Lately I have been playing computer games. A lot. Like, all the minutes I'm not... doing something else... um, obvious much? I mean I used to spend most of that time staring at the ceiling or hiding under a blanket, but now I play a computer game all day. My eyes get blurry and my click hand hurts and in a broad sense I haven't done anything either way, yet I feel much more productive.
I started with PopCap Games Plants vs Zombies, which was kind of awesome. Great fun on first play, lots of replay value, goals to achieve in the mini games, plants to win for the zen garden. Great game. But it's the only thing like it they sell. Most of their games are like Bejewelled, match 3 games, or like Talismania where you connect up a route to a goal. I bought Talismania, I played it, I replayed it to perfection, and then I got bored real quick.
Cosmic Bugs is also lots of fun. You shoot a line out to divide up an area and it kills teh bugs in the area unless they hit your line first. Like Qix, only much much more varied. It has like 500 levels and a ton of different bugs and you get a lot of lives and lose a lot lot lot of lives. You can start on any level you've already done, which is the only way I've seen all the levels. I plan to go back and play it a bunch more when I'm in a blowing up bugs mood. But when I'm not in a bugs go boom mood it gets real boring real quick.
After that I'd tried all the PopCap games.
So then I tried Sandlot games. I started on YahooGames and tried the online games there and most of them won't even load (boo) but Sandlot games worked find.
Tradewinds games are great. I've got Tradewinds 2, Legends, Unlikely Heroes, Caravans, and Odyssey. My favourite is Odyssey, which is newest but also the one I played first. My least favourite is 2, the oldest, which got buggy and stopped giving me missions, so I've only finished it with 2 characters. But they're great fun. You buy things, you blow things up, you invent things (or technically pay people to invent things), and you run little missions in Story mode which are different for each different character and the custom character. Half the characters are women, and the some of the side stories make more sense when you're playing a woman. Characters include a mother with her children along, who has to cure them of a curse, and a dragon that gets cursed to be a camel, and a big muscular macho guy on a quest to find his 'brother' who you gradually find out is widely trusted to escort women around because they're quite quite safe with him... especially their virtue... despite their best efforts. There's a diversity of characters that's really fun. And the Odyssey set plays with Greek myths I recognise without being totally obvious about where they're going. And in all of them you can concentrate on ships/caravan capacity for fighting or trading, or you can save up for curses or magical artefacts or special ammunition, and you can run quests or ignore them, and some items are purely helpful but most of them balance help in one area with difficulty in another. Proper complicated games. The only problem with them is I've finished them all. With almost all the characters. Often twice. :-( Now I must wait for the next one.
Sandlot has a free game every week, so I tried Glyph 2. Match 3 game with a story, some enduring powerups you buy once that keep helping, some transient earn once use once powerups, and really really lovely graphics. So that was interesting. ... once. After I discovered the mouse is *infinitely* easier to use than the trackball for some tasks (drawing fast, not a trackball task) I flew through it right quick. Playing it twice doesn't seem to get you extra powerups. Playing it perfectly doesn't get you extras. There's just glowy places to put more temples sitting there empty, mockingly. There's also the Action version of the game, which is more like Columns, jewels drop or rise and you have to click sets of three and win the levels. I haven't finished that yet because winning the levels doesn't seem to get you anything either, and I'm not that interested in scores. I wants my shiny. So this one is most likely to get uninstalled. Yet for mindless clicky pretty it has good points.
So next I tried clicky time management games. I wanted to play My Kingdom for the Princess but can't find anywhere to give my money that won't charge ridiculous much and sign me up for a club. Boo, no thanks. So I've only played an hour of that on the demo. I like it because you build things a lot. Building is good.
So then there was Cake Mania.
... I have discovered I'm actually embarrassed about Cake Mania. Because it's so pink, and pretty, and girly. Pink games where nobody gets killed! But... er... I'm really in the mood for games with no killing and lots of making, so these are actually fun. I just... have to admit to the uses of lots of pink. In its place.
I'm amused at me. I do all this all everything on the internet, and this is what's embarrassing? Little kid games with pink and cakes? :eyeroll:
So, anyway, I like them, because there's color matching and pattern matching to a timer, and buying equipment to make things easier, and you have to remember to do things in the right order, and if you forget about a cake you just made you lose a customer and have to throw it away and lose money, and same if you choose the wrong cake. I feel like it's practice for all the bits of RL I'm bad at, the order of things and the remembering the foods. Except for RL doesn't have picture bubbles to tell me what to do.
Miriel's Enchanted Mystery is another one with a shop where you match products to customers, and there I found I like the customers who order in pictures *much* better than the ones who order with words. Pattern matching much easier than translation to language and back. Maybe I need to make a lunch menu with pictures...
Today though I played Potion Bar. When I played the demos it was by far the prettiest, and I liked the story, with the magic and the potions. When the customers drink the potions interesting things happen, like plants growing or unicorns of phoenix flying or lots of glowy things. And then to make new potions you find objects in a crowded room, which is fun but I don't want to do too much of in a row. And then to get to new levels you put lots of shiny in the right pattern. It was all pretty and according to the cat that tells you what to do I was very very good at it. So I bought it and played it through.
... what I had not noticed on the demo was I had, in my free hour of play, played more than half of it. It added up to about 2, maybe 3 hours of gameplay. Possibly it would be longer if you were bad at it and had to repeat levels, but I was never even close to that bad at it. Although it kind of has incentives to be bad, because the longer the customers wait the more they do interesting behaviours. But no, I was very good at it and was making lots of money and whooshed through the whole game. The making lots of money wasn't much fun though, since the prices for things seemed to go up proportionately, and you could only ever buy one thing from the salesman. Boo. No way to get every single shiny even if you do really well at the game. Less fun.
Biggest problem though? It didn't make the slightest bit of sense in some places. The typos were bad, but the places where you simply can't make sense of it in English make me think it's a translation thing.
Also there was a character they called a 'werewolf' that was making lots of cat jokes. Is he not a were-cat? Is he a werewolf with some kind of dysmorphic disorder? I don't know.
The characters are fun and varied though. Nice ones and nasty ones and lots of different magic sorts. And a lady with a raccoon. Because she likes them.
So it tried to have a story, and it was a kind of fun story, but there was no chance of figuring it out, you just had to read it and try and understand what they were trying to say.
All these games are tiny money, especially in money-per-hour, especially compared with say cinema. So I don't much mind when they turn out a bit rubbish. But I mind a bit.
And if there's helpful review sites I haven't found them. I only found ones that are full of '5/5 love it!!!!!' reviews for everything, which would seem to suggest that no game has ever had a problem. :eyeroll:
So that's all the games I've played this year. And that's all the games I've played pretty much in the last ten years. They've got more interesting since Mortal Kombat. I'm sure there's still killing things games around as well, a lot, messy ones, but I like building things games better.
Right. Sleep now.
... I'm so tempted to sleep on my new chair. New! Comfy! Goes right back! :eyeroll:
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