Play Journal: June 2019

by Thom Kiraly

July invites me to taste its riches and behold its glory, but I can’t resist risking the Orphic glance back at June with all its ups and downs. My game design class graduated and we celebrated accordingly (local multiplayer party). My oldest kid turned 8 and we celebrated accordingly (local multiplayer party). Late in the month, I started at a summer gig facilitating games activities for young people in Malmö at Spelens Hus. It involves a lot of plugging in of controllers, and troubleshooting, and locking and unlocking doors, and being patient and friendly but not always playful, I’m afraid. Somewhere in between all this, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite launched. My calendar says there were 30 days of no holds barred June but they must have forgotten the nights or something because it feels like more right now.

 


LIVE ACTION

Malmö Play Club Session – Malmö Play Club returned for its first summer session in a while. A small band of players met up at the local library to play the following silly things: Sound and Fury, Quick Draw, One Behind, This is My Nose, Human Compressor, Turtle Wushu, Psychic Handshake, Toilet Paper Tug-of-War, CHIP CHIPOI, Danish Clapping, Face Pass. 

Though the weather was good we opted to stay indoors. It remains to be seen where we end up next time. My hopes are of course set on throngs of people moving like slinkys made of syrup down streets, across parks, into ponds. Somewhere between that and four people attending on Facebook is alright.

Remember to check out the Play Club Facebook page and join in the next time we meet (July 27). 

Soccer – Heard about this game called soccer? Football? Yeah, I play that. Not to brag or anything but I know how to kick a thing and run after it. One highlight from June: final day at my kid’s soccer practice. We got to go into full battle, grown-ups vs. children. For the first two games we split into manageable team sizes but the real fun was letting all 40-or-so kids play 15 grown-ups in the last match. Mayhem, carnage, destruction, and children tackling each other even though they were supposedly on the same team. I got bruises and was happy about it.


TABLETOP

Heckmeck – I’m a sucker for push-your-luck mechanics. Luckily, this hasn’t yet resulted in a full-fledged gambling problem because I seem to get my fill in games with lower stakes. Heckmeck is a dice game that starts out looking like you and the other players won’t really interact much. You just roll, pick dice to make combos and get good scores. Ah, but after a while, when people have claimed the best prizes, this game has players both hoping for and dreading that moment when someone will really try their luck. Will they steal a prize from someone else? Will they block someone else from claiming a token? Will they run out of luck in a spectacular way?

Century Spice Road – Game if the year at Essen and generally lauded as a great board game, my hopes were set high for Century Spice Road. And it’s great. I’m learning to stop worrying and love the Euro-games. I know I haven’t arrived yet so I’m lucky I have friends to kindly shove me into building beautifully broken victory point-generating machines of resources and trade. As so often, my patience got the best of me and I ended up stressing people out by pushing hard for the endgame hoping I’d get there first, if not with the highest-scoring cards. Didn’t work. GG tho.

Bang! – If I had to say one type of game I really struggle with it’d have to be social deduction games. Weird because I usually love the social aspect of games. My best guess is that in a lot of games where I like the social aspect what I really enjoy is bullshitting and joking and connecting and all that fuzzy stuff. In social deduction games, the table talk is instrumentalized and I honestly lose track of who’s just outed themselves as traitor or whatnot because I have too much fun yapping. So Bang! was a challenge, you know. I did enjoy it though and it was probably for the better that I was the sheriff, aka the only character who’s identity and goal is known at the start of the game.

Incan Gold – Another push-you-luck game. Meaning: I didn’t do well but I had a lot of fun. This is a clever and slimmed down design that manages to push all the anxiety-buttons and exploit any sunk cost obsessions you may suffer from while still being enjoyable.

Champions Fight – This is a homebrew by a young, budding game designer I had the pleasure of hanging out with at my summer gig as some sort of hangout organizer at a gaming club. It’s a 1-vs-1 kinda thing where two champions duke it out in mythic battle. Lots and lots of math, hence the calculator in the picture. I didn’t much enjoy playing the game, but I live for the creative spark in the designer and I hope they never stop making their own quirky things. I’m sure I’ll get to try a few more before the summer is over.  

COMPUTER GAMES

Ultimate Chicken Horse – My first thought: oh this will be a total and completely spherical type of shit because we have to build things… together. But then: wow, this is hilarious and kinda endearing. This game plays very different depending on who joins in. At home, I often start out trying to counteract whatever fuckery the kids put in the level. Once people can actually complete the level, I try to follow the hardest route to the finish line, but even if I win there’s a great system in place where I can change my scores much lower than everyone else’s so it still feels fair and fun. All this means is that sometimes I can actually play to the best of my ability and still end up losing in the end.

Kopanito All-Stars Soccer – Soccer is such a big deal, y’all. For my oldest kid’s birthday party we stopped by the closest public soccer field and then went home and played Kopanito. There’s something great about how kids react when they find something they had no idea they’d like. Sure, FIFA is the staple game and everyone want to play it, but Kopanito is disarmingly quirky and stupid. Hard not to like. 

I’ve joined in a few times and right now, we’re working our way through all the various cups. Today, we played as Guyana and beat Paraguay for the South American title by freezing their defenders and using teleportation powers.

Overwatch – Every so often, I’ll fire this up and play a few games in the arcade, but that’s it. I still enjoy the nutty workshop games that are out there. Mystery Heroes gets a lot of playtime.

Local Multiplayer Games at Graduation – The class I’ve been teaching game design to graduated and naturally we celebrated by playing local multiplayer games. These were the ones we managed to try:
Move or Die, Ultimate Chicken Horse, Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy (not multiplayer but I wanted to show it to people), Stick Fight, Genital Jousting, Chambara.

Red Faction: Guerilla – Part of the humble bundle for June, this is a very, very, extremely brownish red game. Blowing things up is fun but the sudden unprompted missions seem disjointed and don’t make sense in the overall game world. I don’t care about or for the story in any real sense. It’s the most boring kind of sci-fi, to be honest. In total I put perhaps eight hours into this game and I doubt I’ll return. Big, big meh.

Paratopic – Now here’s something different and unsettling. Paratopic, ya’ll. Go try it if you haven’t already. First selling point: it’s short. Second: You smuggle VHS tapes. Third: “you” are actually probably three different people. Fourth: creepy static-haunted voices instead of dialogue. I liked this a lot and can’t wait until some more time passes so I can feel like revisiting it.

Black Room –  This should almost not be on here because I didn’t give it an honest try. Nonetheless, this “not honest try” lasted for well over half an hour and reminded me of how weird and beautiful videogames can be. You can just make things and worlds and have them work in really strange ways. It’s impressive but I want to give it more time and attention because I think it deserves it.

Pool Panic – Not the best fit for me and my kids. I also had a lot of trouble with controllers disconnecting so my overall impression isn’t overwhelmingly positive. I’ll save it for a local multiplayer session in the future.

Unrelated but nice pic of the offspring playing my students’ games at our public show of final projects.

Overcooked 2 – I was already a big fan of Overcooked so I knew I was in for a treat when I got to sit down with the sequel. I play it (and try to make other people play it) at my summer job, which means I have to find the balance between wanting to do well at the game while also keeping in mind that the kids I play with are totally new to it. I’m not saying I turn into Gordon Ramsey, but when the kitchen catches on fire for the third time because someone is not keeping and eye on the pasta even though we said THAT’S WHAT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO DO!! I get… frustrated. In a kind way.

Beatsaber – Another game I play at work sometimes. It’s kinda neat. Try it if you can. I don’t care a lot for the music but the interaction works and the visuals are kewl and cyyyber.

Space Dream VR Demo – If beatsaber is cool but kinda just… what it is, I’d say this is much more up my alley. In this VR demo, you walk (or fly) around a space-ish place and check out ooooorbs and green shit. You can pick you own music through YouTube and the world will react in different ways to it. Of course, the lameoids who designed the game suggests the search “chillstep” but true aficionados and masters of chilling out know that only Discreet Music will do. My only regret is that I only got to walk around for a few minutes before I had to actually work again.

Crash Bandicoot – How is it still so incredibly hard to time jumps in this game!!? Gaah. I can’t believe how bad I am at it. I had to really fight to get through the first few levels. Not proud. The levels where you run away from or at the camera are the worst.

 

MOBILE

Dots Series – Idle game. Listening to podcasts. Same as it ever was.

Canabalt – Tried switching my idle game for a day and then went back to Dots again.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite – Finally! It’s here, it’s weird, get used to… not as many people jumping on the bandwagon as with Pokémon: Go? Yeah, a week or two after launch my main sense of HP:WU is disappointment at how it didn’t repeat the success of Pokémon: Go. You do know that the summer of 2016 was the closest we got to world peace, don’t you? 

The lack of an insanely large player base aside, I think HP:WU is a better game at launch. Niantic learned a lot from Pokémon: Go and made sure to put in social features, raids, and other late additions to Pokémon Go into the core HP:WU experience. The AR mode is much more fun and varied, too. It’s not just a pokémon at some random place, it’s a whole host of characters in situations of varying hilarity/precarity ready to be inserted into any situation you find yourself playing in. And then there’s the portmanteaus. I doubt I’ll forget walking through my first portal. It was actually really cool and worked to connect the act of playing the game to the idea of magic as invisible to muggles. I truly felt like I was in on a secret no one else around me understood or could be part of. It’s like the didn’t even notice I crossed the threshold and went somewhere else for a minute.

Come walk with me if you’re in Malmö. But don’t expect me to care about the “lore”.