The Music

While talking to a friend of mine who also works in the games business and I mentioned the trailer and that it would be great if they released a sound track; as I really liked the music and wanted to have it. I got an almost instant reply from him:

Johnny Cash: God’s Gonna Cut You Down

This surprised me; that he knew that one as I don’t know any music from Johnny Cash; just know him from TV and Radio. Anyway, 10 min later and a few checks on iTunes and I had my first Johnny Cash track (well, 3 of them).

I have since heard it many times and it is currently the track in iTunes I have listened too most. I got into a habit of starting each day or when I return the PC with listing to this track.

Does beauty matter?

Does it improve the game in anyway that the hero is a beautiful lady? I would say it does not but then again, it does not degrade the quality.

Do people get connected to the character of such games? Do they feel related to the character or do they feel associated with it? If so, then it would make more sense if the hero was a guy, as most gamers are guys.

Watch it

Check the trailer and maybe you will have it the same way; would also like to hear what people think about the trailer and the combination of: Beautiful woman, violent killing, great music and having a bath.

If you like the style of the trailer then do also visit the web site for the game: WetTheGame.com

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Sure you should not compare the game to World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online as it is rather… Hmmm… Different.

Guess you can only compare it to other Super Mario games but even here it is different and I’m not only talking about the flipping between 2D and 3D (got to love that) but the visuals and the story is brilliant. I sure understand why the game got 10/10 some places. I’m sure that I will be playing this Mario game more than any other previous Mario game; until I get Super Mario Galaxy.

Anyway, I only played the first 3 worlds and just had to show the games to the kids the other day. Here I ran into one issue, the game got SO MUCH text; both as introduction; story telling and while you are playing. I told them to skip it as quickly as possible and told them what they needed to know. They had no problem with this and I’m not sure they would have followed the concept of dimensions and the whole void taking over the world.

So here we are; playing the first levels. My son understood the good old digital controls right away and often checked with the Wiimote if there where hidden objects. The flipping between 2d and 3d was also no issue for him, sure I do have to remind him from time to time to check in 3D but he got it sorted. Now with controlling two characters, having 2 Pixi’s to choose from it starts to get more tricky.

Then after awhile we got to the first real big end boss. Do not continue reading if you don’t want the solution to passing this end boss (flying dragon). I showed him the big red flying dragon and told him the story about it when I played it earlier. I spent don’t know how many hit points trying to hit the antenna on the head of it; NO success at all.

So I ended my first day with Super Paper Mario been annoyed and just turned off. The day after Google helped me ;-)

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Anyway, as I said, I showed the dragon to my son and he was like: “yeah, that’s cool… How about you jump up on his back” I just froze in motion; put the game on pause and looked him deep in the eyes. I told him that I’m impressed with his logic thinking and that I never got that idea myself. Either that tells something about him and games or it tells something bad about me and games.

So we did this and got pass the dragon; played some more yesterday and finished the hamster part ;-)

Point of the story is ‘never underestimate kids and their thinking/logic’. They keep on surprising me again and again, not only in games but in all areas.

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I just came across this YouTube video of a guy who made a song/video with that subject, how he failed in all parts of a relationship and just puts the blame on Halo 3 and Halo 2. (Hope it was not a true story).

I had to laugh when I saw the movie but the sad part of this is that some games DO take over people’s life and they forget the important things in life, such as PEOPLE and communicating with the people around them. I would still not blame the games but it is more about the people.

Oh, and it is not only Halo 2 and Halo 3 that have that effect; guess games like World of Warcraft also counts as a ‘I forgot life’-game.

Watch the video, have a good laugh (I just love the last part) and think about it…

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This should be from unlocked Paradise Mode. The movie features guns formed as Dolphins, shooting water bubbles, killing with banana (down the throat) and jet skies looking like swans. If anyone thinks this is the ’soft’ version of the game; then think again as it actually rather brutal.

So did this make me consider getting the game; nope… I need to see more from the ‘real’ game. I wonder if the developers had a good laugh when they did this part of the game; must have been a good change in the normal boring work.

Watch the movie at your own risk. Do not blame me if you end up having nightmares or wet dreams because of this…

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I finally got around calling Microsoft’s XBox 360 the other day. It went very smooth to explain the problem with ‘The Red Ring of Death’, guess it was not first time for them :-) Just had to mention the problems with the light and the girl at support took over, just one question from her (beyond identifying me) and that was about the light on the power supply. A good friend of mine had already mentioned this so I had the answer ready; he also called Microsoft the same day, to get this 4th XBox 360.

So now I’m waiting for UPS to show up with cardboard box so I can return it again with UPS. The repair time should be around 15 working days. So now the race is on with my friend, does it go faster in Germany or here in Switzerland.

Game ordering of the day

I don’t expect any problems with the repair/replacement so I went ahead today and ordered Halo 3 and Sonic Hedgehog for XBox 360. Sonic Hedgehog is more for my son than it is for me; I never liked the Sonic games after they went 3D. I remember getting the game for Dreamcast but only played it a few times. But my son plays the demo often and since the game dropped a good bit in I decided to get it also.

I also ordered Super Paper Mario for Nintendo Wii, one game I have been looking forward to for a good time. I never played the Paper Mario before so it will be rather interesting.

The final game I ordered was The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for Nintendo NDS, first Zelda game I get for hand held. My only Zelda experience was on Nintendo Wii; I never completed it but was very fascinated by it.

So time to sit back and wait for the games to arrive and then it is gaming time.

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I played Circle TD a bit and Vector TD once. Vector TD impressed me most both game play and also visuals, but one issue I had with both games was that the games where very long. The first time I played Vector TD I got to level 28, so it is very hard to say when things go wrong. Maybe I played the first 5 levels wrong and that resulted in that I could not get far. But after playing 28 levels I just didn’t feel like trying again.

So this is what I fear might happen in Flash Element TD2. But I will be looking forward to this re-vamp of the old game, from the short blog post they did it looks promising and they where even so kind to do a YouTube movie; this shows that the game will be rather different but still based on the techniques we know from their games.

Enjoy it.

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I consider Pikmin for GameCube to be among some of the greatest games ever, sure it helps that I love cute games and that I for a long time wanted to do a game with flowers!!! And I’m not talking Halo FlowerPower.

Guess it is time to find Pikmin and Pikmin 2 for GameCube again and enjoy some time with it. Unless of course the sims in MySims will start a revolution and disable GameCube support (Hmmm. Bed time for me I think, starting to talk nonsense).

Anyway, do click the image below and see one more picture from the French page. I wish it was possible to buy a small Captain Olimar to play with…

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I have to admit that I never played any version of Halo before but I’m actually considering it now. The main reason for it is to check out if the game is over hyped or if it really lives up to the hype. Recently you have not been able to go to any game web site without getting Halo 3 ads and the latest news about Halo 3, unless of course you went to some PlayStation or Nintendo web site.

The previous versions did arrive for Windows and one even for the Mac!!! So the question is will Halo 3 also come for Windows? I would expect to see it on PC during 2008; Halo 2 was released a few month go for Windows so it would be crazy to release Halo 3 too soon. I’m pretty sure that the Windows version will require Windows Vista, just as Halo 2 does.

So what does this leave me with…? I will be getting the Xbox 360 version as I don’t use Vista (Nor plan to). I didn’t buy the game get as I got a serious problem with my Xbox 360. It is broken :-( got The Red Ring of Death so I will need to check if I can get it replaced by Microsoft.

So when that is sorted the hype should have calmed down and it should be possible to get an English version here in Switzerland, currently they are sold out. And then I will yet again hear from my son: “Dad, can I play that new game… I’m only 8 but that is almost okay, right?” I feel sorry for him, it will go the same way as with Gears of War, you can look at the box and that’s all.

I hope that I during the next few month will be able to play the game and then I will of course report back right here about it. For now I suggest that you check what the news media had to say about the launch of Halo 3. Enjoy.

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Some pictures to prove it:

Yeah, got through level 39

WOW. Position 165.

This is how I did it, just a short description. ONLY use normal cannon’s through the whole game, except the air levels. Just before an air level I will sell all cannons that does not have to be used, I do this BEFORE the level ends so I have more gold when the level ends, so more interests. For the air levels I use the Air tower, not too many to start with. But I did use too few at the later air levels so lost some lives there. When an air level is about to finish I will again sell the towers, or as many as possible before the level ends. I do never keep air towers for the next air level. Rather have the gold to earn interests with.

If you can see you are about to loose some lives, then do NOT start to build towers in the hope you can get all creeps killed. Does not matter if you loose a few lives; better just save the money. Same goes with the bosses; I had number 2 pass through twice and I think number 3 passed 3 times. And as always, just as in real life; never use all the money you have. Just a few towers to start with. Place them over to the right; so the creep will pass them to start with and then later pass them again.

Oh, I do not use any cheats, such as the lag cheat that I read about. But I do overlap towers.

So no more Flash Element TD for me; I will sit back and relax and wait for next game from the same developer (Flash Circle TD). Do check this page and check the movie; looks to be very interesting.

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I decided to chill out today and play a game on the PC. Well, ended up playing longer than expected.

The game I tried was Zodiac Tower (Downloaded from Big Fish Games) where I download the game for free. It is great to be able to test a game for an hour before deciding if the game should be bought or not.

I have to admit that I did not buy the game YET but that this will probably change soon. You will see why later in this review.

The game:

The game is of course a puzzle game (what else can you chill out with) and when I started the game my first thought was: oh, one more of these click the same connecting color blocks and they disappear. Well, I was wrong :)

The story in the game is that you want to become an astrologer; to do this you have to explore the ancient Zodiac Tower. This is very nice presented by a tower on the screen split up in to many rooms. Sometimes you can only select one level but often you got multiple chooses. You start from the bottom and have to get to the top. The tower is done with very nice graphics so do not expect a square tower with square rooms.

The game is about removing identical pieces from the playing area but the way you do it is different from other games. On the left side of the game you have different shapes, some do remind of Tetris blocks but the game is NOT a Tetris clone. You grab one of the shapes and move it over the playfield and drop it on the pieces there. These pieces will then disappear and the ones above will fall down, normally they fall straight down but not always as there are ‘holes’ in the playfield often with round corners. Some shapes can be dropped on pieces even if they are not all identical. New shapes are been dropped into the shape area all the time but not at a crazy speed. If a shape is not used for a while then it is removed. There is of course a time limit for each level.

The aim for the levels changes from time to time, some levels requires you to remove all the pieces, sometimes you just have to break some special pieces (by removing pieces next to them) bit it can also be a combination. From time to time you will get some hints when you start a level, first I thought it was a tutorial and got annoyed by the fast removing of the text; but the text repeats so nothing to worry about. On some levels there will be special pieces that got special functions. This can be dynamite, bombs, blitz, magnets; these will always helpful items, done with nice visual effects.

When a level is completed you get a status report and from time to time you get a special item; I’m not 100% sure what these does YET. Oh, there is also a shop in the game which you can access between the levels. First it is empty but it is possible to find items which then are shown in the shop. This can be bombs, magnets and I once got a key which should unlock the ’survival mode’ but I was never able to find that mode!!!

Difficulty:

The game is very easy to get to as it starts out very easy (and continues to be easy…). Learning curve is very low and the game does a great job with introduction of new level aims and new special pieces. So anyone can get started with this game without any trouble.
I played the normal mode and completed around 20 levels without getting any stress. Hard mode didn’t seem that much harder but I only played a few levels in it, but it sure did show some new interesting forms of the pieces. I then tried the arcade mode and saw the ‘Hurry up’ message once. I know I wrote I wanted to chill out but I still wanted some challenge in the game.

Window vs Full-screen mode:

The game defaults to full-screen in 800×600 mode. I changed to highest resolution of 1024×768 but had to restart the game to make the change. I later decided to try the window mode; again a restart of the game was needed. To be honest I’m very disappointed about the window mode; I’m used to that you can move the mouse pointer outside of the game window and that the game will enter a pause mode. In Zodiac Tower this is not possible; the mouse stays inside the game window. I then used ALT-TAB to leave the game; this worked but the game was still running; including the music. This is a ‘bad’ design issue in my point of view. People should be able to leave the game easy and do other tasks and then get back and continue.

Visuals:

It is very easy to see that the developers spend time on visual eye candy; sometimes it happens that the programmers try to pimp the game by adding effects because the graphics in the game is bad. This is NOT the case in Zodiac Tower; the graphics are awesome. The tower got MANY rooms and each room got its own background with nice details. All the in game graphics follows the same route; good quality. The user interface also. Of course there is eye candy here also; lots of sparkling effects; never too many and never annoying.

Audio:

The audio in the game shows that nothing was forgotten when thinking about quality. Sound effects are good and never annoying. Same goes for the background music. I often end up turning down the music in games if it is repeating often or just plain annoying. I didn’t even consider doing that in Zodiac Tower.

Some screen shots before the verdict:

(Click images to view them in higher resolution.)

Verdict:

My only issue (beyond the window mode) was that the game didn’t offer enough of a challenge to me. When playing 20 levels and not getting stressed or not even having problems with the time limit in the game then I feel that the developers should have tweaked this part more. Then again, the game does feature more than 100 levels. As mentioned before; visuals and audio are top quality which sure helps with making the game more interesting in the long run. I’m sure I will be coming back to this game one of the next days; will then have to buy it as I already used my one hour of the testing time. Knowing how the ‘buying’ system works I know I will be playing the full version of the game within minutes. So I will have a chance to see more of the great graphics and see what happens when more items are unlocked. So I can only recommend this game to anyone who wants a game to chill out with.

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