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You see, Gary Gygax invented Dungeons & Dragons.
Thanks to him and his colleagues, would-be adventure seekers could gather their friends and embark on an epic, interactive journey through perilous lands… all this, long before the advent of ubiquitous personal computers, wi-fi, or high-resolution graphics. All you needed was a good imagination, a few guidebooks, and a handful of funny-looking dice. It was a way to step outside yourself for a short while: to be the dashing hero, or the mysterious wizard, or the clever treasure-hunter, instead of the awkward high school student or the mundane office worker. It sparked imagination, inspired creativity, and built both teamwork and friendships.
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| Frankly, I’m not sure I’d have survived adolescence – let alone college – without Mr. Gygax’s magnificent game. It was my outlet and my escape, and in traveling through the worlds of shared storytelling, I learned a lot about the very real people around me. Many people in the videogames industry also grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons and its myriad of pen-and-paper successors, and there’s no counting how many digital adventures these classic games have inspired. It’s certainly safe to say that they’ve had a huge impact on our industry, and an even bigger one on our lives.
Gary Gygax built us a wonderful playground, and now he’ll be sorely missed: as a person, as an author and game designer, and as a fellow adventurer in the realms of fantasy. I may never have met him, but I feel as if I’ve lost an old friend.
Fare thee well, Mr. Gygax, and thank you. From all of us.
Going, going, Go Go Gourmet
As I’m sure you know by now, I have a bad habit of taking my work home with me. Which is to say that I’ll play a few minutes of a game here at work and then lose the next three evenings trying to finish it. Of course I don’t do that with every game; considering how many of them we release, I’d never have time to leave the house again if I tried to complete them all! But some games just grab my fancy, and I have trouble putting them down again.
I’ve been on a bit of a hidden-pictures kick (again? Or still? More about that later…), and one of my coworkers said I absolutely had to try Go Go Gourmet. I thought that was a bit odd, since I’d mentally filed it with Diner Dash 2, Burger Island, and other time-management games. But I’ve never been one to ignore a good game suggestion, so I gave it the requisite few minutes. Followed by the inevitable three nights of trying to finish. Sometimes I wonder if it’s sad that I’m this predictable?
The thing is, Go Go Gourmet actually is a time-management game. But there’s also a hide-and-seek element to it, and that’s what makes it so irresistible. As a cook in various restaurants, your job is to grab the right ingredients and make each order as it comes in. Which would be a lot easier, I suppose, except that on each level, you have more ingredients to work with, and on each level, they’re all in different places. No use looking for the oil next to the sink if it was there before; no, now it’s going to be on a shelf. Or a table. Or on the windowsill. Trying to keep track of multiple customers at the same time while also searching for ingredients is positively frazzling, but in a good way. There’s a serious rush of satisfaction once you’ve slapped the last order of fish stew or nachos – or Gratinee de Coquilles St. Jaques, for that matter – onto a plate and sent it out the door.
Trouble is, after an hour or so of playing, you’ll get reeeeeeeeeeally hungry.
Silly + sappy = spiffy
The more traditional hidden-picture genre has also been well-represented lately. I don’t know what it is about a game that makes me squint at the screen like a myopic badger, but I just love the things. And one thing I’ve noticed is that hidden-picture games have been getting more and more interesting in terms of story. It seems that their designers have realized players like having a reason to squint at the screen like myopic badgers, rather than just being told to hunt artifacts.
Two of the better current games in this style are The Scruffs and Dream Day First Home, and rather amusingly, both of them involve houses. In the case of the former, you’re trying to prevent foreclosure on the abode of a highly unusual family, and in the latter, you’re helping a newly married couple de-clutter and fix up their “starter” house. Well, except that the “starter” house isn’t exactly a gently-used 80’s rambler, but your choice of shabby Craftsman or rundown Victorian.
I am tempted to make a comment here about nobody being crazy enough to buy a run-down antique as their first house, but one of my colleagues has been battling a not-so-gracefully aging Craftsman since she moved out of her apartment a dozen years ago. And I don’t want to call her crazy. (Although, frankly, she might very well agree with me, after that whole “front porch collapsing” incident.) So we’ll just suspend disbelief and say, okay, let’s fix up a historic money-pit.
In both games, you’re asked to find a list of items in several available rooms per level, and then complete a mini-game between levels. In The Scruffs, the mini-game is a jigsaw assembly of torn photos; in First Home, there are several different games to choose from. None of them are difficult or annoying, but I’ll admit I prefer the hide-and-seek portion of the games. Of course, hints are available in the main games, and you can find special items to increase the number of hints. Mighty handy when you’ve got ten seconds left on the clock and you’re still missing a necktie. And in both games, you’re more than happy to keep playing level after level, since you want to see how it all turns out!
As with all games of this type, both First Home and Scruffs contain a few odd objects that left me stumped – I wouldn’t know what a soccer boot looked like if it kicked me in the knee – but most items are pretty straightforward. The biggest frustration I encountered (other than failing to see something that was right there in plain sight) was the occasional duplicate item. For instance, if the game asked you to find “a star”, you could click forever on the perfectly applicable sheriff’s badge sitting right there in plain sight instead of on the more carefully hidden starfish that the game actually meant. Fortunately, there’s little of this, and plenty of very creative hiding, so I thoroughly enjoyed both games.
Retro, with extra poultry
Sort of a last-minute addition here, but does anyone recall an old coin-op game called GORF? It was a radical sort of arcade game, since it had different levels that mimicked other classic videogames. I was terrible at it, I’ll admit, but I remember loving it anyway. And for some reason, I get definite GORF vibes from Chicken Invaders 3. It’s sort of Space Invaders-y, sort of Galaxian-y, sort of Phoenix-y, and definitely chicken-y. You’re never sure what sort of level you’ll get next, just that it will be full of angry poultry dropping eggs on you.
Oh, and I’m terrible at it. But I love it anyway. | |
| Tech Talk
Okay, so you’ve just downloaded the latest version of RealPlayer, and now some of your favorite MSN Games don’t work, even though they don’t use RealPlayer. What’s up with that? Honestly, we’re not 100% sure either, but we’re working with Real to find a solution. In the meanwhile, follow these handy steps to get back into the game:
1. Click Start, Programs or All Programs, the Real folder, the Real Player folder, and then Real Player.
2. On the Tools menu, click Preferences.
3. Under Category, click Download & Recording.
4. Uncheck “Enable Web Downloading & Recording” and click OK.
See you next time! | |
