It’s time for our annual “we’re too lazy to put up new content so here is a rehashed post” list of all the games we played this past year. Sweet! Here’s what we played in 2010.

Our year started off with one of the best games to come out of the Boston Global Game Jam, a highly descriptive and amusing platformer called RunRunRunJump that has one of the best soundtracks you’ve ever heard. After that we played Robot Unicorn Attack which since our post has become one of the best selling games on the iPhone (coincidence? I think not! Of course not all games on our blog get quite as much attention, and Paul Sztajer’s Particulars seems to be somewhat abandoned nowadays judging from the leaderboards. But hey, if you ever wanted to be #1 on some boards now is your chance! I’m personally at #2 of all time with 325K.

We laughed a ton playing Sydney Shark, one of the most hilarious games we’ve seen since Robot Dinosaurs that Roar. Where else can you chomp horse heads, killer whales, and nuclear missiles as a shark? Jay Pavlina’s Super Mario Bros. Crossover got a ton of well deserved internet attention, and since the initial release Jay’s been hard at work adding special new features for each character. We then looked at an artier game called Every Day the Same Dream, which still has a terrific ending if you haven’t tried it yet. I find it interesting that since that game came out a similar title called One Chance was released, which while somewhat derivative is also excellent with a fantastic ending(s?).

Of course if you aren’t feeling especially artistic and just want a fun platformer then Enough Plumbers was probably right up your alley. Any game where you kill clones of Mario and light yourself on fire with jalapeno peppers has to be fun. If you’re more of an RPG or educational gaming fan you’ll probably like CellCraft, a game which not only has “craft” in the title but teaches about both cellular microbiology and platypuses. And if you’re the type of gamer who care for roguelikes and has several days of free time then Desktop Dungeons is the game for you – I think I almost burned a week on that one before deciding I had gone “far enough”. I hope QCF design brings it to consoles!

At the end of the year we wrapped up the demo of the still-in-development indie game Planck by Shadegrown Games, a neat experimental music game with some fun shooting bits. We also played the phenomenal tower defense game Ghost Hacker by Core Sector, and then finally wrapped up the year with the engaging short interactive fiction title The Warbler’s Nest by Jason McIntosh. It was a good year!

If you haven’t played any of these games yet be sure to take a look at them over break, they’re a ton of fun and every single one of them is free to play!I can’t wait for the awesome games we’ll wind up playing in 2011.

So at PAX Dylan Fitterer (of Audiosurf fame) claimed he was addicted to this little dungeon crawler rougelike and that he had wasted some 15+ hours playing it. I decided to give it a shot, and holy crap was he right, this game is SUPER addicting. But it’s so much fun!

Each round of the game is short, generally taking under 15 minutes to play. You roam around the dungeon, dispatching the world’s laziest monsters who just hang out in one spot and wait for you to fight them. What’s really neat is the way that you refill health and mana – simply exploring the dungeon gives back health, and as the dungeon has a limited size unexplored territory becomes a resource to be managed. Brilliant! Layer that on top of an especially deep game with lots of replyability thanks to a highly variable set of characters, races, purchasable items, dungeon challenges, and magic spells, and you’ve got a game that can be played over and over again for a long time.

What are you doing still here? It’s a free download! Go grab it now from QCF design and have fun wasting an evening on this!

The Fire Hose Dungeons and Dragons campaign continues! Jeff Ward was awesome enough to do a second write up (after last time’s), so here’s a rundown of what happened.

The Players:

Nebin – halfling theif, bold + brazen and full of bravado
Silidhor – ranger elf, quiet with a dark past
Arranis – eladrin wizard, more interested in books and history than fighting
Lucian – elf cleric, a healer with a big freaking mace

After returning from our battle against the dragon, Alia immediately ran off to inform Taleh’s family of his apparent demise. Nebin, Silidor, Arranis and Lucian, meanwhile, investigated the contents the chest they had stolen from the dig site. Nebin, Silidor, and Lucian divided (and fought) over some gold, stones and potions, while Arranis spent some time with some very interesting looking (and magical) spectacles, which came with a note, apparently written in Abyssal, which he decided needed more investigation.

Follow the jump for more!

After resting at the inn, the party emerged again to do some investigation about the events and news taking place in Keturah. Arranis attempted some rituals to understand his Abyssal note, and headed to the library to see if he could get any information. After many attempts, they learned that the note held instructions for an attack on some elves, and included portal coordinates on where to find them. Arranis decided this needed to be brought to the attention of the Keturah guard immediately, and set off to find them.

Nebin, meanwhile, contacted his friends (meaning other thieves) for news around the city. Apparently, there were a set of bandits that had been muscling in on the thieves territory, and they were none too happy. The bandit’s had to wait though, as we had more important matters to attend to.

The party rejoined together to talk to Katsin, captain of the Keturah guard, and convince him they needed to go warn the elves about the pending attack. Katsin was wary, and wanted to destroy the portal before Oyev had a chance to break through, but reluctantly agreed to let us through.

Once through the portal, the party set off following tracks into the mountain. Heading in, we were immediately ambushed by several goblins, one of which we recognized as the apprentice from the dig site, meaning the boss couldn’t be far. After taking them down (and receiving some serious loot in the process) and resting, we set out down the caverns, trying to find the elves who we knew were now in danger.

We came into the cave and spotted several Warcasters, miners, and, of course, the Goblin Dig Boss, looking meaner than ever, and interrogating or friends the elves. We decided to attack, but Nebin, in a stroke of brilliance, convinced the Warcasters and the miners that their Boss was a traitor to Oyev, and as loyal subjects of Oyev they should take him down. This worked for a little while, but soon the battle took a turn for the worse. The Warcasters soon came to their senses and turned on us, and quickly made short work of Silidor and Lucian. While Nebin kept the Boss occupied, Arranis did his best to revive and stabilize his allies, as well as attempt to free the elves. In the end, the Boss took down Nebin, leaving only Arranis standing.

The Boss, bloodied but not broken, but also sick of all this fighting, moved over to one of the elves, stole something off of him, quickly killed him, and then ran, with the final Warcaster right behind him. Arranis slowly gathered up his allies and the remaining elf, and sat to rest until they could recover.

The elf informed everyone that he was part of a guerrilla group fighting Oyev, and that what the Boss had stolen was coordinates to the only other group they had contact with. In exchange for their help warning the other elves, he agreed to follow them back to Keturah, and discuss an alliance with the guard.

And so, battered and broken, the party made their way back to the portal.

We recently finished our first D&D adventure here at Fire Hose, and Jeff Ward has been nice enough to write up a pretty detailed play by play for how shit went down. Enjoy!

After the rest of the party was separated from Nebin and Alia, we immediate set to questioning the remaining kobold about where our friends had gone. Of course, by we I mean mostly Taleh. After much cajoling, we convinced the kobold to show us how to rejoin our friends on the other side of the portal, taking him along for good measure.

Follow the jump to find out what happened next

Meanwhile Nebin and Alia had been fighting off the few kobolds that had gone to the other side of the portal, certainly surprised that they were not in the desert city Degania, and instead in a clearing of a forest. Aided by some unseen archers hidden in the surrounding woods, our heroes were able to dispatch the kobolds, except for the leader, who disappeared in a puff of smoke.

By now, the rest of us had joined Nebin and Alia but found ourselves held hostage by the unseen archers, who did not believe we were allies of Nebin and Alia, and enemies of the kolbolds. After several attempts, we were able to sweet talk our way into at least a morticum of trust, and were able to extract from them the whereabouts of the secret Oyev mining operation near by, and the existence of a strange ally of Oyev, a young dragon by the name of Ariyeh. We decided to go investigate the mining operation and, aided by one of the elven archers, Luvian, snuck into the camp, and found ourselves face to face with an Orc and his apprentice.

In the very long battle that followed, we tried every trick in the book to defeat the orcs and their miners (well, except for maybe Arannis, who stood in the corner casting Cloud of Daggers over and over and over again). Taleh and Lucian were knocked unconscious, though they were revived, and the battle seemed almost lost when the dragon, angry at both the miners for not finishing their task, and us for disrupting it, burst forth onto the battle field. In the frey, Arannis also noticed that there was a box in the back of mining operation’s carts.

The party, and the orcs, scattered and ran to safety, but Alia, in a fit of either brilliance insanity, jumped on the mining operation’s carts and attempted to make their horses get him to safety. Nebin, seeing this, jumped on to the cart himself to help, turning the horses back toward the portal, with the dragon in hot pursuit.

Back in the clearing, the party quickly jumped back on to the portal, though not before Silidhor grabed the strange looking box in the back cart. Taleh quickly ran to the podium to control the portel, and punched in the key codes to send the party home. As we traveled back, the last thing we saw was Taleh being quickly engulfed in the flames.

Here is a guest post by Josh Diaz, a good friend of mine who has been helping me out with this D&D campaign. We’ll start a separate blog of our D&D adventures, more on that soon. And with that I’ll turn it over to Josh!

On Monday evenings, a group of heroes gathered in a crowded town square, uniting to help protect their homelands. At the same time, a group of game developers gathered in a dingy dungeon, to help learn the origins of their craft.

That’s right, Fire Hose is running a D&D campaign! I was invited by our Dungeon Master, Eitan, along with a select group of the realm’s finest scholars and sharpest blades, to come around and play in a game of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. 4th Edition is an updated version of the long-running game, and some of the design changes look back to both the original ‘tactical wargaming’ history of its predecessors, while also drawing on the immediacy and class balancing of modern computer and video games.

The rules are long, bookish, and copyrighted — so I’ll direct your attention to Eitan’s simple, but beautiful world. As Dungeon Master, Eitan is artist, writer, programmer *and* executable: he sets up the world our characters will inhabit, and keeps everything moving while we react to new events. As such, he’s come up with a little slice of a world that was richly represented with just a little bit of advance work. Pulling from real-world sources, our characters meet in a small and frozen town stuck on a peninsula behind a mountain range. ‘What’s exciting about a small frozen chunk of isolated no-man’s land,’I pretend to hear you ask? Well, in this case, the town is host to a small magical gateway that leads to a much larger town, and acts as kind of a trading post for the peninsula and it’s inhabits. With a hook like that, characters drawn from all over the world — an elf scholar who came to visit the big city from his wooded homeland, a dragonborn mercenary from a rural mountain rookery — are given both a reason and the means to gather. But if we can get there, where else can we get? And *who* else has access to the portal?

Oh, I haven’t mentioned the invasion, the ambush, or the kobold slingers with their potions of explodey doom yet. But one of the neat things about D&D is that in the course of play, you always end up with more threads than you planned, and that just means there’s something to think about for next week. Adieu!

Dungeons and Dragons is something that I’ve always wanted to play, but in shame have never really gotten around to it. Sure, I’ve played variants like Final Fantasy (the original) and Baldur’s Gate II, and last summer I even played around two minutes of an awesome campaign headed up by Josh Diaz at GAMBIT, but I can’t say that I’ve honestly ever spent time with it.

Well, no more! I’m planning on starting a new campaign using the new 4th edition rules. And I need people to join me! 4-6 people, specifically. So I thought I’d have some fun and invite you, loyal Fire Hose blog reader, to play. Want to join? Here are the requirements:

• Must live in Boston/Cambridge
• Must be free on Monday nights, from 7-10pm
• Must be super awesome, and have fought dinosaurs before
• Ideally we’ll have a mix of guys and girls, game developers and non-game developers

If you’re interested shoot me an e-mail! You can use my super secret address of my first name at firehosegames.com to profess your desire to join, and if you make the cut we’ll get you set up.