|
Yeah. All of a sudden, shoveling the walk and settling for a pot of instant just don’t sound so bad. While I was griping about minor inconveniences and watching my neighbor across the street build an igloo (no kidding – it was five feet high and had a door), my buddy was subsisting on dwindling supplies of airport food and jealously guarding the power outlet she’d found to plug her laptop into. She spent hours in line, trying to get flights rescheduled. She spent more hours on the phone, searching unsuccessfully for a hotel with vacancies. She discovered first-hand that trying to sleep sitting up in an uncomfortable airport chair, surrounded by stinky strangers, isn’t particularly easy. She missed Christmas dinner with her family.
And how did she stay sane? “People-watching and playing games.” Rather than giving in to depression, which must have been tempting, she made the best of things and caught up on all the games she’d been meaning to try. She read two books she’d been saving for vacation. She took serious advantage of the airports’ free wi-fi. Basically, she saw a guilt-free chance to indulge her inner child. If that’s not a lemons-to-lemonade situation, I don’t know what is.
I applaud her attitude, and apologize to both her and anyone else out there who had a similar experience over the holidays. No more idle complaining about trivialities for me!
It’s that time again
What’s a new year without New Years resolutions? I have quite a few this time around, to be honest. My mother says I’m practicing the shotgun theory of resolutions: if you make a whole lot of them, you’re bound to achieve at least one. But I’m determined to stick to all of them, even the one about losing weight.
But I doubt you want to hear about my plans to clean house more often and be more politically active, so here are all the 2009 resolutions that relate to our favorite mutual subject: games!
This year, I resolve that…
I will try every videogame recommended to me by a friend, even if it’s the sort I don’t usually play. If nothing else, it will give us something new to talk about!
I will invite those same friends over to my home at least once a month to play actual around-the-table board games like Galaxy Trucker, Puerto Rico, Battlestar Galactica, Arkham Horror, Pandemic, and all the other goodies I’ve been obsessively buying but never opening. I may even cook dinner.
I will convince at least one person who doesn’t play videogames to try Bejeweled 2, Text Twist, Mah Jong Tiles, or another easy, fun, addictive title that might just change their mind.
I will spend less time playing Guitar Hero 2 and Fable II, and more time playing Wii Fit and Dance Dance Revolution. And my waistline will thank me.
I will “put my money where my mouth is”, so to speak, and donate the proceeds of my annual summer garage sale to Child’s Play this year.
I will write at least five actual letters, the kind that go in stamped envelopes, to tell my favorite game developers what a good job they’re doing. I remember all too well from my own days in a development house that people don’t usually bother to write unless they want to complain, and I’d like to help change that.
I will give brick-busting games another chance. So many people love them that I must be missing something, and I’m determined to figure out what it is.
I will hook up the old Apple II computer in my storage unit and play one of the games I loved when I was kid, just to marvel at how far we’ve come.
No, I’m not resolving to become the person I wanted to be in college, or find a cure for the common cold, or anything else particularly sweeping and impressive. But I like the resolutions that I’ve chosen this year, and I look forward to making each and every one of them come true.
Wishful thinking
Of all the games I’ve played so far this year (and there’ve been quite a few, since I had nearly two weeks’ vacation around the holidays!), my favorite so far has got to be My Tribe. It’s another one of those real-time games where you set events in motion and the characters continue to work even while you’re logged out, although there’s also plenty to do if you plan to just play for an hour or two at a time.
Your “tribe”, in this case, is a group of little shipwreck survivors, and they’re trying to build new lives for themselves on a remote island. Along the way, they need to harvest resources, collect food, research new technologies… and if this is sounding a bit too familiar, you’ve probably played Virtual Villagers. Let me get this out of the way right now: My Tribe is basically Virtual Villagers for impatient people. And that’s exactly what makes it so awesome.
The big difference is the addition of “stardust” and “moondust”. When you’re actively playing the game instead of letting it run by itself, you can scroll around the island looking for these little celestial surprises. Each piece of stardust or moondust you find and tell a villager… sorry, tribesperson… to collect can be used to speed up the process of developing your tribesmen or the island they live on. For instance, using stardust on a villager will immediately improve one of his or her abilities. Dropping moondust on an incomplete building will significantly speed the construction process or even finish the building altogether. These handy items can also replenish resources, add to scientific research, or even change the appearance of characters, depending on how and where they’re used. By actively collecting stardust, you can accomplish considerable progress for your tribe in a fraction of the time it would take in Virtual Villagers.
Other differences that seem designed with the more active player in mind include the ability to place buildings wherever you want them instead of in pre-determined spots, customization options such as the ability to plant flowers and grow trees wherever you might think they look nice, and the fact that tribeswomen apparently don’t get maternity leave, so you don’t have to wait for them to raise a baby before they get back to working on that wood storage hut or researching the next level of architecture. Also, tribespeople can specialize in multiple tasks, so if for instance the food pile is full, they’ll go cut down a tree or do some mining instead of leaping back into the water for more fish (or standing around like a total dork).
If there’s one respect in which the games are eerily similar, though, it’s the amount of time you’ll spend scrolling around the island with a small child dangling off your cursor, looking for mushrooms.
Weird, really.
Whoops…
Wow, I had a whole bunch of other things I wanted to talk about this time – Chick Flicks Trivia, Build-A-Lot 3, the latest Mortimer Beckett game – but this page is already getting too long! So look for those in the next Coffee Break, along with assorted ramblings on our latest badges and hopefully a peek at a couple of upcoming exclusives.
When you love games, you never run out of stuff to talk about!
| |
| Tech Talk
”Okay, I’m sure that target score used to be higher. What gives?”
If you’ve been working on a mastery badge in one of the following games, and can’t quite seem to get the highest levels, prepare to be pleasantly surprised. As part of our ongoing effort to make sure our badges are properly challenging, we’ve lowered the necessary score on a few titles that turned out to be a bit too challenging (read: eye-twitchingly difficult) at their original targets.
Here’s the list, alphabetized for your convenience (and also because I can’t resist alphabetizing things… I’m just weird that way):
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Atlantis Quest
Atomaders
Belle's Beauty Boutique
Betrapped
Bookworm
Bricks of Atlantis
Burger Island
Chicken Invaders 2
Chicken Invaders 3
Cake Mania 3
Chocolatier
Desktop Tower Defense
Diner Dash
Diner Dash 2
Dynasty
Feeding Frenzy
Flowerz
Jigsaw
Luxor: Amun Rising
Magic Match
Pat Sajak's Trivia Gems
Peggle
Puzzle Inlay
Ricochet Lost Worlds
Saints & Sinners Bingo
SCRABBLE Rack Attack
Slide Poker
Talismania
Trivia Machine
Wedding Dash
You Know It! Trivia
We’re always evaluating new games after they’re posted, and current games when folks seem to find the mastery badges too easy or much too hard, so if there’s another title that you think we should really take a second look at, please let us know! If enough folks think the same game is skewed, points-wise, it’ll end up on our next list of updates.
I’ll see you next time!
Ask Moxie!
Do you have a question or comment? I’d love to hear from you. Just email me at zmaster@microsoft.com and I’ll do my best to answer in one of these Coffee Breaks! Oh, please make sure to include your MSN Games nickname, so I know who to list here if I quote you!
(And if you have technical questions or problems with a game, we’ll cheerfully answer those as well. Just submit them through the support section of this site!)
More Moxie!
Need a bit more Coffee Break? Take a shuffle through our archives. | |
