On the road again (and again...) and some self-promotion

I haven't been able to play much in the way of traditional gaming since, oh, the end of April because I've been pretty much constantly on the road.

Two weeks were all about fun and games -- my wedding and honeymoon -- but the remaining weeks have been bouncing around Chicago and Eugene (OR) working for a client with a game shipping this holiday. Oh, and then there was E3 week in L.A. But that was mostly a family visit.

In the mean time, I had a couple of panels accepted at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle this summer. The first part is going to be a joint presentation by some awesome folks who have worked on a variety of casual and board games (including the inventor of Pandemic... How cool is that?). I'll be talking about my work on Catan for XBLA. The second panel will be a brief interactive workshop on how to improve your own on-site usability/focus testing. I'm super excited about putting this together with my co-panelists.

What I have been able to do is experiment with "microgaming" in the form of Twitter games. I can't say I've found the killer app, yet, but I'm guessing that there will eventually be some sort of microgame that captures my fancy to the same extent Scramble has on Facebook.

The Twitter game I'm playing most is called BeatMyTweet. It's basically an anagram name (a genre I love) where @BeatMyTweet sends out an anagram every 15 minutes and people RT @BeatMyTweet the answer. A link to results (people are ranked by time of correct RT) is tweeted and takes you to the host website. Not the best game in the world -- and I'd probably have dropped it by now if I weren't a fiend for anagrams -- but not a bad start. Some issues:

• Limited dictionary. Seems like the same words come up fairly frequently.
• Limited leaderboards. It's hard for an infrequent player like me to keep up with folks who are glued to their PCs or cellphones all day. I need contextual leaderboards that show me how I'm doing relevant to similar others. Unfortunately the current leaderboards only display top 5 players and there's no way to drill in further to see how I'm doing.

I've also tried Spymaster which is basically a Mafia Wars knockoff for Twitter. The level of visual polish is high, although it does suffer from some UI annoyances. Unfortunately this is just not my kind of game -- and it is far too spammy for my liking. I hate cluttering up others' feeds with some silly messages from my game. I figure my Facebook friends will tolerate occasional game feed updates (and can block them specifically without blocking me) but my Twitter followers will likely drop me if I send too many spammy messages their way.

My hope is to find a Twitter game that is compelling enough that it drives me back more often to consume interesting data from the Twittersphere and (hopefully) pipe more interesting updates out to my followers, much the same way that taking my Scramble and Backgammon turns currently drive my Facebook behavior.

I'm a swinger: Pandemic, FEAR 2 Demo, Left 4 Dead MP, Bejeweled 2

I've had a chance to do a bunch of "brief" gaming over the past couple of days. There were highs and lows and in-betweens. I dealt with my biggest "low" in a previous post re: Sonic Chronicles (the DS game by Bioware).

Some of the highs and interestings:

Pandemic is a great co-op board game. There are many things that this game does well, but I think that the key things it executes on are: 

• Vicissitude: The game plays like one imagines a real pandemic might play out -- lots of ups and downs, some randomness that never seems arbitrary or unfair, and a constant feeling of tension.
• Flow: Unlike many competitive turn based board games, the fact that players are constantly engaged and working together means that you're always "in the game".
• Accessibility: I can't remember a board game that had such instant appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike. I still remember the first night of game play (over New Years) when I was listening to people play (a mix of gamers and non-gamers). The non-gamers were the first to chime in with "Can we play again?" after they'd watched the world succumb to pandemic.

The FEAR 2 demo had its ups and downs. On the plus side, I love the IP and the feel of the world. 

• The initial experience was very well polished: Creepy, engaging, and it taught me the game play basics in an engaging and entertaining way.
  
• Controls seemed a little overly complex. But I'd recently been playing Fallout 3 (as a small arms gunner) and Left 4 Dead, so I did expect a learning (and unlearning) curve.
• I also appreciated their Game Shell UI: It had a nice flow that only a few other games have used. First it helped me calibrate my display screen (it's a dark game, so it needs to be optimized based on display device -- CRT, Projector, LCD, TV, etc). Second, it had helpful descriptive labels for difficulty settings (self-reported behavior) to help players get into the right experience.
• My main dislike is that I don't like the way my character moves. I can't remember if there was the sense of gravity and inertia in the original (I played it a bit on the PC). But it's distracting and even slightly nauseating to me -- and I can't turn it off or reduce it. I like a little bit of loping/head bobbing (I think Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay got it right) or using some gravitational force/drag when my character is injured, but I think it was ratcheted up a little too high for default running around. Felt almost like Conker when he woke up hungover and unable to move. Frustrating.
• I'm torn re: health packs. I thought I never wanted to see them again after playing a bit of Call of Duty 3 (rest and recover model) and then trying Resistance: Fall of Man (old school med kits). However, games like Left 4 Dead remind me that health packs can add to the experience.

I then jumped into Left 4 Dead to play some MP. Basically I wanted to find out what it was like to play as a zombie. True to most Valve games, there was a ton of depth and a myriad of cool things to explore from the zombie side of things. The stats were detailed so as to make the scoring system transparent -- although I still never really grasped how team points really worked. 

One of the coolest parts of playing as a zombie (other than vomiting, strangling, and otherwise tormenting survivors) is that you get to see the game through several different sets of fresh eyes:

• As director: You get a glimpse of the "set" from behind the scenes. You see the "actors" (the survivors) doing their thing and fade more into the background. It's really quite surreal and often it is quite fun to just watch the action unfold while waiting to respawn.
• As a study in AI: You have goals (kill survivors, score points, retribution) and abilities (climbing, moving, attack, special). The level is seeded with various grippy UI (where undead can climb and go); closed doors are marked as "breakable"; and you can see silhouttes of your various conspirators and the survivors. I couldn't help but try to deconstruct how AI bots must "see" the level and pursue their "goals" because many of the in-game UI elements seemed like debug tools (albeit with a fine sheen of visual polish) to study and optimize AI behavior.

I kind of wish I could play as the zombies against an entire AI party of survivors. maybe the survivor AI hasn't been optimized for "leaderless" level progression, but still it would be cool to see (although I concede it may not be fun to play).

I finished the night off with some XBLA Bejeweled 2. I've written about my love-hate relationship with Bejeweled Blitz (Facebook) elsewhere, but I basically just wanted to check out the mechanics on the Xbox controller and see if I couldn't learn some more strategies by being able to take turns > 1 minute in length.

As it turns out, Bejeweled isn't very fun to play with the Xbox controller. It's hard to quickly move your selector to a place of interest and there are aiming issues (I often moved a gem the wrong direction by mistake) which makes the game very different, strategically speaking, from the tightly time-constrained FB version. 

I also think that playing on my projector made the game harder to play because I had to physically turn my head to see parts of the board instead of being able to take the whole board in at a glance on the PC monitor-sized version.

That said, it was still a relaxing game to play. I had fun trying to cheese out some Achievements even though I didn't really learn any new strats.

New Year: Need new updates...

I'm sitting in between two vacations (one in Kamloops, BC; one in Maui, HI). I haven't made enough time to blog lately, but I have been gaming.

Here are some of the games I've been playing that I really need to write about soon:

• Fallout 3
• Bejeweled Blitz
• World of Goo (PC demo)
• Crayon Physics Deluxe (PC demo)
• Meteos (DS)

I've also been listening to groups of friends as they play Pandemic -- an immensely popular co-op board game.

And, of course, there are several "best of" lists that I've been paying attention to:

• Gamasutra's best of 2008
• IGF 2009 finalists
• Joystiq's meta-metareview of 2008 releases