Category: Gaming

Another Wii update

Posted on by Nimgimli

The glow you see today leads down a dark and twisty path to an update that breaks the Zelda hack. Yes, it adds some trivial features but basically it looks like Nintendo is shutting down this particular back door.

Apparently if you have the Homebrew Channel already installed, it’ll still work. Haven’t tested this though. If you’re interested in this Wii Homebrew Scene, I suggest you get the Homebrew Channel up and running before applying this update. Either that, or just skip the update, though you know sooner or later some game will require it.

Nintendo updates the Wii Nintendo Channel

Posted on by Nimgimli

Why is your Wii Slot glowing blue? It’s because the Nintendo Channel has been updated and now lets you rate games, as well as check out how other people (cumulatively) have rated them. You can rate any game you’ve spent at least an hour playing (a bit eerie that my Wii remembers that I played Excite Truck for over an hour at some point!).

Typical Nintendo twists apply. You answer the following questions for each game:

Was the person who played it the most male or female?
What was their age?
Is the game for everyone or gamers?
Is it Hard Core or Casual?
Is it more fun alone or with others?

And finally a “how highly would you recommend it?” slider with no numbers showing, so you can’t fixate on a specific score. You just slide the slider to where it feels ‘right’ to you.

All in all, not a bad feature. It’s reasonably fun to “rate” games (though sadly only one person can rate a game on a given Wii, as far as I can tell) as well as to look up how well gamers are doing. And then they link data in a “People who liked this game also liked these other games” fashion, though that isn’t always particularly significant. People who liked Wii Fit also liked Super Paper Mario… ok, but really these two games are about as diverse as two games could possibly be.

Bartle on games and politicians

Posted on by Nimgimli

Here’s a quote for you. Richard Bartle speaking out against the “self-righteous politicians and newspaper columnists” who “beat on computer games”:

Call them [gamers] social inadequates if you like, but when they have more friends in World of Warcraft than you have in your entire sad little booze-oriented culture of a real life…

Richard Bartle: Gamers have won the battle against the censors | guardian.co.uk

It’s a fun rant, but really nothing you don’t already know if you’re a gamer.

Arcade Nostalgia

Posted on by Nimgimli

For the old-skool gamers among us, here’s a post that’ll take you back:

Coding Horror: Rediscovering Arcade Nostalgia

I really miss the days of (relatively) easy programming languages. You could make a simple game in Atari Basic pretty easily, and I spent countless hours typing in games from magazines (not easy on the Atari 400 chiklet keyboard!) and then tweaking/customizing them. Then saving them on cassette tape. Heh, frustrating good times.

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Mudcraft

Posted on by Nimgimli

Here’s a pretty neat little indie game that I found thanks to Play This Thing (Greg Costikyan’s site).

Mudcraft is a real-time strategy game that challenges you to work with Mother Nature as you build a strong mud community while foregoing the violence associated with most RTS games. Mudcraft is a lighthearted game designed to be enjoyable to male and female players of all ages.

Check it out!

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Playing Lately: Jeanne d’Arc (PSP)

Posted on by Nimgimli

I don’t often talk about gaming here, but I might start coming back to it since my other site (Jaded’s Pub) is awfully quiet these days.

Normally I’m an MMO junkie but every so often I burn out on the endlessness of those games and need to take up something more finite. Lately I’ve been doing just that with Jeanne d’Arc on the PSP.

Last fall I splurged and bought the PSP-2000 (or PSP Lite) and it’s made the PSP more enjoyable to use. First it’s lighter, for standard handheld gaming. But curiously enough, I really like the TV-out feature. I know the whole idea of TV-out on a handheld seems silly to a lot of people, but there are times when my eyes are just too strained to peer at the PSP screen, and blowing things up to TV-size means I can continue to play in comfort.

Anyway back to the game. The genre here is turn-based strategy-rpg, a la Tactics Ogre or Final Fantasy Tactics. It’s a genre I’ve always loved and as I get older I find I enjoy turn-based gaming more and more and action gaming less and less. The game follows, very loosely, the story of Joan of Arc…if France had been over-run by beastmen and wizards at the time.

There’s nothing really revolutionary here. Jeanne has a band of companions that keeps growing and growing, although battles are generally limited to 6 individuals at the max. You earn gold and skills during fights, and can spend the gold at shops to buy better arms and armor. Skills get equipped on your characters and offer either passive buffs or spells/actions that require Magic Points. After each battle, non-combatants get some exp too, so they don’t fall too far behind in levels.

I’m taking my time, trying to keep everyone leveled up. I don’t think this is really necessary, but the game is fun and relaxing and I’m in no hurry for it to be over. At any point you can backtrack and enter a “Free Combat” zone to get more experience, gold and skills, so I don’t have to worry about ending up gimped at the end of the game.

I can’t say the challenge level is very high, but my play-style has some impact on that, too. If I were pushing always-onward and never doing the Free Combats, I’m sure things would be more difficult. I have had a few tense battles and certain game mechanics (several of the characters can transform into uber-soldiers for a few turns) can really change the tide of battle drastically if used correctly, adding more fun to the game.

Granted I haven’t finished it, but I’m pretty confident giving Jeanne d’Arc a thumbs up. It’s been out for quite a while and has a metacritic rating of 87, so I’m not sticking my next out by saying its a decent game.

Techie Funk

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. Normally, my relaxation time is spent playing games or reading. Mostly playing games, and even more specifically, playing MMOs. But lately nothing is scratching the itch for me. I spend all day at work bored and wanting to go home. Then I get home and I’m bored and trying to find something to do that interests me.

I finally took the time to sit down and navel-gaze about this. First of all, why am I bored at work? Well that’s pretty clear: I have no challenges. I was hired for a position I’m quite over-qualified for, and rather than use my skills, my manager (who really has no technical savvy) has me doing busy-work. On the bright side, the pay is rotten.

And I think this revelation leads me to why I’m bored at home, too. My brain is starving and playing games, which used to be my recharge activity, is just starving it more.

So I’ve decided its time to let my geek flag fly again. I was thinking maybe instead of playing a game, I’d take a shot at creating a game. But what language to use? I write PHP at work these days, and I’m tempted to build some kind of web game, but maybe I need a change.

And then I happened upon this post at Raph Koster’s site: Raph’s Website » A letter to a 12-year-old It’s a fun read, but as kind of an offhand part of the post, Raph asks his audience: BTW, if you had to recommend a programming language to today’s 12-year-olds, what would it be?

Now I’m a good deal older than that, but often enough I can act like a 12-year old, so I was interested to see what people suggested. One of the things suggested was Alice, developed as a system to visually teach programming to kids. It’s pretty neat! Basically it uses methods that are tokenized into draggable widgets, and you ‘stack’ these up to give orders to a 3D avatar. From some of the examples it looks like you can do a lot more, with collision detection for gaming and so forth. I haven’t dug that far into it. To me it was more a curiosity than a tool I’d use (I think!) but it was well worth a look to anyone with a taste for geeky stuff.

Another option mentioned was PyGame which is some kind of game development toolkit based on Python. I’ve never taken the time to learn Python and have always been interested, so I might give that a look. Some kind of open source UO emulator called RunUO was mentioned as well, but I’m not sure if that requires a UO client or what. Another item to dig into I guess.

Lots to dig into, and I’m still not sure that a web-based PHP game isn’t what I want to do. I have a rough idea of the kind of game I want to make: a turn-based dungeon crawler of some kind.

Anyone have suggestions as to other ‘get up and running quickly’ game creation tools out there?

Rock Band vs Guitar Hero 3: Day 4, Finishing Up

Posted on by Nimgimli

Well, I’ve gotten pretty far away from actually comparing the two games at this point, but that alone is indicative of my personal preference. Tonight right after dinner I fired up Rock Band and played until my hands started to ache. Yeah, just a tad addicted.

I finished out the Easy Mode career and unlocked all the bonus songs, then started on a Medium Mode career. When I made the jump from Easy to Medium in Guitar Hero 3, the difference was crushing…I just couldn’t manage to do Medium songs at all well. In Rock Band, I hit 4 & 5 stars on my first two Medium mode songs.

This felt pretty ‘right’ to me. Finishing up the hardest Easy songs and then the bonus songs on Easy, and then moving onto the easiest Medium songs…it should (I think) feel like a pretty seamless progression, and in Rock Band it does.

At this point it’s hard to imagine me going back to Guitar Hero 3 for anything. I’m just hoping for that patch that’ll let me use the GH3 guitar in Rock Band so I get some use out of the purchase.