Masem’s Gaming Blog

Keeping this really short and simple – the Peggle translation to Xbox Live is pretty much all forms of awesome, with the “Peggle Party” addition for XBox Live being a perfect touch.

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Braid is a rather unique puzzler-platform game available through Xbox Live.  While the basic play makes the game look like your typical Mario clone, the bulk of the game is centered around the use of time manipulation and other time-related puzzles in order to collect hard-to-reach puzzles and complete the game.  The game is fantastically presented, and while the unique time-based puzzles are great, there is a very very steep learning curve as well as puzzles that require tight timing and controls in order to complete, and these may make the game too frustrating for those that lack the patience to solve them.  I feel the game could have used just a few more “tutorial” type puzzles which would have smoothed out the difficulty curve and made the game much more accessible.  Still, however, the game is one that should be praised for its distinctive approach.

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Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (Episode 1) is the first of a series of four games to be developed by Hothead Games that take the Penny Arcade webcomic into a nice variation on both Western and Eastern RPG elements.  The game’s a bit pricey for its length, and some of the graphics and sound design aspects are a little odd, but otherwise don’t detract from what is generally a pretty good game.

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Carcassonne , like Settlers of Catan, has made the jump from a popular tabletop game to Xbox Live in this version developed by Seirra Studios. The game does an excellent job staying faithful to the boardgame and has potential for future expansions. While the online version is lacking some features that Catan had, the result is still as good; a quick fun game that’s easy to learn but has many different strategies to learn.

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So “Settlers of Catan” has finally made it to Xbox Live. The game holds up pretty well to the board version save for a couple areas:

1) It’s too easy to abuse the trade screen with computers. If you’re playing against all human opponents, and you need one of two or more types of resources, you usually can’t play them that much (eg “What’ll you take to give me sheep? Nothing, what’ll you take to give me ore?” would never likely happen in a real game). Here, you can see if the computer AI takes you up on one offer, then cancel it and try another until you’re happy (or your time limit ends of course). You can never poke and prod a human opponent like that.

2) Computer opponents hold a grudge too easily. Be the first to use the robber on their space and they’ll target you for the rest of the game, it seems, even if another player does it 5 or 6 times afterwards.

3) In game text graphics on HDTV even are really small. Dead Rising small. That should be fixable.

4) The XBL notification box is not shifted to a empty area of the board and stays in the bottom center, where all the game messages about what’s happening appears. Thus, it’s very easy to miss what’s happening if you have an active friends list. That should be fixable as well.

Regardless, against 4 human opponents, this is easily a great way to bring a popular board game to the XBL community. I would love to see some others (even simple games like Scrabble or Monopoly would be good too).