The Musical Method in Roleplaying Games

[kaptainvon]

Hello! My name is Von, and I am a person who plays games and thinks about them a bit too much. Found the community via three_weeks_for_dw and thought, in the spirit of the fest, that I might share this little story about how I run tabletop roleplaying games, and how that got started.

( It started, as these things often do, with a wager. I forget what was actually being wagered, but that's not important anyway. Shiny, a chap who history shall know only as Awesome Mike (because he is, mostly), and I had an afternoon on our hands and some Call of Cthulhu that we had an urgent need to play. )

Reaction Shot - Hills and Rivers Remain (iPod Touch)

[shanaqui]

Hills and Rivers Remain is the most addictive (for me) of the three games I downloaded. This one has a bit of a plot, and some characters, and although these are somewhat thin, there's more to keep your interest than in Crystal Defenders. The idea of the game is that you're fighting a war. Each level has a new map with forts on it, which you can only reach by going down pre-set paths. You start off with a certain number of soldiers, and each 'turn' you will gain more at your base -- the more land you've conquered, the more soldiers you receive. To conquer land, you have to select a number of soldiers to send, and then tap on the fort you wish to attack. The number displayed at the fort is the number of soldiers already there, and the colour denotes what army they belong to.

There are some special 'forts', with additional properties: stables and cannons, for a quick example. Stables allow your troops to move more quickly between forts, and cannons allow you to bombard enemy forts.

At the start of the game you face one other army, but over the course of the game, things get more complex and you face several different armies all at the same time. This can be insanely hard in some levels, but I found out (slowly) that if you get defeated in a level (which happens when all your soldiers are dead) then you can set a handicap and begin the level again, with a higher number of soldiers than everyone else.

You can't change the difficulty, as far as I can tell, until you've been defeated at a level once, which is slightly irritating. The controls can get a little fiddly, too, which wastes a bit of time when you're trying to quickly send troops somewhere.

I'm enjoying it a lot, in any case. I'm not sure how long the game is -- I'm on stage ten at the moment -- but it looks like there's a mode for just playing battles and not going through the gameplay. I haven't really explored that yet. Plot-wise, like I said, it's a bit thin -- it consists of a bit of dialogue between battles, really -- but I wasn't really expecting a deep plot.

Plants vs. Zombies

[telesilla]

I'm not a huge fan of tower defense games. My favorite Pop-Cap game is Bejeweled, which I don't play against the clock. Stuff that's timed or involves a lot of tension is normally Not For Me.

So why did I fall so hard for PvZ?

It's all about the fact that it's kind of hard to get too tense when you're playing a game that has such a goofy premise. You have a house and all that's between you and the zombies (who, of course, want to eat your brains) is your front lawn, then back lawn, then back lawn with a pool and then your roof.

Your defense? A series of increasingly weird plants, starting with pea shooters and sun flowers (the sun flowers provide suns, which enable you to buy more plants) and going on to potato bombs, various mushrooms, spikeweed and even melonpaults (yup, catapults that hurl melons) just to name a few. Your opponents? Various kinds of zombies. My favorite is the Michael Jackson zombie who summons up a troupe of dancers attired in 80s fashion rags.

There are also a series of mini games that you unlock as you go. Tip and new levels come from your neighboor, Crazy Dave ("but you can call me Crazy Dave"). It's very cartoony in a fun way, and the music is bouncy and more than a little addictive.

The game actually gets kind of hard in the last few levels and the final boss is kind of tough, or at least he was for me. The thing that I found surprising was that it's very replayable; I've played a lot of the mini-games and actually gone through the main game a few times.

So yeah, even if you're not wild about tower defense kinds of games, you might want to give this one a spin. It's incredibly fun, and isn't that what we want our games to be?

Oh also, it's available for iPhones & iPod Touches, but I've never played it on one.