I Suck at Video Games

I’ve never been very good at Jenga. My hands are too big, and they shake a lot. I reach for a piece, and it just topples over. I am pretty good at Boom Blox, though.

Boom Blox is a new video game from Electronic Arts and Stephen Spielberg. It’s basically a collection of smaller games where you knock things over, blow things up, and move things around; all while using the Wiimote as your tool. Sometimes you throw a bomb at a bunch of blocks trying to knock gems off of a tower. Sometimes you throw a bowling ball at a bridge, hoping to knock some parts off but not others, and in the game that is the most addictive, you play Jenga. Just don’t call it that, please.

The multiplayer games on this disc are just awesome. In the Jenga variation, you have towers of sticks, and you use the Wiimote to grab certain of these sticks and then pull them out of the tower, hoping not to topple it over. If you topple it over, you’ll likely lose. There is this amazing tension when you pull them out, and the not-quite-realistic-but-maybe-it-is-I’m-not-a-physicist-so-I-can’t-be-sure gravity starts moving the tower ever so slightly, and you tense up and hope it doesn’t all fall over. When playing with friends, the trash talking opportunities are countless.

There’s also a game where there are towers full of blocks, and some of the blocks are worth points, and others will make you lose points. You take turns throwing a ball at the towers, and trying to knock the point blocks to the ground while keeping the penalty blocks on the tower. This game can get overly lopsided scores in a hurry, so sometimes you’ll want to spend your turn throwing your ball at the annoying block animals that mock you when you do poorly. When you hit them, they flop around and then disappear in very entertaining ways.

Another game is a bit of shuffleboard variant. Each player has blocks of their color, and they are trying to move them along the ice into scoring areas. You throw a ball at your blocks to move them, and you can also try hitting your block into your opponents’ blocks to knock them off the playing field. This game has amazing screw-your-neighbor opportunities, and could start fights in the wrong group.

There’s also some shooting games, and some blowing-stuff-up-real-good games, and some games I probably haven’t unlocked yet. All in all, Boom Blox is wicked fun as a multiplayer game. My flatmate and her boyfriend played for 4 hours on consecutive days. They would never admit this, but the Wii is kind enough to email me how often my games are played. (If Wii ever adds an “adult channel,” hopefully this channel won’t report its use.)

The single player game is a bit challenging, but bores me to tears. It’s more of a puzzle affair. Once you figure out where to hit the tower or how to pull the sticks, the actual doing of them isn’t too hard. And if I screw it up, which I’m always likely to do, it’s pretty forgiving of errors. It’s a pretty good game to play for someone who sucks at video games, and I’m thankful for that. It was probably made for kids; who knows? I never pay attention to stuff like that. A fun game is a fun game.

Go ahead and get Boom Blox for your Wii if you ever have friends come over who are tired of Wii Sports. It’s the next best competitive multiplayer experience going. (Will anything ever be better for parties than Wii Sports Bowling?)

The Nintendo DS has caught on with the masses, mainly because of the wide variety of so-called casual games. Some of these are downright offensive (Horsez, Petz, Pet Horsez), but most of them are in the puzzle category. The DS puzzle games are what I do on my BART commute every day, so I have lots of experience with them. I don’t even suck at them. So let’s take a look at some highlights and lowlights from the DS puzzle games I’ve played.

Brain Age (and Brain Age 2): It was 5 minutes of drunken Brain Age at Butter in San Francisco that convinced me to buy a DS. I was excited because after years of sucking at video games, here was a game I could be good at! Doing simple math problems as fast as possible! Brilliant! I played Brain Age for a long time until I got bored of the games. Some of them frustrated me (memorizing lists of words) and some just got too easy (3 people leave the house, 2 people go in the house, 5 people up the chimney, etc.). So when Brain Age 2 came out, I thought “here’s the game I love, but with new variety!” Well, I played it for about a week, and it has been left unplayed ever since. I can’t bring myself to sell it because I know I am supposed to like it, but I just don’t care for it anymore.

Puzzle Quest: This one had me seeing circles for weeks! This is an RPG, but instead of fighting with swords, you fight with Bejeweled. Brilliant! The story is so bad, I was just begging for opportunities to skip past it, but the actual battles were puzzlerific! And the system to get new spells and character upgrades was fantastic. I beat this game, collected all the spells, captured all the monsters, and realized I would never play it again. So to eBay it went. But before then, I had a great time with it.

Word Jong: Word Jong is kinda bad. It’s stacks of letters on tiles that you pull off piles to make words for points. The puzzle itself is entertaining enough if you like anagramming, but the actual game itself is really poorly done. The example that kills me is that there is a game mode where you battle against computer opponents. And the computer opponents will make words, backspace, make words, backspace, make words … oh you get the idea. When I am playing against a computer opponent, I want the thinking to happen off screen! It adds no value to the game. I got bored of this pretty quickly, and you probably will, too. Playing against a human opponent is probably fun if you are in the same room. Otherwise, I can’t recommend it.

Picross DS: Picross may have been played more than any other game in my gaming history. It’s phenomenal. It’s a Japanese picture/logic puzzler. There are numbers on the rows and columns that represent the number of dots filled in on a grid. And that’s it. You figure out which dots are filled in, which are empty, and you see a picture! The DS version allows you to download a bunch of additional puzzles, including all of the puzzles from the original Game Boy version of this game, which was called Mario’s Picross. Lots of Mario-themed puzzles in there, which is loads of fun. If you like addictive logic puzzles, this is the game to buy right away!

Clubhouse Games: This is the one I have in my DS right now. It’s out of print, and going for big bucks on eBay, and I can totally see why. It’s a very generous collection of classic games, from Dominos to Spit to Reversi to Bowling … it’s got lots in here. There are multiple game modes to play including a pretty difficult challenge mode. There are some games in here I’ve never heard of, some I’ve heard of but don’t know how to play just yet, and some I am too good at (I pitched a shutout in reversi against the AI). This is a great game collection, and my guess is that a sequel must be coming, otherwise there is no way that this should be unavailable. An absolute must for casual DSers.