World of Goo preview

October 29, 2008 at 4:08 pm · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged , ,

World of Goo is available for the PC (I played the demo via Steam) and WiiWare, which I can being just as easy to pick up and play.  The game premise is very simple, there are small blobs of goo, and your job to connect them and build them to the end of the level.  The unused goos move around whatever structure you already have built, and you merely pick up one of the suckers and move him outside, where he slightly expands your current building.  And by overcoming pesky problems like physics and gravity, you move your goo structure to a pipe that sucks up the remaining goos and lets you move on to the next level.

The demo shows off a small bit of the variety, with goos with different abilities, like those that can be removed and reattached to whatever you build, as well as different obstacles that can make a mess or tear apart your work.   And one can only hope that the worlds following the first one continue to bring new and fresh challenges to the player.  I was reminded the whole game of Fantastic Contraption, by being able to build and try and reach some end point, but Goo is that on a whole new level.

I also found myself enjoying the cute, cartoony aesthetic, with the crude people and animated eyes of the goos, and the levels all have a somewhat crude, dirty design, probably half due to the goos, and the other half being the shady corporation that has you collecting them.

Anyone interested in the Fantastic Contraption sort of building should at least grab the demo and try out the more complex World of Goo.

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The 2008 World Series aka 3 innings from eternity

October 29, 2008 at 3:53 pm · Filed under Sports ·Tagged ,

I’m very grateful for the weather, Major League Baseball, and FOX all allying to not interrupt House last night with the possible remnant of game 5 of the World Series.  I’m always especially grateful for Bud Selig to let the Rays catch up so they have a chance to come back today, tomorrow, whenever the game will be held.  My fan bias aside, Selig, in a league filled with steroids scandals, all-too-important All Star games and more steroids, Selig actually made the right call.  Sure they could have waited another day or started the game sooner, but in the heat, or rather rain, of the 6th inning, he made the right decision, for the sake of the league and the Series.

Now, while I would like my resident Florida team to eke out victory, my pity for Philadelphia is willing to concede defeat as that fair city burns in a victory riot.  Just kidding, you’re not Detroit, but you need a championship much much more.  Being teased by the Eagles year after year, that would leave all but a Buffalo Bills fan blustered, so I hope that the city that the Liberty Bell, Rocky, and Cheesesteaks built will never lose hope.  And thanks to Cole Hamels, it just might happen.

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A sigh of relief for the Nintendo fan

October 2, 2008 at 6:51 pm · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged , ,

Today’s Nintendo Press Conferences have done more for the hard-core Nintendo fan than this summer’s dreadful E3 performance.  And while the casual juggernaughts Wii Music and Animal Crossing: City Folk were part of the show, the other announcement were successful in appeasing the Nintendo loyalists like myself.

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Indie devs make their own Pre-Portal Portal

September 16, 2008 at 11:44 pm · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged ,

For everyone who played and loved and probably replayed the smash hit Portal, a few plucky developers are making their own free mod of the game.  And unlike other Portal mods that are just map packs (such as the 3D version of the flash game) this is a full fledged prequel with a pre-GLaDOS storyline.

Portal: Prelude, as its name states it, is an unofficial prequel to the game Portal. Its story revolves around the pre-GlaDOS epoch, even before she was plugged in. At this time, test subjects were monitored by real Aperture Science employees whose work was tedious, lengthy and repetitive. This is why they decided to build a great artificial intelligence that could both replace them in these difficult tasks, but also take responsibility for many other tasks within the complex and compete with Black Mesa’s superiority. All employees of the Aperture Science complex are now eagerly awaiting GlaDOS. Maybe even a little too eagerly, as the upcoming events will tell…

Since Valve is expanding the Portal franchise on their own, they are working extra hard to launch this free mod.  We expect Portal: Prelude to be released by the early October.

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My life with Scrabulous

September 12, 2008 at 6:39 pm · Filed under Gaming, Internet ·Tagged

While I’ve had to spend the last few years dredging through the countless apps on facebook, being bitten by zombies and vampires and probably some Frankensteins, I really only used one app, the Multiplayer Trivia one.  Even now I spend virtually no time on the site, so I don’t even play that anymore.  Well for those of you who don’t know they had a really good Scrabble app called Scrabulous, and Hasbro thinking it wasn’t very fair to their copyright (and it wasn’t) got Facebook to kill the app.

Piqued by my interest in the new site design I logged back into the old ‘book and also tried the new *OFFICIAL* Scrabble app.  It was terrible, sucked, no fun.  Yes you play with friends, but you can’t play right away, you’re stuck with long-term matches, like playing chess by mail.  And this in turn inspired me to try and find the missing Scrabulous.  Which I did, at scrabulous.com, and it is really cool.  You log into the website and jump into a lobby, which seem to always have plenty of players, and can get started quickly and easily.

There are a couple of notes for those who have only lived with the board game version.  First off, all matches are automatically timed, if you run out of time you lose, which is fair considering it is an online game.  Second they have two different dictionaries and they have numerous options when it comes to bogus words.  Most of the early matches I’ve played used the easiest option where the dictionary automatically bumps bad words, no penalty minus wasted time.  The others allow opponents to challenge with varying penalties, and it’s much easier than flipping thru a thick Scrabble dictionary.  It is a fast, efficient version of the game.  If those reinforced gameplay rules are a massive turn-off, then stick to the board game, otherwise I would say that scrabulous is so easy to get in and play it’s worth it for anyone who cares even a modicum for the Scrabble (c).

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