Review: Die Hard - It's A Good Day To Die Hard

Apparently Die Hard 5 is yet another movie that proves to me that I never seem to agree with critics.  To me, Die Hard 5 solidifies the pattern that every other Die Hard movie is awesome.  None are as great as the first, but this one feels much more like a Die Hard movie than the previous installment: namely a terrorist plot with a clever twist, John McClane getting involved without meaning to, and even a few awesome homages to the original.

The action definitely is over the top, but not as completely ridiculous as Die Hard 4 where John jumps on to a jet and flies a car into a helicopter.  Also, John's partner in this outing, his estranged son, is equally capable of killing bad guys and being nigh invulnerable.  It's like what Indiana Jones 4 was going for with Indy Jr., but with someone that actually matches the father a little better.  Plus, no aliens in this one.  The bad guys aren't nearly as awesome or memorable as the Grubers and their crews, which is probably why this one isn't on par with 1 and 3, but they didn't bother me as much as Timothy Olyphant.

So with all that said, I'd say this Die Hard is ranked 3rd below 1 and 3 and above 4 and 2 and definitely worth a watch.

Gaming Confessions

I think every gamer has their embarrassing moments in their gaming history.  I've decided it's time to confess two of mine: I got a game over from the first Goomba in Super Mario Bros. and I was knocked out by Glass Joe in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out.  Phew, that feels good.

I grew up watching my brothers play these games.  While I was out with the Boy's Brigade at my church for a couple hours, Adam would have played through Super Mario Bros. at least twice.  Although, I don't know if he ever actually beat Mike Tyson, Andrew would play Punch-Out all the time.  I had watched these two master all the difficult sections of the games, saw the strategies and solutions to all the game's puzzles and challenges.  I never actually played them myself until a few years into college.  When I finally decided I needed to play these games, I thought my foreknowledge would help me breeze through these games.  Apparently there's more to video games than just knowledge.

The experience with the Goomba was actually quite comical.  Life number 1 - I ran straight forward, didn't realize the Goomba was so close to the beginning and ran straight into him.  Life number 2 - I was totally ready.  I ran forward, thought I'd pull off my brother's move of hitting the coin block and killing the Goomba in one swoop, but instead jumped too early, hit the side of the coin block and ran straight into the Goomba upon hitting the ground.  Life number 3 - I was determined to pull this move off, ignoring the fact that this was the very first enemy and my very last life.  I managed to hit the coin block properly this time and scored my first points, but it was still just slightly too early and I again landed straight into the side of the Goomba and died.  Sometimes you're just so bad at a game, that it's more hilarious than it is frustrating.

The experience with Glass Joe wasn't as interesting a story.  It was just a series of failed dodges and slow punches that led to Little Mac's loss from one of video game history's easiest bad guys to beat.  Apparently you can't get muscle memory for timing from watching someone else play a game.  Who knew?

Games I Grew Up On: StarTropics

Another game I love to replay from time to time is the game, StarTropics.  This game combined a tropical theme with a strange sci-fi theme and 2D overhead travel and puzzle solving with 2.5D action gameplay.  It also had an amazing soundtrack that matched the theme incredibly well.

One of the most memorable things about the original copy of the game is that it came with a letter that at a certain point in the game, you were told to dip in water to read a message required to progress further in the game.  Basically it was copyright protection, but along with the Monkey Island code wheel and Advanced Dungeon and Dragons journal copy protection it was one of my favorites.

In the game, you play as Mike who is looking for his uncle, Dr. Jones the archaeologist (I see what they did there...) who has mysteriously disappeared.  The journey to find your uncle takes you into the belly of a whale, through a booby-trapped shipwrecked pirate ship, and ultimately into a spaceship.  There are very interesting bosses, tough action, a lot of instant kill death traps that require skill to navigate, many hidden areas with secret goodies, and plenty of powerful items to help you survive.

I want to say I've only beaten this game once and I'm pretty sure that was with the use of an emulator's save states - it's a difficult game to say the least.  But it is well worth a play through, especially with a Nintendo Power map at your side as you play...

Review: Assassin's Creed 3

Another entry in a series of games where you get to relive bits of history through the lives of one secret organization (the Assassins) trying to stop another (the Templars) from taking control.  The III in Assassin's Creed III is more to indicate this is the third different era you are visiting rather than it being the third game in the series (much like how there are way more Kingdom Hearts games then the roman numerals would suggest).

Up until this game, I felt that every previous entry in the series improved on its predecessors in every single aspect.  Although this one definitely had some improvements and some awesome new gameplay mechanics, it also felt like a step back in many respects.  Most striking to me as a collector is that they made collecting everything almost as much a pain as it was in the original Assassin's Creed.

In every Assassin's Creed game, there are viewpoints (a.k.a. really tall buildings) you can climb to reveal large portions of each map.  In all the previous games, if you visit all the viewpoints, you reveal the entire map.  If you want to explore it on your own, you just don't climb the viewpoints.  In this one, the viewpoints only reveal about half of each map, meaning that you are required to wandering aimlessly through the unmapped regions to find out where stuff is.  This wouldn't be so bad except  only the smallest portion of the map around the player gets revealed as he wanders around.  Also, collectables' icons don't consistently appear on the map when you reveal the area around it.  Some of them inexplicably require you to walk right up to the collectible for its icon to appear on the map, but by that point you already know where it is since it's right in front of you so there is no need for the icon at all.  I guess they were trying to encourage more players to explore freely (since that can be fun), but they chose a very poor way to force every player to do so.  If a player wants to explore and uncover the map on their own, let them, but give the rest of us viewpoints to reveal it all.

Aside from that major downside and a number of relatively minor bugs (crowds disappearing right in front of you, one group of guards that will always get mad at you if you walk in front of them, and very poor lip syncing), there is a lot of good to this game.  Firstly, there is a lot to do in the game.  Naval missions (so much potential for its own game), hunting, cowboy checkers, bowls, courier missions, assassin missions, colony liberation, treasure hunts, building a town up out of a large plot of land and an old run-down manor, and on and on.  I clocked in just under 40 hours in the game when all was said and done and I try to be as quick and efficient with my time as possible (except for those first 3+ hours trying to beat the computer at Nine Man's Morris).  As always, the story in the game is top notch with a twist early on that caught me off guard (mostly because once I've decided I'm going to play a game, I refuse to read anything about it until I've beaten it).  I also feel like I understand the Revolutionary War and what led up to it a little better than I did from History class (to be fair that was my worst subject) even though I know there wasn't a grand conspiracy behind the whole thing...or was there?

As with Mass Effect 3, I can't recommend this game to someone new to the series (in this case I'm torn between saying start with the first or the second one) and if you have played the previous ones, then you're probably already planning on buying this or have already beaten it by this point.  This series is definitely one worth checking out if you're a fan of conspiracy stories, secret societies, and alternate history.  Or if you like messing with dumb guards.

The Prototyping Benefits of a Zero-Sum Game

If you are designing a game where points or other resource quantities are involved, you may have realized the line you have to balance when prototyping it.  To save money, you may have printed/bought/gathered less tokens than you thought you needed and had to decide what happens when your playtesters ran out.  Was that an intentional part of the game?  How many tokens are the right amount?  Should you just print way too many and not let the players run out (which of course will be more expensive to prototype and ultimately make if you decide to sell it with too many tokens)?

One solution is to eliminate the bank entirely and divide the resources up at the start of the game.  Then players give and take resources from each other.  This is what is known as a zero-sum game because there is no total loss or gain of resources.  This has a number of benefits: it's much easier to figure out how many tokens the game will need so players generally have just enough or just shy of enough most of the game (depending on what you're going for), players end up balancing the game themselves by (usually) taking from the person winning and helping out people in last place (which is an interesting additional strategic choice for your players), and this dynamic balance should help people from getting an insurmountable lead from the other players.

Zero-Sum resources will drastically alter your game, though.  Imagine if the resources in Settler's of Catan didn't come from a bank of cards, but instead when you bought a road, you had to decide who would get your wood and clay.  That would shift the focus from trading resources directly (simple and intuitive) to bargaining for future resources (e.g. "I will give you this clay now if I get your ore when you buy a development card").  One of the biggest draws of Settler's of Catan is that it's very easy to learn and it's a big social game.  However, while resource trading is a positive thing (both parties get something they want), resource bargaining can be pretty negative (it's essentially begging and what happens if one person doesn't keep their end of the bargain?).

So as always, keep in mind what your goal is with the game and what you want your players to feel.  If your game is directly competitive (players should attack each other) and you're finding all your playtesters playing too nicely, then a zero-sum situation will help force them to attack each other since they have to take their resources/points/whatever from another player and start aggression.  If your game is meant to make or keep friendships alive, maybe this isn't the right thing for your game.

Games I Grew Up On: Q*Bert

One of my first biggest gaming mistakes was buying the game, Q*bert, for NES.  I don't remember how old I was, but I had a regular allowance and my parents had taught me how to keep a balance book of my money and how to save it (I think games like Dragon Warrior also helped).  I had finally saved enough money to buy my very first video game, my mom (lovingly) took me to Toys 'R Us, but back in those days there wasn't an internet filled with video game reviews, so all I had was a wall of video game box art and some minor information on the games.

I'm not sure what drew me to Q*bert, maybe it's that the main character looks like characters I would doodle, maybe I was just overwhelmed and grabbed a ticket for a game I could reach, or maybe I felt bad that the main character was getting killed on the cover.  Sadly, I wouldn't fare much better while playing the game.

The game takes place on an isometric colored pyramid.  Each time Q*bert jumps on to a different step, the color changes.  The goal is to color the entire pyramid a specific color.  Unfortunately, there are a few enemies - a springy snake, gremlins that change step colors, and purple creatures that jump on the wrong sides of the pyramid.  If you get trapped at the bottom, there are one time use spinning discs that will take you back up to the top of the pyramid.  It was a fairly typical high scoring, never ending, super skill game.  What makes the game a lot less fun than it could be is that the controls are super confusing.  Since the pyramid is on diagonals, it doesn't match up to an NES control pad that well.  It almost always cost at least one life to determine if down would go down left or down right or if up would go up left or up right.  This is even worse when you're panicking from all the monsters after you and things bouncing around.

I know my brothers gave me a hard time for buying this game and I think it was only played like 5 times total at my house, so not exactly a game worthy of being the first game I ever bought, but it was a great lesson in researching your purchases before making them.  I think that's a lesson that more people need to learn, especially before they get their hands on a credit card.

Darths and Droids

Have you ever wanted to combine Dungeons and Dragons and Star Wars?  Or just very slowly make fun of all those little ridiculous logic flaws throughout the series?  That's where Darths and Droids come in.  Starting with Episode 1 and currently up to about 2/3 through Episode 4, Darths and Droids takes you through the Star Wars movie in comic book form, except all the characters are gamers playing an RPG campaign in a Star Wars setting.  But in their world, Star Wars never existed.  Basically it pokes fun at Star Wars, D&D, video gaming, and various other nerdy tropes in clever and hilarious ways.  It gets especially entertaining when they introduce new characters who haven't played D&D before (one is an actress, the other is a video gamer).  Also, the post after each comic usually has some good tips and ideas for potential or current DMs.  It's because of this webcomic that I can't help but call the Death Star the Peace Moon from now on.