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  Moxie’s Coffee Break

September 22, 2008

Sidetracked once again

This is the perfect time of year in Seattle.  The weather is lovely – clear, but not too hot – and there are plenty of events and other fun things to do around the city. Everyone I know is either holding a BBQ, organizing a camping trip, or playing some sort of outdoor sport.  I had plans, too. Big plans. Plans for last weekend. Until one of my colleagues loaned me the Xbox 360 game Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise.

I know, I know: “stop me if you’ve heard this one.” It’s not exactly a secret that I’m a sucker for new games. Still, weekend plans are something I usually try to keep, so it’s notable that I threw them all out the window at the mere thought of a new Viva Piñata game. I played the first game all the way through twice, once on my account and once on a friend’s. And lately, I’ve been hearing about all the new critters they’re including in the sequel, including desert and arctic piñatas, so you can guess how easily swayed I was by the offer.

Practical upshot for the weekend: no pick-up soccer game with friends, no Saturday matinee, no garden walk through the Greenlake district on Sunday. On the upside, I am level 32, and I just managed to capture a Flapyak.  Woo!

Seriously, if you have an Xbox 360, get this game. But do try to go outside once in a while, too. Next weekend, no games for me, and it doesn’t matter what tempting new title might be available.

Unless it’s Fallout 3.

Something old, something new, something free!
I suppose it’s a bit ironic that I’ve been checking out a bunch of time-management games lately, given that I seem to be so bad at managing my own time. Can I balance work, family, friends, and games? Maybe not as well as I’d like. But I can certainly take comfort in planning the perfect virtual wedding, running a fast-food dive in outer space, or keeping my chickens from being eaten by cute little panda bears.

First up on the roster: Wedding Dash, which has just been released as a free web game. If the name sounds a bit like Diner Dash, that’s because both games were made by the same group, and they’re very similar to play. Of course, these developers are far too creative to just clone their previous game, so Wedding Dash has a few perks, and a charm, all its own.

To start – literally – each level begins with a quick description of the happy couple, and a chance to special-order some goodies for the reception or the honeymoon. Choose correctly, based on their description, and you get extra money. You’ll want all the help you can get, too, because brides are notoriously cranky on their big day and any little thing going wrong at the reception will mean a chunk out of your paycheck.

To be fair, “any little thing” in this game might be something innocuous, such as an overly weepy relative… but it’s more likely to be bees on the dance floor or the catering table catching on fire. (Frankly, I’ve been to a couple of weddings, and a good kitchen fire could only have livened things up.) Anyway, as guests arrive, rather than seating them according to outfit color, as you would in Diner Dash, you can score bonus points by making sure they sit next to somebody they like. After that, the usual chaining bonuses apply: deliver two or more appetizers together, or take a bunch of gifts up to the bride and groom all at once, and you’ll rake in the bonus cash.

My favorite part of the game? When things are going well, you’ll catch the happy couple smooching in the background. What can I say? True love is a wonderful thing.

”Will you have the space soup, or the space special?”
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned my fondness for the Turbo restaurant series of games. Not only are they a fun take on the time-management genre, but they’re set in marvelously unlikely locations, and they remind me every single time I play why I never want to work in food service. Given how many orders I manage to mix up just playing a game, I can only imagine how hopeless I’d be when trying to help actual hungry, hurried people!

So let’s see, the last time we saw our intrepid restaurateurs, they were serving subs in an old subway car… or was it pizza at the bottom of the sea? Wherever they were, they were dishing up fast food in strange locations, and that’s just what you’ll find in Turbo Fiesta, when the intrepid not-so-gourmet siblings take off for low Earth orbit and open a new space-based Mexican restaurant.

Most of the food items, not to mention the customers, are straight out of other Turbo games, with a sci-fi makeover. The soda bottles look all high-tech, the burritos are lasered instead of toasted, and everyone’s wearing spacesuits, but by and large, this is comfortably familiar territory. As always, chaining actions together helps to fill the Turbo Meter; once it’s complete, both characters and kitchen equipment gets a boost of speed. One very nice addition for Turbo Fiesta is Fiesta Mode, which is activated by filling the Turbo Meter several times in a row. In this mode, food preparation is instantaneous, and you get more of a bonus from tips. It’s a great way to boost your score from basic to Expert on the trickier levels.

Other nifty sci-fi additions include the bean rehydrator, which turns little pellets into a bowl of pinto beans (a very 1950s retro-future touch), a new between-levels minigame that plays much like the “hacking” minigame from Bioshock (or, for old-tyme gamers such as myself, much like the classic Pipe Dream), and the atomic-powered oven, which tags cooked items with an oh-so-stylish fallout symbol.

Oh, and my favorite: a “helping hand” upgrade that allows you to carry three items at once. Hey, it’s science fiction, right? Bring on the kitchen robots!

Chickens give eggs, cows give milk, pigs give… um…
If I had to pick a favorite of all the time-management games I looked at this week, it would have to be Farm Frenzy 2. Not just because I liked the first game in the series, and not just because they expanded on the idea with new challenges. No, it’s because of the pigs. And I’ll get to that in a minute.

If you’ve played the original Farm Frenzy, you’ll know the basic idea of this game. You’re a farmer with a small field and some big ideas. To be precise, you don’t just want to raise animals and sell the resources they produce; you want to take the resources they produce, make stuff with it, make other stuff with that, and then sell the stuff. In short, you’re a really ambitious farmer.

The same model applies in the sequel. On each level, you have a goal (for example, to acquire a certain number of animals or finished goods, or a certain amount of money), and a deadline in which to accomplish it. You start the level either with animals or enough money to buy them, and production buildings or spots in which to place them. Just fill your well with water, click on the field to grow grass, and collect the resources as your animals drop them. Simple!

Except for the bears, which appear out of nowhere on a regular basis and stomp, Godzilla-like, through your livestock. And except for the fact that your warehouse is tiny, your truck is slow, your airplane is slow (you need an airplane now to get ingredients from the city), and your well is substandard. Oh, and except that upgrades to all these things are expensive, and dogs to scare away the bears are expensive, and cats to collect resources are expensive.

Okay, so not so simple.

One of the main reasons I like these games is that they’re more puzzle-like than action-esque, despite the need for frantic clicking to collect resources and allocate them where needed. There are a lot of different ways to solve each level, but there’s usually only one way to get the best possible score, and I love trying to figure that out. You can replay a level as many times as you want, and each replay gives you more “stars” towards purchasing potential upgrades. All in all, it’s a great mix of time-management and puzzle-solving. With bears.

And then there are the pigs. Remember, I promised to tell you about the pigs?  Well, when you buy chickens, they wander around the field and drop eggs.  When you buy cows, they wander around the field and drop milk. So I was a little quizzical when I saw pigs in the list of animals to purchase. But sure enough, pigs wander around the field and drop… pork. Doesn’t seem to bother them at all, they just drop a pork shank every so often, and keep right on going.

Now, I don’t know whether the game developers were unclear on the concept, or whether these hogs are some sort of magnificent porcine mutant, lovingly crafted in a lab somewhere by a mad, vegetarian scientist who craved the taste of bacon without the guilt. But honestly, either way, they are the coolest pigs ever.

Tech Talk
Well, it’s not actually a game issue this week, but we’ve been hearing scattered reports of trouble with billing and subscriptions for GameSpring, Catan Online, and the MSN Games Clubhouse Bundle. If you have any problem with purchasing or renewing a subscription, please contact zmaster@microsoft.com and let us know what’s going on. We’ll do our best to get everything straightened out!

Thanks for your help, and 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!
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