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Mini Game Reviews #1
reviewed by Ben Parrish

That is not to say that the reviews themselves are mini (though next to the Counter-Strike review, they'd have to be considered wispy at best), but rather the games themselves are of the less monumental, hard-disk-swallowing variety. Taking a break from 20-hour epic strategy games and 4-CD adventure games, I thought I'd give the "little guy" a try, and was lucky enough to stumble onto real.com's game site which features, to my delight, several very professionally done games at quite reasonable ($10-$20) prices. I quickly became addicted to this site, and began downloading everything in sight. These reviews are, then, the fruits of my loins. Or however that goes. I'll also include a couple random games from other places, along with links to where they can be obtained. Free demos exist for all of these games, so I encourage you to try them out if you're interested.

Game: Cue Club
Description: Pool game from Hell
Location: real.com

This game has one of the most clever single-player gimmicks I've ever seen, and it nearly caused (and still may cause) me to fly into a homicidal rage. The game is strictly 2-dimensional, but seems to have the physics down so well, and the 2D graphics are so polished, that the missing third dimension hardly becomes an issue at all. I mean, pool is, at its heart, a 2-dimensional game. Anyway, the demo comes with one pool table and one set of balls, and hawks the full version by saying, "Get all 394 pool tables and 9328 sets of cool-lookin' balls!" I'm all about graphic diversity, so I went ahead and bought the sucker.

I fired it up and went to select some of the fabulous new pool tables I'd just plunked down my hard-earned $15 or whatever it was for, but was faced with just the original table I'd already played in the demo. I nearly flew into a homicidal rage here, when I remembered the old computer game adage, "Never fly into a homicidal rage without reading the instructions." So I read the instructions.

Now, here's where the gimmick comes in. There are several different pool halls you can go into. These pool halls appear as "chat rooms". You start with access to just one pool hall, and must go into the chat room, schmooze around, and find another lowly player to play against. Once you do find such a player, you play them, and if you win, your prestige in that chat room increases, and more of the players want to play you. If you can work your way up to a "five star" rating, you can play against the "boss" of that pool hall, and if you win that, you gain entrance into a different pool hall (and thus, gain access to one more table and one more set of balls. Aha!)

I am not going to argue the brilliance of this design, as you meekly wander into the pool hall, and get turned down by higher-ranked players, and wait and wait for a player of your prestige to come in so you can play them, and once you do play them, it really MEANS something, because if you lose, then you risk being even more of an outcast in that chat room, and nobody will want to play you. Hell, sometimes, they won't even let you into the chat room at all.

So this keeps the suspense and the emotions up for quite a while...until you realize, hey. This is my pool game. And it's not letting me play it. About the fourth or fifth (or perhaps first) time you go into a chat room and can't find any player to play with, even after waiting like ten minutes, you really start getting the feeling that they should be paying you for this, not the other way around.

If you're happy with the tables/balls you have, though, you can always just pick "Quick Game" and play whenever and whatever you want, or play in a little mini-tournament, or just practice on your own, and this is all well and good, as the sounds/sights/physics of the game itself are quite good. The only really glaring flaws with the AI is that the computer has no concept of combination shots, and often resorts to the "hit it as hard as you can" method of shot selection, which is particularly frustrating when, for instance, the nine ball goes in of a random carom, and you lose. Oh well.

Anyway, it's a fine product, and I find myself playing it quite a bit, but the experiment-gone-wrong of the chat rooms casts a somewhat negative tone over the entire thing. Great idea, but it just doesn't work. I want my balls, dammit.

Rating: ***

Game: MAD: Global Thermonuclear War
Description: Indecisive strategy/action hybrid
Location: real.com

Any computer nerd who saw WarGames at a young, impressionable age, instantly thought it would be the coolest thing ever to play nukular war. Unfortunately, there haven't been any decent nukular wargames, ever. It was with this sense of desperation that I set out playing the introductory scenario of the demo of MAD ("Mutually-Assured Destruction"), and as soon as that first missile came zooming up from beyond the horizon, I knew I had to have this game. So now I have it. And it goes a little something like this...

In the beginning, you choose, Risk-style, which countries you want to have. The enemy chooses his. This, as well as the rest of the game, is done by means of a 3-dimensional, rotatable, zoomable, very beautiful image of planet Earth. Then the game begins, and it begins as a simplified, focused real-time strategy game. In your countries, you must build a launchpad. You must do this so you can build a space station. You must do this so you can build a science center. You must do this so you can research missiles. You must do this so you can build a missile silo. You must do this so you can fire missiles at the bad guys. Fortunately, all of the above tasks, in total, take about two minutes to complete. So you and the bad guy have built missile silos, and hopefully also built defensive facilities in your space stations so you can shoot down enemy missiles before they hit your cities.

Then you both start hitting the "fire" button. This is very cool, for those of you scoring at home. Missiles zoom up and around your 3D earth in a most delightful fashion, and you realize that if you have to kill billions of innocent people, it's important to at least look good doing it.

However, you soon notice that your defensive facilities keep missing. That's when you read the instructions which say, "They'll fire on their own, but they'll usually miss, so YOU, Commander, must take over!" Err, okay. So you take over, and get a cool Millennium-Falcon-Combat-Station-type display by which to aim your anti-missile beams or whatever, and save your ass. This all looks and plays cool, but then you notice that you're doing an awful lot of this, when you'd perhaps rather be setting up more space stations and researching more cool toys. Instead, you're stuck up there playing Missile Command. This is the facet of this game which turns it from a solid strategy game into a very weird, uncertain mixture of styles. Besides the fact that any sense of realism is completely blown away ("Sir! I know you're busy planning the enemy's destruction and all, but could you fly up here and shoot some bad guys?"), it undermines the focus of the game, if there was any focus to begin with.

All this being said, if you can get past these wacky little sidebars of shoot'emup action, it's really a fun, suspenseful little game, with the only other downside being that I think it might be impossible to lose. In a couple of cases, I let the program run overnight without touching it, and the computer still couldn't win because he refused to shoot at my last country. Besides that, I just don't think the computer is very smart. I have yet to come close to losing yet, and I am no military genius. I am, however, very good at Missile Command.

The game comes with a multiplayer, online option which I hope to try out, if anyone else in the known planet ever buys this game. That should take care of the AI problems, anyway, though I fear what the game could degenerate into -- two people wildly firing and shooting at their own missiles for hours upon hours. Who knows.

Anyway, I still think it's really cool, and it's by far the best nukular wargame we have.

Rating: **1/2

Game: Labyrinth
Description: The magic of gravity -- on your computer!
Location: real.com

We all had Labyrinth games as children, didn't we? The little wooden maze that you'd have to get the marble through by turning the knobs on the sides which tilted the board one way or the other? Didn't we? Well, I sure did. And I played it a lot. Then I got tired of it, 20 years ago.

But now it's back! In Pog form! No, wait, in computer game form! Anyone who played Labyrinth as a child will instantly fire up the demo and go, "WHOA!! I remember this!! This is totally awesome!" Then, if you're like me, you'll buy the game. Then, if you're still like me, you'll remember that you got tired of this 20 years ago.

Which is not to say that this concept doesn't still have significant addictive pulling power. It does. And this version spices things up with all sorts of different mazes, and tricky little "powerups" and holes that open and close and other gadgetry. But it's still, tilt the board, make the marble go through. The graphics, physics, sound and music are all excellent, however. I cannot imagine a more lifelike, faithful recreation of the game in computer form. This is really the game's greatest strength. It's fairly flawless in its execution of the classic Labyrinth game. So, if you like one, you'll like the other.

And I mean, really, if you ever played the game at all, you should at least get the demo and go, "WHOA!! I remember this!!"

Rating: ***

Game: Interstellar Trader
Description: Well, you like, trade stuff...
Location: Stormcloud Creations

Sigh. Poor, poor Interstellar Trader. I feel bad blasting the guy(s), because I mean, at least they wrote a game, and I'll admit that once I started playing it, it was difficult to stop, but...

This reminds me of a game that, as 12-year-olds, you got with your friends and said, "DUDE, we are going to make the K00L3ST GAME EVER and stuff, and it'll have trading, and space battles and intrigue and diplomacy and DUDE!!!" and then they sit down to write it, and it comes out like this. Obviously, a lot of effort and love was put into the game, as the art is all meticulously drawn and quite pretty, and there do not seem to be any bugs, per se, and the author keeps sending out hopeful, cheery emails asking for ideas for the next version, but it's just... sigh. There's just not much here.

Interstellar Trader can be best described as the Simplest Space Trading Game Ever. There are six planets. You have a ship. You can go to each of the six planets (by, get this, clicking on them) and buy stuff there, or pick up passengers, or upgrade your ship (to add bigger weapons and more cargo space). Doing each of these things consists of clicking on a menu item. Then you leave the planet (by clicking a button) and go to one of the other six planets (by clicking on it) and sell the cargo you bought at the last planet (by clicking a menu button.) You do a lot of clicking in this game. But that's essentially all there is to it. Oh sure, sometimes a fleet of "pirate ships" will attack you, and if you don't have the muscle, they'll take your stuff, but it's usually only a mild, momentary setback, as money is pretty easy to come by in this universe. Buy kittens at Planet 1 for 3 credits, and sell them at Planet 4 for 293 credits (this example I am not making up). Big deal.

You can also store money in a savings account which earns interest, or dabble in one of the five available stocks in which to invest. The stock market appears to be completely random, so it's really more of a friendly wager than an investment. The game ends when you reach a predetermined number of credits (250,000 - 1,000,000). And you will, because of the game's biggest shortcoming, which is:

It is absolutely impossible to lose. There's plenty of money out there, so the game in essence becomes, "click on the planets until you find all the money, which is not too hard, since there are only six planets." The author explains this in a usenet post, by saying that "It's really more of just a fun little sim, rather than a complicated strategy game. You can play it however you want." Which is true. You can just buy a bunch of weapons, and only make money in the stock market, or you can build the biggest cargo ship in the world and transport kittens your whole life, or whatever. But by choosing none of these options will the prospect of losing, or even being mildly challenged, even come remotely into view. This is perhaps why I kept playing in the first place -- it's a marvelous ego booster!

So, I'll give suggestions to him, and I'll try the next version, and hell, I'll probably even play this version a couple more times, when I'm feeling down on myself. But, I mean...

Sigh.

Rating: *1/2

Game: Flux
Description: Please do not mention this game to me.
Location: real.com/planetflux.com

Tetris is, without a doubt, the all-time king of "computer puzzle games", which is somewhat misleading, because it's not really a true puzzle game, but more in fact an action-puzzle hybrid. To me, a puzzle game works like this: You are faced with a static playing board, or a level, and must do something to finish that level. Like, that little game with the 15 squares that you have to move around to form a picture. That's a puzzle game.

I HATE puzzle games. I hate them because you're faced with a new level, and it's like, "Oh, God..." So you struggle through that for awhile, being forced to come face to face with your own stupidity. Then finally you stumble into the correct answers, and win the level, and then just at the height of your own sense of self-satisfaction, another goddamn level shows up on the screen, and it's like, "Oh, God..." So you struggle through that for awhile, and...

In fact, that's not true. I don't hate all puzzle games. I will now present for you a Comprehensive List of Puzzle Games That I Don't Hate:

1. Minesweeper

I liked Minesweeper because I felt I understood it better than most, and because it was pretty much the only thing available to kill time with at work before the internet (praise Allah) was created. Mind you, I wouldn't say I enjoyed it, but I didn't hate it.

But I'll never understand why I decided to download Flux. I think it was the fact that it was like two in the morning, and I'd gotten so into real.com that I was just downloading everything in sight, and this one had gotten some "Best of 2000" award or something, so I just said, sure, gimme gimme gimme.

The game is simple, and not altogether original, in concept. You are faced with a board full of blocks of different shapes/colors (ugh). Connecting pieces of the same type can be removed by clicking on them. Any blocks above those that are removed will drop down to fill in the spaces left. You get more points for removing large "chains" than for removing small ones (a "chain" defined as, a segment of similar blocks.) You get lots more points for clearing the whole board.

That's all there is to it.

Flux is the most addictive, time-sucking motherfucking goddamn game in the entire world.

Style has a lot to do with it. First of all, the graphics are slick. The blocks are all ray-traced, textured, rendered 3D, and they float and shimmy with a silky, hypnotic grace. And the fifteen accompanying original hip-beat musical tracks range from tolerably danceable to flat-out gorgeous. And, and, and...

But let's get serious here. Let's get down to the nittiest of gritties. Let's find out what really makes this game the mind-blowing drug that it is.

When you clear a chain of blocks, they don't just disappear. They explode. Oh, sure, a chain of two blocks may not make more than quaint crunching sound, but when you can link up half the screen and blow that sucker to smithereens, the screen shakes, pieces go flying everywhere, and fire rains down from the heavens. There is no more beautiful sight or sound in computer gaming, my friends, than spontaneously combusting a screenful of those goddamn purple little cone-shaped bastards.

Don't get me wrong, of course. Even without all the pyrotechnics, it would still be a very enjoyable, thought-provoking game requiring logic, forethought, and close analysis to determ-- ah, screw it, I just like BLOWING SHIT UP!! You will too. This game is fantastic. Fantastic, I tell you.

Careful. Once you start playing, you can't stop. And you will see it in your dreams.

Rating: ****

Stay tuned for more fun, exciting Mini Game Reviews! Maybe!