I used to play games with my father when I was younger, particularly after my parents divorced and I stayed with him on the farm. We’d play chess or cards most nights, along with any number of board games like Stratego, Pente, or Battleship. Once every two weeks we’d have a “guys night.” We’d start with burgers and an ice cream sundae, and finish up at the video game arcade. My father would buy $5 worth of tokens — about the equivalent to my entire week’s pay for doing chores around the house and on the farm — and we’d play until our faces were sore with laughing and the faux gold coins were all gone.

One of the best things about having a young man in the house is being able to play more games. Sedagive? and I played games every night before he arrived, but it’s always nice to have one more player on hand.

The hands on the clock have gone around a fair bit, and now I’m the adult observing how a young man plays games. I think the biggest thing that I have learned is that young people like to play. That sounds obvious, but at some point people stop playing the game and start playing to win. I guess this depends on the age and temperament of the person, and how they view competition. There’s an entire study of player types in the gaming world, but this goes beyond that.

I notice that he doesn’t care much for every intimate detail about the rules. Going over all of that crap means more time before playing. My friends won’t start a game without reading the rules at least twice, and pre-emptively arguing about how the rules are written and what they mean. Younger players just want to play as soon as possible. Older players want to make sure they don’t make any mistakes at the beginning of the game that may cause them to lose.

I’ll tell you — it’s a lot more fun when you just play the game instead of trying to game the gamers.

As such, we’ve had a blast playing games like Micro Mutants or Zombie Fluxx.While we haven’t gone to any arcades, it’s been great playing StarCraft II and Castle Crashers with him.

More importantly, it’s been fun for me to just play. We play StarCraft II co-op against the computer, and I get a chance to play around with units and build orders that I would never consider in my 1v1 competitive play online. We’ve restarted characters many times in Castle Crashers because we’re curious what would happen if we gave the fire knight an Alien Hominid lance or if the ice knight uses a big ass meat tenderizer.

I may not be back in Aladdin’s Castle playing Xenophobia or Galaga with my dad, but I am still appreciating the gift he gave me when I was younger. Thanks, Dad.

The first StarCraft computer game was released by Blizzard Entertainment in 1998. StarCraft was a real time strategy game, wherein players controlled troops and buildings from an isometric “god-like” perspective. Units and buildings were purchased from resources mined by workers. In the multi-player modes, every player started out with one home base and a few workers. How the game progressed from that point was up to the different strategies of the players.

The object of the game was to eliminate your enemies’s forces. Multiplayer games could range from one human player vs one computer player to up to eight players duking it out. You could play in teams, in a giant free for all, or set up teams and switch in the middle of the game to screw over one of your pals at random.

There were three main races to choose from, which was an innovation at the time. Most RTS games offered two sides; StarCraft offered a rock-paper-scissors approach that demanded different tactics depending on what race you were facing. Players could choose from the zerg, which were a hive-mind alien species that used cheap soldiers to swarm their enemies; the protoss, a high-tech and highly-evolved alien species that featured expensive, high-quality soldiers; or the terrans, humans-in-space that were stuck right in the middle of the quality vs quantity spectrum. These core differences plus the flexibility of unit selection and army composition added a variety to the game that allowed it to survive way beyond its expected prime.

The game became a major success, particularly in South Korea, where it became a professional sport with paid championships. While I never got close to that level of skill, I played StarCraft for about four straight years. I would reinstall the game every year or two and play for a few months. It was a great break from the massive multiplayer online role playing games that ate up a lot of my time back then.

Rumors of a sequel took off in 2002 when Blizzard released WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos. There was a secret demo mode wherein players could control units from StarCraft as rendered by the WarCraft III game engine. Talk flew about StarCraft II being released. Little did we know we’d have to wait another eight years after WarCraft III for a true StarCraft sequel.

It was worth the wait.
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I went to visit my mother at work when I was about eleven years old. I waited patiently in front of her desk while she machine-gunned at her typewriter. Clackity clack clack-clack-clackity-clack ka-ching! over and over again. I was impressed and mesmerized by the sound of it.

Four years later I registered for a Typing I class in high school. I was proud of myself for clacking out something like 50 words per minute on my first typing test. I zipped home and said to my mother with a wry smile, “what is your wpm?”

“One hundred twenty one words per minute.”

I’ve been trying to match her speed every day since then, and even though I keyboard for between eight and fourteen hours a day I have never been able to catch her.
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GameStop and Amazon.com are both running a promotion wherein if you pre-order Starcraft II you will get a key to participate in the beta program.

Previously you had to luck out and:

• get an invitation to the beta at random
• get a one-time buddy invite from someone already in the beta
• get a key through one of Blizzard’s ridiculous Facebook contests
• buy a key on eBay for up to $200+

I wound up pre-ordering through both Amazon and GameStop — Amazon for me, and GameStop as a thank-you to a co-worker who loves the original Starcraft.

Here’s a comparison of my experience.
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We used to play a lot of Settlers of Catan around here. I mean a lot. One of the best parts of the game is that the map is different every time. The hexes that make up the board are mixed up at the start of the game and distributed randomly.

One of the drawbacks to this is that the hex pieces are easily disturbed. There’s nothing hold them together, and without a single, unified game board anything can mess things up. Bump the table? The hexes move. Roll the dice on the board? The hexes move. Don’t nudge the edge of the assembled board, or you’ve got a miniature fault line on your hands.

Enter Mayday Games’s YuCatan game board for Settlers of Catan. Made of thick cardboard, the YuCatan board is designed to hold the Settlers map hexes firmly in place. Mayday was smart enough to only leave room for port tiles around the edges, so you don’t have to waste your time with empty ocean tiles.

I used the board one time about two years ago and it’s sat on my gaming book case until last week.

I was very surprised to learn that the board isn’t built to withstand use in a humid state like Virginia. I keep the house at 43% humidity, and apparently that is too much for the board to handle.

Observe:
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I received Zombie Fluxx as part of my 2009 Ars Technica Sekrit Santa gift. I had some limited, prior exposure to the original Fluxx game several years ago when I worked in Maryland and remember not liking it. I wasn’t entirely sure why I didn’t like it, and in fact I don’t remember if I played it or just watched it being played. However, I think it had something to do with all of the rules and that it seemed confusing.

Now, we all like zombies out here, and most of us like games, so I thought Zombie Fluxx would be worth a try, despite my reservations. We gave it a shot on the tail end of Christmas break, and have run it a few times since with different groups of gamers. Here’s what we thought.
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Every year, I am impressed at the thoughtfulness of the gifts I receive from my Sekrit Santa. The amount of consideration from my Sekrit Santa this year is matched only by my embarrassment at not posting sooner. We’ve been preparing the house for holiday visitors, and between the painting and the unexpected kitchen sink explosion I have been very bad at not saying thank you.

Here’s how my Ars Sekrit Santa did a fantastic job this year.
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We love board games at the Den o’ Gibberish. I prefer to play games that are partly competitive, partly co-operative. If a game isn’t truly co-operative, I like games that allow for “isolated group” play, wherein every person in the game can still do something, no matter how far ahead or behind they are. Games like Settlers of Catan, Dominion, and Carcassonne get a lot of play. Recently we’ve been playing a lot of Power Grid by Rio Grande Games. Power Grid is a nice blend of city building, auctioning, resource management, and tactics. It can be played by a wide range of ages and a wide range of player skill, all at the same time.
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I guess I’m officially old. When the sequel to Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare video game launched yesterday I was super excited. I took yesterday off in order to play online as late as I wanted to Tuesday and Wednesday.

I played the original Modern Warfare a ton online, mostly “free-for-all,” which pits players against each other. There were other game modes that were team-based, but I preferred the lone wolf style of FFA. I didn’t like my playing skill to handicap an otherwise good team, and I didn’t want to feel like lesser-skilled teammates were pulling me down.

After struggling with my Verizon FiOS-supplied router for over an hour, I finally got connected to Xbox Live!. After a short game patch I was in the multi-player lobby. I joined a game of other new players, and was ready to relive all of the fun I had playing COD4.

I spawned, took two steps, and was killed. I respawned, ran about ten yards, and was killed again. And so on. And so on.

Now, when you play a game like this online there is an adjustment period where you learn the maps, and the mechanics, and what not. But something felt different. It turned out that the “difference” was an increase in weapon damage and game tempo that I disliked. I sold my copy of MW2 after five hours of gameplay.

Here’s what went wrong.
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Hopefully by the time you read this, Amazon.com will have delivered my copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the Xbox 360. This is the first game I’ve purchased on launch day in recent memory. I think Everquest was the last game I bought at launch, which would have been in 1999.

Modern Warfare 2 is a first person shooter. There are many game modes, the vast majority of which are only available online versus other human players. The single player (offline) game mode seems to be expanded from the original. The trailer below is from the single player campaign.

Playing online is a quasi-role playing game experience; you start at level one with your choice of three “classes” that have different weapons packages. As you level up by killing opponents and helping team mates, you can select different equipment and customize your gear. While I am unsure of the details for MW2, the game will operate in roughly the same manner.

I played the first Modern Warfare, COD4, to the point that I canceled my subscription to GameFly, the Netflix-like video game rental service. In preparation for the game’s release, I’m taking tomorrow off at work. I haven’t decided if I want to finish up the single player campaign first, or jump right into multi-player. There will definitely be an advantage for starting the online component early. Learning the key points around the map is one of the most important parts of the game.

I already have my article typed up for tomorrow and it’s set to auto-post, so if I don’t come up for air for 48 hours you’ll know where I’ll be.