Gotta love the secondary ticket market.

The secondary ticket market.

It teems with life. You used to only see it outside stadiums where shady dudes held up tickets to sold out shows for insane prices. Scalpers, we used to call them. Now we call them secondary ticket brokers.

Some dude sitting outside a show, smelling of booze and weed, attempting to sell his tickets for major cash has now been legitimized by the market and even Wikipedia.org.



Enter Al Gore and his miraculous invention, the internet. Now, thanks to this great man, we can all skip the booze/weed stench and head straight to many great secondary ticket websites to find that desired ticket.

While many sites offer secondary tickets, few sites out there actually do aggregate sales from a number of other sites. Think Orbitz, Priceline, etc., but with tickets. One such site that I have found to be most excellent is TicketsFTW (For The Win!). They actually search numerous secondary ticket sites for you in order to get you the best price.

Check it out sometime if you want Superbowl XLIV tickets, or Springsteen tickets. But don't expect to see me at the Springsteen show. I know it makes me un-American, but I can't stand that douche.

Game Review: Puzzle Quest: Galactrix (DS)

I recently played Puzzle Quest: Galactrix for the Nintendo DS

Result:

FAIL

Why do I think Puzzle Quest: Galactrix sucks major ass?  

Not because I hate on the Puzzle Quest franchise.  

When Challenge of the Warlords hit the scene, I played it for days.  I still play Challenge of the Warlords...and sometimes for days.   

I really wanted to love and embrace Galactrix.  It has all the makings of a good game.  Interesting (if not overdone) story, side missions galore, a massive universe to explore, and many alien races to make your most hated enemy.  Everything about this game makes me want to love it; it truly is a deep, engrossing puzzle/rpg fusion.   

"So what was the dealbreaker?" You ask.

The Controls.

I may as well have a stump for an arm and attempt to touch the very small and sensitive icons littered throughout the Puzzle Quest universe.  How hard is it to make a text block selectable with the stylus?  I felt like I was going for the funny bone in Operation every time I tried to click on an option.  Half of the time, the nose would light up and buzz, sending my ship to the far reaches of the galaxy when all I wanted to do was trade some Goddamn food to a Goddamn space station I was already docked at.  

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix also includes timed challenges, tasking you with matching a certain amount of gems within an alloted time.  That would be fine if the touch-and-slide mechanic of Challenge of the Warlords worked as smoothly as it does here.  It doesn't.  Frustration abounds and I wanted to throw my DS through the window and pray it would be run over by a passing bus.  

I love what Puzzle Quest has done to fuse genres.  Role playing game?  Hell yes.  Match 3 puzzle game?  Hell yes.  Shitty controls?  

FAIL

Drinking Game Playtest.

     The night passed quickly.  Drinking was had by all.  To ensure better pacing, I tweaked the game a bit.  The few friends who played it before didn't have much trouble acclimating to the new rules.  Even with the spaced pacing, much drinking was done.  The rules changed a good deal as we played.  The no-laughing rule became difficult when the next commissioner implemented the "kiss the person next to you" rule.  I tried not to watch, but there was moaning as well.  Everyone busted out laughing.  Everyone drank some more.  

       I consider the first real playtest a success.  Everything went well until the uber-strong Jell-o shooters came out.  After that, I don't know what the fuck happened.  One minute I'm playing Rock Band, ripping out my best drunken rendition of Casey Jones, and the next minute I'm stumbling and falling toward the ground.  Thankfully, we have carpeted floors.  Unfortunately, my delayed reaction time kept me from putting my hands out to catch myself.  

      I wanted to make a drinking game.  We drank.  We had fun.  

     I always thought game design would be a safer vocation than machining.  I guess everyone must shed a little blood for their passions, no matter what they are.  

Drinkng Game

So, we are hosting a housewarming party this weekend.  About a week ago, while sitting down playing LittleBigPlanet, Sarah asks me "what games should we have out?"  

The wheels in my mind turned for a split second.  The cartoon lightbulb over my head was almost visible to the naked eye.  I responded:  "Shit.  Why don't I make a drinking game?"  

I thought of a shot (or rather, a group of shots) I had taken on my 21st birthday and it went from there.  I also thought of a little skit by the Dead Alewives (roll the dice to see if I'm getting drunk).Sarah went to hang out with some friends for a movie night, and I hit the craft store to make my play-test copies.  2 hours later, I had my rough game.  We play-tested it two days later.  We got really loaded in about a half hour.  Taking the advice of my most trusted colleagues, Ben Reeves and Sarah Blossom, I sat down to tweak the pacing of the game.  

I work in a machine shop.  During long machine runs I am able to stare off into space or do whatever I please.  This week, I rolled dice.  I rolled dice so much I am now afflicted with minor carpel-tunnel syndrome.  And I want to say this:  I love dice.  I love games of chance.  I haven't played craps in 3 years and it kills me.  I love the clackity-clack-clack of chance.  I infused my love of dice, my love of people, and my love of interpersonal relationships into this game.  It kicks my ass.  I will be testing it out on a select few people tomorrow and I will pray to God tonight that it kicks their asses too. 

I will follow up with more information as it becomes available.  I am looking to place the game on the market within the next month.  For now, I will set up an Ebay store; I want the Sunday Gamer website to launch with 3 different games available at the same time, so the Ebay store will have to suffice for now. 

I am still working on my version of the "Jump to Conclusions Mat."  I will post as I move toward a working copy of that.

On with the Game Reviews: Bananagrams.

Rating: FAIL
Read on to see why I think this game sucks major ass.


In a dimly lit room, two people sit naked. Both are masturbating. They stare off in the distance, gaining no pleasure from one another, but race toward the inevitable climax nonetheless. They pay no attention to one another; they do not feed off of each other's sexual energy. They moan softly as their muscles tense up and finally release. Wiping up their respective pleasure residues, they retreat to seperate rooms without saying goodnight.

If this sounds like a blast to you, I urge you to go and pick up the game Bananagrams. You've all seen it, I'm sure. You breezed through Barnes and Noble this holiday season, and passed by the clever marketing scheme. The game is packed within a zippered, nylon banana. The cute packaging belies the utter sham of a game packaged within. I found this to be a completely unenjoyable title for the simple fact that it does not encourage any kind of interplay whatsoever.

The game consists of a bunch of scrabble-like tiles chosen at random by players. The players then are asked to make their own scrabble-like crosswords in front of them. The crossword is your own. You have no chance to play off of your opponent's tiles. The only thing that is mutual is the pool of letters from which you draw. My question is this: Why the hell make a two-or-more player game if the players don't give two shits about what the other players are doing? Take other hit word games. The aspect that makes them fun revolves around players participating with other players. For example. Scrabble: One of the best word games because it is fun to hear your 70 year-old grandmother curse at you when you place your letters where she wanted to place hers. Boggle: Sure, you're doing your own thing, but the set of letters is the same so no one can bitch that they didn't have any good letters; I played with the same letters you did, asshat. You can't tell me that I got lucky. Taboo: Okay this one is a stretch, but it is a word game that involves lots of player communication and fun.

Throughout my little Bananagrams review, I have focused on one of the things that makes board games great. Player communication. If players have a chance to compete and/or have fun with one another, it generally makes for a successful board game. If you wanted to do something by yourself, you wouldn't be playing a two player game. My advice to you: Instead of buying Bananagrams, take the fifteen dollars you would have paid to your nearest tavern. Buy a beer with the ten dollar bill and ask the bartender for some singles. Pump a few bucks into the Touchmaster and play all the single-player word games you want. Hell, you may even have cash left over for another beverage!

A note on my rating system: I am using a very simple rating system of good, blah, or bad. Read my review to see how I further stratify within these ratings; you should be able to tell if I'm merely stoked about a game, or if I'm pee-and-poop-myself excited about it.

The ratings are as follows:

Good: Solid. Copacetic. Boss. Shibby.

Meh: I could be playing this game. I could be taking a dump. I'm pretty indifferent.

Fail: Throw your money on the ground and burn it; if you bought this game, that's just what you did.

Welcome, friends.

Welcome all to Games. Anxiety. Life. Since this is my first Blog, I will be making many random posts to it. I will attempt to keep it fairly focused, but I make no promises. If I feel the need, I will create other blogs in order to better focus a theme of this particular one. Until then, please bear with all of my tangential rants, raves, stories, tales, lies and exaggerations (R.I.P. Bradley Nowell).

My goal with this blog is mainly going to be game discussion. I love games. Wanna fight about it? I will be discussing the various games I've played; why they rule, why they suck, etc. Starting my own game company remains one of the better things I've done for myself; it allows me to play all kinds of games and write it off as work. The study of games and game theory allows me to better grasp what makes a game great or horrible. This in turn assists me in creating a valuable, fun and ultimately playable game product.

If anything runs outside the scope of games, deal with it. You'll notice I titled the blog Games. Anxiety. Life. The theme is pretty all encompassing. It allows me to wander a bit. If this pisses you off, feel free to let me know. I warn you, however, that I titled it that way for a reason. I like to give myself freedom--wiggle room. I am an anxious person. I suffer from panic disorder. I worry about things. Today, I saw two guys at the mall food court cleaning the tables. They were identical; they didn't just look alike; they were fucking identical. Something about their demeanor seemed a little off. They looked twitchy. It made me wonder if the government scientists had indeed achieved the ability to clone humans. What if there existed an underground base with an army of these identical men. If a copy of a copy is less perfect, maybe there are thousands of him and the two of him cleaning the table were at the bottom of the chain where the genes just couldn't hold up anymore. What to do with the two of him but make him work some job at the mall food court. Huxley would have shit himself. The thought of the government clone army scared the hell out of me. I left the mall feeling a bit askew.

See?

These little things I encounter on a daily basis need a repository. They will remain here until I feel compelled to create another blog for the random-shit-that-happened-to-me-on-the-way-to-work pile. Hence: Life. Go me, I rule.