2007: The Year in Gaming

How's this for a belated blog entry. I should have written this one in December.

Now it's time to discuss the year in gaming. First of all, here is what I wrote in 2006.

Let's break this down by category:


Board (and card) games:

For one thing, I played Ticket to Ride correctly for the first time. I enjoyed the game both with the correct way of playing and with the incorrect one, and I was even still able to apply graph theory intuition when playing it correctly. I'd like to get a UK edition of the game because I've been on several of the routes now.

I also played the British Isles Edition of Apples to Apples, which contains a mixture of cards that could be in any version of the game and some that are specialized for this one. Among the latter, I now understand a few things but most of them are still almost completely lost on me. Obviously, this game is awesome.

Another expansion I tried is the Dunwich Horror Expansion to Arkham Horror, which makes the game even more complicated/involved than it was before. One new featured that I very much appreciated was the opportunity to develop psychological problems when one runs out of brains unless automatically going to Arkham Asylum. Mmmmm... braaaaaaaains.

Speaking of braaaaaaains, I also played the non-zombie version of Fluxx. One way to describe this---who was the person who described it this way? It wasn't me...---is as 1000 Blank White Cards with rules. It was extremely fun, even without the zombies.

Another card game I played is Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot, which is an expandable card game. It is like the game Nuclear War, except with bunnies. The game dragged on the couple of times I played it, and I wonder if some of the expansions help.

I also tried Blokus this year. That was pretty fun.

I'm sure there are other board/card games I tried for the first time this year. Some of them that I have tried pretty recently are coming to mind, but I'm pretty sure that all of those date from 2006 or earlier.


Role-playing games:

Let's see... I played in two one-shots in March when we visited Mylanda in Florida. I played a somewhat monkly kobold (though he actually had one level each in three different classes) in a D & D game. I'd really like to spend a lot more time playing as this character (which I was really getting into), but given the game's one-shot nature, that probably won't happen. My die rolls when creating the stats for this character were just about the best rolls I've ever seen. The other one-shot was a Serenity game that Zifnab ran. (Mike)^2 was able to participate via video iChat, and this was done in quite a clever manner. (We were the field team and he was back at the ship. It worked quite well, though I think my feet occasionally got in the way of my laptop's camera.)

After I got to Oxford, I played in a Vampire game without vampires. We used the psychic powers expansion book, and my character specialized in seeing and interacting with dead people. The setting was contemporary Oxford and it was interesting to play in a world that was basically my current world with a fantastical twist. I believe that there will be a sequel to this minicampaign at some point.


Console games:

I played Guitar Hero II for the first time in January when I visited Travis and worked up my skill level from needing to play even the early songs at easy to being able to pass Freebird at medium. (I had seen the game before but hadn't played it, and I had played a total of one or two songs on the original Guitar Hero.) I also spent a bunch of time playing this in Pasadena and its environs at various times throughout the rest of the year. When I visited Travis again in August, we worked our way through Guitar Hero: Rock the 80s, although only a few of the songs were ones I really liked. (Unfortunately, they didn't include too many new wave songs. I did, however, find out just how much knowing a song really well helps one with this game.)

More recently, I played a lot of Rock Band when I visited the gang in December and January. The guitar stuff was more of the same (though it was cool to play using the spiffy perky goth guitarist who I designed), and I was trying to make the transition from medium to hard (which I am finding to be extremely difficult!). I can do some songs on hard with effort, and I can now actually get 100% on some songs in medium, which is quite a far cry from where I was in January 2007. The rest of the gang is much better than I am, but I'm happy with improving my ability compared to what I was before. It doesn't matter how I compare with other people. Playing the drums was really fun, and I am currently making headway through the songs on medium level. As I wrote in a separate blog entry a while back, the thing that makes Rock Band special is rocking out with ones friends. That's what I liked best about the game. I wouldn't get close to as much out of it playing on my own.

I got my Wii in 2007, so I've spent some time with a few of those games. I did some Wii sports, which is basically a tech demo. It serves it's purpose, however. My favorite game on it is tennis, and the boxing game is quite exhausting (especially when one is punching madly before the game actually starts! Oops...). Making a Mii is pretty cool as well. Mine actually resembles me quite a bit, and my collection now includes Miis that several of my students (and a few of my colleagues) have made. I tried Rayman Raving Rabids, which has lots of minigames. There was one that I just couldn't handle at all (sometimes, one has to just recognize that something isn't working), but watching others play the game and the associated sense of humor was a pretty fun diversion. But there were only a couple of minigames that was interested in actually playing.

I have now beaten the boss in Super Paper Mario, though I still want to do the pipe of 100 battles (or whatever its called) and the 100 consecutive battles against the Samar people (I died at the 90th battle yesterday... bloody Hell!). As with prior games in the series, this one has an excellent sense of humor. Also, Mario's special 3D ability is awesome and the allusions to things like Flatland (the first world is called "Lineland" and, for instance, has fake mathematical equations in the background), nerd culture (Francis is awesome), and more were really great! I'm also almost done with Zelda: Twilight Princess. I'm on the final boss battle (which I tried once and failed), and I plan to do the Cave of Ordeals after that. It's not a huge jump over recent Zelda games, but there were some very clever additions (like Spiderlink and the ball-and-chain weapon). My copy of Super Mario Galaxy arrived, but I haven't technically tried it yet. I will soon. Also on the docket (finally!) is Super Smash Brothers Brawl, which will arrive pretty soon after its layover in Pasadena.

I tried a bunch of console games and a couple of card games at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX). (See my old blog entry on that.) It's not really worth getting into the various details because there would be too much to write to cover all the things I tried. I beat one of the designers at an incomplete version ('You can't play as that monster yet.') of a Godzilla game for the Wii. That game wasn't very good, but I pretty much just tried it because it was there. Another of the many games I tried was a Wii version of ping pong, which I had previously tried for the XBOX 360. I prefer playing in real life.


Portable games:

I also played a couple of Nintendo DS games, and I am eagerly anticipating playing the DS version of N+, which I tried at PAX for a different system and which was most recently slated to come out two days ago. (I plan to pick it up while I'm in LA, assuming it's actually come out.) I have done a bit of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, although I have lately been concentrating on my console games. I also played some Puyo Pop Fever (Did I actually buy this in 2006? I don't remember anymore.), whose computer players are ludicrously challenging in the player-versus-player mode! (Somebody should have playtested that better, because it reached ridiculous levels.) Of course, I am quite pleased to have a DS version of Puyo Puyo. "Ribbit! Ribbit! Ribbit!" Also, I think I spent some time playing New Super Mario Brothers last year, but that was more of a 2006 thing. I ought to finish that game at some point...


Computer games:

I played some Civilization IV and decided that I really like cultural victories. That's about it. (Does Scrabulous count?)



I'm sure there's stuff I'm missing, but this entry is already way too long, and I should have written it in December anyway...