Are Casual Games a Gateway Drug?

The other night we had a barbeque at my house. After it got dark and the potential for snow started looming (stupid Utah winters), we went into the living room. After chatting for a bit I noticed my friends girlfriend looked a little bored and for whatever reason suggested she check out Peggle since I just got it for Xbox. After playing a round after she insisted I show her how, I handed her the controller. She enjoyed it’s addictive and simple gameplay like everyone does, but what I didn’t expect was the rest of the rooms reaction. Though maybe I probably should have.

What ended up happening was the room full of primarily non-gamers, who used to play a bunch in high school and could therefore at least hold their own with most "hardcore*" games they had fifteen minutes with, all started asking for the controller. I left for ten minutes to take my sister home and when I got back they had started passing the controller around in a circle all working on various challenges the game had to offer. All these guys rarely play games anymore, but when they do its generally things like Smash Brothers Brawl, or more recently Left4Dead, I was definitely not expecting them to take so easily or immediately to Peggle.

I’ve always been kind of curious about the casual games side of my hobby of choice. Whenever I hear statistics trying to claim a broader demographic including women and older people play games, it generally includes people that only play these simple casual games. There is nothing wrong with that, and as the Wii has proved, there are tons of formally non-gamers that eat that stuff up. They are however completely oblivious to the other side of gaming.

Where do these casual games fit in? I love games like Tetris, but the main reason I’ve been playing games, at least for the last few years, is the unique potential for interactive storytelling. The narrative combined with fun and interesting gameplay mechanics provide a unique experience. Most casual games don’t have that. They don’t even want that. These are games in the purest sense of the word.

I wonder if this casual movement will eventually lead those gamers into our world or if they just have no interest in the more “hardcore” side of things. It seems like there has never been a better platform than the Wii, if this is going to happen. More and more people are picking it up, and even though the more traditional titles are a little lacking, there are more than enough decent titles and okay ports to give a taste of what the rest of gaming is all about.

Another potential idea for recruiting new gamers as I mentioned before, is the design philosophy behind the new Prince of Persia. PoP is still very much a “hardcore” game, but it really is easy and forgiving enough that anyone could pick it up. Even the epilogue content, which is definitely harder, is perfectly doable using the skills you obtain in the main game.

Either way, I’m glad developers seem to be at least slowly moving toward that direction. Everyone finally seems to be getting over the “Nintendo abandoning us” thing, myself included, and no longer think the casual movement is a bad thing. Besides, I heard an interesting argument the other day that it was really us that abandoned them during the N64 and GameCube days by not buying anything.

Now the question is, do the casual gamers even want to play all those other games? The way my BBQ anecdote goes, it seems a lot of formally "hardcore" would rather play the casual games.

*I write "hardcore" with quotations because as you may know, hardcore can potentially refer to several things these days. When I use the term I am referring to gamers like me, who play the more complex games like shooters and RPGs.

Left 4 Dead

We miraculously made it this far, but we all knew the worst was yet to come. We made it to the river and the rumors are true. There is a boat ready to pick us up; we just have to endure a little longer. Surviving one last onslaught is all we need to do. After much debate we decide on a small bathroom somewhat close to the dock. It is incredibly cramped; especially considering there will be four of us with guns a blazing in here shortly, but it is the best bottleneck we can find. After much preparation we stuff ourselves in while Francis radios the boat to come pick us up.

He barely makes it back to the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind him as he enters. Francis is still panting as the first wave assaults the door. The door lasts mere seconds between the relentless zombies and our auto shotguns. Minutes pass and our position seems strong. None of us has moved more than an inch since the attack began, but no undead have crossed the bathroom doorframe yet. We might just survive this after all.

Everything is quiet. How quickly they let up. Is it over? Oh no, that sound…. It’s a Tank! It’s too late, we are all still in the bathroom, we can’t get out! Everyone unloads everything they have, but the giant won’t go down. I hear Louis’ bones crack as the Tank takes him down. Oh god, not Louis. The Tank is still coming strong. His backhand catches me and flings me over Bill and into the wall. Ow, I’m okay, but damn that hurt. Francis draws its attention next, I watch horrified as he is pounded into oblivion, all the while Bill is firing his gun like mad. Francis doesn’t make it, but his sacrifice is not in vain. The Tank falls to the ground, down for the count. Bill takes a deep breath as he helps me up; we aren’t out of this yet.

The two of us fend off another giant horde, how did this many people get infected this fast? A boomer blinds me, but the cramped situation allows me to fire blindly into the door regardless. A smoker grabs Bill, but quickly falls under our hail of fire.

Finally, wounded but still standing, we hear the boat alert us of its arrival. We look at each other and simultaneously sprint toward the boat. Five feet out of the bathroom and a hunter nails me. I see Bill take off running without me, the coward! Oh god, I am going to die, the hunter is ripping me to pieces! At least Bill will make it; I can see the boat coming in!

I watch through blurry dying eyes as Bill makes one last rush down the dock. He dives headfirst into the hull of the boat and falls into the water. As my vision fades, I see Bill being mauled by at least a dozen zombies. It was all for naught….
___

OH COME ON! We were so close! Why the hell would you jump into the front of a moving boat instead of onto it! Who does that?! In the event of an actual zombie apocalypse I know which roommate I’m leaving for dead… JOE!
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Why Halo?

For probably the hundred-thousandth time, tonight I picked up an Xbox controller, fastened the mic to my cranium, and prepared for the world of plasma grenades, rocket launchers, headshots and teenage-spewed obscenities that is Halo (thank God for muted players).

Under normal circumstances, this would be like any other night I arranged to do the same thing. But this time my intentions were different. I didn’t nestle in the comfort of my parent’s newly finished basement to inflict a steady stream of tea-bagging on unsuspecting victims. My desire was not to verbally abuse my incompetent teammates over their obvious lack of skill. And I was certainly in no state of mind to win. Not tonight. This time I focused all of my mental energy and hand-eye coordination on one thing and one thing only—determining just what it is about the Halo series that makes it the most popular multiplayer series in its genre.

During one of our recent conversations, I had mentioned to Jebus the amount of Halo 3 players currently online amounted to over three hundred thousand. He quickly confessed, “Well, yeah. If I were to pick one ‘first-person shooter’ to play for the rest of my life, Halo would probably be it.” That surprised me coming from Jebus, who I would have expected to favor something more similar to Team Fortress 2. I feel the same way he does. But why? His response caught me off guard and provoked my endeavor to find the truth behind Bungie’s successful games.

As I sat there pondering, unloading what seemed to be an endless clip of assault rifle bullets into my enemy’s chest, then attempting to finish him off with a quick melee, I remembered back to the days when Halo’s success had nothing to do with Xbox Live and lag rarely existed if it existed at all. You see, when that melee connected I heard the unmistakable sound of crunching Master Chief armor. My blow had sounded successful. Instead of the result I had expected, however, my foe instantly vanished from site, several explosions went off, and before I saw my dead body fall to the ground I was transported to the death cam only to watch my opponent escape, apparently unharmed. Comcast strikes again!

Halo’s original success can be strongly attributed to its use of Lan gaming – four players per television/console and four consoles per custom game, for a grand total of sixteen players in the same house (sometimes even the same room) playing the same game. Booya! No one else had ever done anything like it with a console before. Sure, we can’t give all the credit to Bungie, with companies like Rare paving the way with Goldeneye. But even Goldeneye didn’t adhere to the killer instinct of up to sixteen simultaneous players. I think we can all agree that Halo, despite some of the unfortunate online lag issues over Xbox Live, is very multiplayer friendly.

So what else makes Halo so great? To be perfectly honest, I don’t have an exact answer to that question. I doubt anybody does. And it’s probably different for different people. My time of contemplation tonight was filled with inquires like, “Hmm. Should I hop in that Warthog with a gunner and ruthlessly annihilate the opposing team to prevent them from capturing the flag?” And, “Should I wait in the base with an arsenal of plasma grenades, a rocket launcher and the invisibility in case the enemy breaks through our first line of defense?” Or, “Man, we’re getting our junk kicked in right now so maybe I’ll just set down my controller and go make a sandwich.” Yes, dive bombing a group of confused players with a Banshee or successfully splattering enemies with the Ghost are both entertaining accomplishments. But amongst all of my thoughts tonight, the only real epiphany I had is credited to Bungie’s successful use of multiplayer schematics. There’s never a time when I can’t boot up my Xbox, sign into Xbox Live, and within moments, find a team of players in whatever game-type I feel like playing. In my humble opinion, that is Halo’s legacy. That is what keeps Halo popular. And that is why so many gamers choose Halo.

Comparing Games to other Media

We’ve all been doing this for years, but in the last little while I’ve read at least three articles comparing games to the various other forms of artistic media. I understand why we do this, games are an emerging art form and comparing its progress to the other established forms makes sense in some ways. Also games went through a period of mimicking movies that just now seems to be starting to end.

Is comparing games really that useful though? I read this article about a year ago, essentially it says that because game technology changes so rapidly, old games like the original Super Mario are doomed to irrelevance. Any time a new game comes out with some new idea, it pushes aside the older technology and makes it obsolete. When the article was published various game related sites all exploded in fury trying to defend their medium. They claimed gamers go back all the time to experience the older games, and just like newer generations are still enjoying The Godfather, newer generations go back and play 8 and 16 bit games in some capacity. While this is true, my reaction was that games haven’t even gotten to the point where there is an accepted convention yet. When movies were first conceived they were ten minute shorts that no one today knows anything about. Even once they became feature length it took a bit before standards were established. Here is where I think the comparison of mediums can be detrimental, movies reached their established standards in a fairly short period of time. Therefore the logical conclusion has to be that the writer of this article is right and by the late ‘80s games should have too.

I see these types of arguments all the time, why do the mediums have to evolve along the same time frame as each other? Why do they have to do the same things as each other at all? We are constantly trying to tell the world why games are a unique form of expression. How they offer interactivity in a way no other medium can. Yet while making these claims we talk about how similar they are to music, movies and plays. Of course there are going to be similarities between them, and some will even be useful for exploring new ideas, but by comparing games with them we are also establishing a standard on which all media can be judged. This doesn’t make any sense because they are all so different.

I’m not saying we should stop making the comparisons altogether, we should just be aware of what we are doing and how we are doing it. Movies, music, plays, books, and games are all very different, and change over time in very different ways. We need to be well aware of how far the similarities to each actually go and where they stop, otherwise games will be judged on a playing field it isn’t a part of.

Style over Substance

Afro Samurai is a gorgeous looking game, with an excellent soundtrack, that is oozing with style. I’ll admit the only reason I was interested in this game to begin with was the art style, but I hoped it had more too offer. As it turns out, it was a fun romp, but it could have been so much more.

What Afro Samurai does so well is aesthetic. It made the transition from the anime to 3D flawlessly, and the way enemies fall apart after a swift slash never gets old. The music even managed reignited my long extinguished interest in hip hop. It always started at just the right times to make the battles that much more epic, and I rarely heard the same song twice. Sadly, that is in part due to how short the game is.

The gameplay on the other hand is lacking a bit. It is fun, but even within six hours the combat starts to get old. Lots of times I was pitted against several enemies at once, but attacking forward left my back wide open. The combat system does little to allow protection from all sides. Separating the enemies is fairly difficult so I found myself relying heavily on a slow motion sweep kick move followed by a horizontal slash. Slashing multiple foes at once into small pieces is rewarding and hilarious, but after the 200th time it started to feel stale. The camera is also atrocious; I was constantly fighting it to see what I wanted. It seemed to think I wanted to see my enemies back from an angle where he covered 60% of the screen.

The story was also kind of confusing. It seemed to be a series of vignettes that were loosely related. Afro is trying to get the number one headband so that he can avenge his fathers’ death. He can only fight the guy in possession of the headband if he is in possession of the number 2 headband. The game starts off with him trying to get the number 2, but once he gets it, the next four levels seem fairly irrelevant. My neighbor who has seen the movie seemed to follow the story better than I, but from a standalone experience it needed a little embellishment.

The game did do some things right however. The combat while repetitive is still entertaining. The focus attacks allow you to slow down time to perform a deadly slash or a crucial dodge. It is a fun feature, but is used so heavily throughout the course of the game that it gets tedious. The game does some cool things with the health bar and focus meter as well. The more damaged Afro and the other enemies get, the more splotched with blood they appear. As for focus, Afro has a dangling gem that glows as when it is usable. I applaud their efforts for removing the HUD entirely, but I was constantly having problems deciphering how much health and focus power I had left.

Afro Samurai had everything it needed to be a great hack and slash game, but it fell just a little short in a few crucial areas. If the combat was a little tighter and a bit more robust and the camera wasn’t constantly fighting player input this game could easily rank among God of War and Devil May Cry. As it stands now, it is a fun six-hour slash fest that is definitely worth a rent. I just wish the game played as good as it looks and sounds.

HUDless

Lately, in the all mighty quest for immersion, game developers have been moving away from using a heads up display (HUD). Overall, I am in support of this movement. Games look so much nicer without being plastered with an overlay covering everything the art designers spent so much time making look so good. No offense to the HUD art designer, but how awesome can they really look? On the other hand games have to sacrifice the conventional means of communicating information or remove the need to communicate the information at all.


Games like Flower and Mirrors Edge have nothing on the screen aside from the game itself. There is no health bar, ammo counter or crosshair to obstruct the game. Flower was designed from the ground up to not necessarily need any of these things, but a game like Mirrors Edge has gun ammo and a health system it needs to convey. The way the player gets the health information they need is through a dimming of the screen whenever she takes damage. This effect has been used a lot in tactical shooters where you can die so easily a health bar is practically unnecessary. The ammo indication is essentially nonexistent; this was dealt with by never allowing a gun to have more than a few bursts worth of bullets.

These tricks work for Mirrors Edge because the game is not a shooter, but trying to overcome some of these issues with a full-blown shooter is another story. Far Cry 2 did a few interesting things to free up the screen, which also doubled as a “never break first person” effect that has been popular ever since Half Life. FC2 uses tricks like having the in game avatar pull out a map in game to look at rather than pausing the game to display the map. Even still, the game has a modest health bar and ammo counter. It is very minimal, but it is still there.


Dead Space manages to display all the conventional information a shooter normally would, while still having no HUD whatsoever. Its method is clever, but not terribly radical by any means. Instead of putting a health bar on the top part of the screen, the characters suit has a lit up spinal cord that shortens as he takes damage. The ammo counter is displayed on the gun and all the cutscenes and map are projected from the suit in game. This also has a neat horror ramification in that as a player you are never safe while checking your inventory, map or watching a scene.

One other thing worth mentioning, despite this being kind an old trick that doesn’t really change anything about traditional HUDs, games like Metroid Prime, Halo, and Half Life all try to make the player feel like they are wearing the power suit their characters occupy. Therefore the HUD displayed on the screen is also supposed to be displayed on the visor of the suit the character is wearing. This is usually conveyed early on by the things other characters say. Things like, “your suit is coming online” as various pieces of the HUD start to appear. This works quite well if the game is first person, but in third person games like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter it seems a little out of place.


Taking the HUD out of games has had some spectacular results, but at the moment it will only work with specific genres and specific instances. Pasting the HUD onto the character like in Dead Space is really just a relocation of specific elements. Removing the HUD entirely out of a game like God of War seems like an insurmountable task. How will the player get the essential information about their health and magic without altering the core of the game in some major way? Perhaps the Afro Samurai approach of having various effects on the screen correspond to things like low health and a built up action meter. This could potentially work, but for something as varied as a large health bar I cannot see this working. God of War does remove the health bar from the screen when it is not needed however leaving nothing on the screen. Without reinventing a lot of genres a HUD will not be going anywhere anytime soon. Could you imagine playing a JRPG with turn-based combat without any onscreen menus? I cannot see that working without a drastic simplification of the game.

What do you guys think, do you like the lack of a HUD in games or do you prefer the more traditional styles? They both have pros and cons, but every time I see a gorgeous game like Mirrors Edge totally unobstructed, I can’t help but support the idea.

Gaming with Friends

I recently started a somewhat regular gaming night at my house with various co-workers. Every Wednesday night, or every other at the moment, we get together and play a game for several hours. We spent two nights going through LittleBigPlanet and just recently we played all the way through Castle Crashers.

Doing this has reminded me just how fun local gaming is. Aside from the very occasional Halo LAN party and a month long Smash Brothers Brawl binge with my roommates in April ’08 I really haven’t done much multiplayer gaming with actual people in the same room since early highschool. I still play plenty of multiplayer games, but they are generally all on Xbox Live with Slevin and whomever we get matched with.

I don’t want to give off the wrong impression here; I think online multiplayer is one of the best things to happen to gaming as a social activity since sliced bread. What? Anyway, what I’m getting at is there is something to be said for gaming with actual human interaction rather than a disembodied voice over a headset. Especially if it’s a crude racist one.

Something about playing in the same room as someone provides a much more vivid and shared experience that has the potential to be a lot more fun. Part of it is that you are probably more likely to be playing with friends if they are at your house rather than online, but I imagine even gaming with total strangers in the same room would be a more enjoyable experience than online. There is no longer a veil of anonymity to hide behind. Another thing is ever since the Xbox had its dashboard updated with the NXE, Xbox Live has been a much quieter place. Everyone, including myself now hang out in party chats. This leads to situations where two groups fighting each other will be spread among several chat channels and unable to communicate. Some people may not even be chatting with people playing the same game.

The nice thing about the last generation of consoles was while online console gaming was becoming more prevalent, all the remnants of past local play were still in place. Multiplayer games generally had online, LAN, and splitscreen options. Lately though splitscreen seems to be getting phased out. Games like Gears of War, Call of Duty 4, Team Fortress 2 and Crackdown limit how many people can play per console. You can still get the full multiplayer effect over LAN, but that requires several consoles and several televisions, which can get quite cumbersome quite fast.

Part of what spawned the previous paragraph was my attempt to think up games we could play together on our game nights. After finishing LBP and Castle Crashers, we couldn’t really come up with many current gen games we could all play together. We excluded most shooters cause one of the participants is not a gamer and the dual stick controls is definitely a difficult skill to grasp, but even still we’ve found ourselves looking into the past for games to play. Next on the queue is Four Swords for the GameCube, we somehow managed to find four GBAs and link cables in the depths of our closets. :) Am I just ignorant or have multiplayer games been downplaying using a single console lately? Maybe it’s an attempt to sell more games, but that seems like a pretty far-fetched and cynical conspiracy theory to me. Maybe it's the processing power required to run the game twice at the same time? I have my doubts about that one too, it was never an issue in the past.

I know the Wii is all about exactly what I’ve been talking about this whole time, but none of those games really interest me at all. I hate to jump on the “Nintendo abandoned the hardcore” bandwagon, but just about every multiplayer game I can think of on the Wii is a compilation of mini games I have no interest in playing. The only games I’ve given a second look on the Wii are the more traditional games like Metroid Prime 3 and No More Heroes. All of them have been single player.

Anyway, if I am just being ignorant please suggest some titles we could play. All consoles are a go.

Quicktime Events: Yay or Nay?

I just finished God of War 2 today and of course it ended with an epic quicktime event against the final boss. Just like every boss in that series, control is yanked from you right at the moment of victory and replaced with a series of timed button presses ending with a gruesome kill or more likely a frustrating few minutes where you regain your lost progress.

I’m not sure what to think about QTEs. When they first showed up in Shenmue in 2000 I thought they were a neat idea. You get to watch a cutscene and still be a little bit involved. A lot of the button presses were the same buttons required to do similar things outside of a cutscene as well so it felt more interactive. Also the end of disc three in Shenmue 2 had one of the coolest uses of the QTE in that series.

Several years later and now QTEs are everywhere. It feels like anytime a game wants to do something cool without “taking you out of the experience” it uses a QTE. We seem fairly anti QTE as a community, but we accepted them in fantastic games like Resident Evil 4 and God of War. Did they somehow do them differently than in games like Tomb Raider: Legend or Prince of Persia?

Several times in God of War 2 I was incredibly frustrated with them. Whenever the button prompts switched from presses to mashing circle it would relocate the icon on the bottom left. The delay of eyeing the change is almost always enough to require you to fail the event once before you know its coming. Also the joystick swirls seem less forgiving that it probably should be.

Despite being annoying, my most fond memories of GoW2 took place during the QTEs. Even though I couldn’t control Kratos in the usual way, the things I was vaguely responsible for him doing during the QTEs were incredibly badass. Jumping from a Pegasus onto a gryphon only to cut off its wings and throw it downward before hopping back, stealing a gatekeepers key then using the door it unlocked to smash his head in, and getting one Sister of Fate to stab another in the face only to be stabbed in the face herself by me a few seconds later are all things I’ll think of first when recalling this game. They are a trademark of the series that helps bring their signature brutality to life, but do we really want them?

I must admit that one of the God of War series biggest strengths, its clever boss fights, would be less effective to witness without the QTEs. Is that a fair trade for the amount of frustration some of these bosses acquire by using them? I don’t know, but I have a feeling QTE’s are on there way out.

Prince of Persia Epilogue

I played through the PoP DLC last night. It was a fun romp; the level design is a lot more creative and at times a bit more difficult. It took me about three hours to finish and I definitely enjoyed it. The new moves were sort of moot however, they added a fifth magic plate and the Prince can now sprint towards an enemy in combat to initiate a QTE for a stun. Neither was a significant addition, but added a little something to change up the experience from December.

The main reason I was excited for this though was not the new gameplay changes. It was the cliffhanger ending that threatened to remain a mystery for another two years before PoP2 came out. Of course it was addressed by the DLC, how could it not be? The biggest gameplay mechanic, Elika, is still usable so they had to address the “disagreement” between her and the Prince.

I am a little disappointed in how they went about with this. Essentially it can be summed up as Elika is rightfully incredibly angry with the Prince and disillusioned by the prospect of stopping Ahriman again. They exchange a few conversations about it, but little progress is made by the end of the epilogue. It does end on a fairly good note that once again leaves me hopeful for future titles, but this wasn’t the satisfying conclusion I was looking for.

I’d still definitely recommend it if you liked playing through PoP, at ten bucks you get about a third of the amount of play that you got for spending sixty. That’s like half off! However if you were one of the few people that chose to turn the console off instead of finishing the canon ending you aren’t going to want check this out. You can probably figure out why. ;)

On that note, I was perusing the internets the other day and stumbled across Ben Mattes blog. He was the producer of the Prince of Persia. After skimming a few of his posts I found one explaining why his team chose to end their latest game with the controversial ending that it did rather than offering an obvious choice. For those of you who don’t want to read the whole article, it comes down to if they ever made a sequel they didn’t want to have to pick which ending was canon. This is what they were forced to do when they finished off the Sands of Time trilogy. The middle game, Warrior Within had two endings, and the harder to obtain ending was the one they ended up choosing to use. This probably led to some confusion for the fans that were unaware of the alternate ending when they started up the final game, Two Thrones.

I have no problem with this explanation, Ben even states in his article that they expected 5% of people to just turn off their consoles and accept an alternate ending by not completing the entirety of the game. He also says, as I think is common knowledge, that this new storyline has always been planned as a trilogy so anyone that chose to turn off their consoles should have been aware that they were also choosing to ignore any sequels that are coming. This is a fine alternative; I just don’t think most people considered sequels when they chose to turn off their consoles. I’m guessing it slipped their mind, because looking at games these days, especially from a company like Ubisoft, it’s incredibly naïve to think otherwise.

I don't get Noby

What’s with Noby Noby Boy? I’m all for weird, creative, and quirky games, but I just don’t get this one. I feel like it’s more of a tech demo than a game. After about a half hour I feel like I exhausted all the game has to offer.


For those of you who don’t know, Noby Noby Boy is a downloadable game on the PS3 spawned from the mind of Keita Takahashi, the creator of the equally weird Katamari Damacy. In this game you play as a worm thing named BOY and you control either end of him independently using the triggers and the thumbsticks. The goal is to stretch BOY as long as you can by running each end in opposite directions, wrapping him around various things and whatnot. Also you can submit BOY’s length when you are finished to GIRL, which is a tally of everyone’s total length. The more everyone plays the longer she gets, and eventually she reaches new areas to explore. Four day’s after release she got to the moon, next stop is Mars.

I gave the game the benefit of the doubt and played for another couple hours over the next few days. I found a few cool levels with spinning things that could stretch BOY ridiculous amounts if he was entangled properly. Still there really isn’t that much too this game. Even with the communal aspect of reaching new planets, it is kind of lame. I checked out the moon, it is very similar to Earth except the green surface was now a gray color and the people were now weird moon people. The gameplay didn’t change at all. What is Mars going to be when we make it there? I bet it’ll be red!

I don’t mean to be horribly cynical; the game is only five bucks. With the current amount of content being delivered in full priced games ranging as low as 5 hours these days, can we really blame a five dollar game for being small? I’m just curious what all the fuss is about? I read a few articles that praise the game and I feel like I’m missing something. It’s not a bad way to kill a half hour, but I just don’t think the game is anything more than a small diversion. Something like Tetris without the replay value. Do you guys see something I don’t?