Plants vs. Zombies vs. Anna

So as previously discussed, we all trekked down to Des Moines late this morning and picked up our iPad. Heidi loves it - it's just the kind of eReader that she wanted. She's already loaded a bunch of eBooks she's been meaning to read into the iBook library and there they sit, complete with covers and the whole nine yards. I've been sitting here tonight using it to beta-read a novella she just finished writing which she describes as "the smutty Snow White."

When we were at the Apple Store today, I picked up one of the demo iPads and was messing around with it and played a little Plants vs. Zombies, which released an HD iPad edition today. For those that don't know, PvZ is exactly what it claims to be - a game in which you defend your home against hordes of undead zombies with nothing more than garden plants. The plants range from simple sunflowers that generate sun to help you plant more seeds, to "pea" shooters and "cherry bombs." It's actually quite a clever game, so I blew $9.99 on it in the app store. It looks a little something like this.



The minute I fired it up, Anna scrambled over to the chair to see what I was up to. She was immediately in love with it, always eager to see which seed pack we would get at the end of each level. Before too long, we were taking turns - she'd play a level, then I'd play a level - until we got to one that we couldn't pass so we called it quits and watched The Muppets Take Manhattan on the Netflix box. When I went out to the kitchen to find some food, she followed me and I knew something was up. I asked her if she was spooked by something to which she immediately replied "NO!" but as I pressed her, asking her if that game had freaked her out, she confessed that it had. She wanted to play it, but was torn between her desire to play it and her general level of discomfort with anything remotely scary. She declared that she didn't want to play the game anymore, which I will admit was a bummer, but one that I was not really going to push knowing how she reacts to things like that.

I was worried about bedtime because for Anna, that's when everything that scares her comes out. But as she was getting ready for bed, we were talking about the game again, and she said "Dad, let me see that game again." to which I replied "Are you sure? I thought that game scared you." She insisted, and we looked at it and when she saw all the plants we still had to unlock and remembered how much fun we had she made a declaration: "Dad, I'm not scared of that game. It's just a cartoon and it was fun. We're going to keep on playing it." We then talked about how ridiculous zombies are because, without a brain to tell your muscles what to do, there's no way movement is possible.

This makes me happy on two levels - the first and most important being that my daughter, who really does get scared of a lot of things like that, faced her fears instead of giving into them. And secondly, this means we get to keep on playing because honestly, it was a hell of a good time. The game paid for itself in the hour or so we played it tonight, and I think we have many more hours ahead of us.

That is, if we can wrestle the iPad away from Heidi.

Larger than life

No, this will NOT be a post about the Backstreet Boys song of the same name.

Heidi has been stuck in revision hell for the last week, coming out of her office mostly just to refill her coffee cup (except when she takes the thermos up and then we don't see her for hours!), leaving Anna and me to mostly fend for ourselves. This is nothing new. I've experienced this countless times before, usually in October/November when she was getting a maunscript ready for the Golden Heart. We know that it happens, and we also know that it reaches an end. But since she has been in her own world (literally), Anna and I decided to go see what kind of trouble we could get up to.

That involved us going out to Family Video and renting a Wii game that I have been intrigued with in theory, but wanted to try before I plunked down the money for it. It's Rampage: Total Destruction (warning: sound pretty much instantaneously.) It is basically an update of the 1986 arcade game Rampage, which has you controlling monsters of various forms, knocking down buildings, eating people, etc. My sister and I played a PC port of this constantly probably 15 years ago so I have a lot of fond memories of the original game. Anna and I also played an emulation of the original game for a while a couple years ago. Whenever the monster ate a person, she laughed uproariously. So when I saw that it was available for the Wii with souped up graphics and up to 30 (!) unlockable monsters, we had to give it a go.

We did find it, picked it up for $3.50 (for 5 nights, no less) and then hit Dairy Queen on the way home. We shared one of their cotton candy Blizzards (which, amazingly, had no calories or fat) and then headed home to play.

It's pretty cool to be able to play this game in three dimensions, and the ability to play through real live cities has been fun. But it still suffers from the problem that the original game had: it is repetitive as hell! Destroy all the buildings, move on to the next block. That is not to say that it is not fun, I just don't see it having a super long shelf life. Anna and I have a blast playing it, though. It's especially entertaining to hear her say "Dad, I'm gonna go find some more people to eat!" And as I mentioned before, you're not limited to the original George the Gorilla, Lizzie the Lizard and Ralph the Wolf. There's a giant chicken, a giant ram, a cyclops, a shark, etc. They all do pretty much the same thing so the differences are more or less cosmetic.

Like I said, Anna and I have fun playing it, but it's certainly not worth full price. I found it on Amazon Sellers for 13 bucks and that is still just a little more than I am willing to pay for it. If I could get it for 10 bucks including shipping, then they might have a deal. Instead, we'll just play the hell out of it until Thursday when it's due back.

And in keeping with the giant, mutated animals theme, I finally sat down and watched my Netflix that had been sitting on top of the TV for at least a week. Eight Legged Freaks is a giant spider movie from several years back that has been hanging out in the top 10 of my Netflix queue for ages, but always getting bumped back by other, sexier movies. I was so pleasantly surprised by this. It is a B-movie, there's no doubt about it, but what a heck of B-movie it was.

Basic premise is toxic waste spills into a local stream in Prosperity, AZ and it mutates the spiders (just the spiders?) to gigantic arachnids. I was expecting some pretty bad effects, but surprisingly, they were excellent. There were a few times when the CG-ness of the spiders was apparent, but mostly, I was just so overwhelmed by the sheer number of the spiders that I didn't pay attention to that much.

At only 99 minutes, it was certainly not a huge time sink, and it was very enjoyable to boot. Here's one of the better sequences.



An enjoyable weekend, that's for sure. Now it's time to get ready for work.

Jabba - no match for Anna

So tonight I finally managed to open the Battle at Sarlacc's Pit game that I found at my folks' house over the weekend, thinking that Anna might enjoy playing it. I opened it up and I about fell over dead from shock when I found out that it was not missing one single piece. This is truly amazing considering how we treated our toys as kids. That is not to say that we were careless with them, but rather they just REALLY got played with.

It was, however, missing one very important piece of information: the directions for gameplay. Since I haven't played the game in probably 25 years, I hadn't any idea as to how to play it. A little inventive Google searching led me to this page, which had a pdf of the rules. With that, we were set to go. At least Anna was.

Get a load of the Jabba piece they have in the game. There's a lot on the web about how crappy the game pieces are, and they aren't kidding. Jabba looks like a snail or something.

Gameplay is incredibly easy, mostly having to do with number cards and "Force" cards, etc. I guess for a game geared at ages 7-12, it can't exactly be chess. Basically the idea is to knock all everybody into the Sarlacc Pit. As one review I found online said, anyone who can't find the fun in that needs to get out more often. You have to kill all the Gamorrean Guards first, then Boba Fett and Nikto before you get a shot at Jabba.

Naturally, Anna kicked my ass both times we played. I was nothing but Bantha poo-do to her. The Hutt was no match for her. Witness.



I imagine a lot more games of this in my future, although how long it will hold Anna's attention I'm not sure.

Zombies meet Guitar Hero...well, sort of

I was poking around online yesterday and stumbled across the site Kill The Zombies! which features a ton of online zombie games. Now, I'm not a big gamer, and online gaming I'm even less into, but I have to admit that some of these are kind of fun because they remind of me of some of the retro games from the 80s in their gameplay and simplicity.

However, the one that caught my attention the most was We Are Legend: Akropolis which is based EXTREMELY loosely on Guitar Hero, another game that I rather inexplicably like as well. I like Guitar Hero so much that I came this close to getting that instead of my sexy new 160GB iPod that I am loving so damn much. I like Guitar Hero so much that I actually played Heart's "Crazy On You" in Best Buy one night when we were there. Just like a 21 year old college student. And it was liberating and fun!

Anyway, this zombie game takes the fun of Guitar Hero, runs it through the equivalent of the Star-Off Machine and what you get at the end is a zombie killing game that functions a bit like Guitar Hero. Zombies walk across 5 flame traps set up in front of a barricade. The Q, W, E, R, and T buttons function the same as the buttons on the guitar, activating each of the traps. The space bar ignites the flame, basically serving as the "strum" on the guitar.

It's not bad, although like most online games, I can see it getting old fast. It also gets HARD fast. I am still playing the "training wheels" levels and I am not very good at it. The first level is quite easy, but successive levels get much harder. The biggest drawback is it's kind of hard to tell which row the zombies are in until it's too late, especially when you have a ton of them coming at you at once.

But since it's something zombie, you knew I had to give it a whirl.

(image via some random myspace page which I won't link to because it plays music)

The King of Kong

(Warning: This is long, or at least has the potential to be.)

When I was a kid, I loved arcade games. I spent more time and money in the back of our Hy-Vee store than I care to think about, plunking quarters into Frogger and Mario Bros. and Sinistar. On my first trip to Adventureland, I nearly fell over dead from excitement when I saw a whole arcade devoted to these games, many of which I had only read about or seen played on Starcade. For a brief moment, while walking down their old Main Street mock-up and seeing the sign "Penny Arcade" over the arcade, I thought that the games really would take pennies. Sadly, no.

Anyway, yesterday on my day off (when I couldn't even be bothered to take a shower or comb my hair) I watched The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters which arrived from Netflix a full day ahead of schedule. Because of my love for retro games and Donkey Kong in particular, I was really looking forward to watching it. It had played at the Varsity here in Ames for a while last fall and several times, I was tempted to go see it. For all the usual reasons, it never happened (no money, no time.)

The documentary looks at the intense rivalry that develops between Billy Mitchell, a retro gaming celebrity and Steve Wiebe, an recently laid-off engineer from Redmond, WA, thanks to Wiebe's attempt to break Mitchell's long-standing world record Donkey Kong score. Wiebe, faced with all this time on his hands gets an actual Donkey Kong arcade game and sets out to best Mitchell's record. I'm not spoiling anything by saying that he does it. What follows is worthy of being called high drama.

It's funny, this little movie about Donkey Kong, classic game competition and (honestly) macho posturing really affected me on a deep level. As with all documentaries, it is written from a certain vantage point and with a certain agenda. Billy Mitchell is portrayed very negatively in the film, and so much of that is his own fault. He comes off as a cocky bastard that the audience desperately wants to see get his comeuppance. He is elusive and seems to live in a world that he has constructed around him, reality be damned. Wiebe, on the other hand, is the Everyman in this story, the one we're all rooting for even though I'm certain there is more to the story than was presented in the documentary.

Perhaps I have my own prejudices to deal with when watching a movie like this. Guys like Billy Mitchell (or at least how he came across in the documentary) really piss me off. At the end of the day, it's a fucking score on a video game, not the cure for cancer. It is kind of, in my mind, what happens when you get too much of your identity caught up in one thing. That one thing can be a job, a marriage, a blog, a whatever. Mitchell's entire raison d'etre seems to be having that high score on Donkey Kong, come hell or high water. And when Wiebe threatens to take that away, his world crashes down around him. Watch the scenes where Mitchell's protege Briah Kuh is giving Mitchell the play-by-play of Wiebe's Donkey Kong game at Funspot in New Hampshire. It's almost comical how seriously Mitchell takes it.

Wiebe, on the other hand, was the kind of guy I'd like to go out and have a beer or lunch with. He's seems so unassuming, so down to earth. He seems like, well, a geek like me (and many others that have come out of the geek-closet this week.) While there's no denying that he takes Donkey Kong every bit as seriously as Mitchell, it doesn't seem to dominate his life or define his identity as it does for Mitchell. In the same way that guys like Mitchell piss me off, guys like Wiebe are the kinds of people that I really like to get to know. I almost can't put into words, but he seems like a kindred spirit. Of course, I can't know that from the movie, but I'm sure that many of you know what I mean. The people that attract me the most are those that have a veneer of ordinariness, only to find out upon closer inspection, their real selves are at severe odds with that projected ordinariness.

So as you might expect, I saw a mirror of myself in that movie. While I am certainly not a Donkey Kong aficionado (I can barely clear 4 boards on a good game), I am not that which so many would assume from outward appearances. Yes, in many ways, I am. But that's the part of me that's the least interesting, at least to me. Certainly, it is not just an important but an essential part of who I am, because it's the part of me that is a good husband and attentive father and hard worker at my job. But as I am so fond of saying, there's a lot more to me than that. Those closest to me know that for certain. Many who read this blog see shades of it. I am probably not nearly as enigmatic as I think I am, but hey, what can you do?

This week has been all about embracing the inner geek. I remember being a kid and just being deathly afraid of that word. Nothing was worse than being a geek. Or a nerd. And then along came Revenge of the Nerds in 1984 and while it is ultimately about nerd-empowerment, it also scared me because it seemed like even as an adult, nerdery would follow me everywhere I went. As I've grown older, I've come to embrace the nerd in me. Really, I had no other choice but to do so. I am who I am, and can be nothing else. The harder you try to be something you're not, the more it sneaks up on you and demands to be heard. I have never been unhappier in my life than when I am trying to be something that I'm not. As the old adage says, honesty really is the best policy. But I am also not stupid. I realize that blazing honesty and wearing your heart on your shirt sleeve is not appropriate in every situation. But being who you are, even when it means not being what your outward appearance would lead other people to believe is at least being true to yourself.

That's a lot to get out of a movie like The King of Kong. It probably helps that this week has been Nerdery Week. I can't think of a more appropriate movie to have watched during this week.

Now excuse me, I'm off to play Donkey Kong.

Apropos of nothing, when I told Anna what the movie was about, she shot up out of the chair and went over to her computer, loaded up MAME and announced that she was going to get the world's highest score on Donkey Kong. Rock on, Anna.