Portal [game]

From Wikipedia: Portal* is is a single-player first-person action/puzzle video game developed by Valve that is often boasted by fans as being more popular than the main fare of the Orange Box (Half Life 2). It was released as part of "The Orange Box" for the XBox 360 and Windows but will be released on its own this April 2008. It is a short game consisting of 19 levels, taking anywhere from 3 to 5 hours for first-time players to finish (I took about 6, spending time exploring and experimenting with the portal gun).

*Note: be aware that the Wikipedia article is full of un-noted spoilers. Read at your own risk.

Setting: A sterile, white & grey walled "Enrichment Center" for "Aperture Science Laboratories".

Premise: You are a woman named Chell. You wake up in the Enrichment Center and are prompted by a female robotic voice (GLaDOS) to begin your training process by completing a series of puzzle tests, one per level. Generally, the test is to cross a room, overcoming various barriers, and/or manipulate a few buttons in order to gain access to the exit door. The puzzles are often very simple but require lateral thinking to discover the answer.

Early on, you obtain the "Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device" (portal gun) which, as you guessed, creates portals. Portals come in two colors: blue and orange - the color difference is there only to aid the player in telling the portals apart; they otherwise do the same thing. Go in one, come out the other. Once placed, a portal stays put until the player shoots to move it elsewhere. Only one portal of either color can exist at any given time.

Gameplay
I played this on an XBox, using a traditional XBox controller. Both control sticks are required for movement - one for forward and side-to-side movement and the other to aim the portal gun. It takes some getting used to (and a large screen helps) but with a little patience it becomes second nature. A friend of mine watching had previously played Portal on a PC with a mouse and decided that was the way to go - particularly for aiming.

I am a long-time MYST player and the more mechanical levels of Portal will be right up any MYST fan's alley. But the majority of Portal revolves around using the portals and physics to get across many of the more challenging levels, particularly with the "speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out" mantra. Because you cannot run or jump, you have to harness physics (usually the physics of gravity - i.e. falling) to create speed to accomplish some amazing feats. Because the game is in first-person perspective, these feats become truly stunning and kept me on the edge of my seat.

Also, for those of you who hate dying in games, its pretty hard to die in this game through most of it. Luckily you cannot fall to your death - you can only drown in sludgey water (where applicable), be crushed under heavy objects (again, not a common situation, or take too much sustained energy damage from lazers in two or three levels, but again - avoidable. You pretty much never have an opponent other than the puzzle itself.

Storyline: because this is ultimately a mini game, there is only a basic storyline. What really drives the game forward is the mystery of the facility, GLaDOS' motivations, and the amount of humor in the game. It uses lots of techno jargon in silly ways, is full of things that later become inside-jokes to Portal players - and heck, the supposed reward at the end of the game is cake. What is there not to like about that? :D

Conclusion
I almost wish I had my own XBox just so I can play Portal. Maybe on my next Mac I will break down and install Windows via Parallels *just* so I can play Portal. The creators at Valve intend on creating a full blown Portal game of some kind and I will be on the wagon to get it when it comes out.

I honestly can't find anything bad to say about Portal - even about its short length, simply because they used every level to its fullest (particularly the last two) to where any more would of felt tacked on. The visuals were clean and were never glitchy, the sounds were practical, the story was funny yet mysterious, and the controls were smooth and pretty easy to use. Portal is a very unique game can appeal to a varied audience and is worth at least a rental. Go try!

And for those of you who *have* played, here's two shirts I made:

Picross DS

A review of Nintendo's PicrossDS

Picross DS Wikipedia article
Nonogram - Wikipedia article about nonograms (what Picross is)

About Picross
Picross is a puzzle game that is often described (and not just by me) as a cross between sudoku and minesweeper. Basically you have a grid in which you need to fill in squares in order to make a pixel picture. Easy mode grids are 5x5 and Normal mode grids (so far) are 15x15 and apparently they can go up to 20x25. The grids start out blank (unless you choose to start with a hint). From there you must figure out which squares to fill in by looking at numbers along the top and left sides of the grid. The numbers tell you how many squares are filled in that row and in what groups.

For instance, a row may have the numbers 5 3 3 next to it. That means that there is a group of 5, a group of 3, and another group of three squares colored in - each with at least one blank space in between them (groups cannot be touching, obviously). So you compare the info of the rows with the info of the collumns and based on how much room you have, where those squares should go.

Some of them are easy. In a 15x15 grid, if you have a row that's "5 4 4" then you add those up in your head (13) plus one blank at least between each number for a total of 15. That means that the 5 and the second 4 MUST be touching opposite sides of the grid. Nice.

If you're patient, you can use lots of logic to fill everything in without time penalties (if you guess wrong then you get penalized minutes to your time score). I'm not very patient so I choose to have a hint at the start.

Picross DS fun stuff
Each level is themed so you can kind of guess some of the things you're trying to 'draw'. Like, one level was all African animals, another was fruit, another was sea animals, etc. Being able to guess pixel pictures is handy for when you get stuck and have to guess at a square placement.

Each puzzle starts out as a complete mystery so you have NO idea what you are drawing. Once you've completed a puzzle, though, it gets a little icon in the menu so you know what it is. It also records your best time for each puzzle so you can try to beat your best times on each puzzle.

Each level has its own theme for the squares, which is fun. Easy mode levels were 'apple' themed, so each square was like a red (square) apple and when you clicked on it you whittled it to a core. The African animal level's squares were grass patches so when you filled them in, it mowed away the grass. Apparently there is a bubble-wrap level - I can't wait for that one. Should you dislike a level's theme you can revert to the generic blue-square theme.

There's also a head-to-head time-challenge mode, a daily-picross mode, and you can download puzzles via Wi-Fi. Also, in normal mode, once you've completed a row of puzzles, you unlock the ability to do a quick special level, of which there seem to be two kinds. The first kind involves giant flying pixels that you must tap quickly to 'tag' - needing to tag a certain number of them before time runs out. The second kind involves drawing the shown image (in a grid, of course) before time runs out.

There seem to be 135 single-player puzzles from what I read online (not counting what you can download.

You can turn off the music but keep the sound FX.

You can save your progress on one game at a time - when you turn on your DS it will ask if you want to restore your game so you don't have to go through the menus to go back to it.

Not good stuff
Each cartridge only holds scores and stuff for one person, unlike games like "Brain Age" that have multiple slots for multiple players.

By default, on larger puzzles you have to zoom in (it shows you the larger puzzle in the top screen) so as you fill in squares, the screen floats around to keep you centered. If you aren't careful, this can cause you to tap the wrong square and incurr a penalty. However, I discovered that by using the D-pad you can turn this off. Nice.

Conclusion
If you like games like Sudoku and minesweeper and you like stylus-based games (you can use the D-pad for this game, too) then Picross is a fun game. I find it addictive - and it's $20, so it's one of the lower-priced games (new). Reccomended.

Killer Bunnies

So we finally got a set of the Killer Bunnies card game on Sunday (it's full name is Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magical Carrot). It's a non-collectable card game that is expandable through the addition of many booster decks that add new dimensions to the game. The point of the game is to collect as many carrots as possible through the use of your killer bunnies while trying to slay as many of your opponent's bunnies as you can. At the end of the game, the magic carrot is revealed, but you have to have at least one surviving bunny in order to win (which is the point of trying to kill your opponent's bunnies - if they have no bunnies, they cannot win.)

It's kind of a strange game in that you can have the most carrots and you could of been kicking ass the entire game but when it all comes down to it, winning is a lottery since no one knows which carrot is the winner. Having more carrots gives you a better chance of having the winning carrot but so far, more often than not, someone with just one or two carrots ends up winning. Maybe it's karma. :P

Pros
So if you are ultra competitive, that might frustrate you. I rather like it as it means you can also win after having played the suckiest game ever - no matter how skilled you are, it all boils down to luck, which makes it an even game for anyone. So no matter if you win or lose, what you remember are all the bizarre ways you were able to scrape by in the game or annhiliate bunnies.

The cards are humerous and inventive and often outlandishly powerful - like the Nuclear Warhead card which automatically wipes out 5 bunnies (a LOT) or the Ebola Virus, which infects one bunny per round - and to survive, a bunny must roll a 12 on a 12 sided die to live. You cannot get attached to your bunnies as it is nearly guaranteed they will die. More often than not, though, you have to laugh at HOW they die.

Good replayability. Our first morning, Kais and I must've played it 6 times in a row. Because the cards you draw are random, you could have a really powerful game, you could have a game where all your bunnies constantly die, you could have a game where it's difficult to even GET a bunny, or maybe you get one survivor bunny that hangs in there. And of course you can never be sure who is going to win.

The cards are super durable, extra glossy and thick.

Cons
The instructions that come with the game are about as clear as mud. We played three games with what we thought were correct rules before downloading a more precise PDF version off the Official Killer Bunnies Website. So if you do get the game, PRINT OUT THE RULES FROM THE SITE!

The game artwork is a bit too simple. The illustrations and the coloring are not very complex and look a little cheap. Although some of the bunnies are hilarious - like the one in the "Containment Suit" card or the astronaut bunnies on the "Black Hole" weapon card.

The cards are super durable, glossy and thick. This is only a con if you get several of the booster decks because you end up with so many cards that it takes a LONG time to thoroughly shuffle them all. And the durability of the cards makes them too thick to use in an automatic shuffler.
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All in all, it's a really fun game. Once you have the rules down, it goes rather quick - at least, if I compare it to Settlers of Catan or Zombies!!! (which can occasionally turn into a 3 hour game), so perhaps an hour is an average length game with just the Blue and Yellow decks (the Killer Bunny decks are color coded - blue is the starter deck and each booster must be purchased in a certain order. Yellow is now packaged automatically with the blue cards.)

Killer Bunnies can be played with 2 to 8 players (possibly more with the addition of more booster decks) and is for ages 12 and up. The game is not gorey at all - not a drop of blood to be seen, just slightly violent.

Accordion Solitaire

This is a very easy solitaire to play, but very difficult to win - I've never won and I think Kais has done it once. The best I've done is gotten it down to three piles, the goal being to get all the cards into a single pile.

This is how it works. You have all the cards shuffled and in your hand. One at a time, you take the top card and flip it over and lay it down next to the card you just layed down, in a row. If the card you lay down is the same number or suit as the card next to it or as the card three cards down, you can take the new card and put it on top of the one it matches. If it matches both the card immediately adjacent to it AND the third card up, you get to pick where it goes. And by "third card over", I mean you skip cards one and two and put it ON THREE, no exceptions.

When you move a card, you move all the cards that are under it as well, so you are slowly combining piles in an effort to get all the cards into a single stack at the end. By moving a card/stack to a new spot, you might create a chain reaction of cards/stacks that can now be moved. Sometimes you can move more cards depending on which order you move them in if a chain reaction comes up, so pay attention to see how far you can condense your cards.

That's it. You go til you've exhausted the deck. If you do absolutely terrible, you might end up taking quite a bit of space with all the cards.

This is a wonderful version of solitaire, if you have the room for it. A lot is left up to luck but it's a nice way to while away time while listening to music.