Results tagged “games”

Excitement filled our offices yesterday as Kazu Kibuishi delivered his final cover painting for Flight Seven. I love the Flight covers and every year its like Christmas morning when Kazu turns in his cover painting. In fact, Flight is a lot of Christmas mornings as I get the same giddy feeling when each artist submits their final stories. Flight Seven will be available in summer 2010 but you should check out the other six volumes if you haven’t had the chance to yet.

In other exciting news, Michel Gagné has teamed with FuelCell to create an animated game called Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. The game looks amazing and has an old school Defender and Asteroids sort of feel to it. But the real thrill is seeing Michel’s creations brought to life in stunning animation. Flight fans will thrill to this, as will casual video game players. Here’s the amazing trailer for the game!

Oops…seems like I did something silly and took the weekend off. Anyhow, here are two gatherings sure to attract crowds! So what’s to know about these two events? Here’s the run-down:

Gaming @ Comic-Con International

As if you needed further proof that Comic-Con is about more than just comics, there will be, once again, several areas set up for specific games, tournaments, and other forms of game play during the Con. Here’s what we know so far:

San Diego Convention Center, Mezzanine Level
10:00am - Midnight: Thursday, Friday, Saturday
10:00am - 4:00pm on Sunday

• Room 14AB : Pokémon TCGs
• Room 15A : Open gaming: Board games, card games, RPGs, LARPs, new game demos and play testing.
• Room 15B : Magic: The Gathering
• Room 16AB : Konami Digital Entertainment Play
• Room17A : Bandai Gaming Events
• Room 17B : San Diego Tekken: Electronic game console tournaments

Marriott Hotel Marina Ballroom EF : Magic: The Gathering, Star Wars Minis
9:00am - 2:30am: Thursday, Friday, Saturday
9:00am - 4:00pm on Sunday

Curious as to where these locations are located? Why don’t you check out Comic-Con’s Floor Map. It helps to be prepared.

Looking for gaming-specific programming? Then you might start by looking HERE.

Lately, I’ve been discovering the joy of casual & puzzle PC games, like Peggle, World of Goo, and PuzzleQuest. This weekend I downloaded an awesome one that I recommend to anyone who enjoys fun, quirky games that just make you laugh and still provide hours of play. It’s called Plants Vs. Zombies. I kept seeing great reviews of the game, but the boring screen shots made me skeptical. I downloaded the free demo and within 2 minutes of playing, I bought the game. It’s just that much fun. Check it out! Note: I bought the game for $9.99 on Steam.com yesterday… but am seeing it listed at $19.95 on the official game site today. Perhaps the game’s recent popularity has sent the price soaring?

Sometime in the mid to late nineties, mainstream video games left me behind. I wish I could say it was a gradual thing, like two entities slowly drifting apart, but no, it was sort of like being pushed out of the car on the way to a party. It seemed like everything was going hard core First Person Shooter or MMO and while I’m not here to knock those kinds of games, they just don’t do it for me. There’s a disconnect between us. Which is to say, I suck at them.

I’m one of those games who was weened on Mario and Zelda and just never quite developed a taste for the other stuff. 3-D games? Awesome, I guess, but if you really want to excite me, show me a side-scrolling platformer with juicier graphics. Don’t get me wrong, I tried to get into the next gen systems before. I bought a PS2 a while back, played games like Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, GTA 3, and Devil May Cry.

I tried, I really did, but by the end I was spending all my gaming time on ported game anthologies from the Atari and NES systems. And then I sold the PS2 and didn’t really give gaming much of a thought…until recently.

[read on after the jump]

I know we don’t talk about games as much as we could here, but I came across this game, by way of the Totally Rad Show, and had to share. Lately I’ve been addicted to my iPod games - Reversie, Klondike (or solitaire, for those who haven’t played the apple version), Tetris, and Vortex have become favorite things for me to do while listening to Book Radio. So, I’m into puzzle games. And if you are too, then I’ve got a great new game to kill off whatever productivity is left in your day for you to try.

The game is Auditorium and if you’re looking to kill time without even know you’re doing it, then this is your game. And guess what? It’s free to play.

So what’s it all about? Good question. This is a puzzle game that has the player using directional “lenses” to alter the path of light particles in order to fill up volume meters. You complete each level by filling up all the meters at the same time. By doing so, you also complete the melody that is playing. As I mentioned, the lenses are directional and you can grow and shrink them to alter the way that they reflect the light.

Gradually, color coded meters and more lenses are introduced. The color coded mirrors require you to filter the light through a similarly colored ring before you fill the meter, adding a layer of complexity to the proceedings. I haven’t played through the whole puzzle game, so I don’t know how many variations there are, but I have found a lens that swirls the light, allowing you to fill color coded meters that would otherwise be next to impossible to fill.

[more after the jump]

I have this friend we’ll call Nate.

Nate is a successful attorney who owns a home with a view of Puget Sound, has a cute girlfriend, two dogs, and volunteers for the organization Big Brothers Big Sisters. But Nate keeps a dark, ugly secret. He’s been playing D&D for years.

He’s the Dungeon Master for a group of six. He’s got more dice than all the storage rooms on the Vegas strip. His books go back to 1st edition. He still finds himself humming the theme song from the old D&D cartoon series. Yet no one, outside his group of six, knows he plays Dungeons & Dragons.

I know this about Nate only because he knows where I work and apparently feels safe divulging his secret to me. But Nate will not talk about D&D in public. If you call to ask him something about D&D and he is not alone, he will pretend you are a telemarketer and hang up on you. He keeps his D&D paraphernalia in a locked, fireproof filing cabinet. He keeps the key to said cabinet locked in another cabinet.

You might assume Nate’s non-D&D friends are reminiscent of the meathead jocks portrayed in a John Hughes movies from the ’80s. Will they give him a wedgie and scalpful of noogies if they find out his secret? Unlikely. His friends skip work to wait in line for The Dark Knight tickets. They debate (in the most gentlemanly and nonsexist way possible) the hotness factors of the women on Battlestar Galactica. They have been known to spend entire weekends “on tour” with their Rock Band. Yet, at the risk of being “exposed,” Nate once flipped an entire table over during his D&D game, sending minis, pencils and dungeon tiles soaring across his dining room and commanded everyone to “destroy the evidence!” because he thought he heard a car in the driveway.

“I don’t want anyone to know, okay?” he tells me.

Okay, I guess. But I have to ask. Which group looks weirder — the ones sitting around the dining room table talking or the ones standing on their sofas, playing plastic mini instruments, and pretending to be in Motorhead?

I know my view is skewed as I spend the bulk of my day with people who talk about, think about, and play D&D on a regular basis. At my office, people think you’re weird if don’t play D&D.

Didn’t Harry Potter make fantasy palatable to everyone? Are we not evolved enough as a society to concede Dungeons & Dragons is a perfectly acceptable hobby?

“Absolutely not!” Nate answers. “And if you’re writing about this, don’t forget I can and will sue you.”

If Nate is right, then more “Nates” are exactly what this hobby needs. Plenty of good people like Nate play D&D everyday. Tax paying, smart, socially conscious, well-mannered people! Why should what they do in their well-deserved spare time cause them embarrassment?

“What do you think will happen if someone found out you play D&D?” I asked Nate.

First he tells me to lower my voice. Then he admits, “They’ll treat me different. D&D is not a socially acceptable hobby.”

“Cannibalism, shooting cats with BB guns, and public urination are not socially acceptable,” I argued. “D&D is a game.”

But it was no use. Nate has actually broken out in hives over someone asking what he liked to do for fun. This saddens me, as Nate can’t be the only one out there experiencing game shame. But if he’s not willing to represent D&D players, someone else has to. Someone like me. That’s right. Me!

What would happen if I did all my normal activities and frequented my usual haunts while bringing my not-so-secret pastime to the people? Unlock your character sheets and dice, Nates of the world! Quit hiding in your bunkers of self-imposed shame! I will make the world a safer place for you!

I gathered up all the D&D gear I could find around the office and prepared to spend the next month literally wearing my hobby on my sleeve.

We had tons of shirts around the office, so I even sent a couple home to my parents.

“Oh honey,” Mom said, calling to thank me. “Do you really wear this? Outside?”

“I’m wearing it right now!” I told her. “I’m bringing D&D to the masses!”

This disturbs Judy a great deal, since she likes to believe I tromp around Seattle in Chanel suits and loafers.

“Couldn’t you just hand out those cute little pink dice?”

“Dragons aren’t supposed to be cute, Mom,” I tell her.

“Puff was cute,” she counters, and I concede. Puff was pretty adorable.

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