Summer Geek Challenge: The License Plate Game

It’s starting to be the summer travel season! This means that now is the prime time to play the license plate game (in the US), particularly if you’re going to be in the car for any extended length of time, or if you will be visiting high density tourist destinations, like national parks.

Playing the game is very simple; designate a passenger to keep a record of all the different license plates anyone in the car spots. The goal is to get as many of the 50 as possible, or 51 if you are in a prime spot to see a Washington, DC plate. You can also keep a bonus list of the number of Canadian provinces you spot. I have a feeling that this would be an auspicious year for me to play, because I saw a Hawaii plate on my way home from work yesterday, and I’ve seen about 3 Alaska plates in the last week.

If you’re feeling ambitious, we could try to work out a point system in the comments based on the rarity of various license plates. If you live outside the US and have a different version of the game, tell us your rules. And if you go on a trip this summer, leave a comment with your list. (To be fair, you should only submit a list that you managed to compile over the course of one trip.)

-posted by Dana

Assassin’s Creed - A gamer’s perspective

Some of you might be surprised to see me posting about my thoughts of this particular game today. Truth be told, I bought the game months ago when it first came out. I was looking forward to the game so much I actually pre-ordered it. I began playing the game the day it was released. In large part, the delay is due to my struggle to experience the game in its entirety and then to decide what exactly I had to say about it.

It’s not that I wasn’t sure if I’d enjoyed the game or not. To the contrary, I was immediately certain that I loved it, and no part of my continued play could convince me otherwise. The game was hugely enjoyable. Every time I set my X-Box controller down I found myself looking forward to the next time I would be able to play the game.

I think, overall, that my trouble was that the game was considerably different from any other game I’d ever played. Many video games are simply variations on the theme of other games I’ve played in the past. Those games can be very good even if they’re not entirely innovative. While Assassin’s Creed certainly was reminiscent of certain other games I’ve played, it confounded my expectations, and required me to do a lot more thinking before I could clearly articulate my experience with it.

Project Sylpheed - A gamer’s perspective

Usually when I buy a video game, I pick up something that I’ve carefully explored in advance. I read reviews, watch videos of the game being played, and perhaps even download a demo of the game to play on my computer or a game console. In this sense, Project Sylpheed was different. I was in my local Best Buy to pick up something else, and happened to see it while walking past the video games. I had recently finished the a game, and didn’t have anything new to play at the time, so I bought it on a whim.

The game describes itself as a “space saga.” I would describe it as a combat flight simulator. You fly a small space fighter, engaging in dogfights against other space fighters and larger capital ships. There is a very simple economic system built into the game by which you earn points based on how well you do on each mission which you can then spend to get access to better weapons and equipment for your fighter. The game also allows you to start over from the beginning after you beat it, but to keep all of the equipment you earned the first time through, and to continue to earn points in order to further expand your gear.

As a combat flight simulator, the game is exactly the sort of highly engaging, mindless entertainment you might expect from the cover art. The game doesn’t require a lot of thinking. You can more or less point your craft at the enemy of your choice and hold down the button until your weapons lock on, then let go of the button to fire a swarm of dozens of guided weapons at them while you turn your attention to something else. The game also does its best to provide an engaging storyline, but this is an area in which it tends to fall short.

Mass Effect: A game review for non-gamers

As Mark mentioned, he was excited about Mass Effect long before it came out. After getting so involved in watching him play BioShock and then learning that Mass Effect was from the same people, I got pretty excited, too. I fear, though, that BioShock has ruined me for all other games, because its level of plot was so high and engaging, and it was so darn pretty. Mass Effect didn’t push BioShock off the top of my list, but it didn’t disappoint, either.

I was around when Mark played through Knights of the Old Republic as well, and as you might be able to tell from my old review from back then, I didn’t like it that much. A lot of the packaging annoyed me, to the point that I couldn’t get truly involved in the plot and didn’t enjoy being in the room with the game. Mass Effect is very much the same style of game, as Mark pointed out, but much, much better from my perspective, because they have moved far beyond all the things that irritated me.

Mass Effect - A gamer’s perspective

Not too long ago, I was presented with an opportunity to be massively disappointed. I had seen some of the early previews and interviews surrounding the game Mass Effect, and frankly my expectations, in spite of my best efforts to contain them, had grown to the point that I could not possibly be satisfied. A story-driven game with heavy role-playing elements set in a fully-realized science fiction world? It sounded more or less like just plugging wires directly into the pleasure centers of my brain, as far as I could tell.

Mass Effect was created by Bioware, the same company that created Bioshock, which I reviewed earlier here on the Buffet, and for which Dana published a review from the perspective of a non-gamer. This is also the same company that created the game Knights of the Old Republic (and its sequel, KotOR II) for the original X-Box console (the games were both also ported to the PC). This second game is much more important for understanding Mass Effect, because the two share a number of similarities in terms of the type of game and the manner in which the player is expected to interact with the world.

I have been very pleased in the past with Bioware’s work, and once again, they do not disappoint. I enjoyed the game immensely, in spite of my stratospheric expectations. I have a few quibbles, of course, because nothing is ever perfect, but in Mass Effect, they have delivered a solid, highly entertaining game that leaves me both satisfied with what I got for my money and eager for more.

Halo 3

Late evening fill-something-up post…

Halo 3 rocks. Well, the Forge, in any case. There’s nothing more amusing then creating random items to smash my competitor to death.

Death by Scorpion-crushing, anyone?

BioShock: A game review for non-gamers

This here is the companion post for Mark’s gamer review of BioShock, which you should probably read first. As indicated in the title, I will be giving my impressions of the game from the perspective of a person who didn’t play the game, but watched it. Which I did, all the way through. I got a great deal of cross-stitching done while he played.

I really did like this game. As a measure of how much, I told Mark he wasn’t allowed to play it when I wasn’t there, because that would make me miss something. My two main criteria for a game I’m willing to watch are that it be pretty and have a plot. The prettier it is, the less plausible the plot needs to be, though it’s looking like good art and good plot are starting to go together a lot now. Yay!

BioShock is a verypretty game. The designers really thought about creating a look and feel that would fit the backstory of Rapture, their underwater city, and they carried it through. It makes it worth it to explore all the levels of the game, just to see what you can see. (This is important when watching Mark play a game. He’s very thorough.) Lots of Art Deco-ish architectural elements, every poster you passed on a wall fit the style, the background music occasionally pumped in added to the same feel, and it all combined to give you a fairly good idea of what Rapture had been like before. Because it is, of course, a utopia that has gone horribly wrong.

As Mark mentioned, the tape recorders you find scattered around the game fill you in on the backstory, giving you an ever more clear picture of how Rapture fell. This was what made me prohibit Mark from playing without me. I got really good at spotting tape recorders and helping him figure out how to get to them. Anything to get more bits of story. They were like little bits of candy. You never knew which storyline you’d be getting a bit of when you first found the recorder, so you had to piece them together like a puzzle to follow each one, and it was fun watching them all converge toward the end.

But now, some quibbles:

BioShock - A gamer’s perspective

We at Geek Buffet appreciate that each of us approaches our geekiness in our own individual way. In our efforts to embrace this diversity of perspective, this represents the first of two posts about the game BioShock. This one is a review of the game from the perspective of a gamer who has played it. The second will be from the perspective of a non-gamer who had the chance to see the game while I was playing through it.

As a gamer, I appreciate being able to read a review of a game that gives me enough information about a game to be able to help me decide if I want to play it or not. At the same time, I don’t want a review to spoil the game for me. I have endeavored to write a review of the kind I would like to read. I hope you’ll agree.

By way of brief introduction, BioShock is a first-person shooter. It starts out when the main character is in a plane crash in the middle of the ocean, and escaping from the wreckage, finds what looks like a lighthouse rising up out of the water. Inside is a submarine, which takes him to Rapture, an underwater city. The nature of Rapture, and the story of what happened to it, are central to the plot of the game.

The apocolyptic plague is fake, but the research is real

I ran across an article while browsing Wikipedia the other day which caught my interest. It was talking about the Corrupted Blood Plague which swept through the massively multi player online game World of Warcraft. This is hardly new news, having taken place all the way back in September of 2005, but like many such things, it has bubbled to the surface at a time that I was already thinking about several related topics, and has captured my attention. The interesting thing to me had less to do with the details of what happened in this particular case than it had to do with the broader concept of what incidents like this mean to the world beyond the game.

The plauge itself was entirely virtual, and never reached past the confines of the game. Within the game, many characters were affected, but even they faced no lasting ill effects. What is interesting to me is that the way in which the events of the plague played out in the virtual world has attracted a great deal of attention from serious researchers who are interested in how observation of these phenomena can be applied to improving our understanding of the real thing.

Get Simpsonized!

Here at the Buffet, we don’t normally push advertising, but this is just too cool not to pass along. What you would look like had you been born in Springfield.

You’ll need a color photo of yourself
+ facing forward
+ in .jpg, .jpeg or .png format
+ with a minimum resolution of 640×480 pixels

It requires an email address only if you wish to save your Simpsonized self for posterity on their website. It is possible to download a full-sized image and an avatar without registering.

Even if you’re not a huge fan of the Simpsons, you can try it out to appreciate the face recognition software used to discern features and create personalized images. It’s a fun way to kill 20 minutes, I promise.