Category: Gaming

Holy Grail Redemption

Posted on by Nimgimli

Back in the day I played quite a bit of GTA IV, in spite of the fact that I don’t generally like playing bad guys. I tried to keep Niko on the straight and narrow but there were some scripted actions that were very unsavory to me. But I played because of the format.

This past week I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption. I’m loving it. Being a gunslinger in the Old West isn’t nearly as unpalatable to me as being a hit man in a realistic modern setting. And I’ve got a certain amount of nostalgia for Westerns anyway. Rockstar was brilliant in picking the setting… the tail end of the untamed west period, where we see influences of the much more modern eastern states. Some early cars and so forth.

Anyway, what keeps me playing RDR is, again, the format. I play it like an MMO (but then I play everything like an MMO if I can manage to). Sometimes I quest, sometimes I chase challenges (gather 5 coyote hides, shoot 5 birds), sometimes I just ride the range to see what me and my trusty steed come upon.

In a lot of ways, Red Dead Redemption is the best RPG I’ve played in a long time, in the most literal sense of the acronym. No, there aren’t levels or character stats (though there is gear, to some extent) but I just sink into the role of John Marsten and lose myself.

But as much as I like Westerns, I’m a fantasy guy at heart. I know everyone else is sick to death of fantasy, but I’m not.

And that’s why I want Rockstar’s next game to use this open world format for an Arthurian Grail Quest game. Imagine you play a knight. You might be a white knight or a black knight. You’re ultimately searching for the Grail, but along the way you could have all kinds of adventures. You could help out peasants who’re being mistreated by a cruel lord… or side with the lord to help him keep those pesky peasants in line. Hunting and fishing, of course.. a knight has to live off the land at times. Magical beasts, just to keep things fun. Random encounters with wizards, damsels, other knights, creatures… and this is Rockstar, so there’ll be some very dark things happening, too.

I could just get lost in a world like that… but I’m sure that’s much to geeky for Rockstar to take on. I hope someone ‘borrows’ this open world format and runs with it, though.

A farewell to LOTRO, and other musings

Posted on by Nimgimli

I took some time tonight to pack up my housing items in LOTRO. It’s silly for me to log in every 5 or so weeks to pay 55 silver/week rent to keep the house. I just don’t have time to play MMOs anymore, and don’t see that changing while I’m working two jobs. I have a Lifetime sub to LOTRO so I can still pop in and dabble when I do find a few spare minutes, but for now it’s a game, not a world. I don’t need a house in a game. I need houses in worlds.

I have to confess, it all felt really melancholy. I miss the days of escaping to another world, a virtual world. But those days have passed me by in a number of ways. There’s my personal situation: no time and all that. But today’s MMOs just seem to be games and not worlds. EVE is the only exception that I really know about, and damn would I love to have the free time needed to play EVE seriously.

Packing up my LOTRO house had me thinking back to our guild halls and my houses in Ultima Online. That was a real world, at least to me and my guildies. There was a society in that game. There were good people and bad people. There was a dynamic economy. Towns sprang up and faded away over time. Inns would appear and be the ‘in’ (ha! See what I did there?) place to hang out for a while, until they went out of fashion and some new place sprang up.

We’d hang out, throw parties, do battle, make alliances, corner markets, have weddings… we did all kinds of things back then. It was more than a game, it was a place.

Back then, cyberspace was coming, and my then-girlfriend and I would kid about being an elderly couple sitting on the front porch in rocking chairs, jacked in via implants. But cyberspace fizzled, the same way virtual reality and the space program did. Cyberspace seemed like it’d become a place. But that never happened and now the very term seems silly.

I also saw that the beta for WOW Cataclysm is coming soon, or maybe has even started. That has me wanting to reinstall WOW to take one last look at those places where I used to hang out so much, before Blizzard plows them under to build anew.

But then I realized, you can’t go home again. Sitting out in Westfall in the wee hours, chatting with friends, having a beer or three in real life while I did so, watching the lighthouse’s beam sweep across the sea… if I went back now, it wouldn’t be the same as what it was; it’d just be depressing. Like when I go to visit my mom in my home town and pop into my old haunts and realize I’m just another tourist weekending in The Hamptons. I’m not the only one who moved on, and there’s no longer a “there” there.

Anyway, enough of being maudlin.

So LOTRO is packed away. Life is crazy hectic and unpleasant. And I keep buying (mostly single player) games. I mentioned this on Twitter today and got a few people who said they do the same thing. The busier I get, the more games I buy. Not the more games I play, mind you. I get them home, find 20 minutes to tear off the shrinkwrap and fire them up, then never get back to them.

So why do I keep buying them? I guess it’s the only way I have to feel connected to this hobby that used to be such a huge part of my life. I want to play, but can’t. Somehow the retail therapy of buying a new game scratches that itch for a few moments. I bought Monster Hunter Tri the week it came out. Played it once. 3D Dot Heroes this week. Booted it up, looked at it, haven’t had time to go back. Red Dead Redemption is coming next week. Bought the Humble Bundle of Indie games and never even got around to downloading it. Bought the Civ IV collection from Steam last night…those I did install but never booted up. And so on and on… so much wasted money!

The one bright spot right now is the iPad. I’m still playing that silly Godfinger game; it’s something I can spend 5 minutes on 3 times a day and feel like I’m making some progress, though towards what, I don’t know. When I hit level 50 I’ll just stop playing probably. Ditto We Rule. Log in a few times a day for 2-3 minutes…it’s a nice break. And a bunch of other simple fun games that I can play for a couple minutes in bed before lights out.

This patch will ease up eventually. I took the whole week of E3 off, to follow all the news and to recharge my batteries. So that, at least, I have to look forward to. And come hell or high water I’m going to find some time for Red Dead Redemption next week! I’m about at the limit of what I’m willing to do for my day job. We’ve all been doing ~12 hour days for a couple weeks (and then I have my blogging job once that’s done) and at this point it’s just starting to feel like management is taking advantage of us. Getting through an unexpected crunch is one thing, but those can’t be permanent hours (at least not without a juicy raise or some fat bonuses!)

Anyway, that’s what’s going on at Dragonchasers HQ. If you’re someone I used to chat with on Twitter or in blog comments, please forgive my disappearance. It just can’t be helped. I do miss my social networking chums, though. Hope everyone is doing well out there!

GodFinger (iPad, coming soon to iPhone/iPod Touch)

Posted on by Nimgimli

[At the time of this writing, GodFinger for iPhone/iPod Touch is available in some places but not others. You can find out if it’s available at your app store here.]

GodFinger is an odd mash-up of casual game, Populous and a splash of social gaming. The idea here is that you rule over a small 2D world. Kind of a cute Flatland place. When you start the game you’ll find a fairly barren world with a few people wondering aimlessly, and clouds and sun drifting overhead. Your job is to bend the people to your will and modify the world to suit your whims.

Luckily you have a GodFinger! By touching and ‘charging’ a cloud or the sun, you can call down rain or sunshine. Doing so causes vegetation to sprout up and these little people to start worshipping you. You can also terraform the planet, raising and lowering land to form mountains and lakes. If you cause it to rain a lot in one area a jungle will slowly form. Avoid raining on an area, and apply plenty of sun, and soon you’ll have a desert. This is all mostly for fun, although if you create a lake your followers can fish out of it, and gain a trickle of energy that way.

All of these actions costs you mana, one of 3 resources. Mana recharges over time, and your mana pool increases as you level up. The mana limitation means GodFinger is a ‘short session’ game; the kind of thing you’ll play for a few minutes, several times a day. There is a totem on your world that you can order followers to worship at, and this will increase your mana recharge rate somewhat, but running out of Mana is the normal cause for a sesion to end.

The next resource is gold. You have a starting pool of gold which you’ll use to buy some buildings. Buying a building just lays a foundation; you then drop some followers onto it and they’ll complete the structure over time. In order to earn gold from the building, it’ll need workers (again, drop followers onto it) and some kind of power source. Power comes from sun, rain or lightning, and you call each of these down from the heavens, spending your mana to do so.

The last resource is Awe. You get this by spending real-world cash, or building it up via leveling and generally playing the game. I’ve yet to feel any need to buy Awe. You can spend Awe on gold, automatic building completion and other ‘miracles.’

So now you have some buildings staffed by followers and you’ve used your mana to power up the buildings. It’s time to sit back and relax for a while. The buildings will produce stacks of gold. Tap on these to collect them. Leave them laying around too long and they’ll rust away. As your followers work, they lose energy, and finally will just shut down from exhaustion.

As a mostly benevolent GodFinger, you can refresh your followers in several ways. You can build them tents to rest in. Tents require no power but take a while to work their magic. Alternatively you can build fountains for your followers to drink from. These need to be powered by rain, but they revive your followers much more swiftly. These little guys and gals love to drink, farting and belching constantly while they do so.

Almost everything you do in GodFinger earns you experience. Using a power, collecting gold, sometimes even from growing an unusual plant… experience comes in at a slow but steady pace. As you level up you unlock new & improved buildings, more potent powers, more followers and your world even grows.

As for the social aspect, if you have friends playing you can add their worlds to your universe. You can zoom out of your planet until you can see others. Interactions between friends’ planets are fairly spartan. You can “Enchant” one of their followers and once your friend accepts the enchantment you’ll get a trickle of gold from them. And once a day you can send a (pre-set) gift to a single friend. And that’s about the extent of the social stuff at this point. Basically if you don’t have any friends playing, don’t worry that you’re missing out.

GodFinger is free to play (aside from optionally purchasing Awe). I actually think the developers misjudged things here. There are a few inconspicuous ads in various parts of the game, and presumably they make some money from those, but I just see no reason to buy Awe, which I assume is intended to be the main revenue stream.

GodFinger is a lot of fun to play for a while. I’m currently level 26 (of 50) and sadly I’ve more or less run out of content. I have every building unlocked and I’ve got more gold than I know what to do with. As I keep leveling my powers will grow stronger but I’m not convinced I need them to be stronger.

I’d like to think the devs will keep adding content, but presumably that would depend on a solid revenue stream. Maybe I’m an anomaly and other people are buying lots of Awe. I hope so.

Still, free is free and it’s well worth a download, even if you ultimately decide it isn’t for you. Just messing around with your planet, creating floods and deserts and seeing what you can get to grow, can be fun.

Small Worlds (Browser/Flash)

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is another one of those “How’d I miss this?” posts.

Small Worlds is a flash game described by designer David Shute as “A short atmospheric game about exploring.” You may have already played it; if so, why didn’t you tell me about it!?

It takes a few minutes to hook you, but once it does (if you’re anything like me) you won’t be able to stop playing until you’ve explored everything (which doesn’t take very long). There a very retro vibe and you won’t be shooting or fighting or even dying. Just jumping and exploring.

Meh, don’t waste time reading my ramblings about it, just go play it.

We Rule mutterings (iPad)

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I’ve been playing We Rule on the iPad (also for iPhone/iPod Touch) for a little while now. It’s definitely one of those social games that draw so much ire, but as I’ve said previously I don’t find these games nearly as annoying when they’re not spamming me and my friends constantly. We Rule runs on the Plus+ social network which is (as far as I know) *just* for games.

This isn’t meant as a ‘review’ really, just some thoughts on what I wish the game has that it doesn’t (or if it does, I’ve missed it).

So you start with a plot of land and some money. You’ll start by planting crops, a la Farmville. And different crops have different seed costs, growing time, and payoff. Annoyingly crops will wither once they’ve ripened if you don’t harvest them quickly enough. That makes growing crops an issue for me since I, y’know, have a real job to go to and I can’t just stop in the middle of the day, dig out my iPad, log into We Rule and harvest. This system probably works a lot better on the iPhone since you’ve always got that and can harvest on the fly while zoning out in a meeting or something.

Luckily there’s a crop that takes a full day to ripen and I just plant those at the same time every day. Even luckilier 🙂 you can quickly get past crop growing and start building shops and houses. Houses collect a tiny bit of rent every so often but the rent doesn’t spoil, and shops are used to produce goods and again, these don’t spoil.

Then there’s the social aspect. Once you have some friends you can visit their kingdoms and place orders in their shops, and vice versa. I’ve never noted amounts but my expectation is that you earn more gold and experience by doing this than by just letting your shops produce for yourself.

And that’s it. Earn gold and experience to spend on better shops or more land so you can earn more gold and experience. You can, if you like, also spend gold on stuff like trees and roads and decorate/layout your kingdom, just for fun.

It’s a nice basis but I want a game like this that does MORE. For instance all these little shops just create items out of thin air. I’d love some more complexity to that system. Give me mines and forests to harvest materials in. And then let me trade materials with my friends. I have a vast forest nearby and my friend has mountains rich with ore…let us trade resources we have plenty of for those we are lacking.

And of course me being me, I’d like a military aspect too, but I think that’s way out of scope. There’s nothing ‘bad’ you can do to a friend in We Rule and I think that’s very much intentional and core to the goals of the developers. Make it all very friendly.

But how about population happiness? Make those parks and ponds and stuff impact your villagers, keeping them content.

Can you have a “social game” and give it this much complexity, or is the simplicity part of the appeal? We Rule is either a very simple game, or the nuances of it are totally escaping me. If the latter is the case, I’m sure someone will correct me. 🙂

EVE? Yeah, I’m still playing

Posted on by Nimgimli

It was March 7th when I posted that I’d started playing EVE Online.

Today I finished the tutorials. 🙂

Y’know you’re not finding much gaming time when every time Raptr announces that you’re playing a title someone welcomes you to the game.

After so long of sneaking in a few minutes here and there to play, while always obediently following the tutorial tracks, I found myself at a bit of a loss when I was finally done. So, once more obediently, I set my auto-pilot to take me 22 jumps to Sister Mary Elephant, or whomever that first tutorial agent…the old-school tutorial agent…sends us to.

Along the way I was playing Godfinger on my iPad, not really paying that much attention. But system after system, the security level dropped. I wasn’t flying the sweet new destroyer I’d been given at the end of the advanced combat tutorials so I wasn’t too worried. But still…

So I set down my iPad and kept my eyes peeled and sure enough! Someone locked on to me. I hit the afterburners and jumped before he fired a shot. Heck maybe he wasn’t even planning to fire a shot. But I have to say it got my heart beating!!

So now, who knows what. All my stuff is way back across the galaxy. My ‘safe’ plot took me through 0.5 systems. Maybe the Sister of Eve will send me back home to find an agent nearer to where all my ships are.

Like I said, I’m a bit adrift (no pun intended) and still struggling to decide if it makes any sense to pay for a sub when I have so little time to play. I figure with the Tyrannis (?) expansion coming soon I’ll at least stick around through that, and see what it’s all about.

I need to remember not to play EVE like other MMOs… not to go from theme park ride to theme park ride, and instead to make my own goals and work towards them. I had that clearly in mind when I started but 5 weeks of doing tutorials will kind of make a drone out of you (I should point out that 5 weeks = 7-8 playing sessions for me).

Aurora Feint 3 Review (iPad)

Posted on by Nimgimli

“Gather your friends and enter the ever expanding massively-multiplayer RPG world of fantasy, mystery and magic.”

Sounds good, right? That’s part of the description of Aurora Feint 3 (for the iPad) on the iTunes store. I couldn’t download it fast enough; that description was right up my ally.

And, it turns out, totally inaccurate.

Basically, Aurora Feint 3 is, at its core, a “match-3” game. You have your game board and your tiles, and you have to get 3 of the same tile in a row in order to make them disappear. In a new twist that does a great job of taking advantage of the platform, you can only move your tiles horizontally, but you can rotate the iPad and what used to be up<–>down is now left<–>right. But gravity changes too, so your tiles will fall to fill any gaps. It’s a neat play mechanic that puts a fresh spin on the match-3 genre.

When tiles disappear the ones above them start to glow, and if they then form a match via falling into now vacant spots, you’ll get a Chain. In order to do this, you need a good amount of tiles on-screen, but if the board fills up you die. Rows of tiles constantly bubble up from below, but you can pull them up faster via a 2-finger swipe if you need more material to work with. Getting Chains is key to combat (see below) so you’re constantly in a balancing act between having enough tiles to get Chains and having so many that the board fills up. It’s quite a challenge.

So what about the RPG meta-game? When you first start playing, you’re matching tiles to build up your health. Every match gives you a bit more health. After a while of this you’ll enter combat against an NPC enemy. You have no control over when this happens.

Combat starts with a fresh board of tiles. Now making matches does damage to the enemy, and Chains do bonus damage. At the same time the enemy is doing damage to you, but you never see his board. The only real direct interaction with the enemy is via his nicely drawn artwork, including his sword that will flash right before he’s about to attack. If you can make a match immediately after his sword flashes you can mitigate some of the damage he’d otherwise do to you.

If you beat your enemy you’ll get some experience, and eventually will gain levels which will give you a longer health bar. After a battle you go back to playing to gain health (healing yourself). You continue to do that until the next random battle.

And that’s the game. Oh, there’s a button that is supposed to let you call for help from friends during a battle, but no one I know is playing so…

If you die in a battle you’ll be prompted to fork over some real-life cash to keep playing. Otherwise the battle ends, and you get no experience. The enemies ramp up in difficulty pretty quickly and since you get no experience when you lose a battle it’s easy to get frustrated from losing over and over (remember, there’s no way to choose your next battle, so no way to take on easier foes in order to gain levels), making that $$ transaction look more appealing.

Aurora Feint 3 is free but requires you to create an account with them in order to play. You have to be online to play in spite of the fact that you’re fighting NPC enemies. They have no posted privacy policy, which means that once you sign up they’re free to sell your email address to email mass-marketers (aka spammers).

I can’t recommend this game. It’s free in the sense of you not having to give them cash, but not in the sense that you’re giving them your personal information for reselling. The game is also balanced to frustrate in order to get you to spend money on Continues.

It’s funny, if I’m in an arcade feeding quarters into a machine and die and am prompted to pump in a few more coins to continue, that feels ok. But on a machine I own it just feels really scammy. You might not feel the same way.

The shame of it is, the production values of Aurora Feint 3 are really good. They’ve got beautiful artwork, creepy sounds (during battle) and a very solid core puzzle-game mechanic.

This would be a wonderful $5-$10 single-player puzzle game. But between the request for your personal data, the requirement to be online all the time, and the difficulty curve designed to get you to pay out money as you play, as it stands now Aurora Feint 3 is just a missed opportunity.

Aurora Feint 3 Trailer from Aurora Feint on Vimeo.

Social gaming: I am a traitor to the cause!

Posted on by Nimgimli

In the past I’ve been very critical of Social Games. I don’t like them because they’re spammy. I don’t like them because they’re hardly games. And I don’t like them because they’re scammy.

But recently I’ve been coming around. It turns out the truth is more that I don’t like Facebook games; the fact that most Facebook games are Social Games is almost a coincidence.

I’ve been playing two Social Games. The first is Pocket Empires on the Droid (or any Android device). I’m way too early in the game to review it, but here’s a look at it from Android and Me. They call it an MMO; I’m calling it a Social Game; maybe it’s both. I’m still building up my city (building/upgrading takes place in real time) and haven’t really started heading out to do battle, nor have I found any allies yet. It just *feels* like a Social Game though; you buy gems for $$, then spend gems on perks to speed up your advancement through the game. You have to check in on and off through the day to make sure everyone is on track and you aren’t wasting build time.

The game is definitely still a work in progress, and I’m not even sure I’ll like it over the long haul, but for now its fun.

The other title I’ve been playing is GodFinger. This is a quirky little game for the iPad (and soon I think, the iPhone/Touch) that has you running a world. It has a whiff of Populous to it, and yes, some very Farmville-ish aspects too. Your early actions mostly involve positioning clouds and the sun and using your mana to bring down rain, lightning or sunshine. The world below responds accordingly (lightning is basically a “Smite” spell). As you gain levels you gain followers, and you can put them to work building and working farms, which generate gold. But the little dudes get worn out, so you have to provide areas for them to rest and recharge.

You have to log into the game to pick up the gold they produce, or to drag them from their work place to a nice soothing fountain or warm campfire to recharge.

As to the Social stuff, once you get your friends to play you can go visit their planets and “enchant” some of their followers, which earns you some exp and a trickle of gold. You can name your followers after your friends, which gets them some small bonus. A co-worker invited me to play the game and we find ourselves sitting side-by-side, checking in with our silly little people a couple times during the day.

In this one, you buy Awe for real $$ and can spend it on various powerups or on in-game gold. The game spams you and your friends, but since it runs on a ‘closed’ iPhone/Touch/iPad social network (called Plus+) devoted to games, the spam doesn’t seem bothersome (and you can turn it off easily enough). You can also send notifications to Twitter (which I’ve been doing) or Facebook just to help get the word out on the game. So while you could spam Facebook with it, that isn’t really the point here.

Anyway, here’s a review at IGN that I felt was pretty accurate.

I’ve whined and whinged a lot about how busy I am these days; I’m plodding away at FF XIII but I’m still under 20 hours there. I’ve been getting in an hour or so of EVE each week. And that’s all my gaming, except for these little ‘hop in, play for 3-5 minutes and hop out’ Social Games. And I’m finding they’re great stress relievers and work well as ‘rewards’ for myself when I deserve a break in the day.

They’re Social Games (I guess… maybe my definitions are just screwy) but they’re fun. The decision making still boils down to resource management, with real-world time one of those resources. But they still feel more like real games to me than Vampire/Mafia Wars. GodFinger, in particular, is a quirky delight, but that has as much to do with presentation as mechanics.

At first I felt…y’know, DIRTY, for playing these games. But I’m not seeing an evil side to them, they way I do with Facebook games. Costs are all pretty upfront, there’s no “Take this survey and win Awe” stuff going on (though there IS a “look at this ad and get a free Awe” feature in Godfinger, but that’s as far as it goes. Open the ad, then close it again) and no one is getting spammed or scammed.

We’ll see how long they hold my interest. I have to admit, I’ve considered buying some Awe in Godfinger… 🙂

If anyone happens to be on Plus+, you can friend me there. My username is pasmith

EVE noobs: losing your first ship

Posted on by Nimgimli

I lost my first ship in EVE tonight.

Yeah, I’ve been playing for a few weeks, but don’t for a second think it’s taken me this long to lose a ship due to any skill on my part. It took me this long because I don’t play much and when I do I’ve been puttering around in 1.0 space mining and junk. And this ship, to my eternal shame, was lost in a PvE Tutorial mission!

Anyway, here’s what I learned, so other EVE noobs won’t be as surprised as I was:

1) Insurance, even Platinum Insurance, isn’t going to get you a new ship. My little frigate was fully insured. Problem was that no one was selling a replacement for what the insurance company thought it was worth. So just like in real life, you’re going to have to have cash on hand to make up the difference between your insurance payout and the street cost of a new ship.

2) That said, newbie ships, at least, are pretty cheap. Don’t panic when yours goes boom! You’ll be back on your feet in no time.

3) Do shop around. By traveling 3 jumps (all through 1.0 space…I think I could’ve flown my pod but I didn’t) I saved about 40% of the cost of my replacement ship. Yes, and still the insurance payout wasn’t enough. At my local station, the ship I was replacing was going for more than twice the insurance payout.

4) Be prepared to refit. I had plenty of weapons and afterburners and stuff; but I had no ammo! Not a single slug. I had more than I could ever use in the ship I lost. So in future I’ll remember to carry only as much ammo as I’ll need for the mission at hand. Not that noob ammo is all that expensive but it’s just so wasteful losing so much to the void…

Hmmm, it just occurred to me… I wonder if I could’ve flown back out to my own wreck and salvaged from it? Does anyone know?

Patchwork Heroes

Posted on by Nimgimli

Patchwork Heroes for the PSP launched today. I haven’t played it, but I did play the demo a couple weeks back, and I have to say it’s worth at least trying. It’s one of those weird, quirky games that just feels right on a handheld.

So here’s the premise. You’re a tiny team of 2D heroes fighting off big 2D airships in order to defend your town. Your only weapon? Saws! The idea is that you cut chunks off the airships (by holding down a button and running, but the saws only work for a few seconds then they need a brief recharge), getting points depending on how big a chunk you cut off in a single piece. You’ll also find some of your friends are captive on the deck of the airships, so you need to save them (before you cut off the area of the ship they’re on). The air ships have gun emplacements, so you’ll be dodging incoming fire, and past the earliest levels there are repair units that will patch up the cuts you made.

And that’s really it. Oh, and there’s a time limit. Don’t cut up enough of the ship fast enough and it will bomb your village into rubble. Which leads me to a another strange facet. So you’re like 4 pixels tall, and you travel in a group of friends. If you get hit my gunfire, one of your friends will die and up pops a message that says something like “Billy Died, Age 14” {going from memory, as I said I played it a while ago}. That weird little pop-up makes the game feel personal. These aren’t little blobs of pixels, they’re kids! You can’t squander their lives!

The gameplay scratches that lizard-brain itch that loves popping bubblewrap, peeling and shredding the label off your bottle of beer, or (more directly) taking a piece of paper and a pair of scissors and just clipping it into little pieces.

The full game is only $10 but again, I urge you to try the demo first, because it’s a really weird game, and honestly I found it pretty challenging.