Genre:  Word
Platform:  XBone

I found this game two days ago on the XBox Store.  I am already declaring it an awesome game.  I’ve spent a total of about 8 hours playing it, although it feels like a lot more.  I love a good word game and will easily get sucked into one.  This particular word game combines a typical word game with an RPG!

You start the game playing as Grimm, a little dude working his way through a monster-filled realm.  You can play in either story mode or endless mode.  Both are fun.  Endless is just what it sounds like – a survival mode where you work your way through monster after monster.  You earn coins as you go and can occasionally buy upgrades and potions to help with the increasing difficulty.

As with most games, story mode is where it’s at.  You work through a map of levels, earning stars as you go.  This is where it gets cool – the stars aren’t just given for varying levels of “good job”.  Instead, you need to play through each level four times to get all of the stars.  Each is an objective.  For example, the first is simply beat the monsters.  The second is a time trial.  The third is some sort of challenge like “can’t use E” or something equally as challenging.  The fourth is a special challenge where the monsters are much tougher and have specific requirements like “takes damage only from words starting with a vowel”.

As you play through story mode, you can spend crystals you earn on permanent upgrades.  There are a lot of them and they all help to make you more awesome.  Of course, if you’re not good at the core of the game, it’s not going to matter much.  The game play is simple – find words from a block given to do damage to monsters.  It sounds simple and is, but when I spelled out the word “AFFIDAVIT” the other night, I felt pretty awesome.  Some monsters will make tiles unusable or make it so you take damage when you use them.

It also keeps track of your stats!  This is a feature I always like.  It shows you how many of pretty much everything you’ve done.  I’ve spelled the word “BACON” five times and spelled out 25 palindromes.  And for the fellow achievement whores – this game is going to be a breeze to complete.  I’ve gotten 40 achievements in just under 8 hours.

This all leads to a really fun and highly re-playable game.  If you like word games, find it!

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Chey’s Top 25 – #15 – Project Gotham Racing

Genre:  Racing
Platform:  XBox Original

I got Project Gotham Racing (PGR from here on out) when I got the XBox original on launch day.  I loved this game from the second I put it in the drive (pun intended).  The graphics are amazing and still hold up well today.  It was the first game that I played that allowed you to integrate your own soundtrack from the XBox’s hard drive into the game.  It handles that brilliantly – there’s a DJ on the radio and he talks between your songs, just like the radio.

I wasn’t much of a fan of racing games before this one.  I played a few of them over the years including RC Pro Am, Super Cars and Need For Speed.  But this game was/still is special.  You don’t just drive to win in this game.  Now, if you want to, there is a mode for that.  However, that is a tiny fraction of what you can do.  The game is divided into cities – New York, London, Tokyo, San Francisco, etc.  In each city there are different tracks and challenges that you need to pass to get better cars and progress through the game.  My favorite car was the Nissan GTR Skyline (superb handling).  Those challenges include time trials, overtake challenges, total laps and more.  But the heart of this game is kudos.

You get kudos by driving with style.  Anyone can slam into other cars and walls to win.  This game rewards you for finesse.  You get points and combo streaks for things like clean sections, drifting around corners, getting air, driving on two wheels, passing cars (without hitting them) and a lot more!  If you hit something, your streak is over and you don’t get the kudos.  Let me repeat this – you are rewarded in this racing game for using your breaks once in a while.  Once you get good at it, notice how your hands react to the course and how fluid you are with the game.  I love this game so much that it regularly finds itself in my XBox 360 drive (thank goodness for backwards compatibility).

Even if you don’t typically like racing games, I would recommend trying this one.  It’s very different from all other racers and I haven’t been able to find one like it since (except PGR 2, 3 and 4, which are all solid games).

 

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hyperkin-smart-boy

So check this out!  A company called Hyperkin has developed an attachment for smart phones that will actually be able to play those old Gameboy original and color cartridges that you may have laying around.  This allows you to have a larger screen to play with and is just…cool!

I don’t have any of these cartridges and this isn’t enough to make me go buy them.  I have a lot of them on my GCW and that’s good enough for me.  It’s still an awesome idea, though!  Read the full article from The Nerdist below.

Gameboy Phone adapter

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Oldies but Goodies – Neverhood

Genre:  Puzzle
Platform:  PC

Once upon a time, I moved out of my parents’ house and into the world.  I had a decent paying job, so one of the first things I bought was a shiny new Packard Bell computer (I didn’t know any better yet!).  And the first game I bought for that computer was The Neverhood.

This game was made entirely from stop-motion using clay.  It was beautiful, funny and HARD.  Back then, we didn’t have much of an internet to look up help files or forums.  We had to figure things out for ourselves.  This is why a lot of us didn’t finish many games back then, and this was one of those for me.  It was a puzzler through and through.  There were always levers and buttons that did some unknown thing.  Your next step usually wasn’t obvious and you would get all frustrated and AAAAHHH.

Neverhood play 2

I’ve pushed this damn button 15 times and NOTHING HAPPENS!

I digress.  This was actually a fun game.  I haven’t played it since way back then (1997ish).  I don’t think I would play it again as I want this one to remain a happy memory.  Sometimes, when you play old games, they are just not as good as you remember.

 

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America’s True Pasttime – Bowling games!

Bowling Atari

Matt and I started our real-life bowling league last week, so I figured I’d celebrate by talking about some bowling video games through the years.  For the record, I’m a much better real-life bowler than video game bowler.  As usual, I’m only focusing on games that I’ve actually played.

My first video game bowling experience was called “Bowling” on the Atari 2600.  That’s the image above.  It was pretty simple.  Line up your bowler and throw the ball.  It made some interesting sound effects and the ball moved about as fast as a 5 year-old can throw it, but it was bowling.  I don’t think this game was able to keep my attention for too long.

Bowling Zombie

Next up we have Zombie Bowl-a-Rama for the PC.  This was a fun game where you could inflict all sorts of carnage on zombies walking your way in an alley.  The “bowling” aspect of it can be applied loosely as you’re really just throwing stuff at zombies.  It might look a bit bowling-y, but it seems to lose something in all of the fire.  Still, it was a fun game to play once.

Bowling Rocket Bowl

Next is Rocket Bowl on the XBox 360.  I really enjoyed this game and still play it from time to time.  As you can see in the image above, it’s not your typical bowling game.  The lanes are warped, there are water hazards, hills and collectibles to get as you play.  You don’t even have to hit the pins on the set you’re aiming at, either.  The “rocket” comes from the fact that your ball can be motivated in a rocket way in different directions.  Fun!

Bowling Wii

This wouldn’t be an article about bowling games if we didn’t include Wii Bowling.  I did have a Wii for a while and I did enjoy this game.  The motion controls were new and innovative and just worked well with bowling.  True story.  A friend and I created a local Wii bowling tournament for senior living facilities and everyone had a blast.  Here’s a video of our event.  Yeah, I still have the shirt:

My final bowling game of the day is Kinect Bowling for the XBox 360/One.  I am terrible at this game.  I can never seem to aim in the correct spot.  It’s still fun and uses motion controls, but damn I suck.

Bowling Kinect

Are there any bowling games that I’ve missed that you have enjoyed?

 

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Matty 8 bit 2

Hi faithful readers of my wonderful wife’s blog!  I’m Matt, and I’m going to be an occasional guest-blogger here.  

I’ve been playing video games most of my life, but unlike my wife most of my experience is PC (or other desktop) based.  My family’s first computer was a Commodore-64, where my eyes were opened to the wonders of video games by titles like Gyruss, Spy Hunter, The Goonies, and Choplifter.  We had a Sega Genesis for a while, but I only remember one or two games from that Golden Axe, Double Dragon, and Streets of Rage.  

Then came the PC era.  I was 14, PCs were just starting to become regular household appliances, and I was all over it.  I and some friends from school learned all the tricks about how to get your PC to run your games, from editing your config.sys and creating autoexec.bat files, running memmaker to free up some more memory, or figuring out what COM port your joystick was connected up to.  Good ol’ command prompt days.

My wife introduced me to the modern console world with her original Xbox, eventually followed by our 360 and Xbone.  I’m still not a huge console gamer (never really developed the fingers for the controllers) but I’ve definitely had my share of memorable console moments with games like Fallout 3 and Battlefield 3.  

My intention is to post occasionally, perhaps a few times a week at most.  My wife did help me put together a top 25 list which I will probably work through, but you can probably expect just some random reviews here and there of games as they bubble up through my memory.  Most will probably end up being PC titles as that’s where I’ve spent the vast majority of my time, but you’ll see a few NES, SNES, Genesis, Xbox, PS2, Xbox 360 and Xbone in there too.  

My posts might be a bit longer, as I do tend to ramble, but I will try to break them up with graphics I’ve stolen from somewhere or some custom made MS Paint masterpieces.  Fair warning, I’ll probably have lots of run-on sentences too, along with the occasional bad/obscure humor, and invariable bad grammar and punctuation.  Thanks god for auto spell check or you probably wouldn’t be able to read this at all. 

You’ll be able to tell my posts apart from the lovely gamer girl’s by this awesome purple background, as well as the nifty 8-bit avatar above (Thanks Heather and Zach!)  I hope some of you out there find what I have to say at least slightly interesting/entertaining, and keep coming back to see more of what we have to say. 

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Chey’s Top 25 – #16 – Super Mario Brothers 3

Genre:  Platformer
Platform:  NES

The first Super Mario Brothers may have had the biggest impact on the video game industry of any game in the history of gaming.  It came bundled with the NES and was a really fun game.  Super Mario Brothers 2 then came along and was just…weird.  There’s a story behind that game, but I’ll save it for another day.  Then came Super Mario Brothers 3 in 1988.  It may not have had the impact that it’s older sibling did, but it was far more fun.

I’m not the only one that feels this way.  This was one of the best-selling games for the NES and is often thought to be one of the best games of all-time.  When it came down to it, it was just a really fun game.  My sisters and I would play this for hours.  I still remember the fun little clap we would do at the end of each level.

This game is different from its predecessors as you navigated from world to world on a map.  This is a feature widely used in games to this day.  You could go back to replay previous levels and skip certain levels if you wanted.  It also introduced a fun new feature – Mario could glide with his raccoon tail!  There was also a frog suit and a bear (maybe?) suit.  The levels were unique – one was a giant level where you were tiny – and fun.  And, of course, that pesky Princess Peach was always in another castle.

The graphics in this game were crisp and cute.  The sound effects and music really added to the game and I probably still hum the main theme in my sleep.  There are lots of secret things to be found in this game, too, so if you don’t look them up, you’ve got a lot of fun exploration to do.

If you haven’t played this game, you likely haven’t played many games at all.  I have it on my 3DS and still enjoy playing it.  It has stood the test of time quite well.  Please go out and find it now if you’ve never had the pleasure!

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Oldies but Goodies – RC Pro AM

Genre:  Racing
Platform:  NES

I still play this one from time to time on my GCW Zero.  This was a fun little racing game where you were racing an RC Truck.  There were supposedly 32 tracks, but I certainly never made it through them all.  As you raced your truck around the track, you could pick up new parts for upgrades, letters to spell out PRO AM and other boosts.  There were also hazards on the track such as oil spills and water.  The crew at these tracks were not very good at cleanup and cautions weren’t a thing.  I know this is not unique in any way to racing games, but it was one of the first I played and thought it was a blast.

The AI (computer) was also notorious for cheating in this game.  You could be almost a lap ahead and suddenly the second place car would come soaring up right behind you, often passing you.  It was complete and utter BS, but that was a part of the game.  The idea of the RC cars was also very appealing to me as a kid.  The sound effects were good and hearing the music brings a smile to my face every time.

If you missed this one the first time around, I strongly recommend finding it and giving it a try!

 

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