Results tagged “games” from KPAO

If you're looking for a good physics game for the iPhone at a great price (free!), then download Stackus today. It's free. I picked it up the last time it was free, and I really enjoyed it. I played through all of the levels, which is more than I can say for 99% of the games I tried out.



For more free games—especially paid games that are temporarily free—check out AppShopper.

I've been playing Words with Friends on my iPhone. It's a pretty good knock off of Scrabble. But if you're gonna win, you need to know your two letter words. I created this list that sorts them alphabetically both by first letter and last letter. Hope it helps!

AAs  ABs  ADs  AE   AGs  AHs  AIs  ALs  
AM   AN   ARs  ASs  AT   AW   AX   AYs
BAs  BEs  BIs  BOs  BYs
DE   DOs
EDs  EFs  EH   ELs  EMs  ENs  ERs  ESs  ET   EX
FAs  FEs
GOs
HAs  HEs  HIs  HM   HO
IDs  IFs  INs  IS   ITs
JO
KAs  KIs
LAs  LIs 	LO
MAs  ME   MIs  MM   MOs  MUs  MY
NA   NE   NOs  NUs
ODs  OEs  OF   OHs  OI   OMs  ONs  OPs  ORs  OS   OW   OX   OY
PAs  PEs  PIs
QIs
REs
SH   SIs  SOs
TAs  TIs  TO
UH   UM   UNs  UPs  US   UTs
WE   WOs
XIs  XU
YA   YEs  YO
ZA

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
AAs  BAs  FAs  HAs  KAs  LAs  MAs  NA   PAs  TAs  YA   ZAs
ABs
ADs  EDs  IDs  ODs
AE   BEs  DE   FEs  HEs  ME   NE   OEs  PEs  REs  WE   YEs
EFs  IFs  OF
AGs
AHs  EH   OHs  SH   UH
AIs  BIs  HIs  KIs  LIs  MIs  OI   PI   QI   SIs  TIs  XI
ALs  ELs
AM   EMs  HM   MM   OMs  UM
AN   ENs  INs  UNs
BOs  DOs  GOs  HO   JO   LO   MOs  NOs  SOs  TO  WOs  YO
OPs  UPs
ARs  ERs  ORs
ASs  ESs  IS   OS   US
AT   ET   ITs  UTs
MUs  NUs  XU
AW   OW
AX   EX   OX
AYs  BYs  MY   OY

Matt Leacock has been my colleague and friend ever since I interviewed him for his first UI design job at Claris back in 1997. He's been a board game enthusiast and designer for as long as I've known him. Admittedly, some of his first efforts weren't that great. I remember playing one game with a "castle seige" theme where there were two different game boards, and for every conflict, the defender had to construct a castle from blocks. Nice concept, but far too fidgety.

In the intervening years, I've playtested numerous games and variants of Matt's: Ants, Lumberjacks, and of course Pandemic. Pandemic was a hit from the first time I played it. A cooperative game, it gets people positively interacting throughout the entire game. It was no surprise to me that he went on to get it published, and it subsequently won Games Magazine Best New Family Game for 2009. Even more prestigious, it was nominated for the German Game of the Year, and just barely lost to Dominion (an excellent game in its own right).

One clear indicator that a game is popular is when it gets an expansion. That means the number of people who own the basic game is high enough that even if only 20% or so buy the expansion, it will still be profitable for the publisher. The Pandemic expansion—On the Brink—just came out this month.

I was over at Matt's house last night picking up a copy of the expansion. That same day, I received an email announcing the 2010 Games Magazine winners. I congratulated Matt on his back-to-back wins. He hadn't yet heard. His latest game—Roll Through the Ages—had won Best New Family game for 2010.

Auditorium is a unique and fun game that I mentioned previously on this blog. My friend Jason did a version of it for the iPhone called Light Jockey, and it is really great.

Considering the original game was in Flash, and Flash isn't supported on the iPhone, it's quite a technical achievement. The animation is smooth and organic. And the direct manipulation of the disks in the game make it more engaging than the original.

The only downside is there is no accompanying audio. Apparently the iPhone can't use compressed audio files for synchronous playback, and uncompressed audio would have made the app huge.

Still, the visuals and gameplay are the star of the app and Light Jockey delivers on both. It has replaced Bejeweled for me as the game to play in those down moments during the day.

Plus it's only 99¢. So buy it already! :-)

First, the game: Hanna in a Choppa. I love the visual design. Simple. monochrome. Great use of typography throughout. And the gameplay is really good too. Simple controls, but each level is unique. I really like the planetoid and the lost at sea ones.

The bad interactions:

1. NorthWest's web site disables the paste command in the credit card number field when checking out. I store my credit cards in a document on my computer. I've always copy and paste them into checkout forms. This is the first time I've ever run into a problem. I ended up working around it by pasting it into the name field, and dragging it into the credit card number field. But seriously, why would you want to do anything in the checkout UI that might prevent a customer from buying your product?
2. Technorati doesn't place focus in the search field. Isn't this the #1 reason why someone goes to the site? To perform a search? Google gets it right. So does Yahoo. Even Live, Ask, and more obscure sites like IceRocket get it right. Why don't more web sites thoughtfully set the focus into form fields?
3. The Marriott Courtyard's TV interface always made me laugh. Why bother asking the user for a piece of information (like your room number) if the system already knows it?

I got sucked into a few games over the weekend. The Good Experience Games page is dangerous that way. Here's what I played:

• Fishing Girl - this one is really simple, yet quite fun and compelling. I went through it 3 times: once on easy and twice on hard. Highly recommended.
• Grow Tower and other games in the grow series. These are fun to start, and then they can become maddeningly frustrating. I still haven't figured out Grow Island. (grumble)
• Auditorium - I like this one. The organic visual flow coupled with the audio mixing is a great combo.
• Theseus Lite - A shout out to my friend Jason Fieldman who just released a free version of his iPhone game. Of course if you like it, you should buy the full version. :-)

Have fun!

I sat in a presentation yesterday by Lee Crawford, CEO of twofish.com. They're building a platform to enable others to embed virtual economies into their applications. Judging from the trends I've see with virtual goods on QQ, Gaia Online, Hot or Not, Facebook, and of course games like World or Warcraft, this is definitely a massive trend for the future. Asian countries like Korea, China, and Taiwan have already embraced virtual goods, and they are becoming a staple on both social networks (as Lee says, to give increased weight to certain connections; not all friends are equal) and within games. Here's what Gaia Online has to say about their collectibles market:

Buying Collectible Items is the best investment you can make on Gaia.

Since Collectibles are sold for a limited time only, they usually skyrocket in value. Many older Collectibles are now worth hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Gaia gold.

This month's Collectibles might make you rich!

Phun is a 2D physics simulation "sandbox." That description might not sound like much fun, but Phun is, um fun! It's obscenely interactive -- grab and draw and push and turn all you want. Stuff is always happening. Watch the video demonstration to see what you can do.

It's currently only available for Linux and Windows (I'm running it on my Asus EeePC under Linux of course!), thought the author says a Mac OS X version is "coming soon." Binary only, unfortunately.

This will have a large (negative) impact on my productivity...

PurposeGames is nice site hosting Flash games, mostly of an educational and trivia nature. They range from  a massive list of geography quizzes to parts of automobile engines to the "greatest album covers of all time" (for those of us old enough to remember "albums."

Even better, the content is user-generated, and all the games seem to tie into a big high-score database. Unfortunately several of the games I tried seem to be just slightly too big for my Asus EeePC screen -- though they are still playable with a bit of scrolling.

Don't expect to play any of the games on your iPhone though....

Following up on Dave's post about a "name the countries" game, here is another geography game. This one comes courtesy of everyone's favorite German national airline Lufthansa (and via my mother-in-law, who told me about it). How well can you identify major European cities on an unlabeled map? What if the map shows only national borders? How about a map with no cities or borders drawn at all? You lose point if you're off by more than about 10 miles. The bigger the error, the fewer the points earned.

Just to lay down the challenge, my best score out of about five or six games is 26,755. 29,271. 29,370! :-P

673

Hey Jude, don't be afraid. We're not really going to play Monopoly. We're going to try to make it better.

My friend Matt finally got his excellent coöoperative game Pandemic published. (Ping me if you want to play it. Or if you don't know me, just buy it and play it with your friends.) It got me thinking (again) that I should design a game.

Or better yet, why not take a game that practically everyone has sitting around in a closet somewhere that is at it's heart a truly awful gaming experience, and try to turn it into something that's really fun. So that's my goal. Take the bits from a standard Monopoly set and come up with a new set of rules.

The concept is still nascent; I've done no work on it yet. But off the top of my head, I'm thinking it could be a card game (have to do something about the mortgage text on the backs of the deeds, though), or maybe a "visit all the locations" game like Elfenland. I'll probably have to ditch the Change and Community Chest cards, as they're pretty specific to the original game.

Any thoughts on how I might go about this? Leave a comment!