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2006: Some of the Best and the Worst

Now that 2006 is officially over as I write this, it’s a good time to go over the year and highlight some of the games that made up the year. 2006 was, quite frankly, pretty damn boring in terms of news, but as always, there were a few noteworthy highs and lows. I’m not going to try to go over territory already covered by our 2006 awards, but I am going to Let’s take a look:

Best Use of Gratuitous Violence: A Bloody Mess

It was a close race between A Bloody Mess and The Last Defender, but I’m giving ABM the nod simply because it has more gore and is deliberately hokey. The idea behind this cheesy b-movie horror spoof was to simply mow down tons of zombies as they approached you in droves. While the zombies approached you in various speeds and the action was non-stop, ABM got very repetitive after a while and felt a little too assembly line after a few minutes. With zombies that acted like little more than sticks, mowing them down was a bit tedious, but it was kind of fun for a while.

Least Essential Vertical Scroller: 3D Star Racer

3D Star Racer billed itself as a 3D space combat and racing game, but what it actually delivered felt more like an interactive demo than anything else. Sure, it was 3D and had some interesting landscapes (that is, if you were willing to cough up the 70 megs of storage space it needed), but that was where the fun ended. It seems the developers never really got around to planning out the game’s basic flight mechanics and decided to make the player’s ship fly around on autopilot most of the time. All the player really does is bob around the screen hoping to pick stuff up, like some sort of interstellar garbage collector. In all their excitement to make it look pretty, they somehow forgot to make it a game.


Discuss...

Least Essential Remake of a Board Game: Battle Ships

Battle Ships was, of course, based on the old hide-and-seek game of Battleship. BS didn’t commit any huge sins against the original game, but it didn’t do anything particularly well, either. The biggest design mistake the game’s developers made was broadcasting game events on a sluggishly-moving status screen, as if the explosions and sinking ships wouldn’t be self-evident. The annoying thing about the status screen was that you had to wait for it to tell you what happened after taking a shot. Apart from that, the game was unremarkable in all other areas and just didn’t seem to have a reason to exist.

Discuss...

Least Essential Role Playing Game: Undercroft

I’m as big a sucker for nostalgia as everyone else is, but I have to admit I’m a bit puzzled as to why all the recent attempts to port/recreate tile-based RPGs over to the Pocket PC just haven’t worked out too well. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I seem to remember them being exponentially more fun than what I’ve seen in games like Undercroft. Undercroft isn’t a terrible game; it’s just that all its various elements are mediocre and the whole thing just doesn’t gel. The original, classic examples of these games had their hokey qualities, but they were at least good enough that you could suspend disbelief enough to make them enjoyable. Aside from quirks in the game’s engine, Undercroft just wasn’t that interesting. While the attempt was made in earnest, it just didn’t work.

Discuss...

Best Port of a Successful PC Game that’s Probably Better on the PC Anyway: Broken Sword

Broken Sword, which dates back about a decade or so, had a lot going for it when it came out: a plot that didn’t fall apart the minute you started thinking about it, well-built characters, detailed locations, and graphics inspired by solid film making concepts. Even today, it’s the sort of game you can spend hours playing. When playing this type of game on the Pocket PC, funny things happen: the time flies by, your eyes get a little bleary, the battery on your device runs out of juice, and you realize just how tiny those Pocket PC screens are. Broken Sword for Pocket PC was one of those games, and, even though it was a decent port, it just reminded me of how limited these little pocket computers still are.

Most Interesting New Idea: Bubble Blobble Build

Girders deserves a mention, too, simply because it was the first, but Bubble Blobble Build gets my nod because it had great graphics, a good interface, and some thoughtful features like the ability to scroll the view by tapping and dragging and an indicator at the top of the screen letting you know the current height of your tower. Little stuff that like that adds up and makes a big a difference. It was neat to build your tower up really high and see it sway gently to and fro or careen dangerously based on the wind and how securely you built it. Even though the game was Flash-based, you didn’t need to install the standalone Flash player (yay!) to install it. Despite the tongue-tying name and the fact that there’s really no point to the game, it was still fun.

News – Flash Hard Drive for Your Notebook

SanDisk, one of the leading companies in the flash memory storage industry, has announced a 32 gigabyte “hard drive” that’s designed to replace a traditional hard drive in your notebook. What’s neat about that?  Its 32 gigabytes of storage space that acts just like a hard drive, but is completely silent and doesn’t have any moving parts. This means, more than likely, reliability will be much greater and shock protection will no longer be an issue. It’s about time somebody developed flash technology for something other than our handheld communication devices. It doesn’t look like we’re there yet, though: the drives won’t be available directly to consumers, and they’re expected to add $600 to the price of a notebook. Ouch!  Once the price difference erodes, then I think that in the future (say, by the start of the next decade), flash based hard drives will start to become common and will start replacing traditional hard drives in notebooks and desktop machines.

Discuss...

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This Newsletter is published by Thaddeus Computing, Inc., 110 North Court Street, Fairfield, IA 52556.

Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright ) 2007 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.