Week Nine: Chain Rxn

While this isn't nearly as "big" of a game as the others I have written about, Chain Rxn is worth some discussion simply for how different it is from the others. Chain Rxn is a Facebook app whose goal is to create a chain reaction of explosions of balls bouncing around a portion of the screen. This reaction is activated by clicking once in the play area, which creates a small explosion that explodes balls upon contact. If any ball contacts the explosion of another ball, it will explode and add an exponentially-incremented number of points to the player's score. Each level of the game has a certain number of balls that the player must explode via a chain reaction, and the number of balls increases as play progresses. To achieve a high score, however, it does not suffice simply to clear the required number of balls for each level; the player must clear almost all of them on later levels to distance him or herself from those who lack planning or thought in the reactions that they start.

Though Chain Rxn obviously took far less work to produce than something like World of Warcraft, it actually has a respectable four million monthly users. Admittedly, none of these users is actually paying to play Chain Rxn, but its popularity is nothing to scoff at. As for what makes Chain Rxn exciting--well, it does what it sets out to do. It's very much a casual game in its length and how much thought is required to play, but it gives players a definite sense of reward through a tone upon the explosion of each ball and the sheer destruction that can be wrought with the right combo. For players who have tired of merely clicking at random, the game has provides a layer of depth in how much planning can be put into getting just the right reaction so as to score the most points.

Week Eight: World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft is strangely addictive. It really doesn't seem like it would be, given that its quest system and character classes have appeared in all manner of other games, yet there is something almost magical about how it is able to keep twelve million paying paying $15 per month. From my experience the past few days with WoW's trial version, I have been having fun myself, but I certainly don't plan ever to spend money on a subscription. While it's a great way to relax after I've finished working on homework, it doesn't stand out in my mind as a truly "great" game.

That said, though, WoW does have its moments. Battles with monsters are executed well for the most part, where character attributes, spells, and skill all play a part in being able to defeat the more difficult ones. As a Tauren warrior, I normally begin battles by using Charge, which generates rage, then Rend, to poison the enemy, followed by an alternation of Heroic Strike and Thunder Clap. Enemies that try to run on low health die either through the effects of Rend or by a couple of shots with my gun. Currently, my primary weapon is a mace, and my offhand holds a tower shield. Once I reach level twenty I'll be able to lean dual-wield, though.

Questing is also kind of fun--I have about twenty quests in my log right now, and I like to tackle two or three at once. The Barrens is kind of a big place, so it's taken a while just to find the enemies I am supposed to kill in some instances. It would be helpful if the minimap or overworld map showed where to go for quests, but no such luck there. Normally I just wander around aimlessly for a while until holding my mouse over an enemy reveals that they are part of a quest.

Week Seven: Core Wars

This week I thought I would write about something entirely different: a game called Core Wars. Core Wars is a computer game in which two players (or possibly up to four) compute in a virtual arena called the Core using virtual warriors. These warriors are not at all the "warriors" of other games, however; they are actually pseudo-assembly programs that try to destroy each other by making their opponent execute a 0-instruction, causing it to "die", or stop executing. The most basic warrior is the Imp, which is simply:

MOV 0, 1

This isn't the most exciting warrior; all that it does is copy the current instruction (i.e. the one at "0") to the following slot in memory, so that the same instruction is executed next turn. A slightly more interesting (although still very basic) warrior is the Dwarf, whose instruction set is:

ADD #4, 3
MOV 2, @2
JMP -2
DAT #0, #0

What this does is to increment the second value stored in DAT (a 0-instruction) by four, then copy the DAT to the location pointed at by its second value, then skip back to the first instruction and start again. In this way, the Dwarf places "mines" at intervals of four throughout the Core, hoping that its opponent will try to execute one and then die. In the battle between an Imp and a Dwarf, the Dwarf will occasionally win by placing a mine on the Imp's current instruction, and the Imp will sometime enact a stalemate by causing the Dwarf to read a MOV 0, 1 and effectively become an Imp itself.

My experience with Core Wars so far has mostly been trying to expand upon some of the basic strategies, though I've had mixed results. Assembly is not an especially easy language to program anything in, and virtual warriors are no exception. I'm hoping to get one of my roommates to take an interest in the game so that we can battle, however, since that would give me more of a motivation to improve my skills.

Week Six: Super Smash Brothers

This really is not an activity constrained to but a single week; rather, it has been an ongoing, almost nightly pursuit for the last three quarters. Super Smash Brothers: Melee is the game to which my roommates and I have devoted many a night from 12am on, that pinnacle of action and fighting. What makes SSBM so fun? I've tried thinking about this before, and I suspect that it's the potential novelty of a match. Even if two people have played the same map with the same characters many times, items, environmental effects, and the players themselves can drastically change the flow of events. Pokeballs are one such factor that can change a match immensely; while weaker Pokemon like Cyndaquil, Chikorita, and Wobbuffet appear quite often and have little effect, less frequent but stronger ones like Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres can significantly alter the balance of the match by killing or inflicting a high amount of damage upon one's opponent.

In terms of my personal interaction with SSBM, I generally play as Falco, though lately I have experimented as Marth. Falco is a very powerful character, as his downward kick in the air has the power to "spike" an opponent downward and off the stage for an instant kill, his deflector shield can "shock" opponents into the air for a combination attack, and his laser can nullify attacks or movement by making opponents flinch. Marth, on the other hand, is somewhat more unwieldy than Falco, but has the ability to "parry" (counter) attacks, can also "spike" opponents downwards, and has an arcing, somewhat overpowered sideways smash attack. I used to play as Fox, but Falco definitely trumps Fox in his ability to spike as well as in the strength of his attacks.

Not to brag too much, but I do normally win at SSBM against my roommates. It used to be that one of them had a clear edge (the one who plays as Marth), but now that edge has dissipated and I beat him five times for every one time that he defeats me. With my other roommate, however, matches are much closer (he plays as Fox) due to his speed advantage over my character as well as his general luckiness in netting helpful, match-altering items.

Week Five: More ourWorld

ourWorld is too much fun. Unlike other MMORPGs where you actually have to run some other program to play, ourWorld simply requires you to open another tab in your browser. This is both good and bad--good in that it's so easy, and bad in that it's so easy. Too often do I get distracted by ourWorld when I should be doing math homework or reading for such and such class. As a result, though, I've been progressing somewhat quickly through ourWorld--I've finished all of the introductory challenges (both game-related and world-related) and advanced to level 16. At the moment, I have 69 flow and am already close to level 17, so spending that should move me close to or past level 18 I would think.

The challenges aspect of ourWorld is what draws me in the most, I would say. Playing flash games with no external benefit to completing them just isn't that exciting. When you can earn five or ten flow for scoring ___ points in a few specific games, though, and are able to spend that flow to get cool clothing and hairdos, it becomes much more rewarding.

Through my spending of flow, I have actually picked up some cool things now, too. It's too bad that the identity paper for this class wasn't due this week, because I'd have a much cooler character to show. As he is now, Major Major (my avatar on ourWorld) has blue shoes, baggy white pants, a green "action games" shirt (with a ray gun on the front) and a gray jacket with a dark gray star on the breast. Major Major also has a groovy hairdo--Lou hair, I think it's called--that makes the whole package even more impressive. Other people do seem to like Major Major too, since I get lots of offers of "Do you want to be my boyfriend?" The answer to that question is always "no" (and a hasty escape), but at least I have reinforcement that Major Major is a cool guy.

Week Four: Perfect World

Perfect World is like World of Warcraft (or so I have been told) except that it is free and less entertaining (at least from my own experiences). I began as a winged elf archer, who looks very much like myself, and soon commenced a series of fetch a ____ and kill 10 _____ quests in order to level up my character and pick up some cool--or at least "level 5 cool"--items. Right off the bat I wasn't feeling overly inspired. Time is precious to me, especially with my current class load, and spending hour after hour watching my character shoot uninspired arrows at uninspired monsters wasn't particularly exciting. The tedium was broken from time to time by my use of "quickshot" or "focus shot" (something like that, anyway), though I generally just watched my character shoot things until they were dead, since I was in no danger of dying myself. One especially dramatic event was when I ran out of arrows and, unable to use better arrows due to my low dexterity attribute, felt mildly panicked until I realized I still had more skill points to spend from my last level-up.

Things actually did pick up after a while, though--my character now has the ability to fashion weapons for himself, and I learned how to level up my abilities so that they aren't quite as worthless. Not to mention that some other players were strangely excited to meet Franz Kafka (me) in the flesh--a couple of Metamorphosis jokes flew zippily upon my entrance to one town, and one person felt compelled to remark, "There goes Franz again!" or the equivalent whenever I walked by him. So Perfect World does have some promise--while not as perfect as I would hope, one of my friends tells me that things do heat up after a while, specifically once it becomes necessarily to go questing with other people. I have something to look forward to, anyway.

Week Three: ourWorld

The strange thing about ourWorld, from the perspective of a nineteen-year-old player, is that I feel like I'm role-playing myself. The virtual world's target audience is something like 11-14, so all of its avatars have the appearance of being close to my own age--an exciting prospect for those in the target demographic, but a rather unsettling one for me. If I think of the other avatars that I see as actual projections of the players behind them, then it's as if I'm in an alternate world where all my peers are socially, mentally regressed versions of their current selves. A rather bizarre phenomenon, really--perhaps I would feel the same way playing World of Warcraft as a night elf if I actually were a night elf, though that's slightly more difficult to imagine.

The play aspect of ourWorld is not quite so strange, and is actually rather entertaining. Instead of playing one casual game after another with no real connection, as one would do on Addicting Games, Popcap, Miniclip, etc., playing casual games via ourWorld benefits one's character in ourWorld. By scoring within games, the player accumulates flow--a intermediate currency of sorts--that can be exchanged for coins or prizes. I found this system rather fun, since one gets a sense of overarching "progress" from playing games. A detractor from the experience, though, was an imbalance in flow-gain-rates between games--some games are much harder than others, and even though success in those games might be rewarded with more flow than average, it would be a better move financially to pick a game with more frequent payouts. Recognizing this, I felt pressured to play the games that paid the most, regardless of how fun they were.