Exposing my socks to the world

The Fatman has posted an article that deserves a look about the Voice Chat option in the new Unreal Tournament.

I don’t really have a proper update for this week, so I’ll leave you with this question:

Has anyone ever used the ‘Notes’ pages of a game’s manual?

Maybe I’m the weird one around here, but I can’t ever remember using the Notes pages of my manuals for, well, anything.

Discuss in the forums

I went through the archive and turned off commenting for all the past articles. Someone was posting trying to use my bandwidth to sell a variety of organ enlarging drugs.

From now on, if you want to talk back about an article, please do so in the forums.

It’s really hard to classify a game like Wario Ware. It’s what I like to call a Metagame. It’s a game that’s made up of a lot of smaller games, kind of like the Mario Party series, except that this is (mostly) a one player experience.

So what is it exactly that you do in this game? Well, storyline aside, your goal is to progress through ‘courses’ of micro-games, each one with a distinct theme and a boss-game every so often. The controls for all of the micro-games are different, but they are fairly intuitive, and they have to be. You have about three seconds to figure out what you’re supposed to do and then do it before the next game starts.

The micro-games that this cartridge offers is where the game really shines. There are about 200 of the things locked away in this cartridge, and while there are some similarities between some of them, they are different enough that each one seems like a whole new experience. The games are broken up into themes (or courses) that are presented be the characters in the game. Jimmy with the gigantic afro has sports games, Mona rides a scooter and presents the weird games, and 9-Volt the grade-schooler presents the old-school games just to name a few.

The graphics in this game are extremely varied. They range from extremely simple, to photographic quality. Every one of the games has a distinctive look to it, which is quite a feat considering the amount of them that there are. The scenes that play out to tell the story of the game are particularly well done.

Running through the courses of the micro-games isn’t all there is to do in this game. The game offers a practice mode where you can hone your skills at a particular game (as well as unlock some of the game’s secrets). There are some full versions of some games that you can unlock that have a Wario flavor to them such as Dr. Wario and Sheriff (an very old Nintendo arcade title), there are some extended versions of some of the micro-games and there are a few two-player games that require both players to use the same Game Boy. Definitely an interesting experience.

Wario Ware is one of those games that is perfectly suited to the Game Boy. It’s a game that’s got an incredible amount of variety, it’s easy to pick up and play, and it’s a good game to play in between other games, or on road trips or wherever. This is one of those games that you absolutely can not go wrong with.

I attended a small LAN party this past weekend and it reaffirmed that I still suck Warcraft 3. We did have a chance to sit down and play a little bit of the popular mod, Tides of Blood.

For those of you that don’t know, Tides of Blood is a custom Warcraft 3 map in which each side of the battle has installations in addition to the main stronghold. Periodically computer-controlled troops will come out and run to the opponent’s base… and mostly get slaughtered. So you control one hero on one side or the other and it’s your job to turn the tides of the stalemate.

Long story short: you control one hero and slaughter the other side. Fun!

This map/mode makes for some of the longest games of Warcraft 3 that I have ever played. The match that we played the other day lasted for nearly two hours and 40 minutes. The game was really a back and forth struggle, and, had the other team not given up, the game could have easily eclipsed the current record of three and a half hours. It’s a fun map, but it totally ruined my ability to play a normal game of Warcraft. Since you only control heroes, I completely forgot what a good build order remotely looks like. Well, I shouldn’t say that that’s the only reason that I suck at regular Warcraft 3. I haven’t actually played the game in several months. I suppose that could play some small part in the whole thing.

For those interested, here is a REPLAY(link removed 7.21.05 since it’s no longer relavent) of the match we had. It requires version 1.14 of Warcraft 3 and version .99M3 of Tides of Blood.