2006 End of Year Gaming Update

K. Fields
2006-12-30T18:41:14-05:00
Video Games

I completed the latest season in Out of the Park Baseball 2006 in early November. Since then, I have played a variety of different computer games. I got hooked on American History Lux and played through the entire game on several difficulty levels. I hadn't played Risk in a quite some time and AHL was a nice substitute for it. I also got hooked on a great 2D arcade shooter, Platypus. It features very unique claymation artwork. I found it quite difficult and haven't made it to the final level yet, unfortunately.

I have been on vacation since December 15 so I have had some extra time for gaming over the last two weeks. I spent more than a little time playing some puzzle games. First was Enigmo 2, sort of like The Incredible Machine but in 3D. There was an afternoon where I couldn't stop playing the excellent Tetris clone, Quinn. I played for hours. I also fired up an old Christmas favorite, Holiday Express. All of them were a nice break from the standard computer game genres that I regularly play.

I finally got around to installing Tropico. What a great game it turned out to be! It is a building game somewhat like SimCity but I found it to be even more fun. One thing that really stood out was Tropico's outstanding soundtrack of Latin Bachata music. I haven't been this impressed with a game soundtrack since I heard Jeremy Soule's soundtrack to Icewind Dale. I first played a random map to get the hang of it. Next, I moved on to play one of the scenarios. Unfortunately, I was voted out of office after 40 years or so. I played a different scenario after that and was able to achieve the objectives. El Presidente finally won the respect of his people.

I hadn't played a first-person shooter in a while so I decided to install an FPS from my large backlog of games. I chose James Bond 007: Nightfire. I knew that it wasn't the most highly rated game out there. However, it was still worth a try. I started it on 12/23 and finished it on 12/30. All in all, I must say that it was good but not great. Most of the gameplay was actually pretty good. However, the game was buggy in places and did have a tendency to crash in a few spots. Perhaps the most annoying thing was the audio in most of the cut scenes. The volume level of the voices was way too low and was drowned out by most of the other sounds. That really destroyed the effectiveness of the scenes and how they should have advanced the plot of the game. Other than that, it was a decent shooter and the variety of Bond gadgets added some flair to the game. Overall, I enjoyed it but it won't be going on my All-Time Favorites list.