Tower of Hanoi (1983)

Tower of Hanoi by D. Buckeye is, as the name suggests, a Tower of Hanoi game for the Commodore 64 and PET 64 computers, released in 1983.

This one is less featureful than even Glen Fisher’s version from five years prior: the number of discs is fixed at five, and the movements are not animated. The graphics are also less impressive–it’s harder to tell at a glance how many discs are on a stack, since they merge together onscreen.

This version is essentially inferior to the several Tower of Hanoi games which preceded and followed it. I do not recommend it.

Pharaoh’s Needles

Pharaoh’s Needles is a 1982 Tower of Hanoi game for the Commodore 64 by Ron Wagner & Wim (thanks to GB64 for this information).

Well, this incarnation of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle is a bit more appealing than Glen Fisher’s versions. Rather than just moving discs around, we’re going to engage in the Game of Kings! Very exciting. Of course, the rules are all the same, but you know, you’ve just got to give ’em the old razzle dazzle and what does it matter if your game’s nothing new?

Pharaoh’s Needles looks nice, and, like Hanoi, animates the moving of discs. Unlike, Hanoi, though, the animation in this game is quick. It’s much nicer, especially if you have the misfortune of choosing to play with nine discs, as the game allows. 511 moves, even quick ones, would wear on my patience long before the game was over. Still, I can’t fault the game for giving you the option.

This is the best Tower of Hanoi game, so far, and will hold that title for several years.

Towers of Hanoi (1980)

In 1980, according to GB64, Brookfield Software released an updated version of Glen Fisher’s Hanoi, including limited color.

This newer version is substantially similar to the first release, including the same animation and interface, and very limited color.

As before, there’s nothing in particular to recommend this version, so let this brief review stand as testament to the insignificant nature of the differences between the 1978 and 1980 versions of the game.

Hanoi (1978)

Hanoi by Glen Fisher, published in Cursor #05 (Nov. 1978), is a Tower of Hanoi game for the Commodore PET.

Hanoi, like most Tower of Hanoi games for Commodore computers, is a very simple and straightforward implementation. The rules should be familiar to most of us, but you may see Wikipedia for details. In this version, you select the number of discs in the puzzle, between two and seven, and then you are prompted from which pile to pick up a disc, and onto which pile to place it.

The discs move with a simple but smooth animation–nice enough, I suppose, at first, but it would get very tiresome indeed in the 127 moves it takes to solve a puzzle with seven discs. Upon completion of the puzzle, the game tells you how many moves you used, and how many were required, at minimum.

While I doubt anyone will be much interested in a simple Tower of Hanoi game in any case, I’ll still recommend against this particular version. It’s not bad, for what it is, but it’s got nothing in particular to recommend it, either.

Two updated versions of Hanoi were released, one in 1980, and another in 1984, which included color but were otherwise similar.

Crystal Defenders R1

Well, it’s been more than a year since I posted here–not because I’ve stopped writing, but because I’ve not yet managed to finish any posts to my satisfaction. I’ve been writing some fairly in-depth, multi-post reviews of several games, but since I didn’t want to publish any of the individual posts until they were all complete, in case revision was necessary. As a result, no posts for a year. Well, let’s change that.

I recently completed Crystal Defenders R1 for the Wii, a Final Fantasy-themed tower defense game by Square Enix, released 20 April 2009 in North America.

Crystal Defenders R1 is grid-based, and the enemies move along a fixed path, while your units are placed elsewhere on the screen. There are a variety of units available–soldiers, archers, black mages, and others–each with their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, soldiers are very strong, but have limited range and cannot attack air targets. Some enemies may be resistant or immune to physical or magical damage, so black mages or archers, respectively, may be needed to deal with them.

Each area in the game contains two stages, with the same map, but different waves of enemies. Each time a stage is played, though, the waves are the same, so it is possible to learn what enemies will come, then play a stage over, in order to use resources more efficiently, and maximize the score.

As is usual for a tower defense game, the units cost money to place, which money is earned by destroying enemies and surviving waves. Units can also be upgraded to do more damage or have greater range.

Early in the game, resources are quite tight, so it’s necessary to be as efficient as possible with unit placement and upgrades, in order to survive. Here, a criticism: it is more efficient to build a bunch of level 2 units, rather than upgrade the ones you have, so the winning strategy, early on, is to place a dozen or more level 2 soldiers and archers, and just let them take care of everything while the money rolls in. You can always upgrade a few or just place more with all the money you save by not upgrading units.

Worse, though, is that late in the game, the rogue becomes available. These allow you to gain extra money from destroying enemies, if they’re in range. Once rogues show up, the new best strategy becomes to spend as little on units as you can manage, until you’ve upgraded your rogue completely, then just kill everything immediately by upgrading things with the thousands of spare gil you’ll have. Resources become a non-issue, and all you really have to worry about is whether you’re placing the units efficiently in terms of space–not a big worry.

Basically, Crystal Defenders R1 is a very standard, and fairly easy, tower defense game. Getting a perfect on every stage may require more than one try (particularly the final stage, unlocked by getting perfects on each previous stage), but shouldn’t prove very challenging for anyone familiar with tower defense games. It’s fun, and you may get a few hours of play out of it, but I’m not sure it’s really worth the 800 Wii Points, considering how many excellent free tower defense games there are.

I’ve included the Japanese trailer for the game below–there is a trailer in English, too, but it’s not nearly as cool, and anyway the words aren’t terribly important.

First Impressions: Super Scribblenauts

Super Scribblenauts is a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS, developed by 5th Cell Media and released on 2010-10-12.

The gameplay is fairly simple: write words in Maxwell’s notebook to create objects, and use those objects to solve the puzzles. Sometimes the puzzles are simply of the ‘think of a word that fits’ variety, and sometimes they require a little more effort. I should say here that I’m not very far through the game, yet, so I suspect the later puzzles will generally be more challenging and less ‘name a part of car’.

You enter each puzzle from the constellation map screen. Having selected a constellation, you’re presented with a list of puzzles contained in that constellation; later puzzles are unlocked by completing earlier ones.

The stars with crowns are intended to be replayed: if you solve the puzzle three times in a row, each time with a different solution, the crown turns from silver to gold, as you see above. This is a pretty great feature, because a lot of the fun is in thinking of outlandish ways to solve puzzles, and the developers clearly knew this. I only wish I could see a list of my previous solutions, but that’s unfortunately unavailable. Probably, it would have been too difficult to make it meaningful–not only the selection of objects but also their placement and what you do with Maxwell can be important.

The puzzles are often amusing, even when they’re not difficult: you can kill the dinosaurs in the above screenshot in any number of ways–I particularly enjoyed using a black hole.

A surprisingly large number of objects are implemented, so feel free to let your imagination go wild. Super Scribblenauts keeps track of how many distinct objects you’ve created, and how many distinct adjectives you’ve used, too, so you can measure just how creative you are, if you’re so inclined. Personally, I’m keeping a list of my solutions for each level, just to see how many ways I can solve them.

Not all of the puzzles are particularly inspired, and some seem a bit obtuse to me, but in general, the game seems to be great fun. I definitely plan on finishing this one.

The Wizard’s Castle

The Wizard’s Castle, published for DOS in 1981 by International PC Owners is an early dungeon crawl.

Avoiding the word ‘year’? Check. Awesome apostrophes? Check. Journey from which no adventurer has ever returned? Yep! Let’s make a journey to the cave of cliches! Good luck!

Cliched-and-basically-nonexistent plot aside, The Wizard’s Castle is actually a pretty solid game. You start by choosing some basic stats for your character (race, sex, strength/intelligence/dexterity, equipment), and off you go to explore the castle and hunt for the incredible *ORB OF ZOT*. You’re aided in your endeavour by a map of the dungeon which is meant to fill in as you explore or use items that reveal information about the dungeon, like flares or the lamp.

Unfortunately, in the version I played, the map is already filled in, which I guess is a bug; I’m told later ports give you a properly blank map to start with. One annoying thing about this game is that the map legend is on the help screen, so you have to keep switching between the map and legend until you learn the meaning of the map symbols. Similarly, the player’s stats are only shown upon moving into a room, so you have to move around to check them. There is plenty of room on the right for both of these, I think. Another, more minor problem is that you must press ‘M’ whenever you wish to show the map; since that is likely to be all the time, it means that the game consists of lots of EMSMEEM, manually checking the map every few moves. It would have benefited greatly from just automatically showing the map.

Map issues aside, how is the game? Well, let’s have a look at the map: the player is on the square marked by angle brackets above; to the west is a monster; to the east is a sinkhole, which drops the player down a level; to the south is a flare, which would ordinarily be very useful, as it lights up the area around the player, but is, in this version, useless due to the map being all filled in. Monsters can be fought, fled from, or bribed, though some (trolls, ogres, dragons) don’t seem to be damaged by the sword I had, so it may be impossible to (successfully) fight some of them. Sinkholes cause the player to fall down a level, and stairs can lead either up or down. Items, such as flares, gold, and treasure, will be picked up automatically, and can be used or (in the case of gold and treasure) traded with the vendors the player will encounter in the dungeon.

Successfully navigating the dungeon involves carefully planning your route, lest you find yourself very dead:

Not all fights should be avoided, though. With the lamp, it’s possible to tell precisely what monster is in an adjacent square, and the weaker ones can be fought for large sums of gold, which is very handy. However, it’s not only the fights that can be hazardous: magic pools can be drunk from, and may either help or harm the player, and books, too,  can be either very helpful or very dangerous–even the chests might explode or release toxic gas upon being opened. After picking up some treasures, the player can choose to leave the dungeon, or continue on, seeking the ultimate treasure in the form of the Orb of Zot.

Seeking the Orb of Zot is harder than it sounds. Scattered about are orbs the player can gaze into in order to gain information about what lies in the dungeon–these will occasionally tell the player that the Orb of Zot is in some particular location, but this isn’t as helpful as it seems–the orbs may claim that the Orb is in several different locations, and I have yet to find it by going to these locations. I suspect there is a trick to it, but I’ve not spent enough time to puzzle it out. For now, I’m satisfied with picking up the lesser treasures.

The dungeon is randomized each time you play, so if you care to, you can play as many times as you like without running out of new dungeons to explore.

The bottom line: The Wizard’s Castle is pretty fun. I’m sure it would have been much more challenging to collect the treasures if the map had functioned correctly in the version I played, so I suspect this game would be good for a few hours distraction here and there. There’s something satisfying about a nice dungeon crawl, and for all its simplicity and lack of polish, The Wizard’s Castle isn’t bad at all. It’s no Nethack, but it’s worth a look.

Lab 14

Lab 14 by SuperCasey4 is a platform puzzler, though a very nontraditional one.

Phage Wars 2

Phage Wars 2 by Armor Games is a fun little flash game, though not a terribly difficult one.

In Phage Wars 2, the player is a lab tech whose goal is to create the most powerful virus ever. This is accomplished by playing through the 32 stages (called ‘experiments’) and adding the gene proteins you discover to your virus in order to improve its strength, speed, defense, agility, and ability to reproduce.

Each of the 32 experiments contains a number of cells and enemy viruses. The player can choose to infect cells or attack cells which are already infected by an enemy virus in order to take them over. Once a cell is infected, the virus inside begins to reproduce, so the player can then attack other cells. The stage is won when no enemy viruses remain. A new gene protein is discovered after beating each stage for the first time.

Between experiments, the player has the opportunity to add the gene proteins to his virus. The proteins have varying effects, and can increase some statistics while decreasing others. Additionally, each protein takes up a certain amount of space in the virus’s genetic code, so the player must choose between them to create the strongest virus.

The controls are pretty simple: click and drag from a source cell to a destination cell to send your viruses to infect or attack. To send viruses from multiple cells to a single destination, just drag over all the desired source cells. The best strategy I found was to infect as many cells as possible as quickly as possible, and then to attack the enemy viruses once all the empty cells had been claimed. To support this, I improved the attack, defense, and reproductive ability of my virus, though I understand that improving speed and agility is also a valid strategy.

Here lies the problem with the game: it’s really much too easy. With a decent bonus to reproduction, the viruses will fill a cell quite quickly, and with a decent bonus to attack, it’s not hard to destroy any enemy virus given a mostly-full source cell. The game requires a little juggling to make sure you maintain control of your cells, but it’s not really hard to do, and by improving defense even that becomes very easy.

Phage Wars 2 has basically identical gameplay to its predecessor, with the exception of the ability to add proteins to improve your virus rather than simply choosing a virus at the beginning. The idea isn’t totally original to this series, either–the concept is basically just Risk, and the game’s particulars are rather reminiscent, to me, of the primordial soup subgame in The Time Warp of Dr. Brain.

The lack of difficulty and originality aren’t really so bad that they ruin the game; it still pretty fun. To be honest, I’m not sure I know any way to make the game more difficult without also making it frustrating or otherwise less fun. As for the originality–well, some ideas are reused because they work, and I’d say this is one of them. Give the game a shot if you’ve got the time to spare.

Gameplay: 7/10

The controls are nice, the mechanics are understandable, the concept is solid. It’s a little too easy, though, and the main skill required, I think, is clicking and dragging very quickly at the beginning.

Story: 2/5

The story’s just an excuse for the gameplay, so this only counts half. On the other hand, the story’s obviously just an excuse, so minus some points.

Graphics: 9/10

The graphics are polished and lovely. Minus a point since the foreground and background were sometimes hard to distinguish, and there was nothing that really impressed me.

Audio: 5/10

There’s nothing really wrong with the audio, but it didn’t stand out in any way. Some more interesting audio might have made my interest in the game last a bit longer.

Personal Slant: 6/10

I enjoyed the game, though I think the sequencing part was a little dull, and the lack of difficulty made it drag on a little by the end.

Total: 6.4/10

Phage Wars 2 is worth a play, though not a replay. In fact, I’d say that the moment you begin to become bored with it, you should abandon it–it’s just more of the same, and the ending isn’t worth plodding through the game if you’re not enjoying it. It only takes a few minutes to play through the first few levels, though, and those few minutes are worth it.

Alabaster

Alabaster by John Cater, Rob Dubbin, Eric Eve, Elizabeth Heller, Jayzee, Kazuki Mishima, Sarah Morayati, Mark Musante, Emily Short, Adam Thornton,  and Ziv Wities is an almost-entirely conversation-driven interactive fiction game based on the tale of Snow White.

According to the teaser on the game’s web site: “The Queen has told you to return with her heart in a box. Snow White has made you promise to make other arrangements. Now that you’re alone in the forest, it’s hard to know which of the two women to trust. The Queen is certainly a witch — but her stepdaughter may be something even more horrible…”