Ten months ago on a whim, I went into Best Buy and bought an Nintendo DS, an investment that has repaid itself in full and then some. The little handheld has kept me occupied on long flights, long bus trips, long weekends at home, sometimes long waits while organizing for another online game.
And it works because the console features fun little games that don’t take long to play. In particular, they started this free WiFi service a few months back, and I’ve been a fan of online play ever since, especially amazing coming from such a small machine. The game I’ve been keeping myself occupied with is none other than the classic Tetris DS.
Tetris is fun and challenging to begin with, but multiplayer brings a whole other dimension to the game. We had tried a few matches in the Factset offices complete with teams, handicaps and level-changing items; great fanatic fun for all, really. Online play takes it to yet another level, where one can play against the world in the comfort of one’s bed, whilst camping in the bathroom, or trying to make packaged ramen (note: neither the game nor the noodles will tolerate pausing in the middle of their respective tasks).
More thoughts in the next post, I’ll try to keep them somewhat short to avoid glazing eyes.
Texas Hold ‘em – one of the many varieties of poker, probably the most popular one, subject of friends’ gatherings as well as professional tournaments, and in last week’s case, an after-hours get-together in the office. I know the basic rules, but was interesting seeing how more experienced players play the game.Hold ‘em is one of those games where luck is a major factor, but player skill has enough influence such that over long periods of time, skill overcomes luck and classes of “good” and “bad” players emerge. It’s interesting since all the player controls is the amount to bet on the table: all the factors that determine how well a player plays can be distilled into the two random cards in his hand and money he puts down each game, yet good players will be able to determine intentions, strategies, and skill from that alone.
So recently, I’ve been playing this one game – Titan Quest – courtesy of the $1 Manager’s Special at CompUSA, which unfortunately ended 2 hours after it started much to the dismay of a few friends trying to get on the deal; I guess managers caught on to the fact that a newly released game shouldn’t be sold for $0.98.
Anyway, the game turns out to be pretty interesting and addictive despite its simplicity. It’s of the Action RPG variety: it’s similar to the classic Diablo, where your main task is to explore a huge world, left-click and attack monsters till they die, then pick up their remains (their possessions, not their carcasses). As you progress through the game, your character gets progressively more powerful, and you get better equipment from vendors and the aforementioned dead monsters, so that you can continue on and fight even more monsters, presumably more powerful as well.
Sounds stupid and repetitive, right? That’s what I figured too before I played an action RPG, figuring that the lack of storyline, meaningful characters or events, and interactive worlds would relegate the game back to the shelf.
Everybody knows Uno – that game you played as a kid with a huge stack of cards (remember trying to shuffle that thing?) with a bunch of friends, where you take turns stacking cards on top one another following rules on value or color, and the player who discards all his cards wins. Simple, intuitive, and Draw 4 Wilds ensured kids developed early rivalries.
It eventually fell out of favor for more sophisicated card games that employed more strategy and probably involved money as well (and if you’re a dork like me, you bought and played with Magic: the Gathering cards). Eventually, the only time you ever played this clever little game was with your 7-year-old cousins.
Sometimes the most exciting things turn out to be the simplest. Lately, two very simple yet surprisingly satisfying games have threatened my thumbs with crippling arthritis: Tetris DS and Grid Wars. I can’t quite put my finger on what makes both games so addictive.
The other game, Grid Wars, is a copy of an XBox Live game Geometry Wars. It almost feel like Asteroids on steroids – you have one little ship with a lot of firepower, and polygons of all shapes and sizes chasing after you on a rippling blue grid. Particles and polygon bits are flying all over the place, so you hold up on the controller and hope that your ship can squeeze through that tiny little gap between 30 enemy pieces and escape to freedom.
Wow…that sounded more like a review or the back of the game box than an honest personal opinion. It’s interesting to see how these relatively simple games are just as, if not more, attractive than some of the complicated games that they release nowadays.
Since that impulsive night when I sped off to Bestbuy and bought a Nintendo DS for the heck of it, I’ve been able to convince six other people to invest their time and money on one of their own, and in the process given my girlfriend something to distract herself from her mostly meaningless last semester as a MCB major.
As it turns out, there’s a semi-underground homebrew community for the DS as well, although it’s not as famous as the PSP community. What is homebrew? It’s the idea of unlocking a piece of hardware’s potential (usually without the consent of its creator), then using it as an open-source platform for the user’s own applications and programs. Of course, one of the side effects of unlocking hardware is doing away with the security of said hardware and the ability to run pirated games on the system.
One of my friends got pretty intrigued with the idea of homebrew and came up with his own little addon to the community, DSLua, some sort of easy-to-use scripting language that makes the creation of DS games easier. Apparently he chose Lua because the PSP has a similar development tool – PSPLua – which people have been making pretty cool games out of.
Ah, free software.
Ten months ago on a whim, I went into Best Buy and bought an Nintendo DS, an investment that has repaid itself in full and then some. The little handheld has kept me occupied on long flights, long bus trips, long weekends at home, sometimes long waits while organizing for another online game.
