Andrew invited me over to play board games at Sara's today which was a lot of fun. We played a bunch of Hanabi, Galaxy Trucker, Ricochet Robots, Mutant Meeples, and Tier Und Tier. And one silly game Andrew really wanted to play... Zombie in my Pocket. It felt like a pretty big dud.
The game was introduced as a mostly cooperative game. The rules to the game stated in bold that it was a non-cooperative game. This may be a bit of the issue since for most of the game most of us were playing it as a coop game while Andrew was playing to score the most points. We finally got justice by killing Andrew off and then tying the game between the other three of us.
In a sense the game reminded me a lot of Republic of Rome. If everyone plays just to win themselves then the game is impossible and everyone will lose. If people actually work together completely selflessly the game is probably pretty easy but has no substance. Flip some cards up, see if the optimal but trivial play wins or not. The trick to this sort of game would be finding a way to make the 'stab for the win' part of the game interesting enough while not being blatantly obvious. I've yet to see that happen. Red November tried, but it didn't have it. Only a couple people could possibly stab for the win in that game which meant the 'right' play is to waste the early game trying to be one of those people which tended to mean everyone lost.
Maybe it's just playing these sorts of games with people like Andrew and Sky. They're practically unwinnable when we're all trying to find the way to screw the team over for the solo win. But playing this sort of game with true team players just means I either don't play for the optimal win or I screw them over time and again. Neither of those situations is very appealing either. I love winning, but I want to win games on the same terms as my opponent. Playing a different game and sneaking in the win isn't fun for me. But if we're all playing the same game we just lose. So maybe the real problem is playing this sort of game with people like me...
Showing posts with label zombies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zombies. Show all posts
Friday, June 14, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Plants vs Zombies Adventures
A new game just came out on Facebook and Ike pretty much immediately linked to an article about how this game merged two popular time wasters into one awesome game which was going to kill workplace productivity. The two games in question were Farmville and Plants vs Zombies. I actually played Farmville for a fair amount of time (basically until they removed the ability for me to give pigs to all my friends) and never really played the original Plants vs Zombies but really liked the World of Warcraft quest that spun off of it. And I love tower defense games in general. So even though I hate Facebook games with a passion after several of them bombed on me (Who Wants To Be A Millionaire stole my money, Scrabble started pausing games to serve ads, and Mystic Warlords of Ka'a took people's money and then shut down) I decided to give this a try.
On the surface the game starts off as a standard tower defense game. They moved away from the core Plants vs Zombies gameplay of having straight lines and infinite range plants and switched into a preset zombie path with finite plant range system. Not a big deal, but it is a change. You have peashooters and sunflowers and it all makes sense. Then the first twist gets thrown at you... Plants that you put down during a tower defense mission don't just cost you sunpower that you have to collect as usual. You have a finite number of these plants and when you use one on a given map it's gone forever. In order to keep playing map after map you need to generate a supply of these plants to use on each new map. The way you do this is by playing Farmville. Your town has 10 planter boxes and you can pay an ingame currency (coins) to grow more plants. The type of plant determines how many coins it costs to grow and how much time it takes.
How do you get coins to buy plants? Well, after each map any plants you use explode into a few coins, so you get a small amount of recycling that way. You can also build houses on your map that generate coins over time. Go to your town and click on the houses to get your coins out of them. They only build up coins for 3 or 4 hours though, so you better keep coming back often to get all of your coins! You also need to keep coming back often so you can grow more plants!
How do you get more houses? You spend another ingame currency (zombucks) on them. How do you get more of those? You do the tower defense missions and kill zombies! So it has nice interplay going on there. Play tower defense to get currency to play Farmville to get currency to play tower defense. Nice if the numbers are balanced properly, anyway. Terrible and frustrating if they're off in some way...
And off they are. I was able to play the game for maybe 45 minutes before I stopped being able to play. Part of this is not understanding what was going on. I gained the ability to make a new seed so I immediately planted a bunch of those in my farm garden. Turns out those seeds take an hour to grow, so half of my plots of land became worthless. It also turns out that the asparagus plant is strictly superior to the pea plant. (It shoots 4 square instead of 2 squares for the same amount of damage and same attack rate.) But it also turns out asparagus takes 10 minutes to grow instead of 1 minute. And costs twice as many coins. So while the tower defense missions are 'easier' with asparagus, you just get to do fewer of them since you can't grow enough plants to keep playing and you can't afford to buy them all even if you wanted to. So either I play with worse plants or I don't play as often as I want.
Or I pay them a bunch of money. Because that's what this game is designed to do, after all. Encourage microtransactions. There's a third type of ingame currency that you seem to only get by paying real money for it. You can spend this currency on pretty much anything you want. More planter boxes so you can get more plants? Done! Tons of coins? Done! $2.50 will get you a planter box. $20 will get you enough coins to buy 336 asparagus plants. Want a garden gnome for your town? (DO I?!) $1.50 and you can have one! Want to use beeshooters instead of peashooters? (They have more range and I suspect do more damage or attack faster.) You can't grow those at all. But you can buy them for a mere 40 cents each!
The numbers could be set up to make this a fun game I could play for a long time. Instead the numbers are designed so that I can pay them a lot of money in order to play for a long time. Or I can play for half an hour every 4 hours for free. It's set up to tell me when my friends outlevel me though, in order to guilt trip me into paying money when they do.
I can't say that I disagree with the design from a business point of view. The game was pretty fun for the 45 minutes I was able to play. I was able to unlock new things, and see achievements, and blow zombies up with plants. I'm sure there are plenty of people who will spend some money in order to play more often. But I hate this business model. Maybe because I'm a game locust who wants to play it all in one sitting and this business model is set up to get all of my money. It's not that I don't like paying money for games; I do. Even for free to play games, like League of Legends. I just hate having to pay extra in order to play at the rate I want to play, and I hate paying extra to be better.
So I'm not going to pay, and as such I'll probably end up not playing either. But if you're someone who plays games in shorter chunks than I do, or who wants to give the Popcap guys all of your money, give this one a try. It seems fun.
On the surface the game starts off as a standard tower defense game. They moved away from the core Plants vs Zombies gameplay of having straight lines and infinite range plants and switched into a preset zombie path with finite plant range system. Not a big deal, but it is a change. You have peashooters and sunflowers and it all makes sense. Then the first twist gets thrown at you... Plants that you put down during a tower defense mission don't just cost you sunpower that you have to collect as usual. You have a finite number of these plants and when you use one on a given map it's gone forever. In order to keep playing map after map you need to generate a supply of these plants to use on each new map. The way you do this is by playing Farmville. Your town has 10 planter boxes and you can pay an ingame currency (coins) to grow more plants. The type of plant determines how many coins it costs to grow and how much time it takes.
How do you get coins to buy plants? Well, after each map any plants you use explode into a few coins, so you get a small amount of recycling that way. You can also build houses on your map that generate coins over time. Go to your town and click on the houses to get your coins out of them. They only build up coins for 3 or 4 hours though, so you better keep coming back often to get all of your coins! You also need to keep coming back often so you can grow more plants!
How do you get more houses? You spend another ingame currency (zombucks) on them. How do you get more of those? You do the tower defense missions and kill zombies! So it has nice interplay going on there. Play tower defense to get currency to play Farmville to get currency to play tower defense. Nice if the numbers are balanced properly, anyway. Terrible and frustrating if they're off in some way...
And off they are. I was able to play the game for maybe 45 minutes before I stopped being able to play. Part of this is not understanding what was going on. I gained the ability to make a new seed so I immediately planted a bunch of those in my farm garden. Turns out those seeds take an hour to grow, so half of my plots of land became worthless. It also turns out that the asparagus plant is strictly superior to the pea plant. (It shoots 4 square instead of 2 squares for the same amount of damage and same attack rate.) But it also turns out asparagus takes 10 minutes to grow instead of 1 minute. And costs twice as many coins. So while the tower defense missions are 'easier' with asparagus, you just get to do fewer of them since you can't grow enough plants to keep playing and you can't afford to buy them all even if you wanted to. So either I play with worse plants or I don't play as often as I want.
Or I pay them a bunch of money. Because that's what this game is designed to do, after all. Encourage microtransactions. There's a third type of ingame currency that you seem to only get by paying real money for it. You can spend this currency on pretty much anything you want. More planter boxes so you can get more plants? Done! Tons of coins? Done! $2.50 will get you a planter box. $20 will get you enough coins to buy 336 asparagus plants. Want a garden gnome for your town? (DO I?!) $1.50 and you can have one! Want to use beeshooters instead of peashooters? (They have more range and I suspect do more damage or attack faster.) You can't grow those at all. But you can buy them for a mere 40 cents each!
The numbers could be set up to make this a fun game I could play for a long time. Instead the numbers are designed so that I can pay them a lot of money in order to play for a long time. Or I can play for half an hour every 4 hours for free. It's set up to tell me when my friends outlevel me though, in order to guilt trip me into paying money when they do.
I can't say that I disagree with the design from a business point of view. The game was pretty fun for the 45 minutes I was able to play. I was able to unlock new things, and see achievements, and blow zombies up with plants. I'm sure there are plenty of people who will spend some money in order to play more often. But I hate this business model. Maybe because I'm a game locust who wants to play it all in one sitting and this business model is set up to get all of my money. It's not that I don't like paying money for games; I do. Even for free to play games, like League of Legends. I just hate having to pay extra in order to play at the rate I want to play, and I hate paying extra to be better.
So I'm not going to pay, and as such I'll probably end up not playing either. But if you're someone who plays games in shorter chunks than I do, or who wants to give the Popcap guys all of your money, give this one a try. It seems fun.
Friday, December 03, 2010
Singing Sunflower
That's the music video for a flash game that I've yet to play (maybe I'll play it sometime this weekend) that has quite a catchy tune. In the latest patch to World of Warcraft they added a series of quests where you basically play Plants vs Zombies in game (Peacebloom vs Ghouls!) and at the end of the quest chain you get a non-combat pet which is basically the sunflower from the video. What's especially cool about the pet is they went and got the singer from the video (Laura Shigahara) and had her do the voice for the pet and it sings little ditties from the song from time to time.
It's so awesome I've started playing WoW with the sound on again, and have the pet out constantly when I'm playing. The only question now is... How long until it gets banned from raids?
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Deathless Wasteland
Often when I'm playing games I'll be listening to music. Pandora got shut down a few years ago now, so I was forced to find an alternative for my internet radio fix. I've settled on Jango which does a pretty reasonable job of doing the 'similar music' thing Pandora did, though not nearly as well.
One great thing Jango does do, though, is allow budding artists to pay to have their music played over the air. There are lots of different ways to target listeners based on what they already listen to or where they live or how old they are and whatnot. For the listener it pops up a box when one of these 'new artist' songs comes on and lets you choose if you like it or not. If you don't the song immediately ends and it lets you pick an artist to come next. (Normally it's random.)
At any rate, there's one song that came on like this that I think is awesome, despite being classified as 'country'. They've put a free mp3 download up on their website (for a limited time) and I think anyone who might read this should check it out. It's about zombies!
Deathless Wasteland (Behind Zombie Eyes) by Lynn Lister
One great thing Jango does do, though, is allow budding artists to pay to have their music played over the air. There are lots of different ways to target listeners based on what they already listen to or where they live or how old they are and whatnot. For the listener it pops up a box when one of these 'new artist' songs comes on and lets you choose if you like it or not. If you don't the song immediately ends and it lets you pick an artist to come next. (Normally it's random.)
At any rate, there's one song that came on like this that I think is awesome, despite being classified as 'country'. They've put a free mp3 download up on their website (for a limited time) and I think anyone who might read this should check it out. It's about zombies!
Deathless Wasteland (Behind Zombie Eyes) by Lynn Lister
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