Lost Cities

New on the Xbox Live Arcade this week (yesterday, in fact) is the 2- or 4-player Reiner Knizia card game, Lost Cities. After a run of 10 games (Single Player), I'm ready to offer up an opinion.

This is a rather good implementation of Lost Cities. The only difficulty I have is that I sometimes discard a card when I mean to play it. Whether this is my own digital klutziness or a design flaw is difficult to say. Fortunately, in about half of the cases where this occurs, I have been able to undo the mistake and recover.

The game itself is a bit luckish, but tolerably so. A good player can analyze the situation and divine a process to extract the best score.

I hope to play more, and against human opponents as well.

4/5

Catching Up: XBLA

I've found quite a few reasons to enjoy and 360 in a more casual manner. It's a great machine for casual gaming, as Microsoft seems to realize, what with their recent announcement of the Xbox 360 Arcade version.

In an effort to catch up, I'll try to quickly summarize the XBLA titles that have caused my point expenditures.

Carcassonne
A very well-executed version of the board game. To date, three expansions are available; The River (included in the base game), The River II, and King and Baron. The console version takes away some of the annoying aspects of the tile game, particularly in the area of scoring. Several game play options are available, which is nice to have.

Puzzle Quest
Wow. It's great that someone can take a game so throughly played-through as Bejeweled and make it so fresh and compelling. By wrapping the base Bejeweled engine in an RPG blanket, it's not only new again, but compelling and captivating.

Catan
Yeah, it's probably because I'm such a big board game slut that I'll always get the XBLA version of any board game, but Catan hold a warm place in my heart and I'm sure I'm not alone. The XBLA version of it is solid, but I'm wondering why it is taking so long for the expansions to come out. Seafarers now!

Others:
Yaris
A free game from Toyota. Generally frustrating and worth ignoring. You get what you pay for.

Upcoming:
Battlestar Galactica
Released tomorrow! I'm a fan of the television show, but this one is definitely try-before-you-buy.

Mutant Storm Empires
I rather enjoyed Mutant Storm Reloaded, so I'm eager to get my hands on the follow-up, which should be out next week, on Halloween day.

Enough of this quick recap - I have to limber up my fingers for the Saturday release of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock... the world is about to get louder.

Thursday Update

Let's see... what have I been up to?

On Saturday, I brought my lovely white box over to the home of DaftApeth and introduced him to the ways of Guitar Hero II. It was love at first twang. Hopefully it won't be much longer before he joins the family of happy 360 owners.

We played for hours, me on lead and he on bass. And it was good. We unlocked several co-op achievements.

Yesterday was a banner day. It was another double-header XBLA Wednesday, with Eets: Chowdown and Pinball FX released.

First impressions: Eets was... OK. Had it been a little cheaper or if I had liked it a bit more, I may have gotten it. But I passed. However, I did pick up Pinball FX. Not because it's a terribly great game, but it's the only pinball available on the 360 and the physics engine is really not bad at all. I've spent a few hours here and there on the Windows Pinball game (Space Cadet), and Pinball FX offers 3 tables with the promise of more, and a rather high level of graphical detail.

It wasn't too late, so I picked up the axe and tried for that elusive Full Combo (100%) on a Guitar Hero song. And you know, I finally hit it. It was on Easy, but still. I'm no Rock God.

I've also Twitter-enabled my XBox, so if you care to follow my goings-on, pick up my Twitter Feed and you'll be notified of my current state.

Guitar Hero II Pwned

I finished up the first two stages of pwnership of Guitar Hero II last night. Five stars on every song in the Easy career and completion of the Medium career. Whew, those Face-melter songs were beasts, but fun at the same time.

I also tried Surrender on Hard mode, and failed pretty quickly. On a scale of 1-10, I would say that Easy is a 2, Medium is a 4, Hard is a 9, and Expert is an 11. The jump from Medium to Hard is quite pronounced.

Since I'm obviously not up to the task of Hard (without practice), I think my next mission will be getting five stars on every Medium song before progressing.

****

In a bold move, XLBA released two titles yesterday. The old-school Gyruss was the expected release, but I was surprised to get 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures as well. I gave them both a spin and passed for different reasons.

Gyruss played like a clunky version of Galaga. Minigolf was not too bad, but it was pretty simplistic, and with only four characters to choose from (as well as the $10 price tag), it just wasn't quite enough value for the money in my book. If it had been $5, I may have taken the plunge. Also, the trial version was horribly short - only three playable holes.

****

In surprising news, Katamari Damacy will be coming, and I look forward to trying it out.

Break is OVER!!!

My taxes are finally finished and mailed, my overseas trip is completed, so it's time to get back into it!

First things first... I completed the Old Spice Challenge, earning my gamer badge (as shown on the left), a rank increase, and the XBLA game Contra. Huzzah!

On to other news. I've stagnated a bit on Worms. I like the old-school game quite a bit, but it's not holding up as well as it used to. I did buy Luxor 2 and enjoy it quite a bit. I'm mostly done with the Easy adventure, which I'll finish up before moving on to Medium.

I passed on Boom Boom Rocket. I quite enjoy rhythm games, but this one didn't quite do it for me. I think it's the way the arrows are scattered around the screen without reason that makes it a bit too distracting for me.

What's really blowing my socks off this week is Guitar Hero II. I never played any previous incarnation of this game, but I'm enjoying the hell out of it on the 360. Easy career mode is a bit too easy, but since I want to ease my way into it, that's where I started. I finished that mode quickly enough and moved on to Medium career mode. I'm currently alternating between that and getting 5 stars on every song on the Easy tour. Almost done with both, and I haven't had the game for a week yet.

I must be in the minority opinion with regard to the cost of the GH2 DLC (Downloadable Content). Everyone seems to be up in arms about the price (about $6.25 for 3 songs). When I think about the effort and licensing that must go into each track, I don't think it's too expensive at all. I've bought all of the DLC available for GH2 and I have no doubt that I'll get more when it is released.

Back in (Old) School

I've downloaded the new XBox Live Arcade version of Worms and played through the training tutorials. It seems quite faithful to the original 2D series, and that's a very good thing.

Unfortunately, many of the weapons that I knew and loved are missing, but it's still an engaging game.

This experience has highlighted for me the change in gaming over the years. The pace in Worms is quite slow in comparison to most modern games, so it will be interesting to see how it is received by the players in general.

More data as it emerges.

Valentine's Update

A little early spring refresher for the blog. Changed the colors and style up a bit.

I've also added my GamerCard over on the right. This should be current and display what I've been up to lately, updated live.

Lately I've been playing around with quite a few games, all quite fun.

I was late to the party on Kameo, but it is a fun one. I've been playing quite a bit of the XBox Live Arcade, especially Mutant Storm Reloaded. I tried out Heavy Weapon, but didn't care for it too well.

I paid full price for Fuzion Frenzy 2, and was rather disappointed with it. My 7-year-old son as well, commented (without prompting) that the first one was better. I'm proud that he can see through all the glitz and 3D flim-flammery and see that it's the game play that matters.

I picked up Rumble Roses XX on the cheap, looking for some correspondingly cheap thrills. I haven't quite figured it out...