What I'm Playing Now: The Majesty of Colors

There are just a lot of great flash games out there right now. Some of them are rather artsy, like Passage, and the game I found tonight, I fell in Love with the Majesty of Colors. You can play it in a couple of minutes, or spend more finding all the different story lines.

What I'm Playing Now: Guardian Rock

In Guardian Rock, you protect an ancient shrine from pesky archaeologists by crushing them to death.

http://armorgames.com/play/4802/guardian-rock

What I'm Playing Now: Spelunky

Boingboing's offworld kept posting about Spelunky, a 2D low-res platform/exploration dungeon crawler, and I just didn't care - it didn't look fun.

But it's free, so I finally gave it a shot, and got hooked. It is surprisingly engaging. Here's why:

Every level is dynamically generated every time, so every game is completely new.

You are given a set of basic actions that can apply to many objects (whip, pick up, throw, drop), an array of interesting tools (rope, bomb at start; cape, teleport are more advanced) as well as some interesting acrobatics that can be augmented by items.

Some hilarious situations can result from experimenting with actions and objects.

Try it out - download for free.

What I'm Playing Now: Osmos

Jon Blow of Braid fame recently recommended Osmos. Osmos is only $10 with no DRM. Those three factors make it the kind of game you can just buy outright without checking the demo, which I did.

It's fun, innovative, and challenging. PC gaming is hot right now, and it's all a credit to indie games. Almost all my favorite games of the last two years have been indie games, with the exceptions being L4D & TF2. Even Portal was made by a small team of recent college grads, even though Valve hired them and published it. Puzzle Quest, Braid, PvZ, World of Goo, and Cogs round out my recent top picks.

What I'm Playing Now: Cogs

I picked up Cogs this week on a recommendation from Braid author Jon Blow, and it's more puzzle mayhem (which I wasn't ready for after Puzzle Quest, World of Goo, and Braid - I actually wanted a break from puzzling).

It's only $10, and it's pretty fun. I'm fond of steam achievements, but there aren't very many of them to earn for those of us that aren't completely OCD:

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197993331175/stats/Cogs

I wonder if part of the fun of cogs is the persistent steampunk theme so often posted on my favorite blog, boingboing: http://www.boingboing.net/steampunk/

What I'm Playing Now: Plants Vs. Zombies

Popcap's Plants Vs Zombies has captured 3/4 of my family. This game stays fresh with a wealth of minigames & puzzles in addition to capaign mode, plus the extra plants you can buy, and 4 different gardens you can create.

I don't even mind the DRM. You can license up to 5 new installations through their website. It's certainly better than Steam and CD-DRM. It still has the problem that I may not be able to play the game in 10 years, though - I assume that eventually Popcap will stop licensing it, and then this thing I own self-destructs. This is why no DRM is always far superior to even the most lenient DRM.

Here sunflower sings about PvZ:

What I'm Playing Now: Bioshock

Actually, it's what I'm Not playing. I picked up a copy of Bioshock recently at the discount price of $5 during a Steam sale. I felt obligated to buy it after listening to Tycho rave about Bioshock for years, seeing it's 96 metascore on steam, and seeing it featured in an early HAWP.

Though I really wanted to finish the game before I read through any spoilers on first-person-shouter or otherwise, I've had to give up. I just don't like this game - not even a little.

I'm still early on, too - I haven't even fought a big daddy yet. ...but I have seen the gatherer's garden, and all the things you can 'buy' with ADAM. It's all junk. This game hinges on the player's concern with making huge moral decisions in the drive to acquire more ADAM - and I couldn't care less about ADAM. That's a problem.

I did like the art & music, though, and wondered what Rapture looked like before it was destroyed. That may be what we get with Bioshock 2, according to this offworld post.

What I'm Playing Now: Braid

I picked up Braid for the PC on greenhouse after a long wait (Xbox release was months ago). The art is wonderful, the sound is great, and the time-manipulating game mechanic is brilliant.

While souljaboy's review is all wrong, it's pretty funny:
davidhellman.net/blog/souljaboy-on-braid/

...and the artist's blog is pretty entertaining as well:
davidhellman.net/blog/the-art-of-braid-index/

Francis: I hate rapping

I'm ripping this to MP3 for my playlist.  Francis of Left 4 Dead lets us know how he feels about Ayn Rand with some good beats.

Here's the MP3, ID3 tags by me: francis-i-dont-hate-vests.mp3

What I'm Playing Now: Left4Dead

Left4Dead was released by Valve for $50 this week, or $100 in the better whole-valve-catalog deal. Unable to raise that much cash for a mere video game when I've got kids to feed, but needing to play it, I reviewed my options: hawk my electric guitar, make an early withdrawal from my 401k, or ask my wife to prostitute herself in Danville's seedy red-light district.

Luckily, a friend gifted me the game, which may have saved my marriage.

Before L4D was released, I joked that it was going to be just a stupid FPS with zombies. Not so. This game forces teamwork on people in ways that even Team Fortress couldn't manage. Working in this foursome against the clever AI director is really a blast. You can't afford to have a jerk on your team, but it's even worse for him; get caught alone in this game and you're dead, period. You simply cannot fight the hunters & smokers without teammates, so you have to coordinate, and that's what makes this 20 times better than any FPS on the market since quake.

Amazingly well-done robot flash game

This robot-programming flash game is just really fun. I got to level nine before I had to leave for an appointment. How far can you get?

http://www.gameroo.nl/games/light-bot

What I'm Playing Now: Puzzle Quest

OK, I'm actually done playing Puzzle Quest, one of the better recommendations that Penny-Arcade has made, but I forgot to post about it before; probably because I was too engrossed in the game.

Apparently I was not too engrossed to screw around with the game, though, something I've been doing since I downloaded ResEdit on my mac and learned what a Hex Editor is. The beautiful thing about Puzzle Quest is that all of the art, sound, storyline, spells, items, maps, mounts ... almost everything is stored in open format, user-readable and user-editable files that are loaded at runtime by the game executable. That turns Puzzle Quest into a veritable Z Machine of puzzle-questing.

Anyone could write a completely new game without compiling a line of code - just invent a new story, design your new stuff, and save it in text & JPEG form.

I didn't do that, though. I just screwed around by inserting a pic of me (just home from work, still in my CPC insignia polo) in the game in place of the hero. This makes my kids giggle like mad every time the in-game me starts talking with knights and elves. Some screenshots [click for detail].

What I'm Playing Now: Final Fantasy 1

Well, not really. I remember loving FF1 when I was about 11 years old. It was fun to revisit recently using an NES emulator (FCEU). The fun with emulators, though, is being able to use savestates and cheats to alter the game experience. I couldn't find a listing on the web of Hex locations of major data locations, though, so I'm posting my own small list here. Perhaps the next person to google for "final fantasy 1 fceu hex addresses cheats gold experience potions" will get this handy list.

Note you'll need a hex editor to get this done, I use WinHex. Also note that many values are stored in 2 bytes, with the second byte as most significant. (so to write "4000" to an address, which is 0x0FA0, you write A0 to first byte and 0F to second byte.)

0x1313-1314 Gil

0x13FE-13FF Experience, Party member 1
0x143E-143F Experience, Party member 2
0x147E-147F Experience, Party member 3
0x14BE-14BF Experience, Party member 4

0x132D Tents
0x132E Cabins
0x132F Houses
0x1330 Heal potions
0x1331 Pure potions

What I'm Playing Now: Team Fortress 2

I've owned the Orange Box for some time, and loved Portal as well as Team Fortress 2 (you can keep HL2, thankyouverymuch). I've been reintroduced to TF2 by A Heavy Update, which has included some achievements and unlockables for heavy and some new maps. Those are fun, but what's really great is that I had apparently missed the previous Gold Rush update that included a new game type called Payload. It's a total blast either running with the payload cart, engineering turret locations to defend it, or clearing out those turrets with an Ubercharged heavy-weapons-guy.

TF2 on payload is up there with Quake1 and Starcraft as best multiplayer games available. It's only $20 on Steam, too.

Keep up to date at the TF2 blog.