Crash!
I'm sorry that this column is more about my car than about videogames, but I got screwed in a hit-and-run on Sunday, and it kind of took my mind off my new Sims2 Seasons. (In short, you should go buy it. Sims 2 Seasons, I mean, not a squashed Saturn.)
Early on Sunday morning, Stick and I woke up to the sound of someone banging on our across-the-hall neighbors' door. At least, we assumed it was their door, since we don't have too many friends who make unannounced Sunday-morning visits.
It was actually the police. Late Saturday night, someone hit our parked car (which is kind of unfair because it's so new that the title only arrived the day before). The drivers' side door, and the cute little half-door behind it, is concave now. When our car got hit, it was hit so hard it was pushed into the car parked next to it, so our neighbor's car has a bumper-sized dent.
The officer was really nice to me, which I totally wasn't expecting. Basically, I expect all police officers to show up at parties with noise complaints or pull me over on my way home from late-night study sessions.
I don't know whether we just got a really nice officer, but his vocabulary included the word please. And Ma'am, which was even more surprising. And there's nothing we can do, which was a lot more cop-like. No leads on who hit us, unfortunately. I'm kind of hoping the person who hit the car will come and admit it when they're sober, but Stick says that's not likely.
But that's ok. If I had friends who decided to come visit that early in the morning, then I'd really have a problem.
Meg will have her revenge in Sims 2!!
It's the "missions" that aren't any fun. After the tutorial mission, you're sent to a contact who tells you to kill X of the gang Y and return to the contact, who then tells you to kill the boss of gang Y, and so forth. Lather, rinse, repeat. There are no puzzles to solve, just increasingly difficult bad guys to fight. Of course, your superhero is leveling up, too, so there's no actual difference, just the bragging rights of having made it through Perez Park.
I love introducing new players to D&D, sort of like a crack dealer of the tabletop gaming world. With new players, adventuring actually is an adventure. Longtime gamers see a group of kobolds and cast sleep on the entire group of low hit die creatures. They see a grick and pull out their magical weapons. Long-time gamers even have Pavlovian responses to the appearance of a hex grid.
I made early-adopter profiles on Orkut, LiveJournal, Comsummating, Friendster, and the less well-known sites like Spokeo and Gaah, as well as several dozen hot new things that don't exist anymore. When Spokeo and Gaah get out of beta, you heard it here first.
About four years ago (Long ago, in pre-Stick history), I was at Eric's, lying on the couch and studying. With characteristic focus on my homework, I looked over Eric's shoulder and saw Morrowind.
And I really like games with stuff. Sure, I like leveling too, but I'd much rather have a sexy new set of armor and a better sword. (New cleavage-baring robes for the magic-users don't hurt, either) Morrowind gives you different styles of clothes, armor, weapons… and modders have built a complete wardrobe, plus weapons and all kinds of trendy Pottery Barn accessories for your house. Celtic and Persian-inspired clothes, NPCs with Roman-style names and an incredible variety of architecture keep Morrowind from becoming pseudo-medieval generic fantasy.
The story is set in a pseudo-medieval fantasy kingdom. You play as the victor in a epic battle against the dark lord, now retired from combat and the adoptive father of a baby girl. The goddess Venus appears in a cloud of light, ok, in a King's Quest-era speech box, and gives you the baby and tells you to raise the girl to be healthy, attractive, good-natured and smart. You send her to school, art and dance lessons, etiquette class, assign her chores, take her on vacations, etc. Although you are trying to increase her stats, the random events in the game like competitions or potential suitors, keep Princess Maker from being a repetitive leveling game.
embedded in Princess Maker about the fine balance between attractive and slutty. It's not a good theme for preteen girls, but it's a message they'll get from hundreds of sources more important that a videogame. And your princess can also be happy and successful by excelling at academics or fencing or dancing or another skill.
Betrayal At House On The Hill is an Avalon Hill board(ish) game based on every bad horror flick you've ever hid your eyes from. You and your friends are the intrepid explorers of a Creepy Old House, and you start out with all the cliches, like the Jock, the Little Girl, the Hot Chick, the Gypsy and the Scientist.
WooHoo, of course, can lead to wee ones. Sims2 babies look like a combination of their parents, and as they grow up, they remember events. Yeah. Your Sims remember who taught them to talk, they remember their first kiss, moving to a new home, getting sick, falling in love or their first car crash. (Ok, that's not true. Only FTTW Sims remember that.) They still don't remember which bed is theirs, though, and just wander off to the first available spot when they get tired. Perhaps all Sims are born polyamorous.
I know I'm totally alone in this, but I don't like YouTube.
made me a pretty undemanding girlfriend. Boyfriends can impress me by lifting entire monologues from Mike Myers, George Carlin and Dennis Leary, just to name a few of the men I think I've dated. I was quite disappointed to learn that Jon Stewart, not Stick, composed those clever diatribes.
HeroQuest, for those of you who weren't propositioned so romantically, is a late-eighties pseudo-RPG boardgame, a kind of D&D lite. One person plays the DM, running the four characters through a module but actually trying to kill them off. Up to four other players can be the dwarf, the elf, the wizard and the barbarian. In my case, I was all four of them.
By creating the beautiful Blood Elves, Blizzard taps into the market of Barrens chatters who want to play Horde and look pretty at the same time. If you're lucky enough to never have encountered the Barrens phenomenon, imagine a text-based Lord Of The Flies. While questing, Horde lowbies use the chat channel and the spelling is terrifying, the questions idiotic and the answers almost always obscene.
First, consider checking your CAPS LOCK key before offering or responding to an invite. Some people may find chat-channel shouting offensive. The CAPS LOCK key, if you're wondering is located just below TAB, or in WarCraftian, the auto-target button. It's easy to hit it accidentally while in the process of aggroing a huge mob. Remember, really hip gamers don't shout their Chuck Norris jokes either!
Save it for the comparison sessions on guildchat!
the WiiMote and over-enthusiastic gamers, I was ignoring my jetlag to play just one more round. "Just one more turn" is a siren song of sleeplessness to me. Anything turn-based, like Civ, is fatal to me. I'll play just one more turn until it's morning. Or until I conquer the world!