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Norinel's Boringly-Titled Blog
I've played some board and card games I hadn't played before in the last week. Here are super-brief minireviews:
Tichu: A trick-taking game with just enough twists to keep things interesting. I'm definitely going to try to push this on people back at school, maybe faking the deck by using a normal deck of playing cards plus the four jokers.
Attika: Hex meets Settlers of Catan. I liked the mechanics of building and stuff, but didn't quite work out all the details.
Oriente: I thought I'd like this game, but it didn't turn out well- we were playing with one major rule wrong (Not shuffling the peasant's cards in to a Revolution) that made one particularly annoying option a lot more common than it should've been. I'm not sure if it would've gone well if we were doing that right, and I don't think I'll get another chance to see, since everyone else assumed the game sucked.
Race for the Galaxy: One of those games that's tricky enough that I got owned the first time but interesting enough that I want to play again now that I have a better idea of what's going on. Plus, it's in space.
Also, I tagged this journal. (Back to late 2005, at least) The new tags should all be self-explanatory: anecdotes, games, puzzles, music, lj, musings, links, memes, projects.
If you feel like giving me something to write about, pick a subset of those tags and I'll try to write an entry to fit them.
I have a friend who's been following the little bits of information released about the next big D&D edition (to come out this summer). Yesterday, he mentioned a new rule involving zombies: scoring a critical hit (Usually representing a blow to vital organs or in the head, which does bonus damage) kills a zombie instantly, which makes for some thematic elements about headshots or something. D&D doesn't have many guns, but I suppose you could say you're lopping off the head with swords, which is sort of cool too. My response was, if the new edition keeps the current rules about certain weapons being more likely to score critical hits than others, that means that one of the optimal zombie-fighting weapons is... the rapier.
On the surface, it seems kind of silly, but I think it could make a good story. Imagine a Black Plague of zombies shambling across medieval France. The only ones with the courage to stop them are an elite cadre of the best fencers in the land, riding across the countryside and deftly stabbing the zombie hordes in the head...
http://www.pingmag.jp/2006/07/24/ja
The ironic thing is that I know people who are interested in urban exploring (Poking around in abandoned industrial underbellies of things), a few of whom went to Japan recently. But I think they were too busy doing touristy things to do any of this sort of stuff.
So I'm like two months late saying this, but I definitely fall into the whole Mid-Core gamer idea, which had a bit of a surge in the blogs back in February. Looks like they tried to start a community and more blogs and stuff, but it sort of petered out because midcore gamers don't have time to run that stuff. But my take on it, in case you're curious:
I like games, I like complexity, and I like interesting, novel, and tricky game mechanics. However, there are constraints on my time, and I know there are more good games out there than I have time to play. (Or capability- I remember the times when the Mac shareware scene existed, but it looks like the current shareware/indie scene is pretty Windows-dominated these days) I play games to have fun, so if I'm not having fun, I could probably do better. Intricacy and time demand are related, but it's possible to have one without the other- the time I could spend obsessing over one game to get good enough at it to have fun, I could spend playing another game and having fun right now. And maybe it's immature to choose the latter, but it's more efficient.
This doesn't entirely apply to electronic games. I approach my pile of board games somewhat the same way, but it's much harder to get people to play those, and they kind of require other people, so it's difficult to play them obsessively even if I wanted to.
So I thought Blank Verse Blog Week might just give
The opportunity, after some time
To post in here again, since it's been long
Since last I wrote a bit about my life.
But still I wonder what you all might like
To read about, or hear about. I feel
As though my life holds little that is worth
Collection in so public of a place.
At least I wrote something; perhaps this chore
Might just inspire me to post some more.
Get your own valentinr
And hopefully, a simple poll will give me some helpful data. It's behind the cut- just a list of 30 songs, check them off if you recognize them. Even if you aren't a music person, at least give it a look- this is sort of targetted towards not music people anyway. The one thing I ask is that you not check off a song if you only know about it through music video games, since that'd sort of corrupt the data.
( Read more... )
I've had access to Rock Band for the last few weeks. It is, as you would expect, tons of fun. A decent part of it is that the co-op mode interleaves the separate parts just enough for everyone to have an impact on how the group does, but not so much that the skillset changes drastically from the solo version. Essentially, score is combined for everyone, and the "star power" bonus, which in Guitar Hero was the tilt the guitar trick to double your score for a bit, doubles everyone's score, and the multiplier adds if multiple people do it at once. Part of that trick is the score feedback is partially visual- you can see what percentage of each of the point targets you're at, and being able to go up to x8 and watching it go a whole lot faster is a Good Thing. If one person fails, someone has to activate star power to save them within a given amount of time or everyone loses, which either provides a short break for the person in question to get back on the beat or makes for suspense to see if someone can get star power/finish the song in time.
If you're curious, the things I usually find myself playing are bass on Hard, guitar+vocals on Medium+Easy, vocals on Medium, and drums on Easy, in about that order. I'm kind of surprised that guitar+vocals actually works- basically, I use a headset for the mike and rely on a combination of peripheral vision, knowing a handful of the songs, and following the provided vocals. (Early attempts involved duct taping the mike to a four-foot piece of PVC and holding it between my feet) Unfortunately, I find myself occasionally doing things I chide people doing when they're just doing vocals- mostly being picky about songs because they don't know them and making the lyrics gibberish since it just counts the pitch. In my defense of the second one, I've only done it on Dani California, which is pretty crazy words-wise.
I had nothing to do with the MIT Mystery Hunt this weekend; I had bigger things going on, and the last time I sacrificed a puzzle event (Which would've been my first live one, actually) to a Bigger Thing, I came out the better for it.
Though I was still on the e-mail list for my previous team, so I learned a little about the theme and structure. All I have to say about that is that this is the second year in a row they've been scooped theme-wise by the previous summer's Microsoft Intern Game, doubly so if there was anything Phoenix Wright-related near the endgame. MSIG 2006 was timeshares turned selling your soul to the devil, and MITMH 2007 was solving the Mystery Hunt turned selling your soul to the devil. MSIG 2007 was a murder investigation you got framed for by the real killer, and MITMH 2008 was a murder investigation you got framed for by the real killer.
I wonder if there would be demand for a wholly online-delivered Mystery Hunt-structured puzzlehunt experience, in the sense that Google's USPC is an online-delivered culture-neutral logic puzzle competition experience. I know there are people who put puzzle sets and minihunts online, but is there anything to be gained by making it a real-time competition? Put something together that a single-digit team could solve in a single-digit number of hours and make the real-time events and stuff more Internet-powered, and I think there could be something.