Time Management, meet Tower Defense

At least six months ago, lured in by the Chocolatier and Tradewinds games, I joined Big Fish Games’ Game Club, and now I get a game credit every month. The last few months, I’ve been at a loss for how to spend it. That’s partly thanks to the relative dearth of material for the Mac, partly to the grinding uninventiveness of some segments of the casual game industry. I don’t like hidden object games or platformers or shooters very much; despise match-3 and mahjong. I enjoyed Diner Dash and the first few of its clones I played, but now there are so many that I wince at the sight of any two-word-title ending in Dash, Frenzy, Fever, Mania, or Madness.

This despite the fact that I’ve played a whole bunch of tower defense games, and enjoyed them all. Some game mechanics are inherently more resilient than others, and the resilience has to do with the strategic richness of play. It’s easy to introduce new strategic problems to tower defense games.

A little belated

My latest GameSetWatch column is up; it’s a review of Tradewinds Legends, a trading-and-piracy game vaguely reminiscent of Taipan.

Of possible interest:

Sam Gordon’s “Final Selection” at JIG.

Language-teaching with interactive fiction

Among the interesting things turned up by my investigation into IF for teaching is a German-teaching module (by Brett Shelton, David Neville, and Brian McInnis at Utah State University) designed for students who natively speak English.

I haven’t gotten very far into the game itself, but I was really intrigued to see this. It starts off with an English-language tutorial voice who steps the player through making commands in German, and I found this very successful (though, obviously, I am not a member of the target audience). In fact, I thought it was better than the average IF tutorial because of the two-language aspect: I had to type back the commands for looking, taking things, dropping things, and so on, but because this parroting was in German, it was more interesting and didn’t feel so zombie-like.

It’s intriguing stuff, I thought. It’s meant for students who have already had a little introductory German, but the first portion at least is playable even if you don’t know very much vocabulary.

Russian Metamorphoses release

Thanks to Vsevolod Zoubarev, there is now a Russian translation of Metamorphoses. I find this very exciting, though I cannot actually read a word of it myself…

To pass along the links from his email, in case anyone wants to try it:

Link to the archive with the game, short manual and the options.txt file
Link to the entry on the translator’s blog (in Russian)
Discussion on the local IF forum (which I can sort of make out with Google Translate…)

Soliciting suggestions about IF for education

I posted this to RAIF, but since I know there are readers here who don’t follow RAIF closely:

Graham and I have been talking about a revamp of the Inform website, and one of the things we’d especially like to add is some support for teaching with Inform and/or interactive fiction in general. But since neither of us has any actual experience of presenting Inform in a classroom, we’d love some feedback about what it would be most useful for us to offer. Particulars follow the cut.

More IF publicity

At 1UP, thanks to Lara Crigger. There appears to be a main article (following the usual scheme of such articles, it starts by referring to the good old days of Infocom, but it does branch out to some history of modern IF) and a feature recommending some IF for beginners — Lost Pig, Ecdysis, Tales of the Traveling Swordsman, Galatea, and Photopia, this time around.

More Views on Games, Narrative, and Character

People who were interested in Second Person but didn’t buy the hardcover copy may be interested to know that many of the articles are now being presented online over at electronic book review, as a continuation of the First Person thread. Since there’s a large amount of content here and it may not be immediately obvious which of these articles are IF-related, I’ve also added to the Second Person page over at ifwiki with links directly into the IF-specific stuff.

Along similar lines, Dennis Jerz has an interesting summary of Chris Crawford’s talk at Hypertext ‘08.

Prose Medium and IF

Posted an article on IF prose: this is an edited distillation of some things I posted in response to Jim Aikin back in January or so, so may not be new to dedicated RAIF readers, but I wanted to have a more general-purpose version available.

More PTT

Have a write-up of The Act of Misdirection over at Play This Thing!