After a lengthy project at work I finally put in for some vacation time and was determined to get myself up to FunSpot. It was a little over 5 hours away but after a recent drive to Florida and back that seemed like nothing. As long as I had some good music to listen to it wasn’t going to a long drive. I left around 10:30am and made good time with the help of iPhone’s Maps application. That is until I got about an hour away from Laconia.

That’s when my cell service suddenly disappeared. Given that it’s AT&T I was honestly surprised that it was with me for the majority of the trip. It’s at this point that I got a little lost but realized that I still had G-Map on my phone as well. I’ve complained about G-Map via Twitter before – my first time using it it sent me on the most roundabout route just to get back on the road I was originally on. The one upside it has versus Apple’s Maps application is that all the maps are stored on the phone so as long as you have GPS reception (which I get even when my cell service is dead) you are good to go. It did the same thing again where it wanted me to go down some side street, up another street, back up another street JUST to get back on the road I was already on, so I just ignored it this time and kept going straight. I eventually arrived at FunSpot and decided to check it out before looking for a hotel.

I went on a Tuesday so that place itself was pretty dead. At any point during my gaming there I didn’t see more than 10 people in the upstairs “museum” section of FunSpot. This meant it was pretty quiet and I wouldn’t look too foolish taking pictures of each game before I played it.

Before the trip I debated trying to play every game there at least once but with over 200 games it would’ve required at least 2 days straight playing video games (assuming about 5 minutes for each game, time for eating, bathroom trips) and while that might’ve been fun to document via video and such I don’t know that it would’ve been much fun. Instead I decided to just play the games that caught my eye. The ones that triggered memories just by looking at them. I got $10 worth of tokens and made my way through the arcade.

Marble Madness (Wikipedia | Killer List of Videogames | Marble Madness Homepage)

There was one game I definitely wanted to play before I left and I made it the first (and last) game I played at FunSpot. I remember playing this every time my family went to Fuddruckers (oh the naughty jokes we made about that name!) on Central Avenue in Yonkers when I was a kid. I’ve always been drawn to this game for some reason, so much so that I eventually created a Marble Madness modification for Unreal Tournament called Marble Mania with the helper of an UnrealScript programmer a few years ago. I think I just loved the idea of an abstract geometric world and at the time I thought the graphics were pretty damn cool. It’s funny how over the years better resolutions and color depths seem like the best things could get.

The machine was in pretty good condition though the left speaker was being flakey and would turn on and off on it’s own, resulting in the music sometimes just blasting away in my face. If you know the music for Marble Madness you know that it can make you a bit tense and anxious while you’re playing, moreso at loud volumes. I only managed to make it to level 4 while playing but did end up knocking all the lower scoring players off the high score list. Still, my 24,000 score was nowhere near the 110,000+ scores of the top 4 spots. By the next day I was debating trying to obtain my own Marble Madness arcade machine so I could practice like some Steve Wiebe wannabe. I still may do it one day…

Dragon’s Lair (Wikipedia | Killer List of Videogames

Speaking of state of the art graphics, how much better could things get than actual cartoon animation in a video game?! Dragon’s Lair was the first in a line of laserdisc-based video games that, at the time, seemed pretty amazing. In truth it was nothing more that Memory + Choose Your Own Adventure really – an animation was played and you had to either push the joystick in the correct direction or press the buttons at the right moment. Doing so took you further in the storyline. You could lose a lot of quarters trying to memorize all the moves needed to finish the game.

I think my first exposure of this type of game was Cliff Hanger which my brother and I saw as kids at Kiawa Island in South Carolina. They might’ve had a Dragon’s Lair as well – it was a posh resort where hot dogs cost like $5 so they could afford to have two state of the art laserdisc games.

Unfortunately the audio level on this game was very low making it difficult to hear where I was supposed to in a certain direction. I didn’t last very long at all and didn’t feel like dumping too many tokens into it.

Krull (Wikipedia | Killer List of Videogames)

As if the movie Krull was enough exciting adventure for one person, apparently a video game was also made of this riveting story of a guy with a neat dagger-disc and annoyingly upbeat perspective on life. I never actually heard of the game until I saw it at FunSpot but wanted to give it a try considering how crappy the movie is.

Unlike the movie you actually get to use the Glaive for most of the game. The first level consists of you collecting the 5 pieces of it strewn across a boulder infested mountain. Once you have the weapon you can use the right joystick to fire it off in different directions. It seemed like you could fire up to 5 of them at a time but I wasn’t paying close enough attention. The next level has you saving soldiers in a forest, the next saving soldiers in a cave and then a level where you are trying to break your way through a set of hexagonal barriers constantly changing colors. You had to hit it when it was black or you glaives would get stuck in it. I sucked at that part. I gave the game another try later in the night but didn’t fare any better.

Continue? 10… 9… 8…

I was thinking I could squeeze all the games I played into one post but it’s turning out to be longer and more work than I thought it would be so I think it’s better to break this up into multiple posts.

Next time: Patrolling the moon buggy-style, bears looking for gems in castles (what?!), strong aversions to aliens and racing way too fast in a tube (no, not the london underground)

I also made a video of the custom D&D terrain set up with miniatures and props.

I can wait to use this stuff in a session of my Forgotten Realms – Mysteries of the Moonsea D&D campaign.

I continued looking and came across The New York Composers Meetup Group. The meeting for that night was full as well but I decided to join the group anyways. Within a few minutes I got an email from the organizer telling me to come by since they usually have a few no-shows anyways. I grabbed some dinner at Pret and then headed down to the meet up location by taxi. I got there a little early so I did some reading while I waited for people to show up.

The meeting eventually started and there was a wide variety of people who showed up. The format for the night was to listen to pieces by a few people, get a little lesson on digital recording, and then do some more listening. Everybody’s songs were good and some people were very impressive, either in their music or their lyrics. During one of the breaks the people next to me struck up a conversation with me (the cast is an easy conversation piece) and I learned that the girl is a composer and the guy is a Ruby on Rails developer. I didn’t get to play the song I wanted to share but after hearing some other pieces I already started to critique my own piece.

I left the meet up at the same time the couple did and they invited me out to get something to eat. We took a few taxis and eventually ended up at a diner where we had a great conversation about meaningfulness, jobs, careers, callings, doing good things, music, programming, psychology and a bunch of other stuff. They picked up the bill, refused to let me pay (the cast really works!) and helped me flag down a taxi to send me on my way home.

All in all it was a surprisingly joyful night. And I even got some new friends out of it.

Next Thursday the cast is supposed to come off but I’m going to probably be back in the bracing boot. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to put weight on it yet. But at least it means things are getting better. I’m just really eager to be able to drive but realize that I’ve got to take it slow.

This Wednesday is the next New York City Boardgames & Cardgames Group meetup and I’m uber-excited for that. I’m planning to bring Robo Rally and Abduction this time and have been reviewing the rules in anticipation. My new friends from the composers group may be joining me as well.

The meetup is held at Lucky Jack’s down on the lower east side. It’s a bar that has a comfy little downstairs area. The hardest part of the evening was getting down the 15 or so steps on crutches. Actually, getting back up them was the scarier bit…

I got there a little late (maybe 6:30) and people were already gaming. Everybody seemed pretty engaged, so I just went over to an empty table and figured I might as well put out my copy of Drakon as bait and see what happens.

Well it worked and within 5 minutes I had 3 other people who wanted to play. I went over the basics and we played one game. Since it was everybody else’s first time playing I took it easy and tried to explain different strategies and good and bad reasons for doing certain things, even letting players take back decisions if they wanted to.

After that one of the players was nice enough to go get me a drink from upstairs, then showed us a game called Set.

I don’t normally enjoy “abstract” games, but this one was pretty neat. The gist is that you have a bunch of cards with different symbols, colors, shadings and numbers on them. A set is any combination where each of those attributes are all the same or all completely different. So if the symbol, shading and color are all the same, but they each have a different number of symbols… you have a set. It took a little while to grasp it but we eventually got it. Then some seasoned players came along and just schooled us at the game. Then it wasn’t quite as fun…

After that a guy came over and asked if we wanted to play a game called Hybrid Dungeon. That sounded cool to me, so I was up for it. We ended up playing with 4 people. The premise of this game is that each player has a character made of 3 creature parts: upper, middle and lower. So you might have the head of an elephant, the body of a shark and the legs of a centaur – which is what I have. Each part has different attributes like weight, height, attack, carry, etc. Some let you fly, swim, jump and even carry other characters. You travel through a dungeon, opening doors and fighting the guardians of those doors. The players work together to fight the creatures with the end goal of retrieving 3 gems located throughout the dungeon. I got into this game because we could joke about our characters and the situations we were getting into, like how I was really strong and defeated a lot of monsters but somehow never got to keep any treature… it was all in good fun though.

Somebody was passing around a Vegetarian Indian menu by then and I decided to get something since I hadn’t had any dinner and it was already 9pm.

After that we played another game by the same guy called Assorti. This was a card game using only the numbers and aces (as ones). The idea was to try to get cards in your hand that matched as many cards as people put down in front of them (3 total each), but those cards keep changing. It was certainly interesting but not my kind of game.

Dinner arrived and I spent some time talking to the couple I had played Hybrid Dungeon and Assorti with. The woman told me she’s being playing Magic The Gathering with her daughter for the past 11 years. I told her that’s the last thing I was expecting her to tell me!

Once I was done eating it was around 10:30 and I was getting pretty tired and had a long trek home. I peeked at some of the games people were playing and then headed up the stairs. Overall it was a very fun evening and I’m very glad I went. I’ve already RSVP’d for the next one on April 1st. I wish they had them more often!

I have never been a PlayStation fan.  I’ve never owned any of the systems, console or portable, and have always had a… avoidance of the fans.  It always seemed to me that most of the games were fighting games or had storylines I just couldn’t get into.

It took me a minute or two to figure out how to boot it up.  There’s a power switch on the back of it which brings power to the system but then there’s a little touch-sensitive switch on the front of it for actually turning it on.  Turning on the controller is similar to the 360 – there’s a little button in the middle of the controller.  I found the controller uncomfortably light.  I suppose if I was a PS3 owner I would find the 360 controller uncomfortably heavy.

I used the menu system to set up my own account named “Guest” so I wouldn’t mess up the owner’s save data.  I messed with the theme settings a little bit but overall wasn’t very impressed with the system menu.  The font/layout felt a little amateurish.  I don’t know if there are additional themes you can download to make it look cooler though.

I gave Ratchet and Clank a try but wasn’t particularly impressed.  Seemed like your standard shooter with a few nift bells and whistles.  After that I gave Assassin’s Creed a try.  This game is also available for the 360, so any complaints about it aren’t specific to the PS3. I found the intro downright confusing. The game started with me in some kind of blury, echoey world where the controller directions kept flashing up for about 1 second at a time.  I had no idea what was going on until the game finally took me into a cut-scene and I went through the tutorial level.  The game seems interesting, but I didn’t have enough time to really digest the UI and controls.  It also seemed like my character was a jerk who didn’t like to follow rules – I didn’t really want to play him.

We then ended up watching a DVD on the system (The Descent).  The DVD controls were fine and the UI was nice enough to give me a completely pointless Mb/s reading on the DVD.  Who needs to know that?

In the end I wouldn’t buy a PlayStation 3 unless I a) needed a Blu-ray player and 2) knew of a few really compelling PS3-only titles.  Right now I don’t really require Blu-ray and the only compelling PS3 exclusive game is LittleBigPlanet which is going through the hype machine right now and may not actually be the great.

We also don’t have enough power outlets in the living room for another console.

Xbox 360

• Fallout 3 – 10/28/2008 – Only played little bits of 1 & 2 and Tactics, but know that it’s a classic.
• Scene It? Box Office Smash – 10/28/2008 – 1st is a good party game.
• Gears of War 2 – 11/7/2008 – 1st was very enjoyable. I expect 2 to be even better.
• Mirror’s Edge – 11/11/2008
• Left For Dead – 11/17/2008 – Co-op Zombie game – YES!
• LIPS – 11/18/2008 – Christine likes karaoke, so this is a no brainer.
• Bionic Command – 1/12/2009 – One of my all-time top NES games.
• Borderlands – 2/2/2009 – Post-apoc Car Combat FTW!
• Skate 2 – 3/3/2009 – Didn’t realize it was this far off!

Wii

• Wii Music – 10/20/2008 – Could be interesting.  Need to look into this more.
• Skate It – 11/17/2008 – Curious how fun the controls for this will be.
• Rygar – Battle of Argus – 12/9/2008 – Loved playing the original on the NES. Such a strange/difficult game.

PC
Nothing.  I think I’ve officially transitioned from PC to Console gamer.  It’s just more relaxing, comfortable and you don’t have to worry about requirements or upgrading your video card.

It started this past weekend when for some reason I told Christine, “It’s dark. You might be eaten by a Grue.” She didn’t know what I was talking about, so I told her to look up Zork on Wikipedia. That resulted in me looking up ways to play these old games on the Mac. I’ve been using Zoom, which works well, looks very nice and has a nice full screen mode. For Windows there is Gargoyle.

We played a little bit of Zork but eventually were both tired and decided to go to bed. I was getting a little confused by the dungeon we were in anyways.

The next day I decided to give Planetfall a try and have been playing it on the train the last few days, even going as far as to map out the locations using NeoOffice Drawing.

I’ve also done some poking about with how to make IF using the Inform programming language. There’s a great IF development app for the mac called Inform 7. It also handles version 6 of the language, which is the the version I’ve been toying around with just a little. I honestly have 0 ideas for an adventure game and even less control of the English language. But it’s fun to mess around with.

It’s kind of refreshing to play a text adventure game and let my mind fill in the pictures.