Trace Memory for Nintendo DS

Creepy mysteries always make me happy. This is the appeal, for me, of the game Trace Memory. It was designed for the Nintendo DS system to take advantage of the DS touchpad, and is story based. The main character is 14-year-old Ashley Mizuki Robbins who is searching for her father on Blood Edward Island. Obviously, the game is designed to appeal to the Nancy Drew set. Ashley is blond like Nancy Drew and an inquisitive teenager like Nancy Drew.

Giving the game a story-explore-puzzle format was a good choice. Not everything is a pixel hunt. I get the idea that the makers of this game made it fairly easy on purpose. In this game, you see an object that you will need later and the game pretty much hands it to you. When you get to the stage where you need the object, the dialog says, "hey I have this object let's use it."

Exploring the environment with the touch screen is pretty cool. It is so much easier than having to thumb about with a controller that's too big for my hands(HELLO SONY PLAYSTATION). I'm pretty surprised at how good the graphics are in this game, given that I'm playing it on a DS. Since I go for visually appealing in a big way, this keeps me interested in exploring.

The puzzles are a little on the simple side for me, but if I were 14 and had just started playing games, I would really appreciate the simplicity. If the game had a few more puzzles, they could probably increase in complexity so that a new player would be able to figure out the more complicated puzzles after having played the simple ones earlier in the game. The puzzles that I've played so far are moving a rock and brushing away rust on an old plaque. As I said, they are very simple. I'm hoping as I progress there will be something more challenging.

What I really don't like about this game is the way the game handles dialog. Simply put, it's annoying. A character will say a sentence, and I have to tap the touchscreen to advance the dialog. Repetitively tapping the screen to get the character's next line is not very exciting especially when the dialog is lengthy enough to fill pages in a book. I also noted that there are 3 different ways dialog happens between characters. That's too much, and there was no obvious reason why there should be 3 different ways for characters to talk too each other. I'm guessing there were 3 different programmers for different sets of dialog who each decided that their dialog interface was best.

Overall, Trace Memory is an enjoyable game. I like the way the gameplay takes advantage of the DS touch screen. The story and the environment both keep me interested. I can definitely tell that it was meant for someone younger. Hopefully since the Studios are starting to realize that girls and women play games too, I will see some titles that are similar Trace Memory but incorporate more difficult puzzles and a more mature plot.

Patapon

Image via WikipediaMy husband showed me a very interesting game called "Patapon" on his PSP. The game is based on the ancient method of using drumbeats to herd warriors in battle. You are the Goddess of the Patapons and must provide drumbeats that will guide them to victory. Does that sound really lame?? I thought so too until my husband showed me the game. Aside from the game play, I love the graphics of this game. It is a 2d game, but this is complementary to the shadowpuppet style of the game's characters and sets. Everything is viewed in profile as if in an Egyptian painting.

To play the game, the user must drum out different beats using the four PSP buttons. I watched my husband doing this thinking,"hmmm...looks like a pre-schooler could do it." Well, not really. The drum beats are guiding the Patapons. That means that you have to have the right drum beat to get them to move forwards, to attack or to defend. Not only do you have to use the right drum beat, but you have to do it with rhythm.

It's pretty challenging to make judgments about the next action to take while trying to stay on the beat with the right song. The musical element of this game was very enjoyable and challenging. A warning: if you have a dog, this game may make your dog crazy.

Zork1

Image by vnoel via FlickrPlaying Zork highlighted to me just how much computer games have evolved and how much the way I play games has evolved. When I was very, very young, my dad showed me how to play another text based game called Adventure. Even though I was a child and my dad had to help me play(keyboard? what's a keyboard?), I was able to remember enough to form a comparison between how I used to play this type of game, and how I play the game now.

I remember my overall obstacle to success in Adventure was vocabulary. Although I now know many more words, verbs in particular, that didn't necessarily help me play Zork. The syntax required is fairly strict for these games, and there is no obvious help. I still struggled with finding the right to way to go upstairs in the house or to take the water bottle from the table.

Making it into the house was easy enough. Once I was in the house, I managed to get myself killed by a grue fairly quickly by traipsing upstairs without a light. Although the game allowed me a 2nd chance at life, it dumped me someplace I didn't recognize. At this point, I used ctrl-c and restarted the game. The purpose of the house is obviously to supply the user with some needed artifacts. I ended up taking a bottle of water, bag of peppers, elvish sword, "nasty" knife and most importantly, rope and a lantern.

After acquiring these items, I began my futile attempt to tie the rope to something. My thinking was that if I tied the rope to something, I could throw the rope down the chimney and climb down. I tried to tie that rope to anything and everything in the house. When I couldn't tie the rope to anything in the house, I jumped out the window and went to a tree. When I typed in the command for tying the rope, the program said to me, "you can't tie rope to that." This constitutes game failure for me, because I am a caver, and I've tied ropes to trees, descended and ascended plenty of times. Whatever...

I noticed that I played this game much differently than I did as a child. The first thing I did even before I started playing the game was to print out the few commands listed in the readme file. I knew that this would not be the "end all, be all" list of commands, but would get me started. Once I started the game, I began drawing a map which was very helpful for going back and forth. I'm so used to having access to maps in games that I play. As a child, I would never have started by looking for commands to use or drawing a map. It was all about guessing.

Zork was an ok game for 30 minutes, but I would probably need to find a few more commands if I intended to play it any longer. The lack of graphics didn't bother me as much as the lack of help. For instance, I got a description of the kitchen the first time I entered it, but there was no obvious way to see the description again once it had scrolled upwards. It seemed to me that this was intended to be part of the game play. It's really amazing what I've come to expect from the games that I play.

Boom Blox

When Steven Spielberg was shown the Nintendo Wii, he immediately felt the urge to create a game that would exploit the Wii's interactive capabilities. He found a collaberative partner in Electronic Arts, and the result is Boom Blox.

The basic concept is very simple. You are presented with a pile of blocks. The goal is to knock them down. Since this is a Wii game, knocking down blocks is accomplished by hitting the air as hard as you can with the Wii-mote in hand. It's as if the blocks are saying "I want you to hit me as hard as you can."(Fight Club fans may wish to use the penguin avatar.) This brings up the greatest aspect, for me of this game. The game has cute little characters, which I enjoy, and they crack me up because they seem to serve as a cover up for the fact that this game is all about venting aggression.

There is no one way to hit these blocks. I can jab, punch or slap them. I can even give them a back-handed slap, and the noise they make when you hit then is as satisfying as the sound of popping bubbles in bubble wrap. The makers of the game really did their physics homework because when I make all these crazy hits, the blocks react appropriately to the direction of the force.

Boom Blox has several modes of play and different sets which is pleasing to me because it means that play doesn't have to start where you left off last time. There is a multi-player option and players can play either competitively or cooperatively.

As you play through all of these options, the game unlocks different pieces that can be used in there "create a level" section of the game. Create a level is pretty easy. Players can choose the type and placement of blocks and the characters on the screen.

Boom Blox is one of the reasons why I respect Steven Spielberg. There are absolutely no references to any of his movies in this game. It's just a great game that is easy to figure out but very satisfying to play.

Related articles

• Throwing things at things: a review of Boom Blox [via Zemanta]
• Making games with Mr Spielberg [via Zemanta]

Video Game Class

I just finished the Spring Semester and started Summer. Since my video games teacher wants me to blog about games that I play, my content will be broadening.

As I'm taking the video games class, I'm also working on a project for my Spring Artificial Intelligence class. It's a project that I originally found in Toby Segaran's book, Programming Collective Intelligence. I'm writing a naive Bayseian Filter. It's original intention is for spam, but I want to try and use it for some other things as well.

Image via WikipediaAfter my blog post last month, I thought to myself, "Girl! It is SO time to move on. Enough with the 2.0 stuff." With that, it was on to Semantic Web concepts. YouTube has been the most helpful as some of the W3C "tutorials" are, well, a little dry. (Not all of them just some of them.)

Here is a list of some of the videos I really enjoyed:
Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web
An Introduction to the Semantic Web
RDFa Basics
Google Tech Talks: Semantic Web

After my head stopped hurting from the first 20 minutes of the Google Tech Talk, I found this article which further explains RDFa.


In his video on Semantic Web (which is his concept) Tim Berners Lee describes what I perceive as being the core of Semantic Web technology. The Semantic Web is a method of knowledge representation coupled with the collective intelligence that seems to be reaching some level of maturity in web applications.

That may seem like a fairly small statement, but there is really a lot going on that makes this possible.

1. Advances in hardware have taken us from Pentium III to Quad core in just a few years. Processing the larger amounts of data with the complex structure of collective intelligence is no longer limited by hardware.
2. Cloud computing allows more developers to focus on collective intelligence problems. There's really no need to spend a day futzing around with server/network crap anymore, unless it's just something that turns you on (and that's ok.)
3. There are enough CS students who see the value in going on to grad studies due to a globalized market for developers.
4. Web technology is finally past the hump of, "gee, look at my cool home page with the spinning

All of these factors are combining to take internet applications past the document.

I could go on, but this blog is starting to get lengthy.

For this blog, I've started using Zemanta. It's a Firefox plugin that makes suggestions for whatever it is that you are writing about. It's showing pictures and links to articles. It's also suggesting tags for this post. I think the content is from creative commons. That's how they get around copyright. The picture I've posted is from Zemanta, but the links are ones that I pulled from previous wanderings.

I realy like the feature that links phrases in the post to wikipedia.

Previously, I wrote about one of my favorite web 2.0 apps, Pandora.

After I wrote that post, I read through a chapter in my new favorite book Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran.. The chapter was about searching and ranking using a neural net. It greatly reminded me of Pandora. The user inputs the name of an Artist or a song. Each artist/song are entries in Pandora's Music Genome Project which associates each artist/song with different musical characteristics. Pandora will initially suggest music based on these characteristics. That seems like straight-up database to me...bfd. What's interesting is that once the music starts playing, the user has the option to give each song a "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down." That's training! For most of the semester, I assumed that Pandora must be using a neural network for this training. Then today, I start reading the chapter in Programming Collective Intelligence on filtering documents. There are other ways to train that are not as computationally expensive. This really leaves me to wonder. Aside from pondering the ways in which Pandora is suggesting tunes, I'm very curious about how one would unit test and system test these types of things.

It's been so easy to stick with Web 2.0 concepts this semester. The information I've found about the Semantic Web has been fairly sparse. From what I can tell, it's all about filtering from an extremely wide net. For example,a few days ago, I found out about Zemanta It's a semantic application that suggests content for blogs. The user types along and while they are writing their blog, Zemanta suggests content for the user. The technologies I've looked at for the Semantic web seem to revolve around markup and data representation.

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