geometric galaxy wars

i picked up the wii version of geometry wars: galaxies kind of on a whim after reading a lot of good things about it being a pure, retro shooter. i hadn’t been familiar at all with the game, which began life as an extra in the xbox game project gotham racing 2 before getting more mainstream attention with updated releases on XBLA and PC. the game has received several sequels since then, although none of them seem to be as full an experience as the wii/DS versions, as far as i can tell (and both of those versions include the original XBLA retro evolved version as well). the basic core design has stayed pretty much true to its pure shooter roots throughout: guide your ship through a finite playing field (spanning a few screens at most) while shooting at the satisfyingly large variety of enemies that come your way. the original game takes a lot of its inspiration from other shooter classics, most notably defender, although the greatest design decision in this game is that the enemies don’t fire bullets. so instead of dodging hard-to-see bullets and getting cornered by waves of them, you’re focused on the enemies and their predictable behaviors, which leads to a very satisfying playing experience involving more strategizing; when you lose you feel it’s more your own fault than any cheapness from the AI.

in general i agree with the review at videogamecritic.net which praises the game for its core gameplay as well as its new features. there are several key differences in the wii/DS versions is terms of features compared to the other releases. the main addition is the campaign mode, which has you tackling planets with different characteristics, such as the kind and frequency of enemies that appear, the shape of the board, and the addition of various obstacles such as mines, corridors, and moving, impenetrable blocks. the second difference is the addition of an upgradable “drone” with various behaviors you can choose from, including the “defend” drone, which shoots behind you; “turret”, which takes a position and then shoots 360 degrees; and “collect” which collects “geoms”, the all-important point multipliers you get for defeating an enemy and can also earn you extra ships and bombs.

for the most part there’s a nice variety in both the planets and the drones, and for each planet there are bronze, silver, and gold medals (i.e. “achievements”) to earn for high scores. although it isn’t hard to get bronze medals on every board, gold medals are much more of a challenge and will require more strategizing, and there are times where you’ll find one drone works better for you on a particular board. fun as they are, though, in general most of the drones don’t feel particularly useful, even at their maximum upgrade, which makes that feature feel a bit superfluous. having to unlock the planets is palatable, but having to upgrade the drones seems a bit of a chore since getting a gold medal with a less-than-maximized drone doesn’t usually seem worth even attempting. also, getting the gold medal on every planet does get repetitive after a while, especially since oftentimes you’ll find you just end up relying on using the most basic drone, “attack”, which basically doubles your firepower. perhaps it would’ve been better to have specific tasks, such as “get a certain score on this planet using this drone at this level”. also, the pacing on a lot of the boards feels tedious, as too many times you have long periods of very slow action that ramp up to levels that are just too overwhelming too suddenly.

anyway, despite all the criticisms this is a highly enjoyable game and i’ll definitely be picking it up again to get more of the gold medals. be advised, though, that i, along with all the other reviews i’ve read, agree that using the wii remote to aim is unnatural and tiring; you’re much better off with the classic controller. at the time of its initial release bozon’s main complaint in his review of the wii version for IGN was that the game was overpriced at $40. it seems a bit unfair to say that since there were so many worthwhile additions, but in any case now that both the wii and DS versions are about $20 each there’s really no reason why fans of old-school shooters should hesitate in picking this one up.

geometric links:
- entry at wikipedia
- the wii version lets you beam a demo of the DS version to your DS. i tried it out, and the stylus control is much less awkward than aiming with the wii remote, although it could get tiring. although the galaxies are the same between both versions, if for some reason you don’t want to get the wii version the DS version should definitely be a viable alternative, and bozon at IGN gave it a similar score to the wii version. i’ll probably be getting the DS version at some point anyway b/c if you have both versions you can unlock some more stages.
- great drones strategy FAQ at gamefaqs
- FAQ with basic info on the scores for medals at gamefaqs
- 1up and IGN’s reviews of the latest game in the series, geometry wars: retro evolved 2, for XBLA
- and just for fun, in case you’ve forgotten where it all began, here’s a video on youtube of the game asteroids on atari

thoroughly scrambled

i’m starting to think i’m in danger of getting swept away in all this flood of casual gaming. a friend of a friend was telling me and the bf about how she’s been completely hooked on scramble, so i checked it out, little suspecting that i’d be sucked into it as well. scramble is simply a facebook clone of the parker brothers classic game boggle. i have a dim recollection of my family owning at least a few of the boggle letter dice, gathering dust among a pile of other sorely fragmented board games; but somehow during my fairly normal board-game-playing childhood i can’t remember ever actually encountering a compelete set or playing it.

oh, what hours of time wastage i have missed! boggle is a simple game in concept: on a 4×4 grid of letters, simply find as many words as you can by connecting adjacent letters (and not repeating any within one word) within 3 minutes. my family’s always been rather into scrabble, and my sisters had been playing it on facebook for some time. i played a few games, but one of the main things i hate about scrabble is the number of random words that you have to memorize to do well, and so i quickly lost interest. the other thing i hate about it is, as in chess, having to ponder all of your options in order to maximize your points. i just don’t have enough patience to strategize that much (odd, seeing as how i’m into strategy video games, but i guess in the video games you don’t ever have to agonize over any single decision that much).

and thus, my overwhelming preference for boggle/scramble to ye olde scrabble. in boggle you’re on a time limit, so there’s no time spent just sitting around. in the classic version of boggle you make words with 3 or more letters, but in scramble among the host of options and features there’s one where you can limit the game to words of 4 or more (although the game actually uses the scrabble dictionary which you can find online here), which helps minimize the amount of random words that you have to deal with. here’s the rundown of the features that make scramble one of the many games that really benefit from the leap from tactile board game to virtual computer game:

- play virtual matches with 2 to 10 rounds against any of your facebook friends. like online scrabble, your friends can take their turns whenever they want, although you won’t be able to play the next round until at least one person in the match has finished a round you’ve already played. also you can set each round to last from 1 to 10 minutes.
- limit the words allowed to 4+ or 5+ letters (the default is 3+).
- play on an expanded board: 5×5 instead of the classic 4×4. i find i prefer the 5×5 boards because you’re less likely to get really constraining boards (e.g. ones with 8 vowels on one side and 8 bad consonants on the other).
- play live in “rooms” (like chat rooms) against whoever else is in that room (usu. at least 40 other people). there’s a good assortment of rooms, including beginner, intermediate, and expert rooms; rooms using the 5×5 board and/or 4+ words only (those are the rooms i usually frequent); and even rooms for spanish and french word-seekers.
- in all the modes you’re given the list of all possible words at the end of the round.
- in matches vs friends you can also view a side-by-side comparison of who got what words for each round.
- in live mode words that only you got are highlighted in green.

there’s also a fair amount of stat tracking scramble maintains, such as your all-time highest score and your ranking compared to your friends.

i’d just started getting into scramble when my brother-in-law and sister visited. it turns out that my bro-in-law had completely independently gotten addicted to a version of boggle with his friends on the iphone, called quordy. quordy makes great use of the iphone’s touch screen. it has a “pass and play” feature where two people can take turns on the same phone, and you can also send challenges to people you know who also have the game. it lacks some of the best features of scramble, such as live rooms and a 5×5 board (although i think the latter is being added to the next version), but it does have the distinct advantage of letting you switch to a “lite” dictionary in which only “regular” words are allowed. being able to constrain the dictionary to a normal collegiate dictionary instead of the scrabble dictionary is pretty much the only thing scramble lacks, but although quordy doesn’t have as many features it does make a viable portable alternative (although you’ll also have to factor in the fact that it costs $3 versus scramble which is free). our little group of 5 spent a whole evening with two iphones challenging each other with pass and play games of quordy and teaming up 2 people vs 1, and afterwards when we weren’t all in the same room we turned to scramble to continue the word-making mayhem.

i beat my high score in scramble today and at the same time beat most of my friends (i had a really good 5×5 board), although i’m still behind my one friend who became a boggle master after spending a whole summer backpacking around europe and playing it while riding on trains. my fixation has died down, although it looks like i’ll still be playing for a good while, as my family is still sending me scramble challenges. a modern version of a classic game, and pick-up-and-play, episodic, casual gaming at its best.

some mind-boggling links:
- entry about boggle on wikipedia, although it doesn’t say much about it, not even when it first made its appearance.
- there’s a downloadable official version of boggle, although with all the features of scramble (which is free) i can’t imagine anyone wanting to get the official version which is $7.
- likewise, there’s a DS compilation that includes monopoly, boggle, yahtzee, and battleship, but from the reviews it sounds like the boggle part of it at least is really lacking in features. it’s an especially unattractive option, given its current price, which at the time of this writing is right around 65 smackeroos.
- if i really get in the mood for a word game on the go, i may check out wordjong, a combination of word-making and mahjong, for the DS which caught my attention a while back when it received buckets o’ praise from rawmeat cowboy at gonintendo.com. apparently a wii version of the game, wordjong party, came out this past december, although i don’t remember reading anything about it anywhere and it only has one review on metacritic. but if my family’s still boggling it up by next christmas i may have to pick that one up as well.