Push Button B

Today I present you two very different, very unique “games”.  The first is one that kept me up all night a few years back and the second one will make you punch a kitten… in the face.

P4X is a web based 150 level riddle.  According to the website only 31 out of the 215,000 people to ever start it have finished it, and I am not one of them.  The riddles, which are more like puzzles than riddles, start off extremely easy and slowly take a turn for the worse.  To complete the riddles you have to do everything from viewing the source code for the page to image editing to messing with sound tracks for hidden Morse code messages.  It’s hard to describe it, so save me some time and go play it and let me know what you think.  I gets hard, really really hard, but if you get stuck so hard you want to rage quit there are hints and walkthroughs of some of the stages to be found linked from the site.  So if you are a fan of riddles and puzzles I highly recommend it.

[Update]  It turns our that the hints that use to be there are now gone and have been replaced with hints that you have to pay for…how lame. Fortunately there are still hints up in the forums for the site.

Next up is The Impossible Quiz.  Contrary to the game’s name, it is quite possible to finish the quiz, but it won’t be easy.

The game is full of nonsense questions and puzzles that are so devious and evil I guarantee you will hate me for showing this to you.  The quiz is half multiple choice and half puzzles, none of which make any sense.

You get 3 lives, and once they are gone the game is over and you have to try again, which will happen, I promise.  Seriously, this is hard, like….talking to a 2 year old hard.  But with some time you’ll eventually know most all of the answers through trial and error and realize that the 2 year old has pooped his pants and you’re the only one left to clean it up.  But have no fear, there is some slight hope.  Randomly through the quiz there are points where you can earn level skip tokens, which can come in handy, except on the levels you can’t skip…

Here’s another picture.

I highly recommend you check these out, especially P4X, it’s challenging and very well thought out.  If this website had stars I’d give it 5/5.  Impossible quiz is a great game to play when you aren’t frustrated and want to be.

Enjoy.

I like adventure so this week I tried something new and downloaded a DS game demo to my DS through the Wii’s Nintendo Channel. There were plenty of demos up there, but the only one that seemed to not be a puzzle game was a game called Battle of Giants: Mutant Insects. The title of the game will make you think of a horrible movie with cheesy special effects that you could probably find on SyFy. Battle of Giants: Mutant Insects was used by Ubisoft before SyFy got a hold of it thankfully. The game description mentions that it includes four mutant insects to choose from to duke it out with other mutant insects with a new and unique control scheme. Before we forget, this is a demo and unless I somehow missed something, you can only play as the scorpion in this demo. Funny, seeing as scorpions are arachnids and not insects. I don’t even know what the other three mutant insects in the game there are.

From the title screen I picked Adventure. What an adventure it was! I walked around a destroyed city as a giant scorpion and killed two other scorpions. While in the “field” you move your scorpion with the stylus and like most DS games that have you do this, you just place the stylus on the screen and the scorpion will walk towards the point where the stylus is touching and keep walking in that direction until you lift the stylus or change directions. When you happen upon another mutant (in the demo’s case, another scorpion) the screen will change.

This is a battle. When the battle starts you have a aerial view of the two mutant brawlers with one on the bottom left corner and the other on the top right corner. They are facing each other and that’s where they will stay throughout the battle. The first battle in the demo’s adventure guides you through the battle and teaches you how to play. This new and unique game-play style that the game’s description discusses is a system involving tapping and sliding the various body parts of the insect to make him strike, charge, or sting the opponent (I would imagine there will be different attacks with the other insects in the game). In order to dodge you tap the scorpion and then drag the stylus to the right or left (the scorpion’s right or left that is). In order to block you tap the scorpion and slide the stylus toward the back of the scorpion. To jab with the pincers you tap one and slide it toward the opponent. You can do the same with the scorpions head to charge or with the tail to shoot poison from the stinger. After landing two consecutive hits you can initiate a Supercombo. To do the Supercombo, you need to draw a line from dot to dot. The quicker you do it, the better the combo. If the opponent is trying to land a Supercombo on you, you can minimize the damage by erasing the lines between their dots. The game did not lie; the fighting system was new and unique. It is to me, however, but I haven’t played every game in the world.

The bad part of the demo is that I really can’t tell if the game has a plot or if it’s just a giant insect version of Rampage with a different control system. This game must have been under the radar because the day I played it and wrote this is the first time I have ever heard of the game but I did research and discovered that is in a line of other Battle of the Giants games. All I can say is that its game-play style is kind of neat and maybe it deserves a try before the exterminator or Starship Troopers are called.

There are many talented crafters making video game inspired items. It’s always fun finding items that resemble long time favorite characters.

Michelle Rheaume crochets favorite characters from the Mario Bros games into three dimensional sculptures.

My favorite is the piranha plant.

Luigi gets some love too

She offers her designs in her etsy shop. And if you have crocheting skills, she also offers crochet patterns.

Maybe you could make your own raccoon suit Mario.

Game: PuzzleQuest: Galactrix
Purchased from: Best Buy
Price paid: $5.99
Platform: PC

It’s no great secret that I like puzzle games. But it’s also no great secret that I’m not a huge fan of the Bejeweled-type games. So why did I pick up a game that looks like it’s Bejeweled in space?

Because I had $6 burning a hole in my pocket, duh.

PuzzleQuest presents you with a series of hexagonal grids where you (and optionally a computer opponent) swap tiles and try to match three or more in a row (no big surprise there).

And your goals will vary from trying to destroy your opponent’s ship to ‘hacking’ (which is a fancy way of saying you have to make a certain sequence of clears in a restricted time limit) to ‘mining’ (which is a fancy way of saying that you have to match colors while working around garbage blocks that don’t actually do much). These are all wrapped with a story mode that’s conveyed with static pictures where the portraits talk to each other. Fire Emblem-style.

And I’d really like to tell you more about this game, like how deep and engrossing the story is, how the dialog is punchy with deep and pertinent undertones, how long the game is, all that kind of stuff.

But I can’t.

Mostly because the game would crash after about 20 minutes of me playing it for no discernible reason (thankfully, the autosave worked). I know, poor me, right?

But there was hope to be found!

I checked out the site of the publisher, Aspyr, and found that they had released a patch that, among other things:

“Fixed a bug that caused random crashes/performance issues on certain computers.”

Which I downloaded and installed, only to find that the patch couldn’t find the game installed on my system. It just throws up its virtual hands and gives up.

So I guess that makes this a pretty good game to pick up and play for about 20 minutes or so at a time because that’s as long as it’ll stay running, but that’s hardly a glowing review. But I will say that I don’t really miss my six bucks.

That makes it better, right?

Do you remember the Gamecube’s launch title Wave Race: Blue Storm? It was the one that wasn’t Luigi’s Mansion or Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rebel Leader, had something to do with racing jet skis and the really pretty water. If that’s all you remember about it, that’s okay; you’re not missing out on much. I remember playing it, saying, “Wow, this has got to be as good as video game water graphics will ever get,” and then promptly put Rebel Leader back in because it was a lot more fun. This brings me to this week’s PSN freebie demo: Wakeboarding HD. Déjà vu, friends, déjà vu.

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Lady and gentleman i present you, Continuity.  Continuity is a side scrolling platform puzzle game / sliding puzzle.  Your objective in the game is fairly obvious, get the red key, open the red door.

It uses the standard arrow keys for movement and jumping and the space bar for sliding the stages around (more on that later).  As mentioned before your goal is to get the red key and go to the red door, the hard part is that to cross over into the next level  the two parts must match up perfectly at the side you are trying to move into.  Hitting the spacebar lets you rearrange the parts of the stage to move to the next area (see video  below).

As you progress through the game the levels get larger as the game adds more tiles to the stage and more twists and turns to each level.  Its one of the more original games I have played in a while. somehow successfully mixing those little plastic sliding puzzles you got as a kid with a platform sidescroller.

So go give it a try, and in case you missed the first two links, play it over at Kongregate.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Monster Hunter 3 demo. The other week, the game actually came in. After enjoying the feeling of holding a new game in my hands I opened it up. In the bag with the game was a 500 Wii Points card courtesy of Gamestop as a special gift for pre ordering it. I popped the game in my Wii and sat down. I was ready.

I started a new game. The first thing you do is make your character. I gave mine corn-rolls pulled back in a ponytail and named him Bootsy. I continued on and watched the opening scene depicting a peaceful oceanside village. That’s the first thing I want to comment on. The village that the events of the gamer centers around is a very eye pleasing setting. It is on the coast of an island or continent (not really sure which one) and some of the village is built upon docks jutting out into the water. If you take way the land it would look like the place from the beginning of Waterworld.

When you gain control of your character, you are talking to the cheif of the village. There have been problems around the village and you are a guild hunter that is there to help solve everything. The cheif gives you a hut in the village which also comes with a nice view of the sea and a felyne (cat person) servant. There is a bed there for you to sleep in and a box for storage. You can even decorate our hut with the felyne’s help.

Your first quests involve getting resources to rebuild the hunter camp that was destroyed by the earthquake. Then the quests become a bit more serious once you start actually getting guild quests. The more items you find the more possibilities you have with forging and upgrading weapons, armor, and other items.

The game has good controls that are easy to pick up and also versatile (especially with he classic controller). The characters around the village are somewhat goofy like in the other Monster Hunter games. The monsters look great and have different weaknesses and strengths that makes for good hunting. There are also supposed to be new quests to download via Nintendo WFC. I’m currently not sure of when these will come out, but I’m sure it won’t be too long.

Good hunting!

Hilarious or strangely disturbing? I think it might put me off my dinner taking a knife to Pac-Man’s face. On the other hand, what am I saying?

From the Etsy item description:

NOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOM! It’s the sound of PacMan chomping away at those little pellets – how could I not be inspired to make a cutting board out of him?

Geek out your kitchen with this end-grain cutting board featuring PacMan and either Blinky or Clyde (he’s kind of orangey-red) racing toward a power-up pellet. Who will get there first?!? Help PacMan by buying this board right away and chopping onions all over Blinky’s face!

This hand-made end-grain cutting board will add a touch of gamer-nostalgia to any kitchen. The board is made of walnut, hard-maple, and cherry put together with FDA approved, water-proof glue, and treated with a mixture of mineral oil and beeswax.

End-grain cutting boards like this one are very durable and will not dull your knife edges like some other types of cutting boards might. Also, while some people worry that wooden cutting boards are not as safe from bacteria as glass or plastic, there have been studies done that actually show that wooden boards have antibacterial properties (seriously…ask The Internets). I don’t know if those studies are 100% accurate, but I do know that people have been using wooden cutting boards a lot longer than plastic, and have not all died of food-borne illness, so I figure it’s probably ok (though I won’t hold it against you if you decided to cut poultry on a separate board).

I’ll include a set of care instructions with any cutting board that I sell.

This board is approximately 18 X 12 X 1.5″

This is the opposite of a discount game!

$165 at 1337motif’s Etsy shop!

Game: Audiosurf
Purchased from: Steam
Price paid: $9.99
Platform: PC

Audiosurf is a kind of strange animal. It’s part rhythm game and part puzzler. You take your ship and pilot it down a course that’s generated by analyzing whatever song you chose. There are different colored ‘cars’ on the road that you have to try to hit and collect to fill up a grid on the bottom of the screen. When three or more of the same color line up you clear them. It actually sounds more complicated than it is… sort of.  The hook is, though, that you’re not limited to whatever songs the developer thought you should play with (and could afford the license to put in the game), you get to actually pick and choose songs from your very own music library  to generate the tracks. So the amount and variety of the levels is really up to how many songs you have stored away on your computer.

Which means that the game already has the best soundtrack ever, so it’s got that going for it.

The song you choose affects more than just how the track looks. You pick a slowish song and the track goes up at a leisurely pace. Pick a fast song with a lot of action, and the track goes down and it really starts to look like a roller coaster.

Of course, some songs work better than others. I actually had pretty bad luck playing chiptunes, which made me kind of sad. But that’s a pretty minor concern, really.

And that’s about all there is to it. Do well enough and you can become ‘champion’ of a particular song and get your score posted to the Audiosurf site for all to see, and if you get dethroned, you’ll get an email prodding you to try again.

But that’s it, there’s no overarching goal, no princess to save, and no country to rescue from oppressive, corrupt, government. It’s just you, your music, and your reflexes competing with yourself (and the world, if you want) for a high score.

Even better is that this is the kind of game that you can play for just a few minutes at a time. There’s something to be said about the ability to do a song or two during some downtime to take your mind off whatever task is at hand without having to worry about trying to make it to the next save point is actually pretty refreshing.

The only downside is that the demo only allows you to play four songs, and that’s it. Even if you have to stop the songs in the middle, you get four songs, and that’s it. If you want to play more than that, you’ll have to pony up for the full version. But, really, four songs is really enough to decide if this game’s for you, so that’s not too big a deal.

Sony’s Playstation Network offered only one demo freebie this week: Lost Planet 2 (Read “Lost Planet Squared”). Having not played the first installment of what I’m pretty sure was a game whose primary focus was a single player campaign, it seemed logical to pick apart this 360 MB multiplayer demo for this week’s installment. Bearing that juicy little nugget in mind, proceed at your own risk, this could be a bumpy ride.

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