I'm playing and working, but not thinking and writing...

I've been swamped with work lately (the kind I can't blog about) and will continue to be swamped for the next week or so. Then, hopefully, I'll come back up for air and do some more posting.

What have I been playing lately?

• South Park (XBLA) trial version. It's a tower defense game with some co-op components. My initial experience was "meh" but I think I want to try it co-op with Liza to see whether that is where it shines.
• Defense Grid: Awakening (XBLA). I started out quite liking the game and still do enjoy playing it. It's a little hard to pick up and play after letting it sit for a couple of weeks (unit recognition and ID is difficult at default zoom; maps are getting pretty big and unwieldy given the camera limitations). But I'm going to keep going.
• Lucidity (XBLA) trial version. Think Braid but with time pressure right from moment one. The initial challenge ramp is just a little too steep for me to truly enjoy the game -- and this makes me worry because if the game only gets harder it will quickly become too difficult for me to play. I like the music, mood, art direction, and style of game play. I just want to be able to relax and enjoy it a bit more.
• Need for Speed: Shift demo. It actually kind of sucked me in even though I don't get into sim racers. I should actually talk a bit about why this demo was much more compelling to me than the Forza 3 demo. I should also talk a little bit about their more "casual" control options.
• Lots of Scramble, Wordscraper. Some Sorority Life and Cafe Wars (for Facebook).
• de Blob. This is a pretty relaxing Wii game that I'm going to spend some more time with. Some elements of Katamari Damacy with other more Nintendo like games involving cleaning and painting.
• Nancy Drew: Mystery of the Clue Bender Society. It's a DS game that I've been meaning to check out. I really enjoyed one of the latest ND games (a more "casual" release) but haven't enjoyed the core PC offerings and am not really enjoying the DS game.

I've been getting a lot of use from my Raptr account. I actually need to add my Wii account to it as I almost forgot about my de Blob sessions. What I'm most excited about is that now that I'm about to descend into a mostly PS3 zone with the upcoming release of Uncharted 2 and Ratchet & Clank. I'll still be able to track and share my progress with friends -- most of whom are primarily Xbox users. Thank you, Raptr.com for integrating pretty well into my existing social network flow.

What else am I looking forward to playing, thinking, and writing about?

• The "Top 20 up and coming Facebook games". I'm curious to see what these social games have going for them.
• Some previous games that I've worked on. I really need to get a couple of presentations together based on the learn-to-play tutorials I've co-designed. Because these games are published I can talk about what we learned, what we did, and how to turn these learnings and doings into best practices. It will also give me a chance to play around some more with video-capture tech I've been sitting on for a while.

Questing for Jewels: Jewel Quest 2 (retail) and Jewel Quest Mysteries (30 min trial)

So, I don't think these are the most recent incarnations of the Jewel Quest games, but they were all I had installed on my laptop during my SEA->AUS flight. I did have the GotY edition of Galactic Civilizations 2 in my bag... but the bag was in checked baggage.

This isn't to say I dislike object matching games. Not at all. I love them. I just think that the bar is quite high in terms of nailing core game play, feel, and level of polish. I was hopelessly addicted to Puzzle Quest  on XBLA and I am hopelessly addicted to Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook. 

I picked up JQ2 and Jewel Quest Mysteries on the Amazon.com/games site (I talked about the site and download/install process in a separate post).

For free games (one was free retail; the other was a free 30 minute trial) they were pretty decent. Some feedback on both follows.

Jewel Mysteries 30 minute trial:

This game included a bunch of different puzzle solving mini games, but was mostly a "find the object" pixel hunter game. I have been known to enjoy a good "find the object" game (I recently reviewed Nancy Drew Dossier: Lights, Camera, Curses) and enjoy games that have a variety of puzzles and challenges to mix it up a bit.

I did have a few quibbles with this game, though.

First question: Why the 30 minute trial? I wonder why any "mission" or "level" based games would use a time cutoff instead of a progression cutoff (e.g., you get the first 2 missions and a tutorial). I felt stressed out the whole time that the game was going to end before I really had a chance to explore the available content. 

The learn as you play hint system was a little overbearing. Modal popups that require a confirmation break up the flow of the game and are unnecessary except in the most dire failure cases. What this makes players do is click the "no more help" option box which means that they won't receive help when they actually do need it. Game mechanics should be discoverable through game play, game feedback, and UI element behavior. Even more frustating was the fact that the hints were not contextual: The "Find 3 Gold Coins  for an Extra Hint" prompt came up 2 minutes into the game and had nothing to do with the task I was working on. Why not wait for me to discover a Gold Coin and then give me the hint... Or just bubble up "1 of 3" to tease me to find out what 2 more get me.

The one example where a modal popup did make sense was when I made 3 clicks in a row in error. The game warned me that I was penalized every time I make three erroneous clicks. That said, this might have been done more gracefully via some sort of non-modal "bubble up" text "Strike 1..." accompanied with a punishment sound/visual. At "Strike 3...." there could be a nice animation and message that shows the time penalty deduction. The other problem was that the sound feedback for an invalid click was so subtle that I often didn't realize the click registered and thus clicked multiple times getting multiple strikes without realizing it. 

The initial "find the object" puzzle was too hard. It took forever to find the thermometer (which looked like a cell phone to me, see my note below) so, most of my trial version time was spent being frustrated. 

NOTE: It is puzzling to me why one would choose a non-stereotypical thermometer art asset in the game. Seems to me that you could easily test how recognizable certain art assets are via online survey and then use the most prototypical exemplars as game pieces.

Some other issues with the "find the object" game mode:

• I knew there was a hint mode and I could unlock it using coins. But I couldn't find the third coin required. On the plus side, while trying to figure out where it was, I somehow discovered that I could look at other maps to try and find coins and solve puzzles. However, once I got the coins, they seemed to disappear. I pressed the "empty lightbulb" on the top right of the screen (seems a likely "hint" icon, right?) and got a penalty strike assessed against me (whoops). I thought I wasted my coins. Then I noticed "Specials". Not "Hints" but "Specials". I pressed it and a spot glowed on the screen. I didn't see a thermometer there -- but I did see what I thought was a cell phone. I pressed Specials again (casting my second and final Special) and the same space glowed. I touched the "phone" thinking it must be a "special" item to pick up. Guess what. It was a thermometer. Only 6 "hint" coins wasted. Sigh.
• The jewel matching minigame was a little sub par compared to the great freely available versions. It felt a little flat in terms of visuals and sound effects and the actual swapping mechanic was not as slick and smooth as Bejeweled. The jewel matching minigame felt way too easy compared to the "find the object" game. I'm not sure how best to calibrate difficulty in these games, but I'm not sure they were set correctly (one was too hard; one was too easy). 
• The "upgrade screen" seemed pretty hard core to me. It included some second order unlocking rules that you needed to learn. The basic gist of the upgrades was to bolster your weaknesses (suck at object find, take extra hints; suck at jewel match, start with some squares already completed) so that if you get stuck/don't like a certain kind of puzzle you can cheat your way through it by grinding your way through other puzzles. I'm all in favor of having deep systems that improve user experience -- but there's only so much "under the hood" wrangling most players will want to do. 
• The puzzle assembly game (place different sized objects onto a puzzle board so that they fit together correctly) was a little hard core for the first time player. The mechanics were cool, but took a few moments to figure out. A more obvious first puzzle would have been less jarring.

I didn't get much further because -- BAM -- midway through clicking an item on my screen, the screen went black and I was kicked out and given an upsell option. It seems (to me) like it would be a better experience to give players a section of content (say 5-10% of the total game) that they could play however they liked for as long as they liked. If the game was fun enough, people would buy it for the additional content.

Jewel Quest 2 

I think I've already blogged a little about this game during my original Amazon.com/games post. Anyhow, I played a bit more of it when my Jewel Quest Mysteries demo expired. It's pretty good, but not quite state of the art in terms of gem matching games anymore.

 

I love the interesting rules and jewel variants that get layered on as the game progresses. However, the learning curve seems to be a bit steeper than necessary. I didn't expect to lose a life on the second board. I wonder if part of the difficulty of launching a sequel is that you don't want to bore your core audience who are ready for a steeper curve and more challenging puzzles off the bat. Seems to me like this would be a great opportunity to include old content as a "learn-to-play" mode to ease newbies -- or folks who want to start at a more leisurely pace -- into the game.

 

Also, I'll never understand why some of these kinds of games don't have a "free flow" jam mode where you can just play the basic mechanics over and over again and never die (if you just want to match gems) or include several different time attacks so that you can quickly jump in a game that fits the length of your gaming break.

The game did include a Tournament mode, but hid it behind scary descriptive text: "Challenge players from around the world". I only thought to try it after this review (to see if it included some sort of free low jam that I referred to in the previous comment). Note that I would NOT have just checked it out on my own -- too scary. I don't generally like playing games with strangers.

Turns out that this game play mode is completely asynchronous. You just complete puzzle modes and your score is compared head-to-head against the score of someone who has already played the game. It was actually kind of interesting.

More compelling (in my opinion) would be to have included some live leaderboard data in the game shell that would have let players know that they can compare against other players if they want to. Leaderboards (especially if they contain cool info like "top scores from France") are much more approachable than a "Tournament" or "Challenge Players" mode.

 

A couple of usability issues emerged with the game:

• The hover/mouseover feedback is too subtle, which resulted in me making swapping errors. This is super frustrating when you're operating in a challenging area of the puzzle and have spent a bunch of time lining up the jewels just right -- only to blow it by mistakenly clicking the wrong tile. I actually wasted a "special" by mistakenly targeting the wrong square. Adding a more noticeable (but still pleasant) sound, some gravitational pull, and a visual pulse/bulge would go a long way to prevent this issue from happening.
  
• The other frustrating part is the "final countdown alarm" that happens when your timer is almost at zero. It isn't apparent how many ticks/seconds there are left before Game Over once the alarm goes off. This makes it hard to decide whether to keep pushing forward to solve the last few spots or to spend your specials. I spent a special when the timer lit up as I didn't want to risk losing the game. But if I had 30 seconds before time ran out, I would have tried to complete the game myself for 25 or so seconds before resorting to my special.
  

One kind of "freaky user experience" note:

 

I was playing the game on the plane with my noise cancelling headset on. On one of the levels there is some tribal music and a bunch of voices chanting and arguing in the background. I kept turning my head to see what all the fuss was about before realizing it was just the game.

Freaky.

Guitar Hero: World Tour and Left 4 Dead

It was a weekend of high profile titles: One new IP (Left 4 Dead) and one sequel (GH: 4).

Left 4 Dead is an example of a game that is built for co-operative play from the ground up. Notice even that the top option on the Start Menu is to play the co-op campaign. Second option: MP. Third option: Single Player game.

I haven't played with strangers yet (or MP variants), but so far the game has been a blast. Nail biting suspense, tactical depth that makes the game challenging and fun, and decent bots to substitute for when you don't have enough friends online and don't want to play with strangers.

When you get to spend 3 years loving, crafting, and building a game that -- at its core -- is based on an extremely fun premise (co-op survival horror vs. zombies) and you are committed to iterative design, you have an opportunity to deliver a powerful and polished experience. Valve has done just that.

Guitar Hero: World Tour is a game I'd been meaning to pick up for a while. I've written about the "flow" that I've experienced on a couple of occasions while playing Rock Band with friends and I wanted to study that a bit more. The initial experience was daunting and not really optimized for a more "newb" like myself... But once I got going I definitely got sucked in and I can't wait to play some more.

I'll have more specific comments and updates as I dive deeper into both of these games. I also have 2 DS games on the way (I'll be traveling a bunch, so I figured I should): 

• Sonic Chronicles (the Bioware RPG starring Sonic)
• Nancy Drew: Mystery of the Clue Bender Society (I want to see how these games translate to other platforms)

Lego Batman... Finally got around to it.

I'm wondering if the novelty has worn off of the Lego series. I find this hard to believe as I still just love (love) busting objects and collecting blocks/bolts/what-have-you.

Lego Batman promises more of the same goodness that Lego Starwars delivered in spades. They've taken a few lessons from Ratchet & Clank, which I think is a great idea given that this game is more about gadgets than about swapping heroes (if it was "Lego DC Heroes" then they could have had more emphasis on hero swapping). The Batcave seems very similar to some platform areas in the various Ratchet & Clank games; the magnetic boots (and winding metal paths) are clearly a tribute to the R&C goodness.

Maybe I'm not excited enough by the IP to forgive the Lego series' flaws... Or maybe some of the flaws are exacerbated in this version. I'm just not that compelled to continue on:

• Movies seem longer and not as good as the Starwars versions.
• Geared towards more hard core/experienced players (easier to fall to death early on; combat difficulty is a little challenging for the first 2 levels).
• Severe level design x camera interactions that make for cluttered/obstructed game play.

I wonder if I'm also a little bit sad that the combat system is so shallow. I've been playing a lot of action and action RPG games where more than just button mashing is required and I feel like my combat options in this game aren't that exciting. Pair this with the fact that the default gadget (boomerang) is not very easy to use in combat, I feel like it doesn't really matter what I do in combat -- just don't hit Y (switch by mistake) or hold X (go into boomerang mode).

I also wish there was a little more gravitational pull for the blocks -- I think I've become spoiled by other games where the essences released by a player's desctructive actions are automagically scooped up (instead of requiring me to run everywhere to try and pick some random block up).

No big surprise, but the UI and game shell menus could use some work.

• The classic "binary option; both of which look highlighted" problem (one is in yellow text; the other is in blinking white text).
• Jargonistic terms in the settings pages ("adaptive difficulty") and missing contextual text when having to choose upgrades (what the heck is "silhouette mode"?)

Considering that I've now basically spent $25 on it (2 months on loan from Gamefly) I should probably return it in favor of the next two games in my Q (two DS games: The Sonic rpg and a Nancy Drew game).

Time to dust off the blog-webs... Light, Camera, Curses!

I just completed the recently released Nancy Drew: Lights, Camera, Curses game. It was available on Big Fish Games as one of Her Interactive's first "casual" releases on the portal.

All in all it was a pretty fun game. Good production values, well polished visuals, interesting art direction. Moreover, there were definitely some additional affordances (like skipping ahead in dialog trees, more mouseover text, balanced for non hardcore Drew fans) than in the recent box copy releases.

That said, I have circled a few areas for improvement:

• Minigames were a little outdated and could have used some usability polish. Some of the mini games had confusing UI elements (like which block is going to be dropped next; where will the block land). Controls did not feel that responsive. The minigames seemed dated because I've played more polished versions of them already.
• Game shell UI needed some work. The options screen could have used some more friendly descriptive text (what's the difference between "fullscreen 1" and "fullscreen 2"). The main in-game menu (where you review progress) had a hidden tabbed menu system that I didn't figure out until I was almost finished the game.
• Laptop support is needed. There was no "low battery" indicator and the game doesn't work well with mousepad and standard laptop RB controls.

This is really the kind of game that I would like to play on a mobile device (DS, iPhone, etc). I look forward to future versions.

As an aside, I have a bunch of gaming housekeeping to do:

• I finished Fallout 3. The ending was kind of lame, so by "finished" I mean I finally reached level 20. I'll download the DLC and play some more. As much as I hate the fact that it took me about 10 hours to get into the game, I ended up really liking it.
• I have a metric ton of demos that I have downloaded and I need to try and write about.
• Liza and I also tried out the Wii Fit the other day. I need to start playing it more and probably blogging about the results. At the very least I need to describe our initial experience. 
  

Pre-birthday housekeeping...

I have a bunch of things to write about after a week away:

• I finished the New Super Mario Bros (for DS). And as a comparison I watched an 8 year old kid play 30 minutes of Wall-E for the DS.
• I played a bunch of Nancy Drew Dossier - Lights, Camera Curses (PC - Casual). I also went through the download and install from the Big Fish Games portal site.
• I watched Liza play a bunch of Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy (PC - Core).
• It would be nice to finish Dead Space and play a bit more Midnight Club.
• Oh, and there are a bunch of downloadable demos on my 360 that I need to play already.

Lots of gaming and notes to follow!