Nintendo Switch Sports Resort keeps the spirit of Wii Sports alive

 I very quickly realized that Nintendo Switch Sports Resort pretty much fired Nintendo Switch Sports for me. Which is how it's kind of supposed to work but Resort completely eclipses the earlier game for me which only came out four years ago. In comparison, as much as I really enjoy Mario Kart World, Mario Kart 8 deluxe still has a lot of play for me and that came out eight years and two platforms before World.

I still remember being at a party shortly after the Wii came out and playing tennis on Wii sports. While it didn't make me go out and buy a Wii, it was a transformative experience for me.  It wasn't really like playing tennis but it was much closer than Pong. It was socially engaging and physically active. I had even less video game awareness than I have now but that one tennis game completely revised my thoughts on what was possible with a video game. I still think of it as a revolution.

By the time Nintendo Switch Sports came out, the Switch was a mainstay in our home. My wife and our kid love video games, specifically Nintendo, and Animal Crossing keeping me sane in 2020 got me a lot more engaged as well. I hoped Nintendo Switch Sports would recapture the magic of Wii Sports for me. And, you know what? It did. The formula is simple on paper but it works. Use motion controls to imitate sports. Makes perfect sense right off the bat.

But when Nintendo Switch Sports Resorts came out? Resort kept everything that I was actually doing with Sports and added so much more. 

There are only three games that have been dropped from the lineup and I only regularly played one of them, Badminton. Resort added Table Tennis, which scratches the same itch while being more meaningfully different than tennis Tennis. Mainstays like Tennis or Golf or Bowling are still there. It is amazing how relaxing a game or two of virtual bowling can be. And DLC and patches are industry standard now so I'm expecting more games will be added. (And I'm good if that doesn't happen)

And I am pretty sure that resort increased the level of motion sensitivity and fidelity. Which actually makes things more difficult because it means you have to work harder on being accurate, but that gives me a reason to keep on playing.

But... what makes Nintendo Switch Sports Resort bury Nintendo Switch Sports in an unmarked grave is Wuhu Island. Nintendo Switch Sports took place at Spocco Square which was basically just a menu for sports. It didn't have any actual meaning for the game or gameplay. Nintendo Switch Sports Resort lets you explore the actual island via plane, jet ski and skate board. Wuhu Island is treated as an actual place. When you fly the prop plane over the golf course, it looks like the golf course you play on.

Ironically, these are all activities that you can do sitting down so they are farther away from being sports simulations than any of the other activities.

Our entire family has gotten into the sightseeing option, which has you hunt down floating cameras and interaction with the environment in other ways. It lets you explore while giving you some additional purpose. Free play is also available if you want to just wander but we like having a goal. Really, the three exploration activities are more like 'regular' video games but they add a lot of play for us.

Compared to the Hyrule of Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, Wuhu Island isn't that big. But it is big enough to keep you busy as you explore it in different ways.

Nintendo Switch Sports Resort isn't deep but it gives me a reason to keep moving.

A Meeting With Medusa is all about setting, setting, setting

 While most of the Tor Double Novel series republished New Wave or post-New Wave works, the headliner of the very first volume Arthur C. Clarke's A Meeting with Medusa. Clarke isn't a name I see associated with the more cynical, mature and philosophical bent of New Wave. That being said, I honestly assume works like Childhood's End, 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Nine Billion Names of God had some influence on New Wave.

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A Meeting with Medusa is about the first manned exploration of Jupiter. Since Jupiter is a gas giant, this has to be done with the high tech equivalent of a hot air balloon, although the balloon has to use super heated hydrogen to function in Jupiter's atmosphere. As you'd expect from Clarke, when actual science gets involved in the plot, he goes all in.

The protagonist, pilot and sole occupant of Kon Tiki high tech balloon is Howard Falcon. His personal story serves as bookends for the novella. At the start, we read about the terrible accident that forces medical science to turn him into a cyborg. At the end, we are shown, for the first time, how heavily he has been rebuilt, to the point where he has wheels instead of feet.  There is a thin theme about how Falcon is now a liminal being, existing in between worlds and can act as a bridge between them.

But that's not why anyone remembers A Meeting with Medusa.

No, what you take away from this book is Clarke's vibrant vision of Jupiter, including what kind of life could evolve in that kind of environment. In this case, medusa does not refer to the Greek legend but the jellyfish. Clarke's vision is very much of sea life, floating and gliding through the thick atmosphere. And the showpiece of this vision is indeed a jellyfish ten times larger than a whale. That might even be intelligent.

The plot is remarkably thin. Falcon goes to Jupiter, observes the fantastic landscape and makes reasonable decisions in order to get back safely. The opening scene of the balloon crash that cripples Falcon is easily the most dramatic part of the entire book.

But again, that doesn't matter. What you take away from the book is the setting and that is worth the price of reading. I don't know if that was Clarke's real point in writing the work but it has become the point. 

In the decades since A Meeting with Medusa, Clarke’s vision of Jupiter’s ecology as a fusion of sea life and ballooning has informed many later visions of Jupiter. In fact, while reading it, I realized that the 1980 National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe used it as the basis for theoretical life on Jupiter.

As a work of fiction, A Meeting with Medusa isn’t that strong. As an exercise in world building, it’s amazing.

My October Gaming

 October was another crazy busy month. To be honest, I know adulting will be heavy for the rest of the year other than the holidays.

I learned:

Adventurous - Outlands (playtest)

Roll and Robot (design contest)

Banana Carts (playtest)

Leap Frog (Alexander Shen)

Untitled Simply Solo #12 (playtest)

Fintastic

October gave me the gift of a bunch of Buttonshy Playtests. Which I sadly didn't have a lot of time for but it gave my game time more structure and purpose. That was really quite nice. I will say that I found Adventurous - Outlands significantly more enjoyable than the original game. A few changes made the game more intuitive for me. And I was surprised and delighted at the hidden rigor of Banana Carts. The cute artwork (which will be a real selling point) hid some interesting choices.

Roll and Robot is perhaps the quintessential example of a Roll and Write that I squeezed in to make sure I learned a new R&W. Quick and simple with mechanics I am already very familiar with.  That said, it was a very chill experience. It's not a challenging game, in fact the more unique bits make it less challenging than similar games. However, it will get some play from me just as a way to relax.

Fintastic is a tile-laying game that has one tiny twist that makes it interesting. You have to make a path of tiles to a fish but then you have to make a path back to the fisherman. So, while you try to set up scoring combinations, you can end up being forced to cover them on the way back.

I am hoping Thanksgiving will give me the chance to get some heavier gaming in. However, Buttonshy really made my October.

My October PnP

 Play testing drove both my PnP crafting and game play in October. October was a very busy month with lots of adulting but play testing gave me a reason to kick gaming up a notch.

I made:

Adventurous - Outland (playtest)

Banana Carts (playtest)

Fintastic 

Roll and Robot

Legends of Mana Island (base map)

Leap Frog (Alexander Shen)

Pocket Landship (Star Wars fan variant)

Untitled Simply Solo #12  (play test) 

I guess Fintastic or Leap Frog would count as my ‘big’ build for the month, even though some of the play tests were at least as big. But those aren’t exactly final versions so it doesn’t feel right to count them.

I sadly did not get a lot of play out of anything I made or anything else. Still, having the play tests made both my crafting and playing more structured than September. That was good.

A lot of anyone’s time is spent adulting (or, in the case of a kid, training for adulting) but it’s healthy to work in some play.

Palm Laboratory builds on its island little brother

 Palm Island was a watershed game for me. It wasn’t the first In Hand game I learned but it really kicked off my interest in the medium. And I still think it is one of the best, between a solid decision tree and intuitive game play.

However, I think that it’s sequel, Palm Laboratory, is better.

Like its younger sibling, Palm Laboratory is an In Hand game, in this case means a deck of cards that stays in your hand the entire game. Handy for when you don’t have a table.

There are functionally three things you can do with a card. You can discard any card, putting it at the back of the deck. Some cards can be turned sideways and put in the back of the deck, becoming resources. And cards can upgraded, spending resources to flip or rotate cards before you, yes, put them in back. Upgraded cards can be better resources or worth points or both.

In Palm Island, your deck is an island village that you are developing. In Palm Laboratory, it is a mad scientist’s lab and you are doing mad experiments. You know, using the same basic mechanics, different flavor.

The big change between the games is the addition of goal cards and a danger meter. In Palm Island, you play for eight rounds, plain and simple. Palm Laboratory makes it a bit more complicated.

At the bottom of the deck, there is a goal card and the danger meter. Each stage of the goal card requires you to pay a certain amount of resources. If you don’t upgrade the goal card, the danger meter goes up. And if it maxes out, it’s game over.

So, instead of eight rounds and trying to beat your own score, Palm Laboratory has variable rounds and a win-lose condition. On top of that, the goal cards don’t give you any points so you have to spend resources that keep you alive but don’t help your score.

There are three different goal cards. The resource goal, which is easy one, that just has you spend regular resources. The research goal and the experiment goal add cards to the deck, creating new types of resources that only count toward the goal card. Which still count towards your four active resource card limit. The research goal makes resource management much tighter while the goal card adds a push your luck element.

Oh, on top of that, you can add a helper card that will give some kind of resource and, for a very limited number of times, keep the danger meter from going up.

Palm Island offered a sleek resource management, engine building experience. Palm Laboratory adds a new layer of decisions and the very real threat of failure. Palm Laboratory adds some legitimate meat to the system without getting fiddly about it. 

Palm Laboratory isn’t just Palm Island with different art. The mechanical changes take it to the next level and I didn’t even know it there was a next level. 

Unfortunately, Palm Laboratory seems to be harder to find than Palm Island. Hopefully that will change because it is worth finding.

Roger Zelazny’s brilliant examination of horror tropes

 George R. R. Martin described A Night in the Lonesome October as ‘The Last Great Novel by one of the giants of the genre.’ A fair description. It’s also an absolute hoot. Roger Zelazny was a fun writer who left us too soon (I have a friend who routinely curses Zelazny for being a chain smoker) and A Night in the Lonesome October may be his funnest book.

I wanted to add a fun read to my Halloween October reading and rereading it proved to be a great choice.

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A Night in the Lonesome October is about Jack the Ripper trying to keep the Great Old Ones out of our world and is narrated by his dog.

But, oh, it’s even more fun than that.

When the full moon falls on October 31, it may be possible to open a gate into the elder gods realm. Strange and mysterious people will be drawn to the place where this could happen, openers who want to let them in and closers who want to keep them out. And they all have talking animals for buddies.

Taking place in Victorian England, the cast includes the Wolfman, Count Dracula, Doctor Frankenstein and his Monster, Sherlock Holmes and Rasputin. Zelazny lovingly filed serial numbers off of all of them while making it clear who he was talking about.

The whole book is a love letter to so many horror themes. One whole chapter is basically a synopsis of Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. And Zelanzy isn’t writing a parody. All of the characters are written with thoughtful respect. (Indeed, the Count in the two scenes he appears in is fascinatingly disturbing)

And it is all tied together by Snuff, Jack the Ripper’s dog who may actually be a transformed demon. Snuff has a cynical, world weary voice like other Zelanzy narrators like Conrad from This Immortal or Corwin from the first five Amber books. I have heard the tone described as hardboiled but it’s more like Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin than Dashiell Hammet’s Continental Op. They are always more hopeful than they will admit.

And A Night in the Lonesome October is very much a meditation on hope. The Mythos deities are too nightmarish to actually appear. Jack cursed murderous nature is understated but clearly there. As I mentioned before, Count Dracula is an unnatural hole in reality.

But the Great Old Ones can be held off. People will do the right thing at great cost. And friendships are real.

A Night in the Lonesome October reminds us how much we lost when Roger Zelazny died so young.

Tiny little In Hand game from Alexander Shen

 I recently tried a game called Leap Frog, a title that has been used a whole bunch of times. In this case, it's an In Hand game by Alexander Chen. 

It consists of a small deck of cards. There are pictures of frogs from egg to full grown on the cards but all that actually matters is the numbers. There one 1 and three 2s,3s,4s,and 5s and two 6s. Really, you could make the deck out of a regular deck of playing cards if you wanted to.

Your goal is to get the cards in numeric order. It can be ascending or descending order. You don't use the whole deck, just seven of the cards. In the normal game, it's six random cards and the 1. In the challenge game, it's seven random cards period. You can swap a card with another card that it's value of spaces away. There's no time limit. Just keep going until you are done or you're sure it's impossible.

Now, here's the thing about the normal game. Having the 1 means you can always dink away at moving cards and any hand will always be solveable. It's only in the challenge version that you can have seven cards that are impossible to put in order.

A couple years ago, Shen made another In Hand game called Tumbling Thru Time that had a similar goal of putting numbered cards in order. In that game, when you used a card, you used it up so there were a limited number of moves in the game. I didn't enjoy Tumbling Thru Time and found it frustrating. 

Leap Frog, with its unlimited moves, is a simpler and definitely easier game. Even in challenge version, it's not as frustrating. The only restriction that Leap Frog has that Tumbling Thru Time doesn't have is that you can't wrap around from one end to the other.

Alexander Shen designs tiny, little activities that basically take a cup of coffee to do. Which doesn't sound like much until you see how badly so many games like that are. Within their chosen niche, Shen is pretty brilliant. Leap Frog is a very simple game. I'd say it is the simplest In Hand game I've played but I've played Down. If you are looking for a real challenge, you won't find it here. If you are looking for a quick brain break, Leap Frog might work for you.

I think Shen's dice and more conventional card games are better than their In Hand games. But I do like having Leap Frog around.