Friday Free Game: Boomshine Friday, January 18, 2008

Boomshine is one of those rare games that has stripped away everything unnecessary, leaving just the undistilled essence of gameplay intact. The field of play is filled with floating, multicolored dots. Your job is to click – just once! – and start a chain reaction that will touch as many of the dots as possible. Each level gives you more dots and asks you to clear a higher proportion of them. Those last four or five levels will take you several tries each to beat.

Level	Min	Total	Pct
1	1	5	20%
2	2	10	20%
3	3	15	20%
4	5	20	25%
5	7	25	28%
6	10	30	33%
7	15	35	43%
8	21	40	53%
9	27	45	60%
10	33	50	66%
11	44	55	80%
12	55	60	92%

It's a well-designed and addictive little game and you find yourself trying all sorts of different tactics. At first I clicked when I saw a cluster of dots, then I clicked towards the middle. Then I started trying to track the overall "flow" of them to see what was going to collide with what. The fact that I was performing these strange (futile?) mental acrobatics to track fifty random dots is a testament to this obviously well-tested game's achievement of near-perfect balance. Check it out.

Zero Punctuation and Bioshock Friday, December 21, 2007

Author's Note: I wrote this a little while back and never posted it. So this is me writing about a month ago...

Let me start by saying that I can't believe that I haven't mentioned Zero Punctuation yet on my blog. Yahtzee is my friggin hero and he has redefined the game review as we know it. If you're just hearing about it from me, go, watch all of his reviews and then come back and finish reading this post. Okay, just watch the Bioshock review. He manages to take the piss out of one of the best games in years and has you laughing the whole time.

Which brings me to the actual topic of tonight's post, said best-game-in-years, the game I just finished, Bioshock. Seeing that you're not allowed to call yourself a gamer unless you've beaten this game and talked about it ad nauseam, I decided it was time to bite the bullet, upgrade my machine, and actually play the damn game.

There will be no major spoilers in this review.

I had read a lengthy preview of Bioshock some time back and came away excited that Ken Levine was trying to do something ambitious on a few different levels – he was mixing shooter and RPG, and proposed a complex storyline based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead is one of my favorite books). But it was a first-person shooter, and I don't play those. So I figured I'd pass it by.

Then the game came out, and it gets a ridiculous 96 Metacritic score. One reviewer called it "One of the very cleanest, best-executed shooters ever made." Alright, I thought, if there was ever a reason to go play an FPS, this was the time. So I had two choices: upgrade my computer or buy an XBox 360. I had already decided some time ago that I was glad that I'd sit out this round of the console wars and I needed a new machine anyway (my old one, including lots of code for a new game went up in smoke). So I bought a kick-ass new system with an NVidia GeForce 8800 GTX and bought Bioshock for the PC. Normally, I play every game on the hardest difficulty, but I have a particularly hard time with games played from the first-person perspective. I was playing it for the experience, not the challenge, anyway (for a change). I played it off and on for a few weeks and just finished tonight (I beat it in probably 6 to 8 major sittings).

I'll start off the way this review has to start off by saying that the sound and visuals are nothing short of stunning. The environments are all obviously handcrafted and every detail of the setting is damn near perfect, creating a mood that's downright gripping — transparent tubes with heavy metal rivets surrounded by bubbling oceans, the mournful whale-call of the Big Daddies, the creepy little girls with hypodermic needles screaming for Mr. Bubbles to "unzip" me, the tumbled remnants of a 1959 New Year's party where the attendants are now homicidal mutants, the protest signs that bespoke a terrible social upheaval, the mad shrieks of the splicers acting out scenes from their demented pasts, and Doctor Steinman surrounded by the mutilated bodies he tried to free from symmetrical ugliness.

The voice acting is all superb, the lighting fantastic, and it's certainly the scariest game I've played since Resident Evil: Nemesis. Each of the Big Daddies is just like Nemesis, actually. My heart beat faster whenever one would show up, just like it would when Nemesis did in that other game. It's a shame that such a masterfully-crafted game ended up with an ending that was a little lame and abrupt. I am currently going back through to beat it the other way (month-later author: not so much, with the holidays).

In short — the art direction on Bioshock deserves new awards to be invented for it. It is bar-none the most beautiful game of its kind that I have seen. It's tense and atmospheric in a way most games only dream of being, and also delivers heaps of fun that you've had before. In the end, Bioshock is nothing new – the game plays pretty much like every other FPS out there – but it carries it off with unparallelled panache that makes it all feel so good to do it all again. I think Bioshock is well-deserving of the accolades the other writers have given it. It's one of my favorite games of the past several years.

Friday Free Game: Jelly Jumper Friday, March 09, 2007

I might go so far as to call Jelly Jumper a nearly quintessential Friday Free Game. It's super-simple, nice to look at, and is set up in bite-sized levels that makes you feel like you can play as little or as much as you want. Jump your little green guy around a keyboard (the same Logitech keyboard I am writing this on, actually). Each level is a puzzle, and you try to get to the green keys in as few jumps as possible, avoiding red bomb keys, using teleporting yellow keys, and super-bouncy orange keys. Once you learn to follow the little globby guy's reflection in the surface of the keys, it's pretty easy.

If you finish the first 10 levels, you get 20% off Logitech products — if you happen to live on the side of the Atlantic that I don't. But the best part is, you can keep going, and the game isn't that easy anymore. You might find yourself trying the same level a bunch of times, to do it perfectly, just because you want that little globe to be green and not yellow.

The little things in this game go a long way. The music is engaging but not distracting, the character is a high-quality 3D render, and the game offers a finely-tuned challenge – the level design is varied and scales nicely. I also love the fact that there are only four keys you need to play the game and that they used left and right arrows to replay and advance levels. You don't have to move your hand. Little things like let you know that they tested the thing and smoothed out the rough edges before they released it.

I'm happy to recommend Jelly Jumper as an elegantly presented and downright fun little game. But I can't bring myself to recommend the keyboard; it looks great and has decent feel, but I find it frustrating that they arbitrarily removed the insert key. Back in The Day, we used Control-Insert and Shift-Insert for copy and paste.