Quick update: Spore, EA shared content, and more to follow...

As I download Spore from the EA Online Store I figure I'll do a quick update on what I've been up to. I'll drill in more over the next few days.

These last few weeks have mostly been about social gaming on the one hand and GTA IV on the other. I must admit that I've really been loving GTA IV and can't wait to spend several more hours on it (hopefully today). 

Most of my social gaming has been on Facebook. I've already talked about Scramble and Wordscraper in previous posts. 

I've also been playing 2 "inferior" (at least in my mind) games simply because other friends play them and I can't convince them to make the switch. One is Word Twist, which I consider inferior to Text Twirl for the main reason that it doesn't force players to swap turns. This means that a player can blow through the game before any other player takes a turn. This makes the end-game less exciting (at least to me). The other is Word Challenge, which is a leaderboard game where you anagram words against a clock. The scoring convention is interesting and allows for some interesting risk-reward game play, but I think it's boring because there is no head-to-head competition. Well, there is... But I haven't tried it out yet because I prefer other games (and because I'm so far ahead of my friends they don't want to play me).

As I mentioned above, I'm currently downloading Spore. I have no idea whether I'll like it. The Creature Creator was fun to play with for a bit, but the novelty wore off as I started to crave actual  game play. What I'm most interested in is how Spore enters the social computing cloud of consciousness. With direct links to YouTube (and I've got to believe Facebook and MySpace) this game has potential to rock the SNS world.

EA seems to be pushing this idea very hard (and I'll bet effectively) with other franchises as well. I was cruising a Titans fan board and someone had posted links to movies of his favorite Madden 09 plays. Yep. The game offers players the ability to save and render out highlight films and then post them to the EA sharing site. The sharing site itself was pretty lame (no great way to surface additional/related content; no community rating system; etc) and it's a shame they didn't just partner with YouTube on this like Spore did. But it's a great step in the right direction for what people crave: Shared social content. Way to go EA!

These are, indeed, exciting times in the space of socially shared gaming experiences and content creation.

Oh yeah, I've been gaming... Wordscraper, Boom Bloxx, and GTA IV

I haven't posted in a while. I'm going to start getting back to it now that I've taken a brief break from work and a nice flurry of gaming over the past few days.

First, Wordscraper. I've been getting fewer Scramble, Wordscraper, and Word Twist
requests from friends so I decided to dig in to the "Blitz" version of the game. It's an online competitive solitaire version of Scrabble with some interesting twists. The initial board lay out is random which creates for an RTS-like experience where you scout the map and plot your strategy. The random set up of the game makes it so that you have to adjust your strategy each time. Do I create intricate cross hatches of words to take advantage of a nest of letter multiplier tiles? Do I rush out to the corners as quickly as possible to take advantage of a cluster of word multiplier tiles? Do I need to play a straight up game because there are very few bonus tiles at all? Very fun and very competitive. The rounds are 4 minutes meaning that an hour can disappear quickly.

My biggest pet peeves are:

• The board is puny. This makes it hard to place tiles accurately.
• There are too few keyboard shortcuts. I believe I talked about this elsewhere. Hopefully we'll get some more (especially a hot-key for tile swap).
• There is a serious bug (or flawed feature) in that the game seems to want to "intelligently" decide whether my first click on the board yields a down or across arrow. This is extremely frustrating especially near the end of the game when you want to jam in one last word and the game guesses wrong.

I haven't had a lot of time with GTA IV, but strangely enough I'm rather hooked. I really didn't care for any of the previous versions as I found driving to be frustrating and combat to be painfully awkward and unsatisfying. In addition to my frustration with previous GTA games, after playing a bunch of Crackdown (where I thought combat was over the top, driving was much better, and my character could do insanely interesting things) I figured there was no way I could go back to the more "realistic" GTA world.

I was wrong. I got sucked into the story line and visuals from moment one. This is happening more and more often these days -- I'm willing to forgive less exciting core combat for great story telling. The world is truly beautiful to drive around in (I play on my 100+" projection screen) and the cinematics are mostly worth watching. The writing, voice acting, and cinematic direction keeps me engaged in ways that Uncharted: Drake's Fortune did.

Moreover, the game has become much more accessible to the more linear minded gamer like myself. The addition of the GPS and an engaging main plot line has left me wanting more. As I get a bit better at combat, driving, and world navigation I'm starting to get antsy to just "screw around" in the world... Something that I loved to do in Crackdown (because my character was a super hero who was basically invincible) but never quite got in the previous GTA games.

Interestingly enough, my fiancee has been watching me play a bunch. We both laugh along to the story (not due to cheesiness, but due to actually humorous dialog and situations) and she loves just watching me drive around and act like a maniac.

Also, as with Crackdown, Liza likes to give me hints. This has happened with other puzzle type games (like Portal). Games that she has no desire to play (most likely due to fear of "sucking" because she doesn't consider herself a hard core gamer) but that would probably have fun playing if somehow the controls were made more accessible. Something to think about.

Finally (well, there are some demos to review, but I'll do that in a later post) I picked up Boom Bloxx. I played a bit of it with a friend and knew that I would want to play more. It's a great puzzle game that makes decent use of the Wii-mote. My main gripe is that the pushing/pulling of blocks is hard to execute with any precision. Maybe it's because of the way I'm sitting, but I seem to have to push or pull exceptionally far (and with an exceptionally steady hand) in order to push a block directly away from me or pull it directly towards me.

There's lots of fun content and puzzles. What I'm left to wonder is: Is this game actually worth the full retail price given the huge number of great free puzzle games online? I haven't explored much of the Wii Ware feature (and probably won't until there are free trial versions) but there's a ton of potential here.

Lots of demos... Lots of games: GTA IV, Alone in the Dark, Ticket to Ride, and (of course) WordScraper

I've been buried in games that I'm working on (which I can't talk about), but I have been trying some demos and am waiting on my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV from Gamefly.

Some games & demos to talk about in the future:

• Go! Go! Break Steady
• Alone in the Dark
• Ticket to Ride

I also need to talk more about my growing addiction to WordScraper "Live Mode". It's like the release version of Griddle in terms of addictiveness and I can't wait for the next round of polish.

Some tidying up: So long Jericho... Hello Ticket to Ride

I did some tidying up of my lists today.

New games I'm evaluating:

• Go! Go! Break Steady: This is a game that I want to like. It's a rhythm game like Parapa that has a Match-3 component as well. Unfortunately the initial experience (and especially the tutorial) were sub par and the visceral feel of the game is sub par when compared to other games (the explosions should feel meatier; the button presses during the rhythm game should provide more satisfying audio and rumble feedback). I'm going to try it again and jot down some more in depth thoughts in the future.
• Ticket to Ride: A fun German board game that I hadn't played yet. Tutorial and initial experience left a little to be desired and the board is somewhat hard to read even on a big screen. But the basic mechanics are fun and it had a strong enough achievement point tease to make me purchase the full version. I'm sure I'll get 10 or so hours out of it.
  

Demos I tried and rejected:

• Arkadian Warriors: It was an insanely fun hack and slash RPG. However, I really only wanted to play it co-op and I never had a chance to get a group of us together so I gave up on it.
• Geometry Wars Evolved 2: I always liked the idea of Geometry Wars, but found the achievements to be too hard core. Achievements seem similarly hard core for the newest version. Moreover, even though a bunch of game variants have been added, you don't get to try any of them as a part of the try-before-you-buy experience. Can't try it, won't buy it.
  

Games I'm done with:

• Clive Barker's Jericho: I liked the demo, but the game just isn't exciting enough and the game play is rather mediocre. If the story was a little deeper and stronger I might have been able to hack my way through it (like I did with Darkness).
• Eternal Sonata: The new combat mechanics were kind of interesting (if inscrutable at first). However, the story and characters turned me off in ways that made the game hard for me to enjoy.
  

WordScraper User Created Content: It's not always sporn...

So, a group on Facebook now hosts a place where people can upload screenshots and links to custom Word Scraper boards that they have created.

To the left is one of the cooler screenies that I saw posted. Yes, it's probably not fun to play, but it is a fine example of user generated content that is deviant in a prosocial way. While I saw Word Scraper as a tool to iterate on game design ideas, someone else saw it and said "hey, this would be a great way to send a creative greeting message to a friend who loves Scrabble." It's a great example of how successful games and social utilities allow people to approach them with their own set of expectations, preferences, and play styles. For most Word Scraper players, it will afford them only one use: A way to play Scrabble with friends. But for people who are interested in contributing their own game and social content, it provides an engine that allows these folks to pursue other goals.

Now I'm off to Word Scraper again... I'm trying to figure out the correct color and placement of tiles to make a large phallus board that I can send to my friends ;)