Odds and ends

I'm currently playing Die2Nite. It's a multiplayer co-op zombie survival game. It focuses around resource management and teamwork. Ultimately it is impossible to survive, and players can earn benefits for being the last one alive. So it forces you all to work together to make progress, but near the end when doom is inevitable, people start doing selfish things. Very interesting social dynamics.

Another game I just picked up is Gratuitous Space Battles. There is also a Mac version. It's really simple (and gratuitous). You choose ship hulls, add modules, place them in a fleet formation, give the captains orders, and hit "fight". After hitting the "fight" button, you have no further control. Here's a video what it looks like.

GSB allows playing against other people. Just set up a fleet, hit upload, and others can try fighting it. You get messages saying whether they succeed or fail.

Here's a plug for one of my own projects: "Crystal Shuffle" is an iPhone game I made. It's an old-school puzzle game, and is a lot of fun. I've gotten approval to continue and make another iPhone game. You can follow that development on Twitter by adding UbisoftAlmo to your follow list.

I recently got Hoard on PS3. It's a very nice action/RTS game where you are a dragon trying to amass treasure. It's a game of trade offs. If you burn the windmills and fields to get gold, their emitted gold carts are smaller. You can just take the carts, but then they don't get to cities to make them larger. Larger cities emit larger goods carts. You can just take the goods carts, but those also make other cities larger.

There are castles that emit royal carriages. Stealing their cargo (princesses) can yield a lot of money. Larger castles emit princesses worth more money. But they also make more powerful heroes you have to fight to keep the princesses.

Hoard supports online and offline multiplayer with up to four people. It's quite a lot of fun.

Well, I guess that's all for now.