Boldly Going Where No Catanian Has Gone Before!

The day I heard Star Trek Catan had finally been released in North America, I used my lunch hour for a mad dash to Target to get my copy.  I have been looking forward to this game ever since I heard it was coming!

I've had a chance to play it a few times now and I think it will make any Star Trek fan proud.  I'll admit as I was setting it up the first time I couldn't help but hum the theme song.

Pre-game setup!

I really like the introduction of the support character cards, makes the game a lot more interesting and also faster.  Otherwise the game is pretty much the same as regular Catan, which makes it all the more easy to learn!

Reamde (or not)

Last week I finished Reamde, the latest offering from Neal Stephenson.  To tell the truth I was a little disappointed, since I enjoyed his last book Anathem so much (and also wrote about it on this blog).

What always brings me back to Stephenson's books is the way he plays with ideas about commerce, currency, and technology (sometimes the intersection of all three).  In Reamde, he again picks up on these by setting the novel around a new game (which reminds me of much of what I've heard about Skyrim) and how different groups of people exploit it to generate revenue (the 'gold miners' who find virtual gold and sell it for real-world cash).  When one faction of players creates a virus to scam others out of their gold, all hell breaks loose as both a virtual and real-world conflict ensues.

Unfortunately, Stephenson gets distracted from the interesting ideas in his book by trying to create a cliched commercial thriller.  In particular there are a few problematic points:

• there is a group of terrorists that somehow gets included in the action; they don't seem to add anything to the plot except action
• Stephenson adds plenty of gun battles to keep the action going (however feels the need to discuss the workings of said guns down to the most minute detail, resulting in several skim-worthy passages right in the most action-packed parts of the book)
• an international cast of characters adds intrigue, but it's an unfortunate assumption that every one of them can communicate seamlessly with every other character
• one of Stephenson's main failings in the past has been his ability to wrap up an ending.  I felt he had been improving, especially with the conclusion of Anathem.  Here however he gets a bit maudlin and a bit too neat.  For example, despite featuring several strong, independent-minded female characters (yay!), Stephenson finds the need to ensure they are all romantically involved with one of the male main characters by the last chapter of the book (ick).  

All that said, the book is an entertaining read and I don't regret the time I spent on it (and given the size, this was a non-trivial amount).  If you are going to give it a go, just make sure you set your expectations appropriately.

Catan + Star Trek = WIN

I'm a board game fan and I guess it goes without saying that I'm a huge fan of Star Trek as well.  One of the things that helped us make it through long nights in the lab during grad school was playing Settlers of Catan while waiting for our experiments to finish.  So when I saw a new Star Trek-themed Catan game, I knew I had to try it.  It's due out in March 2012 and you can be sure to see a review here from me!

Cut the Rope for IE

I love web games, and find them pretty addictive (most recent evidence of this is my completion of Angry Birds).  Here's a cute one built in HTML5 for IE: Cut the Rope.  Enjoy!

Playing with Portal 2

For the past few weeks I've been working my way through Portal 2 on Xbox.  I'm really enjoying the elements of story and puzzle-solving, so I thought I'd share a bit of my experience so far here.

Since I normally find it hard to fit hours of time in front of the TV into my busy schedule, I end up going through games pretty slowly.  I've never finished Mass Effect 2, and my pace at Portal 2 is about one chapter per every 1.5 weeks.  I also had an initial setback having downloaded the game for PC and hit the Data Execution Prevention problem, which eventually made it impossible to play.  I like the game on Xbox much better anyway; I find the controls much easier to use than a keyboard/mouse combination.

For some reason I don't really enjoy solitary gaming either, so in the past I've spent more time playing board and card games with friends rather than playing video games.  I'm not a huge FPS fan (I'm not coordinated enough to run, shoot, and look around at the same time, although I'm great at doing one or even two of these actions at once, and I also don't like the feeling of being snuck up on).  The nice thing about Portal 2 is that (at least so far) it doesn't really have the traditional FPS elements.  It also has a very entertaining cooperative mode that lets you play with a friend and truly work together to solve puzzles.  I also like that the puzzles you solve in cooperative mode aren't straight copies of the single-player mode puzzles, but rather the experience is completely designed to be most appropriate for the mode you choose to play in.

Another element to this game that I think help keeps players engaged, and that is the clever writing, particularly the lines delivered by GLaDOS, such as: "Sorry about the mess. I've really let the place go since you killed me. By the way, thanks for that.".  If you like puzzles, problem-solving, crazy physics, and most of all dark humour/sarcasm delivered by an affectionate robotic voice, you'll probably enjoy Portal 2!  Give it a try and let me know your thoughts!