Saturday Morning Gaming: Like Where’s Waldo, But For A Computer
We talked about Where’s Waldo before.
my idea of a perfect crime? I’ll show you pic.twitter.com/jmWSPQbpXT
— blakemessick(@blakemessick) February 11, 2020
Now imagine a Where’s Waldo that has little flaps. So maybe just scanning the page isn’t enough. You have to lift flaps as well. And this allows little stories to be told in addition to what you see on the page. See a little monkey looking under a leaf? Lift the leaf and show the monkey finding a banana! Have the inside of the flap fold out in a special way to show the expression of the monkey change from curiosity to delight! Have another flap next to that one that shows a monkey finding a spider! And have another flap show you, oh, THERE he is! Waldo, you scamp!
Well, if the flap books from my childhood are any indicator, that book would last maybe three readings before something catastrophic happened to one of the flaps.
So imagine if you weren’t limited to paper. You could make a hidden image game for the computer. That would not only allow you to do the flap thing, but come up with entire animations.
And that brings us to “Hidden Folks“. The idea of Where’s Waldo except interactive this time. They give you a handful of little things to find… a guitar, a dancing guy, a lady reclining…
And then to find them, you have to do stuff like click on the weeds that might be obscuring what you’re looking for or opening a tent flap.
The difficulty ramps up. You go from easy stuff, like the above, to crazy crowded pictures pretty quickly:
But on top of everything that you’re doing, the sound effects are delightful. They’re all made by people. So when you click on, say, a monkey, you hear a guy making monkey noises. When you click on a waterfall, you hear a lady make waterfall noises. And when you find one of the hidden pictures you’re supposed to find, you hear someone give a cheerful “BLING!” It’s goofy and silly and I turned them off after about 10 minutes. But 8 of those 10 minutes were pretty fun.
If you’re looking for a little zen game to play while you’re doing things in another window, beware. You’ll soon have only one or two things left to find and you’ll be clicking EVERYTHING trying to find the hidden flap that will release the animation that will FINALLY show you the picture you’re looking for.
But, until that point, it’s a fun little zen game.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is “Skinny Milk in the Cupboard” by avlxyz. Used under creative commons license.)
FTL. Again. It’s evergreen, it is. I haven’t unlocked about 40% of the achievements yet so I’m working on those (win with the Rock Cruiser A-layout, etc). The lesson I’m trying to incorporate is that, if you know early on that a run isn’t going to work out, abandon it and start over. Example: The Rock Cruiser A-layout has two missile launchers as it’s starting loadout. Your goal is to save up scrap and buy a laser cannon that doesn’t depend on ammo. I recently abandoned a run where all the stores in the first and second zones all wanted to sell me beam weapons or non-combat augments or crew and not offer me something useful like a crew teleporter to go along with all that crew (FUN) or a drone control and some combat drones. I realized I was going to run out of missiles long before I found what I needed so I punched.Report
The thing that annoys me about FTL is that if you want to win there’s kind of only one loadout to take to the final round — lots of lasers, a defense drone, and a teleporter with a tooled-up boarding crew. These are all hard counters to the enemy flagship’s abilities and they make the fight pretty much a by-the-numbers affair; but without them, the flagship will smash you flat.
I kind of wish they’d added in some optional way to soften up the flagship before you fight it; maybe if you went on quests or missions in the final sector then you can “free up friendly ships” that go attack the flagship for you, and then when you fight it there’s already some damage done. Random damage would be in keeping with the roguelike nature of the game; but you could even have it be optional, like “as the last Rebel ship explodes, you receive a hailing signal from an Alliance cruiser. Thanks for helping out! We’ll go on to hit the flagship while you resupply. What should we target? 1. Weapons 2. Shields 3. Engines 4. Systems” (and then it starts with damage to weapons / shields / engines and helm / drones or teleporters or oxygen)Report
My problem with FTL is that the game was at its most fun before you beat it the first time.
And after you beat it for the first time, it was less fun. The mechanic where losing taught you, the player, something new had mostly evaporated by that point and so the fun games involved meeting the weird requirements to unlock new ships instead of making it to the final boss.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got… this can’t be right… more than 100 hours in the game? (I must have left it on overnight a couple of times!) so I’m not saying it’s not an awesome game or something like that.
But its awesomeness is front-loaded.Report
I’ve got 269 hours in it. DD is right about the “one loadout to win.” That’s exactly the loadout I shoot for (ha!) in nearly every game (because boarding parties are fun). I’m working on beating the game with every A-type to unlock the hidden ship.Report
If you’re finding yourself in a place where you are looking to kill an evening with something FTL-ish but not FTL? Pick up Shortest Trip to Earth. It’s like they said “what if we did FTL with different mechanics?”
And they fix some of the things wrong with FTL and they take some of the good things about FTL and screw them up and they make trade a major (as opposed to incidental) mechanic.
I wouldn’t recommend it for FTL hardcore fans.
But I would recommend it to people who find themselves on the wrong end of a Friday night with nothing to do if they remember FTL fondly but don’t want to re-open FTL.Report
I’ve had that game on my wish list for a while, and every time the sale price hits the magic number I reconsider because yeah, it hits most of the right FTL buttons, but it also looks waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more complex than I want when I’m dialing up a game like FTL.Report