Frank Branham: Pictureka, Talisman, Mercer Gaming Ex, Portal, CAKE!

I've been doing precious little board gaming the past few weeks, as the run up to the Mercer Gaming Extravaganza ate into my time a bit.

This went well, the final total was 105 people, and I think we made a profit even after the food. While we're still trying to work out what we learned, I'm pretty certain that:

1. Reducing the entrance fee by $2 for people who bring snacks means that there is a steady flow of snacks. People spent much more than $2--two cakes showed up, as well as a couple of veggie and fruit trays. We still have a lot of our original food left for Mercer Thursdays.

2. Most gamers seem immune to any sort of scheduled events. (We made them all strictly optional, not stopping the open gaming for anything.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pictureka is the weirdest game find of the past two weeks. It costs $20, and is a Target exclusive published by Parker Brothers. The box looked eerily familiar to me as I toured the game aisle.

It is an English version of Project X, a great party gamer I am now spared from trying to hunt down a German copy.

You have 9 tiles containing a massive number of random cartoonish images. Each round, you flip up a card from 1 of 3 decks, all of which require you to search the board for objects:

1. The Blue Desk asks all players to match a particular picture first.
2. The Green Deck asks a single player to find 1-6 of a category of thing in 30 seconds.
3. The Dreaded Red Deck asks all players to bid on how many things in a category (Things that fly...) in 30 seconds.

It is pretty much the same game as Project X. The only change I can note is that the Red deck rules we used for the original allowed you to hear the category before bidding, and require you to lose a card if you fail. The Pictureka rules encourage you to bid arbitrarily high numbers with no penalty. I suspect that these are in fact the Project X rules and that Dale did some well-needed tampering when he taught Sandi and I.

Nifty game. At least a couple of more copies are going to be purchased from the people we had playing.

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I also got in a game of the new Talisman. This is second edition Talisman with a couple of rules changes, revised art, and nifty plastic bits.

Well, mostly nifty plastic bits. The classic plastic cones have been replaced with tiny bits of plastic with unreadable numbers.

The surprising thing is that my 3 person game ran a bit under 2 hours. Talisman has a reputation as a game that takes many, many hours (and we saw a game at MGE that must have run for 4-5 hours.) But if you play it with 3 or 4 players who actually play quickly, the game kind of moves along.

It is still Talisman. The characters and cards are wildly unbalanced, luck is rampant, and stuff just kind of happens. There is actual strategy, and I occasionally found myself pondering whether it was worth fighting X to get a chance to get Y, and trying to scramble for a Talisman to make a victory run.

However, I rather enjoyed my game. And I would personally rather play a longer fluffy game like this than a string of soulless fluffy card games.

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Of course my lack of boardgaming hasn't kept me away from the Xbox 360. Valve's marvelous Orange Box showed up a couple of weeks back.

Half-Life 2 is still the best first-person shooter ever made. The level design is just sublime, and gameplay changes dramatically several times during each hour of play. I love it, and I finally will get to play the add-on Episodes 1 and 2 packs. I've heard they are even better, if short.

The truly amazing part of this boxed set is a tiny 3 hour highly experimental game called Portal. If you can spare the time, and do not suffer from extreme motion sickness, play this game.

The concept is so simple. You can jump (very tiny distances), pick up and put down things, and create two teleportals that are connected. That's the entire game.

...Except that they put some kind of magic dust on the disk.

The game is only 3 hours long, and in reality the first half of the game is an extended tutorial. For such a simple concept, the physics and uses for the portals are quite complex. Pop a hole under something connected to a wall high up, and the item falls "out" of the wall. Jump into a portal from a height, and your speed is immediately translated to flying horizontally at a high rate of speed. You can also open a portal as you are flying toward the floor, which makes for a couple of dizzying jumping puzzles.

The rest of the magic dust is the premise. You are basically a test subject wandering through a very clean set of test chambers. Normally this is tedious and pretty banal stuff.

...Except that this one is funny.

Really funny. Gun Turrets that apologize as they shoot you. An omnipresent, calm computer voice that explains how dangerous these tests are, and most importantly, that you will receive cake at the end of the testing.

There is also the introduction of the Weighted Companion Cube--a large (hopefully) non-speaking cube with heart icons on its sides. It....it's just to painful to talk about. that part of the game. But people have already made cakes and plush versions of this curiously compelling object.

And the entire thing ends with a song. It is sung by the computer, with a melody that lodges in your head, and lyrics that make you giggle until you can't breathe. Said lyrics are from the twisted mind of Jonathon Coulter, a fact which may lure Brian S. over to my house armed with a bottle of Dramamine.

I adore Portal. I want more games from the team that put together this amazing bit of work. And...

I want that freaking song out of my head. And Cake. I want cake.





© 2007 Frank Branham

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Comments:

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Frank, yes—I did subject you to my house rules for Project X at Oasis of Fun… If there is no penalty for missing a bid, the game breaks down! I am a bit disappointed in Pictureka that it somehow takes my coolness down at least one notch!  Well, I still have the put-your-dead-pets-back-together-cardgame that will prop it up for a bit!  (Tobynstein) I’m curious though—did the Pictureka rules credit anyone?  It certainly sounds like Arne Lauwers’ game, and I’d be quite impressed if he was able to turn Project X into something picked up by a mainstream company Dale Posted by Dale Yu on Oct 25, 2007 at 06:55 AM | #

I bought portal online (not the whole orange box) after seeing yahtzee’s review of orange box a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately so far I’ve only been able to see up to the first before it is crashing on my laptop. : ( Posted by Lee Fisher on Oct 25, 2007 at 07:49 AM | #

Yes, Portal is made of awesome; it is far and away the best ratio of fun to gameplay length I’ve ever experienced on a computer. The game itself is fun and cleverly designed, but it’s the dialogue and voice acting that really push it over the top. And the credits song, of course. (BTW, Frank, it’s Jonathan CoultON, and he’ll be playing a show in Atlanta in two weeks. Yes, I’m going.) “Did you know that you can donate one or more of your vital organs to the Aperture Science Self-Esteem Fund for Girls? It’s true!” Posted by Brian Schoner on Oct 25, 2007 at 08:16 AM | #

Arne is credited. It uses the same artwork, and probably has the same rules as Project X. Posted by Frank Branham on Oct 25, 2007 at 08:22 AM | #

I’ve not tried Portal the console game yet, but have enjoyed a number of hours playing the two-dimensional version (think LodeRunner with portals) floating around the internet for a few years now… (I think there’s a flash version you can play online.) I could imagine that done as a first person shooter it could be quite “interesting”. Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Oct 25, 2007 at 09:13 AM | #

I would be happy if they simply rereleased portal as a two player game.  (Each person gets a wooden chair leg...) Posted by Marshall Miller on Oct 25, 2007 at 09:33 AM | #

The cake is a lie… Posted by Karl Deckard on Oct 25, 2007 at 11:24 AM | #

The 2D game you refer to is called Narbacular Drop and it was created by a small team of students at Digipen University.  Valve hired that same team to create Portal, using the Source Engine; a nice success story. Posted by Karl Deckard on Oct 25, 2007 at 11:28 AM | #

Actually, Narbacular Drop is 3D, though fairly crude compared to Portal. I think Matt may mean this one: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/404612 Posted by Brian Schoner on Oct 25, 2007 at 11:33 AM | #

Ah, yes.  And I am probably mistaken about how old it is, too… not sure if it pre or post-dates the 3D game (in terms of concept, not distribution.) Still waiting for an excellent “swing” game.  My friend made one based around mechanics similar to the rope weapon in the Worms franchise, but couldn’t find a developer to produce/distribute it. Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Oct 27, 2007 at 01:28 PM | #

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