A Dragon Shaped Meeple

I've blogged about meeples before, but it turns out that as well as people shaped meeples you can get dragon shaped meeples! The dragon comes as part of an expansion to the Carcassonne game where I first discovered meeples.

It turns out that there are quite a few expansions to the basic game, most of which can all be played together, and so I can now look forward to other shaped meeples including builders, pigs, mayors, barns, waggons and even ghosts! Many of the board games we have bought over the years haven't been played much after the initial novelty has worn off, but we keep going back to Carcassonne and the expansiosn certainly help to keep it interesting, even if a dragon removes it from reality somewhat!

URL Hunter

If you enjoyed playing Rogue or other ASCII art based games then I'm almost certain you'll enjoy URL Hunter. It's certainly worth a 30 second diversion from whatever else you are currently doing.

Guinness Based Physics

A long time ago in a high school far far away... I studied applied maths. Like any other job teachers need some on the job training and we ended up with a student teacher. I don't think we were particularly nice to the poor bloke (I can't imagine anything worse than a room full of obnoxious 16/17 year olds). One of his lessons, however, forever changed the way we treated him -- he had somehow managed to make a maths lesson fun.

He was attempting to teach us the maths behind the centre of gravity in different objects. Rather than some random shape though he decided that the most relevant thing to us would be working out how steep a slope you could stand a pint glass on without losing any beer! Of course given a blackboard and white chalk it has stuck in my head as the Guinness based physics lesson. I don't usually reminisce about high school (not the most enjoyable period of my life) but something I saw the other day brought that maths lesson flooding back.

I read a review for a new independently developed computer game called Crayon Physics Deluxe. The game is described by it's developer as a 2D physics puzzle / sandbox game, in which you get to experience what it would be like if your drawings would be magically transformed into real physical objects. Solve puzzles with your artistic vision and creative use of physics. Drawn objects move and fall as they would in real life. No more maths to work out if that pint glass will topple over!

I downloaded and played all the way through the demo and thought it was so good I was quite happy to spend the $19.95 for the full version, especially as buying the game directly supports the single developer rather than going straight to the purse of some large games company.

My Rating: I think the idea behind the game is brilliant and it was well executed to produce a thoroughly enjoyable game.

Meeples

While I am a computer person and enjoy playing computer games I also quite like playing board games. For the younger (or future) generations that may read this post these are games that do not require electricity or a screen!

Over Christmas we bought a new board game as Bryony thought the description sounded interesting. The game is called Carcassonne and involves trying to build and own more farms, cities and roads than the opposition. For those who enjoy computer games think Settlers or any of the Age of Empire type games, only without any fighting. We really enjoyed the game and Bryony started to look see if there were any expansions or other games by the same game designer. It turns out there are quite a few expansions to the game. It was in the description of the catapult expansion that we found the sentence: "Knock out tokens try to remove meeples, seduction tokens try to swap meeples". Taken together Bryony and I know a lot of obscure English words but we had no idea what a meeple was.

It turns out that meeple is a portmanteau word (an interesting word in itself) that merges me and people. Given that the game is played with small wooden human shaped figures this should probably have been obvious but for some reason it wasn't. Interestingly it must be a word mostly associated with the Carcassonne game (even if many other games use similar styled pieces) as the Wikipedia page for meeples simply redirects to the page on Carcassonne.

If you ever find you are short of meeples then do not despair! For all your meeple shopping needs visit MeeplePeople.com. As well as being able to buy meeples in any number of colours, you can also buy meeple shaped cushions and pillows, meeples on beer glasses and meeple themed t-shirts. My favourite t-shirts (in no particular order) are: got meeples?, evolution of gaming, and meeples with human game pieces.

And if you don't fancy a meeple t-shirt how about trading wood for sheep?

The Temple of Kali

You may remember that a while back I mentioned that I had pre-ordered a copy of Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii. Well it was released, arrived and I've played it quite a bit. It really is a fantastic game and may even be better than Lego Star Wars (which I thought would be impossible). I have, however, found a bug in the game which I though would be worth blogging about to save others the hassle of trying to figure out why they don't seem to be able to complete one of the rooms.

Level 3 of Temple of Doom is set in the Temple of Kali. The second room you enter contains the sacrificial pit with Willie suspended just above the surface of the lava (or whatever the hot swirly stuff is). The aim of the room is to rescue Willie by defeating the level boss Chatter Lal. Now it turns out that there is an expected way of defeating Chatter Lal, namely: punch him twice, then activate the two Thuggee statues to leave him nowhere to stand and then punch him twice more. Unfortunately it is possible to punch him often enough to remove all his hearts (and hence kill him) without activating the statues -- DO NOT DO THIS! If you kill him without using the status then he will die but the end of level sequence isn't triggered meaning there is no way for you to ever complete the room and move on to the next section of the level. The only way out is to quit and start the Temple of Kali level again from the beginning.

Given how much Chatter Lal jumps around I assume none of the testers ever managed to kill him without the help of the Thuggee statues and so this bug was never spotted. I was only (un)fortunate enough to find it as he seemed to get trapped against the statues by Short Round who just kept hitting him until he was dead. I wonder if the same bug is present for any of the level bosses where you are expected to do something other than just hitting them to defeat them? Also is the same bug present in the other versions of the game for other consoles than the Wii?

An annoying bug (especially as I find jumping across the spinning towers in the first room of the level tricky enough that I didn't want to have to repeat it) but not enough to ruin a very enjoyable game. Hopefully I won't find any more bugs but if I do I'll let you all know.

Lego Computer Games

On paper they seem ridiculous: take a well known film franchise, re-imagine it in Lego, and then turn it into a computer game! How anyone ever managed to persuade their boss that it was a money making idea is beyond me.

Having said all that I'm blown away by just how good they are and how much fun they are to play. My current favourite Wii game is Lego Starwars. If you still can't imagine the concept then here is a trailer for the game:

Click To Play

I've previously mentioned that some of my favourite childhood films are the Indiana Jones movies. So given how much I'm enjoying Lego Starwars I've just pre-ordered Lego Indiana Jones!

Click To Play

Bomberman == Sore Thumb

My thumb is still tender!

As you may have gathered from previous posts I own a Wii games console and had friends and family staying at the weekend. The combination of the two is quite a lot of game playing. Now you might think that with a new console it would be the newest most uptodate games that would get the most play. You would however be wrong. We must have spent at least six hours playing Bomberman '93 and hence my thumb is still sore from using the D-pad (apparently this is short for directional controller, who knew) on the controller.

Although the game is now 14 years old it is still highly addictive and when played with three or four people gets highly competitive. If you've never played it before then I suggest you go find one of the many freeware versions available (this one seems a relatively good version) and have a go, or better yet if you already have a Wii download it for 600 points from the Wii Shop Channel, you won't regret it, although your thumb might never forgive you!