Category Archives: Games

Ever feel like your video games don’t have enough consipracy theories, secret illuminati like societes, meditating aliens, or insane “spiritual” rambling? Well never fear, because Esoterica America has got you covered. YEAH!

I’ve never seen a video game that has managed to continually surprise us as much as Esoterica America. Here’s a partial list of the things you’ll do in the game:

• Meditate through various underground societies scattered throughout Washington DC
• Talk to your dead father
• Listen to a space fetus pontificate on life
• Help a stuttering former soccer superstar get over his past shame for missing an important goal
• View a picture of Jesus riding a velociraptor, with the caption “Never Forget”
• Tell a man that he should stop being so racist and should love his gay son
• Enjoy some hilariously over the top voice acting
• Ride on a public transit bus that sounds like a jet
• Communicate with aliens via crystal ball
• See several frames of animation
• Sing Bob Marley songs

Really, I don’t think any review of the game can do it justice. If you play this you will find yourself constantly surprised and, most likely, frequenly laughing (especially if you play with friends). The game costs $3 on Xbox Live Indie Games and is definitely worth checking out.

Score: 4 out of 5 masonic hieroglyphics. Buy it and play it if you really want to see something different.

Hey SBS fans!

We’re excited today to be releasing the original soundtrack for Slam Bolt Scrappers! We’re offering it as a free download over on this page.

The 13 tracks making up the soundtrack were composed and produced just for SBS by me and Jeff Nickel, who’s also responsible for the soundtrack to our thugged out team video. This is the first released game music for both of us — we learned a ton and had a blast getting the tracks ready for the game. We hope you’ve enjoyed listening to them too.

So go download the tracks now, or listen on YouTube to get a taste!

Our good friends over at Owlchemy Labs have just come out with their new game, Snuggle Truck, for the iPhone and iPad. And it’s awesome! In the game you control the driver of a flatbed pickup filled with a bunch of cute stuffed animals, and speed up and slow down the truck by tilting the iDevice. As you zip around your truck bounces on the uneven ground and the cute animals can pop out. If all the animals fall out you lose! Every now and then a baby animal flies out and you have to catch it, doing so gets you a rocket boost.

The game is super fun and feels like a mobile version of one of our favorite games, Trials HD. It’s silly, fun, frequently hard, and the kind of game that you’ll play over and over and share with your friends. And we’re not just saying that because Alex and Yilmaz are two of the most awesome Boston Indie developers (but they are, did we mention that?).

There’s also been a fair amount of silly, ginned up controversy over the game. Originally titled Smuggle Truck, you were supposed to help illegal immigrants cross the border to get into the US. The game was a parody based in part off their friends’ trouble immigrating here. However it got picked up a few months back by Fox News and a few others who didn’t understand that the game was satire and took it at face value, complaining that the game was corrupting teh childrens or something. The upshot of all this was that the original game got rejected by Apple despite being high quality and fun, and Owlchemy had to resubmit with the new title. It’s kind of ridiculous, but I suppose that any press is good press and at least they got a ton of coverage out of this.

Go check out the game now if you haven’t yet! They’ve also got a PC/Mac version if you don’t have a fancy iWhatever. Congrats Owlchemy!

Ah, prepackaged Windows games. Solitare, Minesweeper, Freecell, Pinball; how many hours have these games wasted? They’re certainly some of the most popular games out there if you go by how many people play them, and for how long.

Minesweeper in particular is one of my favorites – it’s a great time waster that everyone spends a few minutes on here and there. That’s why I was particularly excited by Mamono Sweeper, a terrific Japanese game that puts a neat spin on the old standby. It treats the game as a dungeon crawl where you are trying to clear the board of all enemies. You can kill enemies of your level or lower (enemies are all level 1-5), and as you do you get experience and can level up, allowing you to fight tougher enemies. When you click on a tile it shows you the sum of all the adjacent enemies, so a “7″ might be surrounded by a 3 and a 4, a 3 and a 2 and a 2, etc. The logic takes a game or so to get used to but once you get in the groove it really starts feeling good.

Mamono Sweeper does a great job of showing how introducing one small (and simple!) new mechanic can make an old game feel fresh again. Go give it a shot, or if you have an iOS device you can grab it from the app store.

This article was originally posted on March 5, 2010. We’re reposting it along with a bunch of small changes to update new thoughts on the game’s difficulty. Enjoy!

Difficulty adjustment (usually picking easy/medium/hard) is great as for making games appealing and usable by everyone. Really awesome games will adjust difficulty quietly and without being seen, either through dynamic difficulty adjustment or through choices made by the player. This past weekend I realized during the cgcmarathon that the original Final Fantasy, a Dungeons and Dragons inspired 8-bit classic on the original NES, had a great choice based difficulty adjustment system that let the user choose how hard they wanted the game to be at the very beginning of their quest! The only problem? That it isn’t clear at all. All of the critical decisions get made the first few minutes of the game at the “party select” screen, and there is no indication whatsoever as to how crucial these choices are or what the impact of the choices will be.

So how does difficulty adjustment work in Final Fantasy? Let’s examine, using math.

How to determine game difficulty in Final Fantasy based on party make up

When choosing your party in Final Fantasy, there are six characters to choose from. I’ve assigned them numbers here based on their usefulness. When you pick your party, just add up the value of each character.

5 – Fighter: Can soak up damage dealt by enemies, dish it pain consistently throughout the game, and is cheaper to equip than the mages.
3 – Black Belt: The cheapest character to equip and deadly in the second half of the game, this character loses points for being relatively worthless during the first half as he can’t take or deal much damage early on.
2 – Thief: A slightly less useful version of the Black Belt, except he never really gets good. The ninja upgrade isn’t really that much of a boon, and he remains the weakest fighting character.
3.5 – Red Mage: This guy can deal damage, wear some armor, and knows both white and black magic spells to boot. He’s very powerful in the early game, and while he gets weaker later on he still holds his own. He’s somewhat cheaper to equip than the other mages.
1 – White Mage: Can’t take a hit, can’t deal damage, very expensive to have in your party and counter intuitively healing isn’t super helpful in this game. This guy (girl?) sucks.
2 – Black Mage: Also can’t take a hit but at least can occasionally deal damage. Very expensive.

Once you have your total for the characters in the group, subtract these modifiers if they apply to how you are playing:

-3 – No Magic: If you’ve got no mages in your party, subtract 3 from the total points. Magic is generally less useful than attacking but has a knack of pulling you out of a hard battle here and there.
-2 – No Class Change: Not getting the rat tail and doing a class change makes the end game harder as there will be weapons, armor, and magic that your characters can’t use. The end of the game is somewhat easier than the beginning though, so it’s not as damming as you might think.

Got your total? Great! Check it against the list below to see how difficult playing through Final Fantasy will be. The difficulty level assumes that the player has a basic knowledge of what to do in the game but is by no means an expert who knows all the game’s secrets.

16+ points: Easy, grind free playing. Just walk through the game and kill anything in your path!
13 – 15 points: Medium difficulty, it shouldn’t be too much of a challenge. Grind will be inevitable at some points.
9 – 12 points: Hard, and you’ll have to level a bit to get past certain points, but doable.
8 points or less: Grind-tastic. Enjoy your hard game full of pain, disappointment, and failure.

That’s it! Pick your party and you are ready to go, knowing that you have defined how difficult your game will be.

My “I want to take it easy and not have to grind at all” party? It’s these guys.

The party I played with during the CGC Marathon was probably the worst one possible. SCREW YOU, ALL WHITE MAGE PARTY!