Bunker Project Log

The Abstract Apocalypse game night started with Pottse and I playing “Ricochet Robots”. Mrs. G was putting Prince Thud to bed. The three-year old DemonPop was tearing ass all over the place, and father-in-law wasn’t yet back from his galavanting. It was a perfect time to learn rules whilst everything settled around us.

Ricochet Robots is a game that can be played by as many people as can see the board. There are no “turns”. There is only a problem that must be solved. This problem is to get a single robot from its current position, to a specified position on the playing surface.

The surface itself is comprised of four double-sided 8″ x 8″ boards. Each is a grid, with walls here and there, and occasionally colored symbols. The four boards are joined together in one of the corners with a plastic piece having four protrusions. This makes about 384 possible layouts, if I remember my remedial math.

A board section

Once the boards are laid out, four square colored chits are placed randomly on the grid. Then the corresponding-colored robots are placed on those. These markers are necessary to keep the original position of the robots.

All laid out

Finally, there is a pool of chits that represents each one of the colored symbols on the grid. These are placed face down on the table. Each problem is created by revealing one of these symbols, and placing it in the board’s central area. The color of the symbol defines which robot needs to be moved. The color and the symbol define the destination on the board. As soon as the problem is presented, all players try to figure out the shortest number of moves the robots need to make to get the target robot on the destination square.

The destination chit:

The destination square:

The trick is, a robot can only move straight, and has no brakes. They can only stop when they hit a wall or another robot. Any robot can be moved in any sequence, but each one of these moves counts toward the total.

To the observer, Ricochet Robots is a bonecrushingly boring game. I know this because Mrs. G (who, admittedly, has the patience of a Piranha) said “boring!” the second she saw it in “action”. The reason is, once the problem is revealed, the players just stare at the board. There is no movement, no talking, no anything until the first player announces their opening bid. For example, “I can solve this in 12 moves.” Once that happens, the hourglass is flipped, and then even more brain-burning, cog-churning, (and totally silent) cerebritude ensues.

What is unseen is the amazing internal drama: “Is there a faster way?” “Can he see where I’m looking on the board?” “Oh crap, time’s almost out!” “Oh man! I’ve almost got it!” “I’m a genius!” and “Uh-oh… what were my moves again?” For an oldie moldie like me, remembering anything 10 steps out is pretty tough. Pottse was coming up with solutions 22 steps long that involved moving all four robots in different orders. After a day at work and then dealing with rodents, I just let those go.

So, if your brain hasn’t melted down, and you can come up with a more efficient way, you call out your bid. Then you have to wait for the time to run out, which is hard because until it does, you have to remember that sequence of moves you committed to. Once it does run out, whoever had the lowest bid describes the steps taken to solve the problem. If you were right, you get the chit. If you were wrong, you get the derision of your peers, and the next best bid is attempted.

The game went well, once Mrs. G decided to listen to the rules and stop being bored. As usual, she decided it was her “favoritest game evar” once her initial knee-jerk reaction wore off. Eventually, father-in-law, who shall be heretofore known as “The Wall” joined in, but didn’t fare so well. Pottse, the wonderbrat, coasted out with at least six trophy chits, setting the tone for the rest of Abstract Apocalypse. I just enjoyed the experience, with middle of the road performance.

The most important lesson was, “YES, YOU CAN MOVE ALL THE ROBOTS.” I say this is in all caps, because it is really frustrating to explain the rules, and particularly this salient point… twice… and still have the mouth-breathers go “OH! I DIDN’T KNOW YOU COULD MOVE ALL THE ROBOTS.”

But, this is what I expect from my wife’s side of the family, so it’s all good.

Mrs. G’s entire family, and their family’s families are here from across the pond. This is a lot of people. A lot of… ahem… older people.

So… of course I wanted to have a Bunker Party for them. I really want to test out the Wii on a group of unsuspecting Sexa and Septuagenarians.

Things were going pretty well. Everything was clean, powered up and ready to go. Then the second the first group arrived, the sky broke open. We?were in the middle of some sort of freak, instantaneous, in-land hurricane thingy. The house shook, the roof plinked and popped with the sound of hail, and to my horror, the lights browned for a minute, and finally went out entirely.

No more Wii and no “cinema” as my guests say. And since it’s dark, I can’t even rope anyone in to a game of Carcassonne.?Everybody loves Carcassonne!

The power came back at 1am, which explains why I still haven’t got my session reviews up, and also explains why I was in bed at midnight for the first time since I was 8.

I think the Bunker needs a generator. I’ll keep you posted.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bD4_nSK2Mc]

I’ve been really slacking on this, and pretty much every other project in the log, so I figured I better do something.

I pulled the guitar open again to fix the mistakes I mentioned in the last installment, and Pottse helped take some footage of the guitar in action. You’ll notice a few things:

1) The pedal is really loud.
2) I’m not very good at playing with it.
3) I use the Star Power switch at the head of the guitar by pressing it against my cheek at 0:54 and 1:23.
4) I still haven’t figured out the whammy, but I’ve got a bunch of ideas.

I’ll let you make your own caption for this one:

This weekend, I was cruising around boardgamegeek, and found a bargain thread that I couldn’t pass up. I bought a lot of games, but don’t tell Mrs. G how many, she hasn’t figured it out yet.

For some reason, I keep buying the resource management/settling/development/trading games because they are highly rated on the geek, but we never end up playing them. I guess it’s good for my games list/sex appeal, but I’d play Can’t Stop, Blokus, or Quoridor, before Puerto Rico, any day.

But, that could be because we have never been able to make it past 2 turns of Puerto Rico. Mrs. G’s favorite thing to say is “BORED!” and you better be quick with the rules, or have none at all if she is going to play.

Anyway, tonight we sat down with four of the games that I received from the BoardGamesUSA sale. Here is a brief, and too-vague synopsis. Expect a flurry of long posts with the minutiae later.

Ricochet Robots: A group puzzle game where you try to get robot X from point A to point B in a more efficient way than player Y,Z, and C, and D, and E, and F.

Turbo Taxi: Another group puzzle game similar to Ricochet Robots. In this, all players are given identical sets of tiles, and a starting tile and paths that must be completed around this central tile. The first person to complete their city wins the starting tile. Once all 12 starting tiles are gone, the game is over. The player with the most tiles wins.

Zertz: A game with similarities to Checkers and maybe Go. Players may take one of two possible actions: place a marble, and remove a piece of the playing surface -or- if you can… you must jump a marble with another marble, like Checkers. You win by collecting either 2 of each colored marble, or a certain number of a single color.

Yinsh: A game where rather than subtracting pieces from the board, you add them. There is also a jumping mechanic, but when you do so, you flip the pieces you jump to the opposing color. You win by removing three rings from the game, and you remove a ring from the game by creating a line of five pieces of your color.

Here are the dark and blurry pics of the festivities:

It’s early Summer, and I’m just chillin’ with Mrs. G, and she says “isn’t it weird that we’ll be married seven years tomorrow?”

And, because I’m a total blockhead, I say “our anniversary isn’t until Saturday!”

Remember that thing about a land war in Asia? That is like arguing with your wife about when your anniversary is, when her birthday is, where your first date was, when your kids were born, when your kids were conceived, where your kids were conceived, etc. Don’t do it.

Anyway, as the “talk” went on, the icy cold grip of fear began gently massaging my heart. It was tomorrow, and I had forgotten. And… we had just had kid #2, which made it all the more important in her hormone saturated brain. I had to come up with a plan fast.

So, I did what any self-respecting gamer would do. I logged on to boardgamegeek?to find out where to buy the Travel Edition of Settlers of Catan.

My thinking was this… it was our seventh anniversary. The ridiculous gift for seventh anniversary is copper and wool. Wool comes from sheep, and sheep are in Settlers of Catan! It was obvious! She would love a romantic dinner at one of the many new fru fru restaurants in town, we would play Settlers at the table, then I would take her to “Knocked Up”, and then go swing dancing. Best. Husband. Ever!

So, after calling every game store in the metro area and coming up empty, one of the lovely people on boardgamegeek gave me a lead that resulted in a pristine sealed copy. I punched out the bits and read the instructions while driving back to work.

From there, it was magic. She loved the idea! We drove to the snotty restaurant. She loved that too! We ate, then busted out the game during dessert.

So Ro Mantic!

Unfortunately, Settlers ain’t really a 2-player deal, even with variant rules, so we had about three turns before giving up. From there we went to? “Knocked Up”, which was incredible! Those of you with kids… watch it (but not with them!) Then we snuck into the Swing thing 10 minutes before closing time. We acted cool like we were?experts from the next town over?checking out the scene, but we were scared to death. Damn young spry kids, and us all crotchety and old. Youth is wasted on the young.

Anyway, that’s the entirety of my experience with Settlers. With that out of the way, here’s my impressions of Cities and Knights of Catan.

First, I have to describe the Bunker experience. There are about 200 board games, and 200 video games, and about 20 people to play them. Most of them have never been played by me, because the party is my only time to play. This makes it a little hard to commit to a game that lasts over 10 minutes long. No matter how good they are, I want to keep moving on to something else.

So when?six of us started crowding around the table, I got a little nervous. Then, when the tiles were laid out,?with what looked like 3 times as?many hexes as a usual Settlers game, I got really nervous.

A big game

Then, when all these cards, and upgradable buildings, and barbarian tracks and such start coming in to play, I felt like a rat in a cage.

It didn’t help that I had made a painfully witless road placement at the beginning. It also doesn’t help that I am cursed with the most amazingly bad luck (just ask anyone who has played a dice-rolling game with me.) I was a casual onlooker to my own destruction. I could get no brick. When I got brick, it was stolen from me by clever playing of those damned cards I mentioned. When I got one of those same cards, and demanded brick, no one had it to give. Then they started playing cards that let them steal my cards… right when I’d figured out how to use them!

I eventually whined myself out of the full game “I wanna play Dystopia…”, “13 Victory Points?!”, “Will this game _ever_ end?!” And so forth. Yes, poor form, I admit. (But Dystopia was sweet!)

We decided on nine victory points as the winning condition, and Necrontyr immediately scored four more to take it. Surprisingly, I was first loser with seven. Odd how that happened.

Anyway, even with all that whining… I am dying to play it again, just not in the chaos of the Bunker Party setting. It would make a great?game night game?of cutthroat devilry.

One of my favorite games in the whole wide world is Unreal 2 eXpanded Multiplayer, or XMP for short. It’s a class-based game of capture the flag/football that totally encourages teamplay and strategy, and allows old fogeys like me to compete with overamped, reflex-having, newly graduated college-aged punks. When Mrs. G was pregnant with mouth to feed #1, I played this game a lot. When mouth to feed #1 was in her cute little car-seat contraption doo-dad, I played even more XMP, and paused to feed her every once in a while.

Just as an aside, one of the Bunker hardly-regulars, Dangerkitty, was told that he was pregnant whilst playing XMP. He disappeared for a while, then came back. I found out the news the next day. Believe it or not, he understood the gravity of the situation enough to not blast it over team chat.

Anyway, this isn’t about XMP, it’s about Dystopia, a source mod I have been hyping, and hoping that the Bunker knuckle-draggers would take part in.

The Setup

Dystopia is an objective-based first-person shooter. Two teams, the Punks and the Corps, alternately attack or defend objectives. These may include computers, power lines, access panels, and most importantly, cyberspace terminals.

And this is where the game gets really interesting. Those of us who have played objective based games are familiar with the “hack” objective, where you run up to the computer and hit the action button, and you’ve “OMG, h4x0r3d the 5y5t3m!” I’ve always been a bit disappointed by this, and even my beloved XMP seems overly simplistic.

But Dystopia really goes the extra mile, and gets positively Bill Gibson?with the whole hacking thing. First, you must have a cyberdeck in your posession, which is selected during your initial loadout. Then you must find a terminal, and hit the action button. But wait, there’s more!

Cyberspace

The player is immediately transported into cyberspace, which is a trippy, Tron-like, wall and ceiling walking computer construct. In here are panels which allow you to open and close doors, take over turrets, or shut down certain defenses. The hacker’s job is to open the doors and shut down the defenses that allow the rest of the team to move forward in “real life”. Sometimes this is as easy as hitting a button, in other situations, different levels of digital countermeasures must be removed.

To the outside observer, the hacker becomes totally inert and defenseless. This forces his or her teammates defend them while they are trying to find the right panel, or even dodging the opposing team’s hacker. That’s right, the heacker is often not alone in there! Combat in cyberspace rarely ends up in “real death” but the player will get bounced out, and must wait for their energy to build back up before jumping back in, causing the team to lose valuable time and initiative.

How it played

The interface is clean and straight-forward. I was the only one who had played before, but everyone understood the loadout screen right away. The server was set to enforce balanced teams, so all 8 of us were allocated fairly. By the end of the first 15 minute round, we were grasping the basics.

Then, Seraphim and?Necrontyr sparked the evolutionary gap, and discovered the stealth suit, and the ninja sword, and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, there were these scary-ass predator-esque cloaking mofos slicing up my team left and right. It was damn cool.

About the same time, Jester was discovering the joys of hacking, and he spent pretty much full time opening things up for us to move on. I was suddenly out of a job, so I became the heavy, and tore the younguns to shreds with the mini-gun loadout. It felt real good.

With that said, we still had trouble finding the objectives. Over the course of the night, no team ever completed an entire mission. The game is very unforgiving on this front, not giving either side the win.

Also, the game induced vertigo in almost all of us. We had to take a break halfway through the party to keep everyone from puking. By the end of the night we couldn’t bear to be in front of a screen at all. (That’s why the lan is cleared out in the picture at the top.)

So, was it good? For me, definitely yes! I think four or five Bunkerites are true believers, the rest probably could do without. We will probably revisit the game after having passed out some Wiki links. Like this one. C’mon guys, study up!

Dateline: Game Developers Conference, March 9, 2005 – Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA. I’m sitting in the Grand Ballroom, waiting for the Microsoft keynote, titled “The HD Era”. J. Allard looked tragically hip, with his suited hoodie and preaching the MS game gospel. I, being a corporate droid, fell hook line and sinker for the endless possibilities of micro-payments and downloadable content and the this and the that and the other.

Then, J shows us Forza Motorsport. For the unwashed, this was the moment when Microsoft gave away 1000 HD TVs to anyone wearing the badge colored the same as the winning car. I had blue, Mrs. G had yellow. Or was it the other way around?

In any case, one of the two was the winning color, and I was sent to wait in line and sign the forms. Effectively, it became mine.

That’s why there is a TV in the bathroom, and sponsored by Microsoft, no less!

Anyway, as I said, my good buddy J had me at “micro-payments.” To me, MS really had it right with the new Live and the 360 was going to be the shizzle. I had to have that machine!

So I showed my commitment by making sure not to pre-order the 360. Genius. This led to many a night of considering standing in line, but not. I mean, the age of the 360 was the video game event of the epoch, but it was cold outside!

I finally managed to get one on Christmas Eve. That is a long and complicated story, and I don’t tell those, so I’ll skip it. The long and short of it is, I got a 360, and I got it after all the bugs had been fixed! My 360 is 604 days old.

And just 2 days ago, my drive started stuttering while reading discs and sometimes not starting at all.

Microsoft Xbox 360 3-Year Warranty, FTW!

The Cobalt Flux pads in their Bunker habitat:

Back in the day, I got Mrs. G a copy of Dance Dance Revolution for the Playstation, and she was hooked. This was a game should could beat my ass on consistently. In fact, I couldn’t even make it through a single song.

This of course, made her happy. So I, being “best husband evar” went out and bought her as much DDR crap as I could find. At the time, this included Konamix, and Disney Mix. Once she got tired of that, I stepped it up a notch and hit all the import shops in town. I bought 3, 4th, and 5th mixes, all at a hefty markup, and invested in a hard pad.

Now, the thing about DDR is, the pad is the game. The stupid vinyl plastic thingies that come bundled slide all over the floor, or just plain break after a month of play. The hard pad is supposed to fix this. This one didn’t. Sure, it stayed put, but sounded like a friggin 50 caliber machine gun when you played on it. To add insult to injury, half of the button presses didn’t register.

So I, being “best husband evar”, did some research, and found some MyMyBox metal pads which were even more expensive, and set them up. They worked awesomely, and were pretty quiet… for about 2 days. When I ripped one of the squares apart to see what the deal was, I found that the contacts were made up of aluminum tape on the plexiglass square itself, contacting a large printed circuit on the base. With each step, the aluminum tape was being ground up, and deposited all over the circuit, causing the switch to always be closed.

Now, it was an obsession. I, being “best husband evar” made it my goal to get my wife the best DDR pads known to man, no matter how much they cost! (Within reason.) This was the time that I found Cobalt Flux.

At the time, Cobalt Flux was not a household name. All I had to work from was a few posts on DDRFreak that said that they were the best pads known to man, short of an actual arcade set. Plus, they were expensive, really expensive… like, high school car expensive. So you can imagine my hesitation.

However, being “best husband evar” I took a gamble and ordered them. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. Then I sent an email and asked them how long it would be, and explained that I was having a big party and wanted to have them there and this and that and the other. They responded within a day, and said they were on the way.

And they were, and they were awesome, and she loved them, and I loved them.

So I went downstairs one Saturday morning, and finally made it through my first song. Then the next, and the next. I finally stopped three hours later, dripping with sweat, but loving the DDR master of beginner mode that I had become.

Fast forward to five weeks ago, when I was setting up my beloved Cobalt Fluxi for a party. Suddenly, one of them was completely unresponsive. Oh noes! My Flux had finally failed me. I did a little investigation and found that the pad itself was just fine, but the control box, the intermediary between the pad and my PS2/Xbox/PC was shot. I was relieved, but a little irritated, knowing that it was still an expensive proposition.

So I promptly forgot about it. Even though I had these awesome pads, DDR always got the gas face from the troglodytes that frequent Bunker Parties, so I figured it didn’t matter anyway.

So what happens? The next (and hugest ever) party happens. And someone wants to play… you guessed it… DDR. How do I explain that it “broke the week before”, and I, crappiest host ever, ?just ignored it as if DDR wasn’t the most important cultural phenomena of the Naughts?

After that humiliation, my first order of business was to order that cursed control box, and by hook or by crook I was going to have it at the next Bunker Party.

That was three weeks ago.

This was an email exchange on the?morning of?yesterday’s?party

Me:

Hi guys,

I ordered a control box over 3 weeks ago, and it is still in “being built” status. Is this normal?

Thanks!

Them:

At this time, that is normal. We have been backed order on the controllers do to a shipment not making it to us on time. Your order will be going out shortly! If you have any further questions feel free to ask!

Thank you for your understanding!

In other words, no DDR at the Bunker Party. Again.

In the words of my buddy El Greco:

“They screwed me man.”

I have a massive woody for Singstar. It has done what the majority of all other rhythm games have not… real songs, by the real artists!

For as brilliant as Guitar Hero is, that final piece would make it better. For a game like “Get on Da Mic”, which has possibly the worst fake artists imaginable, it’s a death warrant. Those of you stuck on the Karaoke Revolution series owe it to yourself to try Singstar. Who needs animated bobble-headed avatars? Not you, and definitely not me! I wan’t to sing Sk8er Boi with Avril on the screen, in all her video goodness!

So, the UK has about nine versions, why aren’t they here? Ironically, it’s probably the reason I’m lauding it above. I’m betting securing those song rights are a few times more expensive in the good old U.S. of A than they are in the UK.

Or… we are all too busy spending money on GTA and Madden. Lame.

I’ve been pretty excited about Zombie Master. It’s a Source Mod that combines FPS and RTS elements, and requires teamplay. In it, one player assumes the role of the Zombie Master, while everyone else spawns in as a defenseless human.

The Zombie Master has the typical RTS perspective and controls, and can spend points to spawn in different varieties of zombies at particular places on the map. The Zombie Master’s job is to eliminate all of the human players via manipulation of the zombie horde.

The human team is charged with fulfilling mission objectives which change from map to map. In the one that we played, “Docks of the Dead”, our mission was to locate and retrieve several parts to a van. Once complete, it would be used to escape.

Not that we would ever find out what that looked like! Basically, the second each human spawned in, we all scattered like rats. We had no clue what we were doing, or where we were going, and the map is so dark that we spent a lot of our ammo on each other. Worse, when you die as a human, you were out for the entire round. Which meant that most of our time in the game was trying to convince the lone, hiding survivor to go find some way to kill themselves so we could start over.

Now, I’m not saying that Zombie Master is a bad game, in fact, I still think the idea is great and would love to play it again. However, I do think it will require a more experienced group playing it, or some gameplay revisions (and… maybe we need to adjust the gamma before we start!)

That said, I think JayJian (who played the Zombie Master exclusively) had a good time. 😉