After Abby’s birthday celebration, I look my son, my father, and my best friend to CP Pinball for a few hours of fun.
Tag Archives: Games
Masterpiece: Robotron 2084 (via Ars Technica)
Ben Kuchera on why Robotron 2084 is one of the great games:
The game popularized the twin-stick design, where one joystick moved your character and the other controlled your direction of fire. (You only had one weapon.) The joysticks were of course digital back then, so you could only move and shoot in eight directions. There was no scrolling and there were no surprises. The game showed you the entirety of the level for a second before play began; you had a tiny moment to see the four walls and to take in where the enemies were and in what numbers. This was the game’s way of bowing at you before the attack.
(via Masterpiece: Robotron 2084.)
Cultivated Play: Farmville (via MediaCommons)
The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity.
A great essay and a look into why so many of the people on your Facebook friends list are playing a game they will never win that intrudes upon their real life and isn’t even fun.
Old(er) Shirt: A Simple Plan
First Impressions: Transformers: War for Cybertron
I grabbed the new Transformers game earlier today and gave the first Decepticon campaign level a spin this evening. This is a game that’s specifically meant to target my nostalgia and then attack it for ridiculous effect.
The best thing about it is that this is (so far) a pretty competent game. It’s full of giant robots blasting the crap out of each other, a story about Megatron’s megalomania, takes place on a planet where just about everything transforms, and has some solid fundamentals. It plays basically like a hybrid of Gears of War and Modern Warfare 2 in that it’s a third-person shooter (with no cover mechanic) and is heavy on the action.
Of course, you do have the ability to transform at will between vehicle and giant robot mode, which is half the fun—run into a room, shoot a few fools, then jump into the air and transform in mid-air into a car to zip away and recharge before attacking again.
Then again, all they needed was this trailer, because Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus Prime could basically have said any kind of dialogue they wanted and all I would hear was “buy this game.” When I hear Optimus, I’m five again.
I haven’t dropped into the multiplayer yet other than during the demo, but it of course has a progression system like most shooters do now (though it tracks each class you can play as separately). And what’s with everything Activision having a Prestige-style system now? Blur had it, too.
Ryan Markel 