Geographical Gaming

Thanks to a post at Easily Distracted, I have discovered a really wonderful little game online that you all can probably enjoy right now for free – the Traveller IQ Challenge from TravelPod. If you’re a member of Facebook, you can keep track of high scores, which is also nice.

Anyhow, the game is 12 levels of geography questions. You have a map o’ the world, and you click on the location of each keyword. So if New York City pops up, you find that wee little spot to the west of Long Island and give it a click.Then you get points based on the quickness of your click and the distance from the correct location. Quickness doesn’t seem to give so many points, but accuracy is key. After clicking, the game tells you how many kilometers you were from your target.

It makes geography fun! Well, geography was already fun. If you didn’t like it before, the game’s probably not going to change that. But I find it to be a most fascinating subject, so a game is welcome.

There are other challenges like the flag challenge in which you see a country’s flag and then have to click on that country’s capital city. On Facebook, there are a bunch of user-created challenges, a nice touch in addition to its high-score table. It is kind of strange that you have to get all registered with Facebook for that, though.

The one gripe I have with the game is how the map is kind of small. There does not seem to be any way to play the game in a full-screen mode. When you’re using the cursor, sometimes it’s hard to see underneath the crosshairs to pinpoint an exact location. New York City, for example, is very easy to find by examining the coastline for the tell-tell sign of Long Island. But the tiny size makes it harder to hit correctly, though coming close is no problem. I’m not sure that I have ever made it under 10 kilometers away from any location on the full world map (other games have more detailed maps, such as individual continents, countries, and states).

[Edit - 2:55 12 January 2007: I've been playing some more, and, for the record, I have reached 565,694 points for an IQ of 132. This is just on the regular site, not on ye ole Facebook, but it might be the highest score I've gotten on the regular version of the game.]

Test Driving a Toyota via the Xbox

The Toyota Yaris is out for Xbox 360, as a free download from the Live Arcade. This is how I stumbled onto the game; I don’t know how long it’s been up there, but I just downloaded it yesterday. Actually, I had been trying to download it earlier, a day before or so, but the download wouldn’t complete for some reason. Anyhow, I figured it’d be a commercially churned out game with product placement as the main concept. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but would gameplay be lacking?

You can really complain about a free game – as far as pricing goes. However, if it’s not worth your time, then, well, time is money. Actually, time is far more valuable than something like cash. Anyway, I’ve had the game for less than 24 hours, but here are my initial impressions…

First of all, it reminds me a whole lot of the Chaos Emerald stages in Sonic the Hedgehog 2. You drive through a half-pipe, moving from side to side, but turns are automatic; you’re never going to fall off the path. While you collect rings in Sonic 2, you collect coins here, and these can be used to purchase upgrades. There’s a bunch of obstacles and enemies you can shoot down (or vice-versa). You can control the aiming of your gun (a tentacle thing in front of the car), but there’s a good amount of auto-aim (convenient, since otherwise, it’s really hard).

The game itself is pretty fun… In fact, side-by-side with the Sonic 2 minigame, this one might win out, though to be fair, the Sonic 2 was made many years ago. This Yaris business is quite a challenge, though; I’ve played for a decent amount of time (maybe 30 minutes to an hour all together), and I’ve only made it to the third stage of eight. Stage three is insanely difficult, and I’m not even close to beating it. Stage two is pretty hard as well, but I’ve passed it a time or two. Stage one, the introductory level, is rather easy, and I find myself replaying it for more coins. I’ve upgraded to the most expensive car already, the 4-door S sedan, and I want to max out its stats before working to that $1,000,000 cash saved achievement. Yup, they didn’t make the achievements easy. Playing the first stage – rather well, I think – I can get more than $1,000 but less than $2,000. Unless I get good at later stages (and unless those stages pay out more cash), I’m looking at maybe 500-1000 replays of level one (my best time is a bit under three minutes). That’s a maximum of 50 hours.

Thereare some multiplayer options, but I haven’t tried them yet.

I have to give Toyota some props. It’s not a generic “look how awesome this car is” game. Actually, it is, in that the car can shoot lasers and whatnot. I like how they playfully take the game to this level. The concept is kind of ridiculous, and the car itself, while pretty cool, isn’t invincible. Basically, the product placement does not impede gameplay, but rather enhances it.

For example, a TV show in which every character drinks, say, Coca-Cola, and constantly says “Boy, I do love me a refreshing Coca-Cola” is something that might impede the show’s story. But a character who causally is drinking some Coca-Cola (and sure, that character can make positive remarks about it) can fit right in with the story, and it much preferable to someone drinking a can with an unrealistic label saying “Cola” that kicks down the realism as much as someone giving out their 555 number.

Back to Yaris, though. For a game about Toyota and its cars, I would have liked to have seen more details on the actual car itself. Maybe they could have let you customize it more in close-up detail, allowing you to purchase cup holders and such. They could have used that to showcase more features of the actual car and simultaneously give users more ways to make their own cars unique. Customizing things in games is usually a fun part of the process.

All in all though, I’m pleased with the game. It’s free, and it’s fun to play. Maybe I won’t play it long enough to make that $1,000,000 achievement, but I’d say its worth taking the time to download it and try it out.

Mrs. Pac Man for the Xbox 360 Is Difficult

Of all the old-timey arcade classics, Mrs. Pac Man has long been my favorite. In fact, if I were to get any arcade machine, it’d be the Mrs. Pac Man one, (or actually, the one with both Mrs. Pac Man and Galaga, but maybe it’s not fair to choose a two-games-in-one package). Back in the day, I was able to zip through much of the beginning of the game, getting to the last fruit stage (banana) with ease. A score of 100,000 was the score I would try to achieve at the very least – anything less would be unacceptable, like bowling less than 100. (Yeah, I know a score of 100 a great bowler does not make, but for a run-of-the mill bowler, I like to set that as a minimum goal.) I want to say that my top Mrs. Pac Man score was around 150,000, or maybe I think that because my top bowling score was, I think, 153. Anyway, I was not a great Mrs. Pac Man player, but I was pretty good and probably better than most people I know.

Naturally, with the Xbox 360’s Live Arcade, Mrs. Pac Man was a priority. I had never had much success with console versions of the game, and this is no exception. In fact, a quick look at my gamer profile reveals that I don’t even have all 200 gamerscore achievement points! I’m missing 30 points for the “Perfect” achievement in which one must eat all ghosts four times within the same stage. This is a task that, for the first couple of levels, used to be extremely easy for me to do in the arcades. My overall high score on the game is a mere 37,070. I guess some of the blame must go to the Xbox controller, but then again, I’ve been pretty bad at other Mrs. Pac Man ports to home consoles in the past. I think I just need the actual arcade version, which is another reason why my first purchase of a real-live arcade machine would have to feature this game. Perhaps my skills have dwindled in the past few years, but I don’t think that alone would account for a high score of only 37,070.

On the other hand, I have done well at the Xbox 360 port of Galaga. I managed to get around 99,000, which is probably higher than I’ve ever gotten in the arcade.

Beautiful Katamari – The Xbox 360 Demo

I’ve long been interested in the series of Katamari games, but I’ve never gotten around to getting my own copy. So I finally downloaded the X-Box Live demo for Beautiful Katamari, and I just might be hooked. Basically, it presents one quick, three-minute level, in which you get to roll up a katamari ball from a wee size to a few meters. It’s a basic taste of the gameplay, but the demo is surprisingly re-playable. I have found myself logging on multiple times to just replay that same small level, trying for larger sizes. I’ve based four meters, and I’m aiming for five, a record that has eluded me thus far. The controls take some getting used to… Maybe Katamari experts will be fine, but for me, sometimes they are unwieldy and a bit frustrating. However, that obviously hasn’t halted my enthusiasm, so I continue to play on; gradually, I’m getting the hang of the controls. While a mere demo probably won’t be able to hold my attention forever, I have extracted quite a bit of fun out of it. I’d say I’ve likely played it more than 10 times, maybe around 15 or so, which would mean (for a three-minute game), at least a half hour. My point is, whether or not one wants to chuck out the cash for the full version, it might well be worth it to download and play the demo a bunch of times.

By the way, once one finishes the three-minute demo game, there’s this little sound effect that sounds like something from the effect-laden album The Who Sell Out. It kind of sounds like “ree-out” or whatnot, and seems like it’d fit right into the world of that 1967 record.

Xbox Live Arcade Demos

One of the really neat features of this Xbox Live business is the idea of the downloadable demo. I have a bunch of said demos for Live Arcade games, and sometimes they provide enough entertainment that I don’t need to download the full game. For example, the first bit of Sonic the Hedgehog is probably enough, since if I could, I’d download Sonic the Hedgehog 2 instead. Boom Boom Rocket is good for some fun, so sometimes I may drop by that game despite not wanting to throw down 800 Microsoft points for the full version. Dig Dug is fun and brings back fond memories, and if I had extra cash to use, I’d probably download it, but I don’t know if I’d really play more than a few levels anyhow.

On the other hand, some demos provide too much gameplay. Spyglass Board Games sounded like a good idea. It had chess, which the Live Arcade was sorely lacking. However, upon playing the demo, I found that the player’s point-of-view is absolutely terrible. It’s not a straight bird’s eye view of the board, which makes it really hard to see what’s going on. While one probably doesn’t play chess on a real board with a bird’s eye view, in real life, one would likely have more peripheral vision. You can kind of straighten Spyglass‘ chess board out to a bird’s-eye view, but it sort of cuts off a bit of the board at the bottom. I don’t wanna sound too picky, but if I can’t choose a clear view of the board, then what’s the point?

Of course, demos can also lead to purchases, and for all the free play I’ve gotten, Microsoft has squeezed money after I ponied up the dough for the full versions of games like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. While this was a new game for me, most Live Arcade downloads I have bought have tended to be old classics, like Galaga and Mrs. Pac Man.

Train that Brain!

My wife and I have had a lot of fun playing the Nintendo DS game 東北大学未来科学技術共同研究セZンター川島隆太教授監修 もっと脳を鍛える大人のDSトレーニング, also known by the English title Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day. We have the Japanese version, which has some fun Japanese-specific minigames that couldn’t appear in versions in other languages. For one thing, they have this kanji radical minigame, in which you see floating radicals and you have to combine them into kanji while trying to work as quickly as possible. Another fun kanji-related game is found in the Brain Age Check mode. Similar to the game in which you try to memorize the locations of 25 number sin a five-by-five grid (which I read also exists in the English version), you are presented with two screens of kanji to memorize, after which you write as many down as you can. It’s funny how my scores tend to drop when I work on the Japanese-specific tests as opposed to the universal numbers-related ones. However, it’s fun to play. I did eventually get my age down to the best-possible score of 20 years, but being a bit sneaky, I haven’t gotten my age “tested” since for fear that my score wouldn’t be as good. The daily Brain Age Check poses three random minigames, and I think when I got the 20 years, I managed to get three random non-kanji ones. One ironic game is the English-testing one. It presents words in Japanese, and you have to use your English skills to fill in black spaces with letters. Easy for a native English-speaker like me, right? Well, you have to know the Japanese keyword in the first place, so it doesn’t matter so much. The non-Japanese games are fun, too, like the aforementioned five-by-five grid or the falling blocks game. That game in which you keep track of the sprinting runner is really hard, though.

One great addition to Brain Training 2 is the relaxation game, which is a version of the classic puzzler Dr. Mario. My wife likes that one especially, and she has some pretty high scores. It kind of made me want to get a copy of the real Dr. Mario, maybe for Game Boy Advance. However, using the DS stylus to move the medicine pills is really a nice feature, and I’m not sure if I’d want to go back to a version of the game without a stylus. The only downside though is in rotating the pills. You give ‘em a tap to rotate, but sometimes this doesn’t seem to work as well for me as a button press might.

The Japanese Brain Age 2 does not include Sudoku. It is my understanding that while neither Japanese version of Brain Age 1 or 2 has Sudoku, but English versions do. It’d be nice to have Sudoku included. Perhaps eventually, I’ll get the game for English, for Sudoku as well as for English word puzzles, which could be fun. I wonder, would it be worth a purchase for just that? Maybe I should just buy the English version of the original Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, so I could get different non-language tests as well.