Tag Review

Entries 4 Total

Trapped in a Tiny Tower

Jul 5, ’11 9:18 AM
This is my tower. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
This is my tower. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I have spent way too much time this weekend playing tiny tower. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy my holiday—just that, every fleeting moment I could snag between grilling, family events and fireworks, I would dash to my phone to restock my tiny businesses.

As time-wasters go, Tiny Tower has a leg up on the competition. The writing is clever (and delightfully referential), and the pixel art feels fresh in a market over-saturated in nostalgia. The art’s strength is in abstraction of the familiar: an Apple Store, a wood-grilled pizza parlor, and a brewery are all represented, each row no more than about 50 pixels tall. With a nod to its social-game ancestors, Tiny Tower even abstracts Facebook: your ‘bitizens’ will post status updates about their jobs, favorite pop-culture quotes, or speculations on 8-bit existence. Sam Cooper, one of my “Mapple Store” genius bar associates (complete with blue polo—you can customize each character’s outfits) muses, “If we were thinking with portals then we wouldn’t need these elevators!”

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Final Thoughts on Red Dead Redemption

Aug 3, ’10 3:55 PM

I achieved 100% completion in Red Dead Redemption in just over 43 hours, and nothing else I’ve played this year has come close to equalling that gaming experience. I normally avoid 100% completion—I would like to think I have better things to do, and I believe my friends and family tend to agree. In this case, however, the experience was enjoyable, motivated, and most importantly the tasks made sense within the gameworld. One of my complaints about Grand Theft Auto IV‘s completion stats is that there are many things in that game that I do not believe Niko would normally do—the online dating side-missions in particular run at odds with the Kate McReary subplot. That was not the case in RDR.

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The Graveyard

Mar 12, ’10 11:11 PM

They say the best camera is the one you have with you, and I believe the same can be said for game consoles. I own a DS and a PSP, but now that I actually have a daily commute that could finally provide a good outlet for my portable gaming habits, I have found that I rarely game on anything but my iPhone. It doesn’t have the best games and it has significant drawbacks versus dedicated gaming hardware, but it wins out purely because it is the most portable of the portables. I always have my phone on me, and all the games are stored internally—not having to carry around additional game cartridges, however small they have gotten, is a big plus. When the T stops on Longfellow bridge, I don’t think “Oh, I wish I’d brought my DS,” I just fire up Canabalt.

There are a couple of games I have been playing lately that I have particularly reacted to, and as I am currently stuck on a bus in deepest Connecticut I thought I might take a break from replaying Spider to reflect a little on a handful of iPhone ports that have most interested me: Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard, Popcap’s Plants vs Zombies, and Lazy 8 Studios’ Cogs.

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Sequel of the Week: Heligoland

Feb 9, ’10 11:52 AM

Album Cover for Massive Attack's Heligoland (2010)This blog was intended to be about games, art and animation, not music, but with no disrespect meant to Bioshock II, Massive Attack’s Heligoland is my most anticipated sequel of the week and I would like to devote a few words to the album.

Introduced to the band through “Dissolved Girl’s” brief appearance in The Matrix, I backtracked from Mezzanine to Blue Lines, eagerly awaited 100th Window in 2003, and somewhere along the way acquired their limited edition Singles ’90/’98 collection. I have gone to see movies purely because this band recorded the score. Nowhere along the way would I have necessarily have claimed they were one of my favorite bands, but I have been a devoted listener for over a decade and I somehow own their complete discography. Suffice it to say that I was pretty excited to hear they had a new album coming out, especially after seven years of silence.

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