole sheet a Catch 22.

Here’s what my table looked like at endgame. Red won by a bunch, despite being behind purple for most of the game, which gives me hope that early mistakes don’t have to be your undoing. I was trying for a home-expansion strategy with my green player but he could just barely muster up enough food each harvest so he never really got anywhere. Purple did alright, but didn’t have the explosion of resources at the end like Red did.

For my first play, I am really impressed. I thought the game would be dry and methodical, but it seems to be more friendly than I had imagined. It will certainly need more plays to flesh out strategies and tactics, but I get the jist now already, which is something that was lacking in another popular game Race for the Galaxy that still vexes me. As a game designer, I have experience analyzing systems of mechanics, but with this game I just can’t take a bite off and make a lasting judgment. It needs more chewing.

If anyone reads in the New York City area and knows of any game stores that do board game nights, let me know as I would love to get beat up on by more experienced farmers. I think the game will be a lot more fun with other people (though it supposedly has a very robust true solitaire variant) simply because you can be super melodramatic “FAAAARRRRRMING! Gonna raise some vegetables up in your face, wooooo!”

The good folks at HandyGames were kind enough to provide me with a download code for Puzzlegeddon for the iPhone. I had played the demo of the PC game ages back when Puzzle Quest was en vogue and anything that slightly resembled it caught my attention. Now it is ported to the iPhone which is really the appropriate platform for such a game.

The premise is similar to Puzzle Quest in a way: play an action puzzler to gain resources and use those resources to attack foes. Instead of match 3, Puzzlegeddon uses a sliding mechanic akin to Yoshi’s Cookie but easier as you only need to get a block of five of the same type adjacent to clear those blocks.

Puzzlegeddon is polished and presented well. There are a number of bonus challenges and assorted bells and whistles that pack more value than your average Flash game. If you are a fan of the Puzzle Quest esque genre, you will find a lot to love here.

However, I find the game mechanically flawed if it is attempting to be tactical or too slow if it is trying to be a fast-paced twitch puzzler. Tactically, you only need red or green resources for attack and defense. Blue and yellow are generally a waste of time when playing against AI opponents. Thus, you load up on red and then try to clear the board with green until more reds come up. If you want to play as quickly as possible as if the game were an on-your-toes sort of puzzle game a la Tetris Attack, then you burn out because the timed levels are generally five or six minutes long.

While that sounds like a damning criticism, it shouldn’t be taken as such. The real test of any iPhone game is to see how often you play it when you are waiting somewhere (Idle Time Test) and I’ve fired Puzzlegeddon up a number of times in the past few weeks. It isn’t perfect, but it is executed well and brings a unique addition to any app collection.

Continued from Part One.

Bookworm by Popcap

Bookworm is no Peggle. In fact, Bookworm really isn’t that original. You search a board full of letters for a group that is connected and forms a word. Shorter words increase the chance of fire blocks. If a fire block reaches the bottom of the screen, game over. I’d played it on the PC and it was all right, but not that interesting (especially compared to the Bookworm Adventures variant they later released.) But what grabbed me was actually their unique take on achievements. Instead of the standard “Score 1000 points” style of achievements, when you completed a word from a hidden list, the list would be unlocked and checked off (say I played the word “beige”, the colors list would be unlocked). I found that trying to complete these lists was much more fun than the actual game itself.

Chocolatier by Playfirst

It’s worth disclosing that I’m a Chocolatier fanboy. I thought Chocolatier 2: Secret Ingredients was one of the best casual games of all time. So when I heard they were porting the franchise to the iPhone, that was an insta-buy at any price. This port contains pretty much all of the features of the original.

While the good news is that the factory minigame is much more intuitive using touch controls, the bad news is that the interface that works well on a big PC monitor doesn’t work on a tiny cell phone screen especially when you have fat fingers like YT. As it stands it ends up feeling unpolished and cheap. While it is still Chocolatier, it isn’t the best introduction to the series.

ESPN Cameraman / ESPN Zoom by EpicTilt

Free games that are worth the time to download? I can count them on one hand. This is one of them. For some unknown reason (copyright? Did Langdell sue them?) the name has been changed to ESPN Zoom, yet I downloaded it as ESPN Cameraman. This is essentially a repackaging of the MegaTouch game that requires you to touch five differences between two photos before a timer runs out. It is made more challenging my the resolution of the pictures, but overall it is a painless, fun time-waster.

Mafia Wars by Zynga

An embarrassing portion of the traffic to my site comes from people searching for my posts on Mafia Wars. I was thoroughly enthralled in it for a while and during that time I downloaded the mobile app. Now you would think that a company that is focused on playing games on the quick from anywhere would be hip enough to know that folks who pay for imaginary doo-dads for their avatarless characters would not want to start from scratch with a new version. Not the case. The iPhone version doesn’t connect to your profile on either Facebook or MySpace. You start from Level 1. Your friends aren’t there at all. Instead you can connect via number like the failed Wii Friend Code system. What good is that?

On the good side, the interface is much more slick and attractive on the phone than it is on the four gajillion visitor per day Facebook site. How about that?

The Price is Right by Ludia

I grew up watching The Price is Right. I’m sure some psychologist could dig deep into me and find that my obsession with games has some root in the television show. I tried the dreadful DS version of this that recently came out and assumed that the iPhone version was just as bad. When the price dropped to 99 cents, I figured it was worth the gamble.

The game relies heavily on video clips from the actual show and whiz-bang graphics. As such, there are long loading times for almost every way to play and the phone chugs when having to do simple tasks like dragging and dropping Plinko chips. Despite only having a subset of the pricing games, the games that do exist are fairly faithful to the originals. Some of the choices are odd. Why have Hole in One and make an awful putting mechanic when you could have something as easy to implement and popular as the Clock Game or my personal favorite, Pathfinder?

Regardless, I keep coming back to it even as it sucks my battery dry. My lack of memory lets me continue to forget the price of the paper towels that I KNOW was in a pricing game yesterday.

Inside Trader by Jeff McFadden

Besides Doom, I think Drug Wars has been the game on every platform created since the beginning of time. The premise is extremely simple. Create some random goods, have them fluctuate in price randomly, attempt to buy low and sell high. While it was dumb in Drug Wars, it is stupider in Inside Trader. Take the mature and Apple-censor-tickling drug theme and replace it with a stock theme. Take that to the bank.

Here’s the dominant strategy: look for the variable with the wildest swings. Buy when it swings low because it was always come back. In the real world, this just doesn’t happen. Sometimes when prices crash, they stay crashed. Look at GM stock. In the game, the only way to buy low and stay low is to simply run out of time. Unfortunately, the game simply doesn’t have enough depth to be interesting.

Civilization Revolution: Lite by Firaxis/2k Games

Maybe it runs swell on a 3GS, but on my 3G the interface lags horribly and the game chugs along. I can’t give a real review (or enjoy the game at all) if I have to try three times to drag my army because it is still trying to decide to scroll the map. Thumbs down. I even tried FreeMemory to see if it could help the problem, but to no avail.

My friend Mark and I are each working on prototypes of card games we are designing. I had previously gotten a quote from the nearby university’s printing services that my ~150 card game printed in color double-sided and cut would cost approximately $150. Needless to say, that was way too rich for my blood, so when Mark linked me to a site called TheGameCrafter.com, I was pretty excited. The estimator guessed at a cost of around $20 to print and ship the whole she-bang. That’s much better.

So I used their site and uploaded my already complete files. The FTP side is a little wonky as the cards are not displayed in alphabetic order, but in some unsortable mess. That’s a problem when I have 100 different card designs, but eventually I got everything into the service. The site was otherwise very user-friendly.

A few days after I ordered I got this message:
Subject: your game is broken
Howdy!
Order #17 went out the door today, but unfortunately it’s broken. Content
is being cut off on it. It looks like the game will still be playable,
but it won’t look right. I just thought I should give you a heads up
so you can get it fixed sooner rather than later.