Over the Christmas break, I was home in New Orleans with limited computing resources. Tucked away in the back of my mind was Mike G’s mention of an online game called Puzzle Pirates. I visited the website and within minutes was hooked on this bloody madness.

Puzzle Pirates is a full-blown MMORPG with a large user base, elaborate economy, in-depth ranking system, vast game environment and puzzles out the wazoo. I have a true weakness for anything remotely pirate related and if there’s a game where everyone’s walking around talking like pirates, I’m on board. The graphics are cartoony but don’t be fooled, there’s some serious work behind the scenes of this thing.

The game is played by joining up with a crew of other pirates and sailing the high seas looking for other pirate crews to plunder. Once on board a vessel, you man a station (carpentry, bilge, sails, cannons, etc.) and the way you perform your duty is to play these puzzles. Should you board another ship to plunder, a swordfight breaks out between crews which takes the form of this badass team tetris game with a twist. When somebody gets knocked out the game goes “Yarrrrr!” I declare this awesome.

I also learned something new by playing this game. While walking around yelling random pirate jargon to complete strangers, I strolled up to a couple of guys and yelled “Avast!” They replied by asking me what it was that they should stop doing. All this time I thought avast was just something pirates yelled when they entered a room like when I walk into a meeting and yell “What’s up, sluts?” Apparently it means something else.

I’m going to give this game a big thumbs up and get this: you can download and try it for a month without even giving a credit card number. Go buy a parrot, purchase some rum and give this one a try.

http://www.puzzlepirates.com/

“Palooka’s been here…”

{sniff sniff} “…chamber pot’s fresh… He’s close…”

It’s 1:30Am and I’ve been playing this game all friggin day. I actually can’t physically play anymore. I’m so beat that I’m saving my game during a boss fight and will beat his ass in the morning. My hands are stiff, my eyes are sore, my ass hurts and I have a headache.

Needless to say, it’s fun.

While I wait for the WoW addicts to get me their addresses, I thought I’d past the time with Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath. This marks the first game I’ve ever pre-ordered, but it came with a free DVD of movies from all the past Oddworld games. It was rushed to my floor immediately…

So far the game is great. I’m a little disappointed by the graphics though. The Xbox is starting to look outdated. You can really tell the game is pushing it beyond it’s capabilities. The scenery is beautifully conceived with tons of plants and bugs including dandilions that release floating seeds all over the place. The problem is that there’s a lot of aliasing and visible draw-in so all this “natural clutter” makes it hard to see what’s going on. I hope they port this to PC where the graphics can be suitably rendered.

The gameplay is a riot. As you probably know already, your ammo are living creatures. Chippunks are annoying rodents that attract the enemy becuase it wants to kill it. They’re handy for isolating outlaws from a group and then capturing them with the web of a bolomite. After you incapacitate your enemy, you suck them up into a container (ala Ghostbusters) to be cashed in at the Bounty Store. There are also more projectile type weapons like thudslugs, stingbees, and explosive boombats. My favorite so far are the stunks; skunk-like creatures that release a potent stench, causing the enemy to retch. While they’re puking, you can capture them in your container.

The action shifts seamlessly from 3rd person to 1st by clicking the right controller. In 3rd person, you fight with your fists and by headbutting, in 1st person you use your crossbow. There’s some platforming aspects so far, but nothing annoying. When you run, Stranger goes down on all four and gallops like a lion!

Another bizarre innovation is the health system. You have a health bar and a stamina bar, but there are no medkits or health potions to be found. Instead, you shake your wounds off like a wet dog. When you’re out of stamina (which regenerates with time), you can no longer shake off your wounds.

The quests are moderately non-linear. You go from town to town collecting bounties so you can afford the $20,000 mystery surgery you need to survive. Each town has a general store that gradually gets better upgrades and accoutrement. You get paid more if you capture your prey alive by knocking it out or webbing it instead of killing it. This makes it more lucrative to be stealthy and clever, but there are plenty of times when you have no choice but to gun it out with zapflies.

That’s enough praise for now, more later…

So we officially have seven participants for our Secret Satan: Pain Scavenger Game-A-Thon (title pending). Jeff, Mike, Chris, Dan, Ryan, Steve, Tim

Everyone should email me their mailing address (tim@eatmybomb) . I’ll put their names and console info on folded index cards. My wife Jess will pick a card for each person and place it in their respective envelopes (after making sure she isn’t giving someone their own name!) After you receive your victims name, check their console info and start hunting for a wierd ass game!

When you receive your game in the mail, take a picture and post it’s arrival on EMB. After the victim posts the game’s arrival, it’d be fun for the Secret Satan to publish a post about where he found the game, how much it cost, why he picked it, etc.

After that, I think the victims can just post at will. I thought of scheduling specific weeks in order to give each game it’s due, but as long as we have a seperate topic, I think the random posting will be more entertaining.

Remember that the victim’s goal is to try and finish the game as much as possible. If it doesn’t have an official finish point, we may put it to a vote as to whether the victim has sufficiently completed his task.

The Secret Satan’s goal is to find the most “interesting” game at the lowest price.

So email me your addresses and let’s do this thing!

Ok so I’ve made a tentative name for the crappy game secret santa and I put together a table of what consoles people have. If something isn’t on here, just add it to the comments of this post and I will update the table.

I think it would definitely be funny to get the random crappy game in the mail. Anyone got any idea how we can pick each other’s addresses out of a hat virtually? Man, I sound like a dork. This way though, it would be pretty damn funny to get two posts out of the deal, the first one being a digital picture of what game you got in the mail. And Jeff, Dan needs an account. Also, how about a category for this activity once we have a final name? And thanks for making the comment font bigger.

World of Warcraft has had quite a devastating effect on the lives of several EMB editors, myself included. Several games have fallen by the wayside in its wake but that doesn’t mean we should let them go unplayed. I appreciate Tim & Chris’ focus during these trying times which have left bills unpaid, houses filthy and personal hygiene forgotten.

We can’t let some of our best multiplayer games go out of style: ATV Offroad Fury 3, RavenShield, Ghost Recon. I accept the proposal for a Ghost Recon reunion as this is one of the best cooperative multiplayer games EMB has ever seen. I also can’t keep going for weeks at a time without posting so I’ll be updating more frequently and it won’t be limited to talk about World of Warcraft.

Finally I’d like to welcome Dan to the forum and thank him for his commentary. We hope to hear a lot more from him around here.

So many games, so little time…

I have a Summer 2005 proposal. It’s a sort of Secret Santa if Santa was evil and liked to force kids to play bad games.

We all put our names in a hat and each pick one out. Then we go out and buy the strangest, most obscure, most terrifying game we can find in the dank and dusty bargain bin of the local liquidation store and give it to that person. We all have to attempt to finish our selected games as best we can. Then each week a different person will post a report on EMB and tell us how horrible (or surprisingly fun) their game was. Of course, we’ll have to swap console / OS information and we should probably shy away from DOS games as getting them to work in XP will ultimately be more terrifying than the games themselves.

So whaddya think? Who’s man enough to truly waste their time?

______Conquer Everything______

There’s a new Evil Empire in town and it’s name is EA Games.

EA Games just signed an exculsive contract with the NFL and Players Inc. This means that Madden is now the only video game that can use the names of real teams and players. No more ESPN NFL 2K, no more Sony Gameday, no more NFL Fever, and for that matter no more Tecmo Bowl!

The NFL claims that this won’t affect quality “We think it’s actually going to increase the quality of the game. …we’re going to push them because they are our only licensee” Yeah right. So not having ESPN NFL 2K4 kick your ass is going to motivate you more?

On top of this, EA has been trying to gobble up its competitors. It recently bought a 19.9% stake in Ubisoft (gee, I wonder why?), and has consistently bought, dismantled, and absorbed smaller developers like Westwood, Origin Systems (makers of Ultima) , Criterion, etc. It’s also been reported that EA has been over working their employees and not paying them for overtime. A class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the employees.

Now I’m not saying they’re a monopoly, but I am saying they want to be. I’m not saying we should boycott EA Games yet, but I will be more mindful to buy their titles used and buy other company’s games at full price. Ubisoft has developed some of the best titles of the last few years and I’d hate to see them devoured by the gluttonous beast.