Category: Gaming

Motion Controller Wars

Posted on by Nimgimli

So now that all three of the major console makers have some kind of motion controller system, I figured I’d stick my oar in and give my thoughts on what each platform offers. Major caveat: I’m not at E3. I’m basing all the following on what I’ve read, and building on the hard work the professional gaming press is doing in LA.

Nintendo (Existing):
When the Nintendo Wii initially came out, it offered 2 weeks of great fun followed by a period of “This is it?” for a lot of early adopters. Playing Wii Sports was awesome, but once that was out of the way, a long procession of games with ‘forced waggle’ followed, and many gamers quickly tired of randomly shaking the controller in order to accomplish anything.

Eventually the waggle-wave cooled a bit, and games started coming out that used motion control where it fit in naturally (e.g. pointing, or a quick flip to reload a gun), and standard controls for the rest of the game. Suddenly the Wii was interesting again, and I actually grew fond of the nunchuk/remote combo for controlling games. Having the controller essentially broken into two halves made gaming very comfortable.

Nintendo (Wii Motion Plus):
Next week, the Wii Motion Plus comes out. This is supposed to add more precision and 1-to-1 correspondence between controller and on-screen presentation. This means we’ll have to get up off the couch again. When Tiger Woods 10 is played with the Wii Motion Plus, you’ll have to actually do a full swing of the virtual club, rather than a quick pendulum motion with the WiiMote. At least, that’s my understanding. Hopefully the Wii Motion Plus won’t set back the state of Wii games by very much.

At this point, the Wii is essentially the ‘base line’ of motion controllers. Both Sony and Microsoft seem to be leap-frogging Nintendo in the motion controller arena.

Microsoft and Project Natal:
Microsoft really wowed audiences with its controller-free motion control system. A sensor bar consisting of an IR camera, an RGB camera, and a microphone sits in front of (or on top of) the TV and reads the movements of players. The IR camera actually measures heat, and via heat, distance from the TV. The microphone is for voice commands.

Folks who’ve tried the system say it really works. The neatest demo I saw was a version of Burnout hacked so that the player steered just by holding his arms out as if they were on a steering wheel. When they turn the imaginary wheel, the car turns. Sliding their foot forward and back controlled acceleration. Very neat tech demo.

But I have some concerns. First of all, how well is this going to work when I’m wearing a checkered shirt and standing in front of a paisley-print couch? [Update: After pondering this for a while, it occurred to me that this might not be an issue, given the IR camera. It could use the heat of you body to tell the difference between you and the couch.] The demos were done in an empty room with white walls. Apparently the system can adjust for lighting differences, so they have that much licked.

Assuming the tech works, is this what we really want? If you have a choice of playing air guitar Rock Band, or fake-instrument Rock Band, which would be more fun? Props are important; they give play a visceral feel. I find it ironic that when the PS3 came out with a controller that lacked rumble, they were heavily criticized for losing that feedback. But now Microsoft has a system that by definition has no feedback at all, and everyone is going nuts for it. Nintendo’s Wii Remote has rumble and a microphone and these aspects really add to the immersion. When you wallop a tennis ball with the Wii Remote, you hear and feel the impact of the racket hitting the ball. You won’t get that kind of feedback with Natal, nor is it clear how you’d move around using Natal. How do you get your on-screen character to run, turn (without you turning so you can no longer see the screen) or fire a gun?

So I think Natal will spawn a new genre of games that take advantage of the hands-free control system. But where I think Natal will have the largest impact is with the overall UI of the Xbox. The idea of never having to search for the remote is very appealing. I wave my hand to browser through video or music selections, then I say “Play” to begin playback. Now *that* is both radical and useful, and I’d really love to see MS license Natal to other consumer electronics manufacturers.

And then there’s Milo. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in Milo. The demo was a heavily scripted event (Molyneux himself apparently admitted that) that made the demo seem more than it was. One of the most interesting aspect of Milo was the facial recognition. A person could stand in front of the Natal sensor and say his name, then when he returned, ‘Milo’ could identify who the person was. That’s pretty neat. The bit where the player splashed around in the water wasn’t anything new: the Sony Eyetoy has been able to do that for a while (granted the fidelity was better here). The conversation stuff was the most scripted…apparently Milo ‘understood’ just a few questions: this is understandable. If Milo worked as well as he *seemed* to work (without tricks) then he’d be about as smart as the voice actuated and controlled computer on Star Trek, and we just aren’t there yet.

But what was really, really cool about Milo was the head tracking. As you walked around the room, the view on-screen changed to reflect how you’d see the virtual world from that new location. This is really huge because it allows some very cool ‘virtual 3D’ effects; I can’t wait for MS to roll those out (see the video at the end of this post for an example of what I’m talking about).

So Milo was a really fun tech demo with some really cutting edge aspects, some rehashed stuff, and some smoke and mirrors. But the aspects that people seem so excited about (talking to Milo) isn’t what was really cool about the demo.

Sony’s Wand System:
Lastly we have Sony’s wand-based motion-control system. If you haven’t seen it, it consists of a pair of wands that include traditional controller buttons, and a light on the end of each wand. The Sony Eyetoy can track the lights with a high degree of fidelity. During the Project Natal demo, a player ‘painted’ by splashing buckets of paint on a wall. During the Sony demo, a player very legibly wrote his name on a virtual wall. That’s the difference in fidelity between the two systems.

In a lot of ways the Sony system seems like the Nintendo Wii Remote on steroids. A bunch of game applications immediately spring to mind. It has buttons so you can shoot a gun, and they could put an analog stick on it so you could move around a 3D space that way (a la the Nintendo nunchuk). The demo showed a very simple RTS game being played using the wands like a mouse. Let’s just pray that we don’t get a bunch of waggle games from Sony!

Really the three systems map well to now, soon, and future. Nintendo is the now solution. Depending on how much Wii Motion Plus adds, we’re all pretty familiar with what Nintendo can do. Sony offers the next step; an enhanced way of controlling your games that should be available and working well pretty soon (Spring 2010 they’re saying). And Project Natal represents the dreamy future. When Natal launches (my guess? sometime in 2011) it’s going to mean a rebirth of the Xbox 360 in much the same way that the NXE did. I don’t honestly see a lot of mainstream games supporting Natal, but I do see it refreshing the entire UI of the Xbox in remarkable ways, as well as adding a new genre: Natal Games.

Back to the head tracking issue. Here’s the video I mentioned. This fellow now works for Microsoft, but before he went to the big M he was hacking Wii Remotes:

*THIS* is the technology of Project Natal that I am most excited about!

UPDATE: GameSetWatch has a brief article up confirming that Johnny Lee is working on Natal.

UPDATE: Johnny Lee himself chimes in on his blog.

Whatever happened to Sacred 2?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Someone (Werit) asked me today if Sacred 2 had slipped down my play list.

It has not. My entire playlist has slipped down. Due to poor planning on the part of upper management at my job, the past few weeks have been rather hellish insofar as having to work a lot of extra hours, extra stress, and so forth. I haven’t been playing anything, aside from some LOTRO, and that I play as a kind of reward. Y’know “OK, I’ll write the data validation scripts for this page, then I’ll kill 10 bog-lurkers, then start the next set of scripts.” (I chose LOTRO because I needed some coin to pay my in-game rent.)

The silver lining is that I’ve killed the 180 bog-lurkers required to complete the deed in the Lone Lands! 🙂

But in spite of what XFire says, I sure didn’t play LOTRO for 14 hours this past week. Much of that time was me logged in, the game running in the background waiting for the next ‘reward’ of killing 10 more lurkers.

This week is E3, and I’m stoked to follow it virtually. After that madness ends (G4TV is showing something like 22 hours of coverage and I intend to watch all of that, plus countless web videos and blog posts) I hope to go back to Sacred 2, probably starting over with a character I can take more seriously than the sexpot Seraphim.

Hmm, wait, that’s not right either. My boss finished Infamous and is going to lend it to me, so I’ll be playing through that first, and THEN going back to Sacred 2.

Bottom line, I didn’t lose interest in Sacred 2…I just got pulled away from it.

LOTRO & LOTR

Posted on by Nimgimli

So last weekend I was playing LOTRO and made the journey to Rivendell, on foot. As I crossed the Fords of Bruinen I stopped to look around, and said to Angela “Check this out. Remember when Arwen drove back the Nazgul here?”

And I stopped, appalled.  Because that’s how it happened in the movies, but not in the books.

And I realized it had been far too long since my last read-through of The Lord of the Rings.

So I dug out a copy — Angela’s copy, (despite the face that it has Elijah Wood on the cover), since the pages of my copy are falling out — and started reading. This has been rather a hellish week, work wise, and I’ve only managed a few pages each evening before falling asleep, but already I’m finding it really interesting to read the book after playing the game. Places referenced casually, like The Chetwood, mean something to me now.

I do find myself wondering why the hobbits chose the path they did, given the fine road from The Shire to Bree (in the game) but maybe that will become more clear as I re-familiarize myself with the true story.

If you’ve been playing LOTRO and haven’t read the books in a while, I highly recommend doing so! The two complement each other really nicely.

Active Day 5

Posted on by Nimgimli

Today was Day 5 of the 30-Day Challenge in EA Sports Active for the Wii. It was workout #4, since Thursday was a rest day (every 3rd day is rest, it seems).

Yesterday’s workout felt easy and it was over before I knew it. I was feeling cocky, then today came. Jump Squat and Jump Lunges and lots of running. Oh my aching legs.

I am doing better with the running but I’m not really sure how/why other than I’m feeling less reserved about the whole process. I realized as I started to really huff and puff that I’ve been so non-active for so long that I subconsciously have started thinking that heavy-breathing means something is wrong, and I pull back.

I don’t want to get too touchy-feely but I really feel like I’m starting to think differently about things. Even after just 5 days. After my first workout I felt terrible and really gross (sweat? EWWW!) but now, yeah, I’m wiped after the workout, but I’m kind of, I dunno, proud of the sweat? And I know I’ll feel GREAT in an hour or so, which is the best part of the whole experience.

I’m not eating any better, but I’m intending to eat better. LOL. We’ll see how that goes. Getting lots of veggies is a challenge for me. I take some baby carrots to work to snack on, but what other veggies are convenient & portable? Any suggestions?

I’m considering getting a set of these, once they release:
riiflex
I just don’t know how they’d work with having to put the Nunchuk into the pocket. Maybe have 2 Nunchuks and just plug the appropriate one into the Wii Remote?

So far, really happy with the product, and feeling a bit better about my self. I already seem to feel like I have more energy, though maybe its all in my head. But I’m not questioning it for now.

If you’re on the fence about Active, I heartily recommend you give it a shot. It’s actually working for me in ways that Wii Fit never did.

EA Sports Active Day 2

Posted on by Nimgimli

I promise I’m not going to make this a daily workout blog! But I did think it might be of interest to some for me to relate a bit more EA Active experience.

I woke up this morning sore, but not uncomfortably so. In fact it was that “good feeling” soreness, though oddly it seemed to get worse, not better, as the day went on. That said, I worked from home today so my ‘commute’ was 15 feet from the bedroom to the office and plunked back down in the chair to write code.

I went out to do some shopping this afternoon and that loosened things up, but then it was back to work for part of the evening, so I didn’t get to EA Active until about 9:30 pm, which I think is much too late to do this kind of thing. But life happens, right?

Tonight’s workout was different from last night. A few new things, a few varieties of things I did yesterday. Yesterday I did side lunges, today it was side lunches with a toe touch, for instance. No boxing today, instead it was tennis (just returning balls at a target, not actually playing).

The leg strap was fussy again. I finally got it to stay put after Angela insisted I should wear it higher on my thigh than I’d been doing. After I looked at my on-screen trainer I saw she was right, so I put it almost as high as it would go and cinched it down pretty tight and it finally stayed in place. I kind of tucked the leg of my shorts around the pocket in the front and that seemed to work well. I think you’d have to do that with anything the least bit baggy. So under the shorts unless you’re wearing spandex or something, and believe you me, you do not want me wearing spandex. Even if you can’t see me, it would cause a darkness that would spread across the lands.

I’m already getting better at using the tension strap and pocketing/unpocketing the Nunchuk. The upper body exercises really feel kind of trivial. I know you can double up the strap but I’m afraid I’m going to break it (and I know some folks have broken them). I might see if I can find a heavier weight strap the next time I’m at a department store.

On the other hand, the lower body exercises continue to kick my behind. And I struggle on the track when it comes time to run. It *always* tells me I’m too slow. Brings back bad gym class memories. I was blaming the system, but then I just went for it and I got into the “Perfect” range, which I could maintain for about 10 seconds before I started wheezing. Plus we live on the 2nd floor and it was closing in on 10 pm and our office is technically the master bedroom so I was worried I was stomping on the floor when someone was trying to sleep.

But bottom line, it’s clear that the running is going to be an on-going challenge for me. But that’s ok.

I’ve also found that you have to be careful with the exercises and do them as instructed. For instance, I was doing these standing leg crunches… you lift one knee up high and are supposed to cross your hands over your belly and ‘crunch’ your abdomen forward. I was just lifting my leg, and I wasn’t getting any Active love. Turns out you NEED to cross your hands over you belly (thereby placing the Remote on you belly) and then you have to crunch forward in order to move the Remote, and then the rep counts.

In general, smooth controlled motions work best, but I guess those are best for maximum performance anyway. It’s important to know that you don’t have to start the exercise with the on-screen trainer…it’ll wait for you. So get your breathing right and then start. But once you start, you have to maintain cadence with him/her/it, and it will do things like make you hold a position for an extra few beats now and then. You WILL curse at this thing.

The good news is that after I was done, I didn’t feel the need to pass out. I managed to get right to the showers (yesterday after the workout I wouldn’t have trusted myself to stand up near all that hard porcelain). So Day 2 wasn’t as bad as Day 1. And Day 3 is a “rest” day and I have to confess I’m glad of that!

I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with the product. I do feel like I’ve had a full body workout, and I sure do sweat (I barely broke a sweat on Wii Fit). I’d just love to see EA take advantage of the Wii Motion Plus add-on when it comes out.

Oh, and my apologies for any typos. Apparently my brain is slightly oxygen starved after working out and my writing gets really sloppy, but I don’t really notice how bad it is until the next day!

EA Sports Active — this ain’t no Wii Fit!

Posted on by Nimgimli

I just got out of the shower. Over-share? Well, there’s a point to it. I’m a morning shower guy. I can’t leave the house without my morning shower. So why did I just get out of the shower at 9:30 at night?

Because EA Sports Active came out today, and I figured I’d start right in. You remember your first day with Wii Fit? You headed some soccer balls, hula’d some hoops, did a little downhill skiing. No biggie. So I fired up EA Sports Active and figured I’d jump into some relaxing introduction to the program.

Nuh-uh.

Now in all fairness, I’m about as out of shape as a person can get while still being able to get out of a chair on his own locomotion. I spend my days sitting in front of a computer, and my evenings…sitting in front of a computer. And I’ve got the body to show it.

But still, I told Active I wanted a “lite” workout. That ended up being about 20 minutes of running in place, squats, side lunges, held-squats camouflaged to look like an inline skating mini-game, and some upper body stuff that honestly was pretty easy. It was the leg/thigh stuff that kicked my ass.

By the end of it I was a sweaty ball of jello, barely able to stay on my feet. It took a good 15 minutes before I could manage that shower.

So was it fun? No, frankly it wasn’t, but I feel better for having done it. The boxing exercise was fun (pretty similar to the one in Wii Fit, honestly), and the inline skating thing might’ve been fun had my legs not been screaming in agony by that point.

Was it convenient? Well, nothing works like it does in the ads. Active comes with a belt that you strap to your thigh, and for exercises like running, you stick the Nunchuk into it. That belt was a pain in the ass for me. I was wearing sweats when I started, and no matter how tightly I cinched the belt, after a while it’d slide down and finally off. I finally ditched the sweats and just worked out in boxers and a t-shirt, and then it did a better job of staying put. Guess it’s time to invest in some gym shorts; the guinea pigs were shocked.

Once you get the belt in place, you jam the Nunchuk into it. The fit is really tight and I worry about damage to the analog stick on the Nunchuk. And you only use the belt and ‘chuk for some exercises; for others you have to hold it, so you’re constantly jamming it into this pocket and pulling it back out.

You also get a ‘resistance band’ which you use for doing curls and stuff. You hold one end in each hand, and stand on the middle of the thing. Seems really easy, until you’re trying to grab the end of the band and the Wii Remote in one hand, and the other end of the band and the Nunchuk in the other, and trying not to get the cord between the Remote and the Nunchuk tangled in the band. I mean it ain’t rocket science but I did find myself wishing I had a third arm a few times.

I’m sure all of this will become less of an issue once I’ve used all this gear a few times.

The software itself is decent. For every exercise you can first watch a video to see how it’s done (demonstrated by a real person, not an avatar) and then during the exercise, your avatar takes up most of the screen, while a trainer leads you in an inset window. Encouragement is fairly constant but the trainer will bitch you out if you start messing up.

It all worked pretty well, except for the running towards the end of the workout. Suddenly it stopped registering consistently. My guess is that the belt/nunchuk had become twisted or something… I was about to pass out from fatigue so it isn’t all that clear to me what was going on 🙂 but I was jogging in place at what I thought was a consistently plodding pace, and my onscreen avatar keep slowing way down, then speeding up, then slowing again. Apparently the game watches the distance between the Nunchuk and the Remote to determine your pacing, so you do need to pump your arms as you run…maybe I was screwing that up? Running was working a lot better early in the session though, so it was something wonky, not bad software.

After the torture workout was over, my trainer gave me a glimpse at what we’d be doing tomorrow, and then I had to answer a couple of surveys about eating habits and exercise outside of the game. I found myself feeling guilty at not having eat enough veggies, or drinking enough water, and for only getting 3 hours of sleep last night. I found it interesting that I was already giving my digital trainer a ‘personality’ and wanting to please her. But I am a geek with something of a robot fetish, so there ya go… ok, over-sharing again.

For my trouble, I got a trophy for completing my first workout, and another for burning at least 100 calories . 🙂

So that was day 1 of EA Sports Active. It offers a much more real workout than Wii Fit ever did, for me. The pre-set 30 Day Challenge doesn’t let you just do the easiest things over and over, and downtime between exercises is basically the amount of time it takes you to change gear…none of that 2 minutes of mini-game, 2 minutes of loading screen that Wii Fit offers.

By the way, the game will work with the Balance Board, but ours is still out for repair, so I couldn’t test that.

At this point it’s pretty clear that I have the tools. If I stick with Active, I’ll wind up in better shape than I’m in now. I can tell you that just by how my legs and thighs are feeling after that 1st workout.

Sacred 2 Initial Thoughts (Xbox 360)

Posted on by Nimgimli

A few people saw that I’ve been playing Sacred 2 on the Xbox 360 and have asked me how it is. Rather than try to answer 140 characters at a time, I figured I’d offer very early thoughts here.

Honestly, I don’t know how it is yet. I’ve only put in about 4 hours, and have only gotten to level 9 with 1 character class (the goofily over-sexed Seraphim, of course). I *think* I’m going to like it once I figure everything out; the game really throws you into the lake and expects you to learn to swim on your own. The manual isn’t much help and even though I have Tutorials set to “On” I haven’t really seen anything I’d call a tutorial.

The game is really about growing a character. You have attributes (ie, Strength, Dexterity and so on) and you have Skills (Sword Mastery, Shield Lore) and then you have Combat Arts. Combat Arts are your “active” abilities. You power them up by slotting Runes into them. For every Rune you slot into a Combat Art, the art gets stronger but the cool down time increases (substantially). Both attributes and skills (which you get points for when you level up) can be used to reduce cool downs.

So you have this balancing act of making abilities as powerful as possible without making the cooldown times so long that they become less useful, but you also don’t want to spend all your skill and attribute points on reducing cooldown times, since that cuts you off from all the other benefits of skills.

And if you slot enough runes into one “School” of Combat Art, then you can enhance a combat art in another way. Each art has two ‘upgrade’ paths and it seems like you can only choose one of the two.

And the runes that you slot into Combat Arts can also be slotted into weapons, giving them a bonus.

And that’s just a quick overview of character development. I still don’t really get it all and I’m guessing I’m growing a gimped first character.

Gameplay wise, you map both combat arts and weapons to the face buttons of the 360 controller. So that gives you 4 weapons/combat arts. Then you can map another 8 to the Face Buttons + Left Trigger and Face Buttons + Right Trigger.

For some reason, I’m finding it really hard to keep track of 12 combat arts/weapons, in spite of the fact that I can be very comfortable playing an MMO with 4 banks of 10 hotkeys full of skills, consumables and the like. I think it’s because you can’t see all 12 at once? Since they aren’t always there, you don’t memorize them like you do skills in an MMO.

Potions get mapped to the D-pad, although Up on the D-Pad is always mapped to your Deity special ability (which I haven’t really looked into yet).

Basic gameplay here is very Diablo-like. If you don’t love top-down hack & slash RPGs, don’t even bother with Sacred 2. It isn’t good enough to convert anyone, and it is a pretty pure example of the genre.

A few gripes… the combat doesn’t have a lot of “umph” and you tend to have to play with the camera pulled way out (so you can see enemies before they see you) which means the onscreen foes become pretty tiny. This doesn’t impact gameplay — you can see their health bar clearly — but it kind of distances you from the action. The game also feels a little rough at times. Sorting through inventory is more cumbersome than it should be (you can’t see the stats of both equipped gear and gear in your backpack at the same time) and I’ve had Details screens refuse to pop up, and Quests get ‘stuck’ until I quit and restarted.

But on the other hand, there’s nothing really like this on the 360. The world seems huge and the environments are pretty lush. Your character persists between games, so you can play through again and again at higher difficulty levels with the same character, leveling up and maxing out gear. There’s a Chest in towns that you can store equipment, and all you characters have access to that chest. So if you’re playing a Seraphim and a really sweet piece of Shadow Warrior gear drops, you can stash it in the chest and roll a Shadow Warrior just to put the gear to good use. If you’re a hack & slash fan, you’ll get why these features are important.

I started playing at Silver Difficulty (2 of 4) and so far the game feels really easy, and that’s my biggest beef so far, but I’m led to understand it gets a lot harder later on.

I’m still on the fence with this one. I haven’t yet played enough to give it a thumbs up *or* down.

Free Realms update

Posted on by Nimgimli

Free Realms seems to be signing up people left and right; they announced yesterday that they’d reached 1 million registered users (note: not subscribers). And they’ve added another 2 servers, bringing the total to 10. We logged in at 10 am ET this morning, and all servers were already at Medium capacity.

The Friends list is still borked, but it seems like the overall server crashing/unexpected downtime issues of last weekend are gone.

Speaking personally, Angela and I are still enjoying the heck out of it. In fact I found it a bit too enjoyable, and played so much last weekend that I aggravated my wrist (typical gamer/programmer RSI issues, nothing serious). Then Mon & Tue were very long work days full of head-down coding, which didn’t help the wrist situation any. So I’m restricting myself to short Free Realms play sessions a few times a day. And mostly doing combat missions, which aren’t as mouse-intensive.

It still feels like every time I log in I find something new. Today it was a whale breaching off the coast in Seaside, then later a crazy fireworks display from a musician named Bruce who was being held hostage by some ogres. When the last ogre was knocked out, a huge burst of rainbows and fireworks shot off from the rock that Bruce was using as an improvised stage.

We’re supporting the game, both via subscriptions (in my case, Angela has a Station Pass) and buying stuff at retail shops. I bought a couple of $10 Station Coin cards at Target one day, and a couple of Starter Packs for the physical CCG from Best Buy this week. Those were $10 too and are a decent deal. They get you a month’s subscription to the game ($5 value), a virtual dog (pets cost between $2.50 & $4.00 in-game) and some other in-game odds and ends, plus of course a deck of cards and a ‘playmat’. The down side is that there’s still no detailed instructions on how to play…just what’s printed on the playmat. Maybe all this stuff is obvious to veteran CCG players, but this is my first such game.

But I find it interesting that I’ve spent $25 this month on a “free” game and have zero regrets for having done so. The $5 for the subscription was a ‘must-have’ but the other $20 was just bubbling-over enthusiasm and wanting silly extras.

We’re gleefully anticipating the future of Free Realms. Apparently more jobs and more mini-games are in the works, as well as all those “coming soon” areas on the map. The funny thing is, we weren’t chomping at the bit waiting for the launch. I played a tiny bit of the beta and wasn’t impressed, and Angela had zero interest in the game (I’m not sure what convinced her to try it…I guess just that it was included in the Station Pass). And now we’re both completely enchanted by it.

If any devs happen upon this, here is my suggestion for the future of Free Realms. How about offering different ways of accomplishing crafting tasks? Granted I’m an old man and not the intended audience, but the smelting mini-game kills me with all its “frantically shake the mouse around” motions (ie, the bellows). I’d love a more cerebral alternative to doing those action-based mini-games. And I’m sure there are players who would like more of the whack-a-mole action-packed mini-games and that get tired of the ‘eliminate the gems’ stuff.

I’m visualizing an option when you start one of these tasks you are prompted — Minigame 1 or Minigame 2? — with 1 being action-packed and 2 being more cerebral. You could ask every time, or let the players indicate in their settings which style they prefer.

And one last request: soundtrack, please?

Or, just ignore me and keep doing what you’re doing, because what you’re doing is pretty damned awesome.

Rough week

Posted on by Nimgimli

Sorry for the radio silence so far this week. I worked until about 10 pm on Monday, and 11 pm on Tuesday, and it hasn’t left much time for twittering, blogging (reading OR writing) or gaming.

The bright side is that my wrist is feeling better. I played so much Free Realms last weekend that my carpal tunnel/RSI/whatever the hell happens to my wrist, was starting to flare up. We’re loving that game.

Rumor mill is going great, isn’t it? I can’t believe we’re less than 3 weeks from E3. What’re we going to see? What’s this crazy new Xbox 360 camera all about? Will PSP Go! be announced? And what about this slimmer PS3 (along with, presumably, a price cut)?

I’ve actually scheduled days off for that week; I won’t be at E3 but I’ll be following the news in real time!

Ahh, screw it. Rant deleted. Ranting solves nothing.