Octopodial Chrome

While searching for information about rithmomachia, I discovered The Game Report, which has reviews of various unusual games & such. Naught about rithmomachia, but that’s just my luck.

Bungie (now a subsidiary of Microsoft) have just released the Marathon Trilogy. For those who’ve not heard of it, Marathon came out at about the same time as Doom did for PCs. Despite being roughly contemporaneous, Marathon was much more advanced: while on only aimed horizontally in Doom, Marathon supported full horizontal and vertical aiming; while the PC game was very two-dimensional (with just the illusion of 3D), the Mac standard was fully (albeit primitively) three-dimensional; but most importantly where Doom had no story other than kill lots of things before they kill you, Marathon had a complex story of aliens and an insane computer who was both ally and foe.

Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity carried on that tradition of excellent stories, with perhaps the best storylines of any first-person-shooter I’ve ever played, stories almost good enough for interactive fiction. Indeed, the Marathon series were a kind of interactive fiction with a shoot-em-up component.

Although now long-outdated, the source for Marathon Infinity was released years ago by Bungie and has now given birth to Marathon: Aleph One, with which it is possible to play the latter two of the original trilogy, but with better sounds and graphics. Marathon lives on!

The Morning News offers a list of Good Gift Games for 2004; Funagain Games offer the Games Magazine 2005 Awards. Regarding the latter, it seems strange to number the awards for a year which hasn’t yet arrived.

Well, I bought Mystery of the Abbey, as I’ve wished to do since my friend Shaima recommended it. It is a cool little game—I can’t wait to play it. It looks to be worth every penny.

Piecepack is a free board game system which appears to have a great deal of promise. It is composed of four suits (suns, moons, crowns & arms) and six values (null, ace, 2, 3, 4 & 5) distributed across 24 tiles, 24 coins, 4 dice & four pawns. Very cool seeming.

Eric Solomon has devised a clever pen-and-paper game called Middleman in which players buy and sell tins of some commodity. It looks like a quick play, with but 10 turns (I’d extend it to an even dozen, of course), and an intriguing randomisation system—no dice are needed, and indeed nothing more than pen, paper & players is necessary. The game sheet is short and easy to reproduce from memory. Now if only I could find someone to play with me…

In a small German-speaking region of a canton in Switzerland, a card game called Troggu is played. It appears doomed to die out, which is a real pity, since it appears to be both simple and a lot of fun. I’ll have to see if I can get a deck and teach it to some folks.

I’ve recently rediscovered crossfire, the game responsible for so many of my bad grades back it high school. Man was it fun! As the website states, it’s an open source, cooperative multiplayer graphical RPG and adventure game. Highly addictive, that’s for sure.

My friend Shaima sent on a link to Mystery of the Abbey, a game somewhat like monastic Clue, but better—much, much better. I want.