Joe Gamer

When Redbox game rentals made their way into our area, I was excited to rent Tangled – the video game. There was something about this that reminded me of Shrek the video game. Maybe it’s just because they are both movies and multi-player. I wanted to play it. After months of not finding it for rent, the price dropped to $20. Figuring that was cheap enough, I bought the game about a month ago. Last night Tangled actually made it into the Wii. So months of anticipation finally came together for an impromptu gaming session with the Little Gamer.

I knew she would like Tangled since she loves the movie. Also, I knew that she would want to play Rapunzel. Game play is basically for two players – Rapunzel and Flynn. Two more people can play – if you can count pointing the Wiimote at the screen and picking up loot as ‘playing.’ So with the Little Game as Rapunzel, I was by default Flynn. We finally found our way out of Rapunzel’s tower – the home base of the game – by clicking on the map and going forth on an adventure.

The game is pretty much laid out like the movie. You set out to the forest on your first quest and learn the ropes. Rapunzel can do all sorts of cool tricks – like twirling around flowers to make them grow with her magical hair. She can also swing from trees. Her weapon is a frying pan – that doesn’t seem to do much of anything with Flynn around. Flynn has a knife and can easily clear bushes and fight bad guys. He is there to protect Rapunzel after all. He can climb cliffs. All of these skills are learned through your first journey. You can also hold hands and run together. It’s just so darn cute but not really practical. We kept trying to hold hands while Rapunzel swung with her hair. Anytime you do another action, the hand holding stops.

One really neat part about the game is that you do not have to stay together on screen. If one player wanders ahead or back tracks, the screen splits so that you can explore at your own pace. This was nice because the Little Gamer was enamored with twirling on flowers while I was interested in what lies ahead of us. So this way Flynn could scout ahead while Rapunzel enjoyed just being out of that castle.

Our game ended as many video games session end – with the Little Gamer in tears. She usually gets frustrated about something and will not let it go. With Tangled, the vague game book said that butterflies are always around where Rapunzel could play with her hair. The only butterflies we saw were at places where she could swing by her hair. So their definition of ‘playing with her hair’ is definitely different from a six-year-olds.

Tangled was fun but not worth the wait I put myself through. But glad I waited until it was $20 – instead it would have been a better $2 game rental. We’ll give it another try soon. The Little Gamer is ready to give it another go – so if she can be forgiving of poor game mechanics, then so can I.

© 2011, Lynn Little. All rights reserved.

The Little Gamer loves unicorns. She loves anything pink and remotely related to princesses and fairy tales. It’s no big surprise that she is wild about unicorns. She keeps telling me to contact the ‘game companies’ to make a unicorn game. Not sure the whims of a five-year-old will persuade developers to make a game. She may have her father and I wrapped around her finger, but the world at large is not that easily swayed.

JoeGamer has been playing Red Dead Undead Nightmare, and the Little Gamer has been enamored with it. She also enjoys zombies – to a certain extent any way. She enjoys watching her daddy play the game and has been cheering him on since she learned there is a unicorn in the game.

It was JoeGamer’s mission this past weekend to find the unicorn. After some Internet searching, he learned what he had to do to unlock the unicorn. He had to kill the Chupacabra since he had already completed the four horseman of the Apocalypse challenge. After working diligently at this task, he finally did it – and there was much rejoicing from the Little Gamer.

The unicorn is pretty neat. She – because everything cool is female according to the Little Gamer – leaves a rainbow trial and has butterflies that constantly surround her. She has limitless stamina and nearly impossible to kill. Apparently killing her can make her fly. The Little Gamer would be heartbroken if JoeGamer ever did that – so we will just have to take the Internet’s word on that.

Here is an article that explains more about the Red Dead unicorn.

© 2011, Lynn Little. All rights reserved.

By now most people have heard of the infamous World of Warcraft or WoW for short. The latest expansion pack to the game is called Cataclysm. If your husband has shown interest in playing this game, this is a very bad thing. Here is why, the game is incredibly addictive for many people. Specially if the person has problems with anxiety or depression, the game can provide a false sense of achievement by leveling. The game requires very little gaming skill other than being able to click buttons with a mouse which is the reason it is very easy to learn and pick up. Instead, the game does little to reward skill but rewards time that you have played instead. Granted, some skill might make things a bit faster.

The more time the player keep playing the game, your avatar starts gaining levels which makes you stronger against foes. However, there is no shortage of enemies as they endlessly re spawn or throw more difficult enemies that will probably require several players to beat. This starts escalating up to a point where you need dozens or more people to beat enemies. These players then need to arrange a time when players with enough time sunk into the game can play. This is where things start getting ugly. In WoW, these groups are called guilds, several of them meet 4 or more times a week for 2 or more hours. This could add up to the time you would spend in a part time job. The game can not be paused unless agreed by everybody in the group. Somebody hooked on the game will probably not leave the chair in a while.

I tried to explain what the game is in a nutshell avoiding lingo used by people that play it. If suddenly all your partner can talk about is WoW and all the words coming out of his mouth are raid, guild, crits, aoe, dkp, or aggro. This is a bad sign. When they start saying my druid, my mage, my paladin without giggling. You got a problem.

If he starts making up excuses to not go out or work out, he is sick etc but he feels well enough to play on the computer. That is also bad. Eventually, it is going to get to a point where no excuses are made and the person is not ashamed anymore to the point where he will flat out tell you that he has an online appointment to play with his “friends”, referring to people he has never met in person and which only connection is to advance in the game.

Unless the person playing is standing up or in a treadmill with a desk on top, all the time spent playing the game will increase the sedentary lifestyle which will show on the scale. It happens slowly so that it will probably not be noticeable but when people you have not seen in months such as relatives start saying stuff, pay attention.

If you do not believe me, google and you will find hundreds of stories over the Web. Ranging from people taking laptops to play at cruises to wearing diapers so as to not waste any time going to the bathroom. Even little disregard for children safety when they are left unattended. Several parodies have been made by popular TV Shows including The Big Bang Theory “Sword Master”, South Park “Make love, Not Warcraft”, and the online mini series The Guild. Some are exaggerated but they can happen to you.

I need not to tell you that a combination of these factors will probably lead to a decrease sex drive which does not make for a happy wife and eventually a WoW widow. I am not saying everybody who plays WoW is a complete fat loser with no life living on his mother’s basement but one way or another with that much time spent on the game it is bound to take a toll on your relationship and life. Make no mistake, World of Warcraft is to be considered an addiction. Some people can control their drinking or gambling but a lot of people do not. You should do whatever you judge to be the right thing.You have been warned.

Original @ http://bit.ly/gqKmZJ

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© 2011, Christian Rios. All rights reserved.

The wife is reading on her Kindle in the bedroom while I am playing Call of Duty: Blacks Ops on my PC with my headset on. Then, the apartment starts to shake, the ceiling fan is about to drop, and it sounds like a stampede is going by. My wife and I grew up in Central America surrounded by volcanoes. So thinking that it is a small earthquake, I start running to a door frame when I realized it is very easy to walk because the ground is not moving. Now I am a bit scared because I am thinking it might be a tornado since this is common in the Southern United States where we live. I go look out the window and there are clear skies when the shaking suddenly stops.

A minute has passed now when we realized, the sounds are coming from upstairs. I go up there thinking somebody went UFC on somebody else’s ass. I knock on the door, and this thin short white college kid opens the door. I asked him if he was okay because my apartment was about to come down on me. At that moment, he apologizes saying that he and his friend were playing a new Xbox 360 game where you play by moving around. Of course, he tells me this while he points to a Kinect for the Xbox 360. However, this still did not add up though, until his 300-pound friend came back from the fridge with another beer. I told them that they should play Call of Duty instead.

I guess the Moral of the story is that you should not invite your chubby friends to play Kinect in your upstairs apartment even though you might think they need the exercise. Rather, tell them to eat a salad every now and then! I know even McDonald’s sells them now.

© 2010, Christian Rios All rights reserved.

Original @ http://www.chrisrios.com/2010/11/15/a-kinetic-experience/

© 2010, Christian Rios. All rights reserved.

With that grand title, I begin my mini-review of Starcraft 2!

Starcraft 2 has been a long time coming.  The original Starcraft was released on PC way back in 1997 and continues to be one of the gaming world’s giants.  People still play the multiplayer game.  South Korea holds tournaments that rival NFL games in the US.  There are TV channels that show replays of games!  Easily one of the most anticipated releases of the year, Starcraft 2 does not disappoint.

I will admit it, I suck at RTS games.  Real Times Strategy games (or RTS’s) involve management of troops and resources to outmaneuver the other player.  On a minor level (like the one I play at) this involves building buildings, amassing troops, and throwing people at the opponent until one or the other gives up.  On a more professional level this involves macros (button combinations that do multiple things at once) and a nice stat I like to call “apm” or actions per minute.  Yes, professional Starcraft players measure how many actions they can perform in a minute.  When I say “enough” they say “200″ or some other number I can’t imagine.  Thinking on that as well as my… 5:4000 win/loss ratio (similar to most anything I do), when I say I enjoy Starcraft 2, I really mean it.

I have played a great deal of the single-player Vs. AI segment.  Wanting to get better in multiplayer, I figured I would attempt to practice against the computer.  Let’s just say I haven’t been able to eke out a win on “medium” yet (but I feel like I’m improving!).  Other than the new units and buildings, the three races of Stacraft, the human Terrans, the buglike Zerg, and the technological Protoss, all play just like they did back in 1997.  The beauty of the game is in polish and production values, though, which really shine in the single player campaign mode.

Unlike the original Starcraft where you play through all three races, Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty have you playing as Terran renegade Jim Raynor as he fights the evil Terran Dominion and its leader Arcturus Mengsk.  Lasting around 30 missions, the single player missions provide various objectives that tend to go above and beyond “kill the other player” and often give you a choice that effects the outcome of the story.  Between missions the player can explore Raynor’s ship, play minigames and experience entirely optional exposition on the story that a singularly bloody-minded player may ignore, but a more story-focused player would definitely enjoy.

I have certainly enjoyed my time sucking at Starcraft.  The single player (both against AI and story mode) have been excellent so far and I want to continue in order to get the full experience.  When I get in to the multiplayer aspect, they actually have a 50 round “training bracket” for losers like me that are either terrible enough to warrant some training time or people who are new to the game.  I’ll let you know how I do with that as soon as I start playing multiplayer for real, but it may be a while before I gather up the courage!

I entirely recommend Starcraft 2 with a 9/10.

© 2010, Jeff Hollingsworth. All rights reserved.