Ambition makes you look pretty ugly
So...
Not a lot to talk about. I've...been playing kind of a lot of games lately? After devouring Professor Layton in about a week, I got Kudos 2, by the dude who made the Democracy games. Though this game is kind of like turn-based Sims, it has the same sort of feel as Democracy, with stats that go up or down when you perform various activities, and lots of tradeoffs for each. My first character was an aspiring scientist, but after my first year he got two job rejections in a row and his confidence plummeted, so I quit and rolled up a new character. (Already this game is providing uncomfortable insights into how I approach real life.) My second character was a lawyer. She seemed to spend a lot of time exercising and playing sudoku, was an avid bowler, and made junior partner by age 30. Up until the last year or two, she didn't spend a whole lot of time with her friends, mainly just enough to fulfill the usual obligations; also, she had no love life whatsoever, since I couldn't figure out what to do in order to make relationships happen. (More uncomfortable insights here.)
Also, a couple weeks back we (ambitiously) tried out this Android game. Given that the other characters were psychic clones and robots and cyberenhanced bounty hunters and damaged geniuses, I wasn't entirely certain I wanted to play the cop who is just a regular cop only also crooked, but his story was just really fantastic, it was about honor and the struggle for redemption and all that good crap. Another thing about this game that I totally didn't notice until afterwards but think was a good choice was that it didn't use any dice. Now, believe it or not, this can actually be a touchy issue for me, since one thing that one occasionally encounters among board game snobs is a certain disdain for dice and other random elements. You will hear people complaining about, for example, Settlers, that the game is less fun insofar as one's odds of victory are not solely determined by one's skill. I find all this kind of narrowminded and even faintly adolescent, but enough about that. The point is that I think it works really well for Android, since it really highlights the narrative to have all of the events and their outcomes be determined, directly or otherwise, by player choice. Also, and this is something Kudos has also done, for a few days afterwards I found myself looking at the real world through the lens of the game mechanics, which I suppose is a sign of a pretty darn effective design.
Oh! Here are a couple links: this is from Clara, and this is from Simon. They are both great, but in very different ways.
Not a lot to talk about. I've...been playing kind of a lot of games lately? After devouring Professor Layton in about a week, I got Kudos 2, by the dude who made the Democracy games. Though this game is kind of like turn-based Sims, it has the same sort of feel as Democracy, with stats that go up or down when you perform various activities, and lots of tradeoffs for each. My first character was an aspiring scientist, but after my first year he got two job rejections in a row and his confidence plummeted, so I quit and rolled up a new character. (Already this game is providing uncomfortable insights into how I approach real life.) My second character was a lawyer. She seemed to spend a lot of time exercising and playing sudoku, was an avid bowler, and made junior partner by age 30. Up until the last year or two, she didn't spend a whole lot of time with her friends, mainly just enough to fulfill the usual obligations; also, she had no love life whatsoever, since I couldn't figure out what to do in order to make relationships happen. (More uncomfortable insights here.)
Also, a couple weeks back we (ambitiously) tried out this Android game. Given that the other characters were psychic clones and robots and cyberenhanced bounty hunters and damaged geniuses, I wasn't entirely certain I wanted to play the cop who is just a regular cop only also crooked, but his story was just really fantastic, it was about honor and the struggle for redemption and all that good crap. Another thing about this game that I totally didn't notice until afterwards but think was a good choice was that it didn't use any dice. Now, believe it or not, this can actually be a touchy issue for me, since one thing that one occasionally encounters among board game snobs is a certain disdain for dice and other random elements. You will hear people complaining about, for example, Settlers, that the game is less fun insofar as one's odds of victory are not solely determined by one's skill. I find all this kind of narrowminded and even faintly adolescent, but enough about that. The point is that I think it works really well for Android, since it really highlights the narrative to have all of the events and their outcomes be determined, directly or otherwise, by player choice. Also, and this is something Kudos has also done, for a few days afterwards I found myself looking at the real world through the lens of the game mechanics, which I suppose is a sign of a pretty darn effective design.
Oh! Here are a couple links: this is from Clara, and this is from Simon. They are both great, but in very different ways.
posted by Evan at 11:12 AM
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