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Well it looks like Fallout 3 is officially not going to hook me. After two more sessions I feel like I understand it a lot better now. It's bleak and you have to conserve ammunition and combat is hard and it's a constant struggle to avoid death and I'm reminded of a story that Chris Pikula tells about teaching his girlfriend (now wife) how to play Magic: They played for a while and she was struggling a bit but then there was this dawning realization in her eyes and she says "OHH, so I compare the numbers on my creatures to the numbers on theirs and I have to figure out how my opponent would block so know whether I should attack or not?" Chris shouts "Yes!" And Kerry says "Why would I want to spend my time doing that?"
Fallout doesn't seem to present any interesting mental challenges for me, it just seems like a grind where you have to not mess up any of the details. At some level I have to admire the way in which their desolate post-apocalyptic flavor has permeated even their game mechanics, and I'm sure if I played a ton of these big open-ended single-player RPG's then I'd probably find this one to be a refreshing challenge. But I don't ... and I don't.
So now I have nothing queued up to play on my XBox 360. I'd love to hear suggestions - what do you guys think I would like?
Meanwhile, I realized after my last blog entry that I left out a platform that I've been doing a fair amount of gaming on:
iPhone
WordFu - This is basically a well-polished Boggle variant. (All of the ngmoco stuff I have seen seems pretty well polished, by the way.) I'm not a huge word-game guy, but between the sound effects, the power-ups, and the achievement system I am definitely enjoying this one. It's also got the distinction of being the only iPhone game that my wife Del has borrowed my phone in order to play.
iShoot - I first encountered this game by reading stories about how the developer made enough money off of it to quit his day job and do iPhone app's full time. Then I played it, saw how decidedly mediocre it is, and began to think that maybe it was easier to make money off of iPhone games than I realized. The idea is that you spend money on weapons, shoot opponents one turn at a time (where you control aiming), and earn more money for bigger weapons. It's not awful if you like that kind of gameplay, but it wasn't exciting either.
Galcon - I want to like this a lot, but in fact I only like it medium. It's a cute little real-time strategy game and it's absolutely worth downloading the Galcon Lite because the first half-dozen times you play are very very good. It starts to lose its appeal after you have figured out how things work, but I highly recommend trying out the free version because they've chosen to put pretty much that entire initial experience into it. My issue with the game after the first hour is that it becomes a twitch a game once you sort through the basic mechanics. Playign a twitch game versus a computer AI isn't my cup of tea ...
Cuberunner - The idea is that you fly around for as long as possible while dodging the randomly generated cubes. Very simple, but pretty fun and the price is right (free).
Monsters versus Aliens - Those of you with young kids might consider this. It has now replaced Lightsaber Unleashed and watching "Move It, Move It" from Madagascar over and over again as my 4-year old daughter Kira's favorite thing to do on my phone. She gets to poke B.O.B., sort cards, and play random sound effects. (Their website has a decent Monster Builder, by the way, where once again by "decent" I mean "entertaining for a 4-7 year old."
TCGBuddy - The best Magic life tracker app I am aware of. Definitely worth a couple of bucks if you play any TCG irl.
PuzzleQuest - Great game. It's "just" a port of a game that's been around for a couple years on pretty much every platform, but if you haven't already played this then I highly recommend it. On the one hand, it's a really good game. (Basically take Bejeweled, add a spell system, add a number of ways to level-up your avatar between games, then add in an RPG-style plot arch. It probably sounds strange if you don't already know this title, but it totally works. Suddenly the basic match-3 mechanic changes from idle diversion into strategy game that must be beaten.) On the other hand, it lends itself really well to the iPhone because you can easily play it in 5-minute bursts, picking it up and putting it down as convenient. This is the game I have spent the most time on since I got my iPhone in December.
Fieldrunners - Another great game. This is the game I have sent by far the most time on in the last month. On some level it's "just" a tower defense game, but it's well polished, well balanced, and Tower Defense games speak directly to what I want from a game, especially the ones where you get to build your own map (a mechanic this one shares in common with Desktop Tower Defense).
Of course, the biggest flaw with the iPhone app store is finding stuff. Given that my tastes aren't the most mainstream in the world, I don't really know how I'm supposed to find games that I will like. Hopefully some of these suggestions are useful to you and you can reciprocate by telling me what you've found. All I've got left in Fieldrunners is to beat it on hard and PuzzleQuest bogs down a little bit in the late game, so I'm hoping to find something new soon. Anyone?
Fallout doesn't seem to present any interesting mental challenges for me, it just seems like a grind where you have to not mess up any of the details. At some level I have to admire the way in which their desolate post-apocalyptic flavor has permeated even their game mechanics, and I'm sure if I played a ton of these big open-ended single-player RPG's then I'd probably find this one to be a refreshing challenge. But I don't ... and I don't.
So now I have nothing queued up to play on my XBox 360. I'd love to hear suggestions - what do you guys think I would like?
Meanwhile, I realized after my last blog entry that I left out a platform that I've been doing a fair amount of gaming on:
iPhone
WordFu - This is basically a well-polished Boggle variant. (All of the ngmoco stuff I have seen seems pretty well polished, by the way.) I'm not a huge word-game guy, but between the sound effects, the power-ups, and the achievement system I am definitely enjoying this one. It's also got the distinction of being the only iPhone game that my wife Del has borrowed my phone in order to play.
iShoot - I first encountered this game by reading stories about how the developer made enough money off of it to quit his day job and do iPhone app's full time. Then I played it, saw how decidedly mediocre it is, and began to think that maybe it was easier to make money off of iPhone games than I realized. The idea is that you spend money on weapons, shoot opponents one turn at a time (where you control aiming), and earn more money for bigger weapons. It's not awful if you like that kind of gameplay, but it wasn't exciting either.
Galcon - I want to like this a lot, but in fact I only like it medium. It's a cute little real-time strategy game and it's absolutely worth downloading the Galcon Lite because the first half-dozen times you play are very very good. It starts to lose its appeal after you have figured out how things work, but I highly recommend trying out the free version because they've chosen to put pretty much that entire initial experience into it. My issue with the game after the first hour is that it becomes a twitch a game once you sort through the basic mechanics. Playign a twitch game versus a computer AI isn't my cup of tea ...
Cuberunner - The idea is that you fly around for as long as possible while dodging the randomly generated cubes. Very simple, but pretty fun and the price is right (free).
Monsters versus Aliens - Those of you with young kids might consider this. It has now replaced Lightsaber Unleashed and watching "Move It, Move It" from Madagascar over and over again as my 4-year old daughter Kira's favorite thing to do on my phone. She gets to poke B.O.B., sort cards, and play random sound effects. (Their website has a decent Monster Builder, by the way, where once again by "decent" I mean "entertaining for a 4-7 year old."
TCGBuddy - The best Magic life tracker app I am aware of. Definitely worth a couple of bucks if you play any TCG irl.
PuzzleQuest - Great game. It's "just" a port of a game that's been around for a couple years on pretty much every platform, but if you haven't already played this then I highly recommend it. On the one hand, it's a really good game. (Basically take Bejeweled, add a spell system, add a number of ways to level-up your avatar between games, then add in an RPG-style plot arch. It probably sounds strange if you don't already know this title, but it totally works. Suddenly the basic match-3 mechanic changes from idle diversion into strategy game that must be beaten.) On the other hand, it lends itself really well to the iPhone because you can easily play it in 5-minute bursts, picking it up and putting it down as convenient. This is the game I have spent the most time on since I got my iPhone in December.
Fieldrunners - Another great game. This is the game I have sent by far the most time on in the last month. On some level it's "just" a tower defense game, but it's well polished, well balanced, and Tower Defense games speak directly to what I want from a game, especially the ones where you get to build your own map (a mechanic this one shares in common with Desktop Tower Defense).
Of course, the biggest flaw with the iPhone app store is finding stuff. Given that my tastes aren't the most mainstream in the world, I don't really know how I'm supposed to find games that I will like. Hopefully some of these suggestions are useful to you and you can reciprocate by telling me what you've found. All I've got left in Fieldrunners is to beat it on hard and PuzzleQuest bogs down a little bit in the late game, so I'm hoping to find something new soon. Anyone?
A couple of iphone recommendations - most of the iphone peeps I know are addicted to flight control, while I keep going back to drop7. I recommend both.
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Flight Control seems cute, but at the end of the day it's a dexterity game. The more I play it the more frustrated I will get that my fingers aren't as fast or as accurate as my brain wants them to be.
Drop7 looks very good. One game with the Lite version made it pretty clear that it's worth at least a couple of bucks. Thanks!
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This list might be fairly helpful too...
http://www.marco.org/101489099
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Reiner Knizia has a couple of games on the iPhone now, Poison and Knights of Charlemagne. Not his best games but I'm quite enjoying Poison.
iScopa isn't too bad an implementation of Scopa the Italian card game.
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I read the introduction to your blog entry about Fallout 3 being an unrewarding slog full of all sorts of Negative Reinforcement. Sadly, for most of us, this is what real life is all about - "do this, or you will be in the poorhouse; don't do that, or you will get cancer" and I probably would be disillusioned with the game as well.
I'm a creative/reflective person currently forced by economics and circumstance into a job filled with a lot of policies, procedures, reactive damage control, and crisis management. While the adrenalin runs high, the spirit flags because there is no room for error, no latitude for creative or proactive thinking, no place for plumbing the metaphysics of what we're doing. It's not a good fit for me, just as a game spent counting shells and hiding in the mud from zombies would get tiresome after the first several hours. In fact, I'm considering dropping out of the training program, taking a loss of several thousand dollars, just to "save and quit" and find a game with less structure and more thinking. I'd been on the fence about this, since I don't have any financial cushion if I do quit, but your article got me thinking I should look at it the same way - if it's a drag, and you can't see yourself grinding to the top, don't waste anymore time, fix your game.
Thanks for a thought-provoking read and I hope you can find something new and engaging to run on your iPhone. God knows there is enough power under the hood for a wide variety of game styles, not just a warmed-over Windows Entertainment Pack. Meanwhile I'm looking at fixing my game.
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Thanks for the comment. Good luck!
Current iPhone game I am playing is Drop7, by the way. It's Tetris meets Sudoku and with that bloodline you can probably guess that it's highly addictive.
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This isn't Touch Arcade, but another worthwhile game on the iPhone is a matching game called Totomi. They've had Flash and (I think) PC/Mac versions for a while now, but the touch interface changes the interaction design of the game enough to take it from fun-for-a-while to really-fun-for-a-while. Also, as match games go, it's got a rich set of relationships between the tokens that make it less mechanical.
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As for your 360 queue, if you like: "Magic: The Gathering" and "Poker" you might also like "Street Fighter IV."
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It took me awhile to get into Fallout 3, and i was a big Oblivion fan. But, once i got over the hump (~6 hours!), i fell for it hard. While the new VATS mechanic and level progression/perks were cool, it was the maturity of the story and the sense of immersion that ultimately hooked me. For next in your queue consider Peggle on XBLA (if you haven't already played it on every other platform).
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You aren't the first person to make this case for Fallout. Maybe. Right now I think there's too many other good games out there, though.
Peggle is indeed awesome. Truly a great game ... and a thinking game masquerading as something casual, in my opinion.
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First off great blog. I have enjoyed it so far, and plan to read the rest of it very shortly.
The iPhone as a platform is going to be very big in the future and some games/companies that I think are doing a good job that you might like are listed below:
Most games by "More Games" published by Chillingo are pretty well polished. Those include:
-iDracula: well made shooter that just looks good compared to the other ones out there.
-Orions: This is a very interesting game that combines the resource production and management of games like Starcraft with the game play of a CCG. You can use these resources to construct buildings which allow you to buy different cards which you use to battle opponents and take over their world and then this opens up access to more buildings and more cards.
Good puzzle games are pretty easy to find. SOme of my favorites are:
-Basic games:
+Subway
+Blocked
+Flood-it!
-Advanced Games:
+Aurora Feint II: (both Tower and The Beginning)
+Crayon Physics (Really neat sandbox puzzle game)
+Enigmo (If you liked the Incredible Machines games that came out on the PC long ago)
Those are my top picks for the iPhone. I really could see it taking off as a platform.
Thanks for the blog, let me know if you try any of those games out.
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I feel like the biggest flaw with the iPhone app store is finding what you want. Although my tastes aren't the most mainstream in the world, I don't really know how I'm supposed to find games that I will like. Hopefully they find a way to streamline your tastes with what apps work best for you. Pandora.com; an internet radio station makes the best suggestions for taste in music. Hopefully someone figures out how to use their resources as pandora did.
Kristy
Arizona
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First off great blog. I have enjoyed it so far, and plan to read the rest of it very shortly.
The iPhone as a platform is going to be very big in the future and some games/companies that I think are doing a good job that you might like are listed below
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