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  Moxie’s Coffee Break

August 6, 2007

Bring on the berries!

I love summer food! If you’ve ever been to Seattle, you’ve probably heard of the Pike Place Market, our big public market downtown. Year-round, they have fresh local seafood, meats, and produce, but summer is when you get all the really good stuff! Perfect strawberries, the sweetest raspberries and blackberries you can imagine, blueberries the size of marbles… the trick with buying fruit there is getting enough so that you still have some left after you snack on it all the way home.

So what does this have to do with games? Not a thing, I guess, although you could make an argument that it’s similar to shopping public markets around the world to find the best ingredients in Chocolatier. I finally finished that game recently, and I have to say it was wonderful all the way to the end. The longer you play, the more difficult the recipes become, so you never really hit a point where it’s “too easy” and becomes uninteresting. (That’s one of my biggest complaints with longer games; I start a lot more of them than I ever finish!) Chocolatier is a great example of a game that takes quite a few hours to finish, but stays fun all the way through. Although it still makes me hungry every time I play!

A tropical GoPets paradise
Check out my GoPet, Moxie, in her new jungle environment! Since the game launched last month, I’ve been playing around with different backgrounds, decorations, and accessories. I even found my favorite pair of sunglasses. They say people tend to look like their pets: in GoPets for Messenger, it’s really the other way around, since you can customize your pet’s appearance to look a lot like yourself. Or like a pirate. Or a Mardi Gras dancer, or an Egyptian pharaoh, or a superhero, or a pumpkin farmer… half the fun of the game is trying out different costumes.

I also upgraded to a premium membership because I wanted to try out the item customization tools. If you have a bit of artistic flair, these can be a lot of fun: some of the best lands I’ve visited in the game have featured lovely customized decorations. Of course, I’m no artist, but I still managed to use a photograph I found online to give Moxie the GoCat a pair of buckeye butterfly wings (my favorite species!).

And that’s pretty much GoPets in a nutshell: build your pet, travel around to different GoLands to see how other people have decorated their spaces, and build your own private playground however you like. This month’s theme is Ancient Egypt, so the next time you see Moxie the GoCat, she’ll be dressed as an Egyptian queen and lazing in the shade of her very own pyramid. How cool is that?

Friendly fun
I think I’ve mentioned before that my sister is a huge fan of Sudoku games? Well, she recently discovered Sudoku Too for Messenger. I used to complain that she didn’t keep in touch; now it’s kind of the opposite, since she’s constantly inviting me to play! Not that I’m griping about that, either (particularly if she’s reading this, heh). I still play Jigsaw Too with my dad from time to time, and it’s great to have a game to play online with my sister as well.

I’m actually quite happy to see that more multiplayer games have cooperative modes these days. It’s just not as much fun to compete against family members and close friends – and I’m carefully not saying anything here about how long certain people can hold a grudge – as it is to team up with them to solve a puzzle or tackle a challenging Sudoku layout.

Tech talk
No real technical issue this week, so I’m going to use this space to plug the World Series of Spades, Hearts, and Euchre, a series of face-to-face card tournaments hosted by frequent MSN Games columnist Joe Andrews. It’s a great way to meet other players, indulge in your favorite card games, and possibly even walk away with a cash prize. So if you’re a fan of Hearts, Euchre, Spades, Pinochle, Bid Whist, or Hand and Foot, check out the site and see whether you can fit a bit of real-world play into your schedule this year. It’s always fun!

See you next time!