Last Friday we had Valentine’s day. Kirsty very kindly bought
me a game we’d seen reviewed and talked about in Tabletop Gaming magazine and
found intriguing: Misty.
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| Incidentally, I don't recommend searching for Misty Game with Google Safe Search turned off.. |
Misty is a simple card game that uses a couple of nice
conceits and mechanics to make an engaging, if brief experience. The idea is
that you’re drawing doodles on a steamed-up window in the middle of a storm, and
once you have twelve, the doodles come to life and start moving about. Each
player picks one card from a hand of six, reveals it by putting it in a 4x3 “window,”
then passes the remaining cards around to the next player. Once all the cards
are gone, another six are drawn for each player, then the process is repeated except
the cards are passed the other way around. Once all the players have a 4x3
window in place, the cards activate…
What the cards do depend on the card. Anything that can move
– a bicycle, falling leaves, balloons etc – moves one space in the indicated direction.
And if you have a flower and a monster, the monster will eat the flower. You
then score points based on how many cards you have left on the window that can
score. Any that have gone flying off the window are gone and won’t score any
points. And if a card has moved on top of another card, you’ve lost them both. If
the monster eats the flower, you’ve lost the points for the flower – but not
the monster. And if you manage to get two smiley faces next to each other, that’s
worth an extra point.
The strategy involves building your window and watching out
for what the other players are doing. Have they got a lot of flowers? Probably
worth sending them monsters. Are they playing a lot of movable cards? Send them
some cards that can’t move, so that they will have to lose at least some points
accommodating them. At the same time, you must build your own window as efficiently
as you can – How can you stop your cards from overlapping each other? Will it
really be so bad if the monster eats the flower?
It took Kirsty a while to get the hang of what was happening
and I won the first game we played, however we both agreed that it’s a great little
game with mechanics that are easy enough to understand and use. We’re looking forward
to having another go with more players!
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| In Hell, they have trousers... |
I also downloaded and played the Ultimate Doom on my laptop.
I owned this game in 1998 and it is still good fun today. The reasons for this
lie with a lot of the things I was saying about Wolfenstein 3D back in the summer
– the level design is excellent, and the core gameplay loop is solid. Hardware
may have been somewhat limited back in the early 90s, but they squeezed every
ounce of playability they could out of that they had to work with.
After rebinding the keys with some finnicky DOS-based lists,
(now that I’ve discovered WASD for movement, I’m not going back,) and snarling
over the fact that for some reason you can’t bind Left Shift (would have been
great for running!) I set the difficulty to Ultra Violent (4/5.) I have played
through most of the game on the middle difficulty; that was on the Xbox version
with a controller, and I’ve got better at FPS since then so I thought I’d give
the increased difficulty a go. I was very glad I did, because the general
effect of this was to increase the number of enemies present in the level, leading
to some truly thrilling battles! I’ll come back to this every now and then.
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| This is the level I'll be playing next, funnily enough... |
Finally, I carried on with the Greek campaign of Age of
Empires. I’m enjoying it, but I got stuck on the mission where you need to attack
the temple. Whatever I tried, I couldn’t get my units close enough without the
enemy priests converting them! I eventually did it by being a bit more economical
with my unit building and pounding the enemy from afar with the catapults –
standard procedure for Age of Empires!
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