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Games of 2012: McPixel

I’ve spent a lot of time in 2012 playing games, but not a lot of time writing about them. As I did last year, I’d like to tell some stories or share some thoughts about the ones that meant the most to me this year. I’ll be posting one a day until Christmas. See all Games of 2012 posts.

McPixel

I spoke of “anti-gaming” as a concept earlier in the month when praising Frog Fractions. It’s a growing genre where antagonizing the player – or the gaming industry itself – is the fun. And no game did that better this year than McPixel.

McPixel is a point-and-click adventure game without the adventure. A level starts, 20 seconds appears on the clock. You know there’s a bomb *somewhere* on the screen. Clicking on something interacts with it – picking it up, manipulating it, or trying to kick it in the genitals. Your goal: prevent the level from exploding.

Sometimes it’s obvious. The bomb is exposed, you pee on it, the fuse goes out.

Other times, it’s not. You’re in a volcano with a lady, a cow, an oversized bone, and a river of lava that says “INSERT VIRGIN” next to it. Pick up the lady and throw her in the lava? Volcano explodes. Pick up the bone and insert it into the cow? The cow loves you, and the volcano explodes. Throw the bone in the lava? Volcano explodes. The correct answer: just click the lava. You jump in, and the volcano is calmed.

The game is an endless trial-and-error experiment; screwing up a level doesn’t penalize you, it just takes you on to the next in the series of 5 that you haven’t completed. But to fully complete the game, you don’t just need to find the right solution – you need to see all the wrong ones, too. Completing all the possible actions across the three rounds in each level unlocks a bonus set of levels. The humor takes ridiculous flights of fancy, and is often crudely animated, but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t snickering the entire game.

The biggest joke of all comes when you unlock the final round. I don’t want to spoil it – because after you’ve played through something like 80 levels, you start to think you’re getting the hang of how the game thinks and acts. And when you see that last level, you can’t help but burst out into a full laugh. It’s that absurd.

For gamers who have lived through the rise, fall, and rise again of point-and-click adventures, the game is a reminder of the futility of the medium – clicking blindly, trying everything in the room, hoping something leads you to the solution. Most everything in McPixel is a solution – they’re just not all the right one.

Highly recommended for people who appreciate adventure games and have a sense of humor similar to mine.

McPixel is available on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, and Linux. My experiences were with the iPad version.

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Games of 2012: Diablo III

I’ve spent a lot of time in 2012 playing games, but not a lot of time writing about them. As I did last year, I’d like to tell some stories or share some thoughts about the ones that meant the most to me this year. I’ll be posting one a day until Christmas. See all Games of 2012 posts.

Diablo III

This past weekend, one of the most reviled – and (it should probably be mentioned) most successful – figures in the gaming industry received a lengthy profile in the New York Times:

Mr. Kotick, 49, has reason to be annoyed. Not since the music industry’s heyday has there been a business with such a wide disparity between the popularity of its products and its customers’ perception of the chief executive who made those products possible. Video games are among the most successful segments in the entertainment industry, and the disdain heaped on Mr. Kotick in video game blogs is second only to the admiration for him on Wall Street.

Bobby Kotick is seen in such negative light not because of the success of Activision, but because of how he gets there. Notorious for rejecting games that couldn’t be “exploited” into yearly franchises, Kottick personifies a lot of disliked trends in the gaming industry.

Blizzard, which is part of Activision, has generally been seen as the exception to Kotick’s rule. The studio famous for World of Warcraft and Starcraft, it is believed, tends to follow their own hearts and dreams. And when Diablo III began its long gestation (around 2005), it was widely given that the game would turn out magnificently. A ship date of “when it’s done” was grumbled about, but accepted. Genius takes time.

But with that long a development cycle, some questionable choices are always going to get made. The color palate went from traditional Diablo to something more akin to watercolor; gamers revolted, and it went back to dungeon-esqe. Achievements were added, something the series had never had before. Then came news the game could only be played online, leaving those people who might want to play without an active internet connection out of luck.

If there was any design decision that sucked the fun out of Diablo for me, it was the inclusion of an Auction House. I generally have nothing against the transfer of digital goods, but it defies the model under which I played Diablo in the past. The joy of the game was always doing runs through levels, hoping that some amazing loot would tumble out of a corpse or a chest. But why leave the game to chance when there’s seemingly every permutation of item in the game available in the auction house, so long as you have enough gold?

Once the auction house went live, my entire style of play shifted. I found myself no longer hoping for that magical drop – most of my loot drops were getting thrown into the auction house for someone else to buy. Once I stockpiled enough gold, I’d do a quick appraisal to figure out what I needed the most, and then quietly stalk the auctions until just the right gear was available. My character evolution became less about playing the game, and more about being a good shopper.

That’s what killed Diablo III for me. Not the lack of PvP all these months later, and not the rather dull end game. It was that they implemented a very modern, very smart revenue stream that ended up sucking the main reason I play right out of the game.

I blame Bobby Kotick for that – even if he had nothing to do with it.

Diablo III is available for Windows and OS X. My experiences were largely with the OS X version.

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Games of 2012: The Grading Game / Cook, Serve, Delicious

I’ve spent a lot of time in 2012 playing games, but not a lot of time writing about them. As I did last year, I’d like to tell some stories or share some thoughts about the ones that meant the most to me this year. I’ll be posting one a day until Christmas. See all Games of 2012 posts.

I’m breaking my own rules tonight and highlighting two games that seem like absurd things to have been made into games. Both of these games were released after I originally put together my list of games for this blog post series. In the end, I couldn’t decide which deserved the feature more – and seeing as I can’t stop playing either of them, here’s praise for both of them.

The Grading Game

The Grading Game is proof that eventually, everything will get turned into a video game. In this case, you are a poor hapless TA trying to pay off your student loans. Grouchy faculty member Dr. Snerpus is more than happy to give you sums of cash if you’ll just do one thing: flunk your fellow students.

No, really. A virtual term paper (culled from various places online) will be thrust in front of you, and your job is to tap on the randomly added errors. Typos, capitalization errors, grammatical mistakes, and run-on sentences are all right before your eyes, in an assortment of different game modes. Sometimes there’s only one error in a fairly long paragraph. Others, there’s more errors than normal, but tapping on a non-error drains your clock heavily.

As a gaming concept, I know this sounds completely ridiculous. Who would want to grade papers (particularly terrible ones) for fun? But like any good “find the hidden object” game, The Grading Game works because you’re having to process information very quickly to find the things that are out of place. The pressure of the clock and the bizarre topics for the papers (Grief houses! Sun sneezes! Jigglypuff! Shoe Throwing!) make it a tense, abstract puzzler.

Besides, is any game that can help improve your writing skills that bad? (Everyone loved Mavis Beacon way back when.)

Cook, Serve, Delicious!

Cook, Serve, Delicious! is a little more traditional, but only just – it’s a “hardcore restaurant simulator”. The daily grind of operating a restaurant is an exercise in planning and multitasking.

Take menu construction: do you go with simple foods like french fries, which you can turn out quickly for limited return? Or do you tend towards expensive soups that require more prep work? You may think maximizing profits sounds great now, but when you’re fielding three orders and a sink full of dishes during the lunch rush? Not so much.

You’ll balance the need for equipment upgrades against buying new and upgraded recipes. Health inspectors will come by. You might get robbed and have to provide an artist’s sketch of the perp. Catering gigs become available. Invites to an Iron Chef-style competition arrive. I think there’s even a dating component and some sort of Kickstarter system.

It sounds like work, and it is work. And like all work, sometimes the reward is in doing a job well. When you get a large combo rolling and juggle complicated orders without missing a beat, you feel firmly in the zone. Completing a round in Cook, Serve, Delicious! provides a lovely sense of relief and completeness.

It’s a bit reminiscent of the original Cooking Mama, but with a shorter fuse and higher stakes. Definitely worth a look.

The Grading Game is available as a universal iOS app. Cook, Serve, Delicious! is available on Windows, OS X, and for the iPad. My experiences were largely with the iPad version. Both games are on sale for the immediate future.