Who blogs here:
Erik spends his night and weekends saving worlds, slaying beasts and organizing mismatch shapes into straight lines. While First-person shooters (FPS),
survival horror and platformers are some of his favorite, there are no genre of game he won't play. From PC to PSP, Xbox to Wii. Erik is just as passionate
with playing games as he is talking about them.
J.R. is the sorta-completionist gamer. He almost always completes the main story arc in all games he plays, but seldom plays the "gamer's game" to complete everything. He'll never get all 120 stars or fight Emerald Weapon, but he will save the day. His favorite genres are RPG, Action/Adventure, Platformer, and MMO. He doesn't like fighting games and is rather picky about FPSs.
Ted has been hooked on gaming since the birth of the Atari 2600, when high fantasy adventure consisted of maneuvering a colored square through a castle maze while dodging pesky dragons that looked like 2D seahorses with beaks and wacky bats that took great pleasure in stealing your keys. To this day, while he enjoys platformers, first-person shooters and puzzlers, he is most passionate about RPGs and any other games which weave great stories into the overall experience.
Amethyst, a gamer that giggles at calling herself a gamer because she fits none of the glamorous stereotypes of female gamers, has been gaming since her father brought home the sparkly new Nintendo Entertainment System back in '89. Up until then she had dabbled with the Atari at a cousin's, but it was Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt and pounding with her hands on the Power Pad in World Class Track Meet that sealed her fate. Despite a three year stint that she doesn't talk about, she has been playing video games and other nerdly activities with enthusiasm. She enjoys puzzlers, RPGs, MMORPGs, certain shooters/fighters, platformers, magic carpet rides and um, mechanical pencil sharpeners. She hates, despite a couple of exceptions, racing games and sports games. Amethyst is married to Erik and is friends with J.R. and Ted.
My Mountainous Molehills
Spyderbyte
| 7/01/2008 10:38 am |
Game On
My imagination often gets the better of me.
Present me with a simple puzzle (or in my limited defense, perhaps, a challenging puzzle with a simple solution) and if I fail to solve it quickly, I'm soon leading myself down all manners of dead-end trails. I'll expend copious amounts of time trying this and that when all along the answer is right in front of me.
I should really know better. Case in point, years ago now a friend and I led our prom dates on such a quest to find our "missing prom" tickets. I'll spare you the details, but after leading them all over the place, they ultimately found that the tickets were in the glove box of our car. Yes, the very car in which we'd been riding the entire time. You'd think if I could dream up such a puzzle for others, I could solve them on my own with ease, right? Wrong.
No, instead I fear I may always find simple puzzles to be more complicated than extra-difficult ones. A few weeks ago, for example, Amethyst and I were working on one of the puzzles from The Stone. Early on, I found a trail which I was sure had led us to the right answer. I was sure I had it right, but the judge kept rejecting my responses. Soon, I was traversing all sorts of different routes. In the end, Amethyst figured it out. What was the solution? Let's call it an abridged version of the very response I was sure it was all along. I had just been supplying too much detail for the judge's taste.
This
morning before work, I finished Uncharted - Drake's
Fortune. I adored this game from
start to finish. It features a great story, endearing
charaters, a nice pace, seamless and frequent auto-saves, superb
platforming maneuvers, a fun cover system for the gun fights, and
an excellent sountrack and score. (Incidentally, this
was my first game I played in full DTS audio -
glorious!) Appropriately, though, for a game that
follows a treasure hunter through an adventure, there were puzzles
galore. I rarely found myself stuck for very long, but
for some reason this morning, when I reached the final fight, I got
stuck in the middle of it. In retrospect, it's painful
for me to think about how difficult I made it when it really wasn't
difficult at all. Some players could easily argue that
it the final fight was too small a challenge. Not for
me. I kept overlooking the obvious resolution and
spent more time than I should have trying other options which just
weren't there.
The plus side, I guess, is that I felt even more satisfied when I won the final fight. I felt like I had really accomplished something, even if most of that particular challenge was self-created. The game designers might shake their heads in shame, wondering how I could have ever gotten stuck or lost in the places I did. I choose to think that I'm gifted at discovering challenges even the designers were unable to find. Yes, gaming is making me even better at making mountains out of my own molehills. I'm bringing the fun back to self-delusion.
Take that, imagination!
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