TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Category: Games I’m Playing

  • Power Outage => Pocket Frogs

    We had a long and annoying power outage last night, apparently due to the high temperatures in Los Angeles. Since the only piece of electronic equipment that was still charged after the workday was my iPad, I sat in the dark on my patio and played Pocket Frogs. As you can see, I now have quite a collection of frogs. The large number of blue ones in the nursery is due to breeding attempts for a requested frog type. The bad news is that I don’t yet have the coins yet for a new habitat to house all the new frogs I’m getting. Pocket Frogs is a fun, casual game that I enjoy.

  • Star Trek Online Captain’s Status Update

    I finished the last of the Breen/Deferi/Preserver weekly episodes. It was pretty good and had not the worst plot of the game. I think if Cryptic can keep these up, it’ll be a great addition to the game.

    I also really made Vice Admiral. Before, when I maxed out the skill points, I wasn’t a real Vice Admiral, because I hadn’t spent the last 100 points. Well, a respec later, I spent them all and got the promotion. Now I’m getting level XI loot sometimes. I also picked up my fancy science vessel retrofit ship and have been using it. Nothing too special. The biggest boon to being a Vice Admiral is the ability to double the in-sector speed for a short time.

    Cryptic says they will lift the level cap sometime, but until then, I may start a new character…

  • Pocket Frogs iPad/iPhone game surprisingly addictive

    The free Pocket Frogs game for iPad and iPhone doesn’t have much “game,” but it is strangely compelling and surprisingly addictive. This is one of those “freemium” games that are free to play, but to speed things up, the company will happily sell you (for real money, of course) coins or potions or mana that make your life easier. There are many such games, mostly involving pretend farming, though GodFinger involves playing God and having worshippers and making rain. I have tried GodFinger and one or two farm games and never enjoyed them in the slightest. There was always the overwhelming “you must buy stuff from us to succeed” vibe that was a total turn off. And, frankly, making crops grow isn’t all that much fun. More like work than fun, in fact. Yet I know that many people are addicted to such games.

    Pocket Frogs is almost entirely unlike those farming games, and is much more compelling to me. The game is essentially about breeding and raising frogs (cute things, as you can see in the picture below). You start with a couple of frogs that you have to tame (really) by taking them to the pond (see picture below) and having them jump from lily pad to lily pad to catch dragonflies. Catch a few flies, and the frog becomes tame, at which point, you can breed it, catalog it, or sell it. The breeding is the interesting part: frog types are named with 3 words. The first is the color of the frog (emerald in the frog in the picture), the second is the highlight color (the spots or stripes – “folium” below), and the third is the species (“anura” below). So if you breed frogs, the offspring will have some combination of the parents features. Breeding frogs costs coins, the currency of the game, and space is limited, so you have to sell off some of the frogs you breed to make money and space. As you go up in level, you can get more habitat space for more frogs. Cataloging a frog allows you to sell it now, but to buy one back later for more money if you need it.

    So far, this sounds like work and not fun, but there is strategy involved in figuring out what frogs to breed to get desired characteristics. You sometimes get requests for a certain frog type, and you probably need to breed to get it (I haven’t yet succeeded in my first request, because I’m looking for “viola” highlights). Beyond that, taking the frogs to the pond to mature them, tame them, and make them happy is fun. The rhythmic hopping from pad to pad is very relaxing and amusing. While romping through the pond, your frog encounters other frogs to breed with and sometimes lands on lily pads withs presents. These presents include interesting frogs, decorations for habitats, coins, growth potions (speeds up hatching and maturing), and stamps (speeds up delivery of items you buy or find). You can buy things at the store for in-game coins, but they typically take half an hour or more to be delivered. Using a stamp makes it instant. Sometimes stamps are needed simply because your mailbox only has a few slots and you need to make space.

    Overall, the game is very simple and pleasant to play, and seems like it will give moments of satisfaction. Maybe not quite the same satisfaction as blowing up Covenant enemies or saving the galaxy, but less work to get there. The biggest flaw I’ve found is that you can’t sync your game so it is consistent between iPad and iPhone. The games must be separate, which is too much work, so I won’t bother playing on the iPhone. Check the game out for yourself and see if it grabs you or bores you. I like it.

  • Halo Reach Space Fighting is Fun!

    The space fighting part of Halo Reach is the most fun, so far, but it was quite short, and since my Sabre was destroyed with the Covenant super-carrier, not likely to be repeated soon. The first video here shows part of the first space battle. It gets busier in the attack wave after the video, but is more of the same. As you can see, my teammates can’t seem to hit much of anything, so I have to do most of the blowing things up…

    In the second movie, we’re going after a Covenant corvette to take it over and use it in the upcoming attempt to destroy the super-carrier. I get the task of taking out the engines.

    Once we disabled the corvette, there are some fun battles inside to gain control. Then things go from bad to worse, but that’s for another post.

  • Halo Reach Turret Shooting

    Because Halo Reach put me more than an hour back in my game, I had a chance to relive some of my favorite moments so far. The first is as I’m being airlifted to a spire I need to shut down. I got to shoot from the turret and took out a lot of Covenant baddies and AA guns on the ground. Pretty fun.

    The next video shows the launch of my Sabre into orbit. It’s a cutscene, but it looks pretty good. Both videos are available in 1080p if your machine has the guts and your display has the pixels.

    I’ll have a couple more videos tomorrow. They’re uploading now, but I’m not going to wait for them to be done processing.

  • Halo Reach Save System Stinks

    A major annoyance with all the Halo games since Halo 2 (I forget how the original Halo was, so I can’t condemn it) is the stupid save system. You reach checkpoints as you play the game, and generally the checkpoints aren’t too far apart, but they usually aren’t as frequent as those in the Gears of War games. The problem is that the Halo games don’t actually save your progress at the checkpoints -they just mark a restart spot if you die. If you really want to save your progress, you have to choose the “Save and Exit” (or similar) in the menu, which actually saves your progress to disk so you can resume later. I learned this the hard way in Halo 2 and haven’t messed up since.

    On the other hand, Halo Reach did manage to mess up my save of last night and instead restored me to a much earlier position, thus wasting more than an hour of my time. It put me back before the fighting in space (which I was okay with repeating, because it’s the best part so far). I am certain I properly saved before shutting down for the night last night, but when I started it up today, it put me at the wrong spot. Now I don’t trust it at all and am saving every half hour or so, in case it decides to forget where I am again. Bloody annoying.

  • Halo Reach Space Fighting Fun

    Though I said the ground fighting of Halo Reach was pretty boring, I find the space fighting good fun. Sure, it’s pretty arcade-oriented, but there’s a bit of strategy (guns first to take down shields, then missiles to finish them off). The controls work pretty well as does the targeting reticle for the guns. So far, the space fighting in Halo Reach looks good and plays well!

  • Halo Reach Boring?

    I’ve been playing Halo Reach and am enjoying it, but it is pretty boring. Many of the missions are at night, so the graphics are muted and uninteresting. The day missions are better, but there is not a sense of wonder, so far. In Halo, we found and explored a ringworld, while in Halos 2 and 3, we dealt with Universe-ending threats, the Flood, religious fanatics, and more. These were experiences out of the ordinary for games and made them more fun than just the combat. So far, Halo Reach hasn’t had any sense of discovery or awe. The troops seem to know all about the Covenant and are mind blown that they are on the planet. Now, I’m not that far along, so the larger, universe threats may come later. I hope so, otherwise, it’ll be hard to keep interested. I know I shouldn’t be interested in the plot, but stories are important for games, in my opinion, which is why I’ve never finished any of the Grand Theft Auto games (among other reasons, like the driving is horrible).

  • A Closer Look at KOTOR

    I played a bit more of Knights of the Old Republic and remembered the good and bad parts of it. The good (great) parts are the story and much of the combat. The combat is a combined real-time and turn-based mix that works pretty well. As you can see in the video below, I can pause the battle to look around, issue commands to each of my characters, then continue. Each character has a set of attack options, including power attacks, force powers (for the Jedi in the party) and grenades. In addition, healing and shield activation are also selectable. Each action takes a turn, so some things happen maddeningly slowly. In addition, once an action is started, you can’t stop it, so healing, for example, will have to wait until the next turn.

    You can see in the video that I did a naughty thing by leveling up during combat, which replenished my hitpoints. Most games don’t allow that sort of thing just to prevent an unfair advantage, like I took here.

    The bad thing about KOTOR is that the view is fairly fixed. You can rotate around your characters, but can’t zoom in or out, nor can you change elevation to get a better view. This feels a bit constraining. The graphics are okay, particularly given the age of the game. It runs in 1600×1200 just fine, but doesn’t support widescreen modes (without unofficial patches).

    In all, Bioware did an amazing job of transforming D&D rules into the Star Wars universe with light sabers and vibroswords (really) replacing bastard swords, force powers replacing magic, and blasters taking the place of bows and arrows. The game works well, as does its sequel. Perhaps the new Star Wars MMO will turn out to bring some of the greatness of these games back.

  • Halo Reach Not Bad So Far

    I managed to get a couple hours of play (well, more like an hour – see below) in for Halo Reach last night and it was pretty good. I had forgotten how to steer the warthogs, so I was having a miserable time for a while, but eventually remembered and that made things better.

    I started off playing the game on my big 52″ Sony LCD TV connected via HDMI. The game looked very good from my sitting distance, but there were a lot of dark areas in the first part of the game and somehow they were too dark on the TV (you can adjust game brightness, which helped). The sound was really awesome coming from the surround speakers. I have highly-rated surround gaming speakers in my home office where I do most of my gaming, but the sound experience in the living room is far superior.

    I moved the Xbox 360 down to my office and connected it to my Dell 27″ monitor via component cables via the Hauppauge HD PVR, so I will be able to capture videos. This meant I could only run at 1080i, not the 1080p of the TV with HDMI, so the image wasn’t quite as crisp. On the Dell monitor, however, I could really see the flaws in the game, however. It really appears to be a 720p game being scaled by the Xbox’s built-in scaler. The graphics are good, but not as good as one would get on a decent PC, which is one reason I prefer games on the PC.

    Another reason I prefer PC games is mouse control, particularly for shooters. Aiming with the stick on a gamepad is lousy, for me at least, and the Halo games are no exception, though Halo Reach seems pretty forgiving. The controls of Halo Reach are quite good and as simple as possible. Movement is one stick; aiming/looking is the other one. Triggers and buttons do various actions, but it isn’t complicated. But I still wish it was on the PC with a mouse. I played Halo and Halo 2 on the PC, but since the rest are Xbox 360 only, I no longer have a choice (thanks Microsoft).

    The game play so far has been nearly identical to the earlier Halos, so no surprises. The addition of armor abilities (speed, defense, etc.) is nice and lifted from Crysis (though you can only equip one ability at a time, so you can’t switch on the fly, as in Crysis). The biggest difference is your squadmates stick with you. In earlier Halos, most other soldiers would work with you for a bit, but you, as the Spartan, were the star of the show. In Halo Reach, you are part of a team and your teammates are pretty competent and sometimes better at certain things. But not driving. AI driving is simply terrible. I found it much better to drive the warthog myself and let a squadmate be gunner. If they drive, we just got stuck all the time.

    The music is good, but not as great as Halo 3 was. So far there isn’t an iconic, compelling theme in the music, though perhaps one will show up later as I move on to bigger and better missions.

    So Halo Reach is fun, but more of the same. And that’s okay with me, as I liked the others enough that more of the same is good!