What I Played Today: February 6

Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times, Guild Wars, Flash Games

I had the day off and spent it inside, where I played a few games, most of them not terribly interesting. I’ll hit the highlights.

My most recent rental is Magician’s Quest: Mysterious Times. It is basically Animal Crossing with magic, as you arrive to join magic school, in a town populated by anthropomorphic characters. I haven’t gotten very far, mainly because there’s a less guidance than I would have liked, and I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing. The only thing so far I’ve done is been upset that those who rented before me named the school Hogwarts in a complete drought of unoriginality, and I wandered into a haunted house only to be spooked out almost instantly. Hopefully, I’ll make it a bit farther soon; I hear that there’s mini-adventures each week to be solved, so I hope I eventually find the right cues to discover them.

I also played a little bit of Guild Wars, an old standby that I’ve been playing for over four years. There was some holiday questing that needed to be fulfilled, so I wandered around the fish farms of the African-inspired realm of Istan looking for Christmas presents with Rudi the reindeer. It was pretty dull, truthfully, mainly because the only areas of the game that I haven’t seen way too much of requires more player interaction than I’m comfortable with. Most of the time, I run with a small cadre of robots. They are so well programmed that I could basically wandering around without actually attacking and be able to mop up most of the areas. That probably why I like Guild Wars so much, because of the fact that you can see most of the game either solo or with a group. That and the CCG-like quality of the skill system. (The cost also helps)

I also spent some amount of “bored time” playing a tower defense game online, the name of which I can’t remember and don’t feel like looking up. It involved some nonsense involving finding walrus statues. The only real thing that set the game apart was that the money you have after the round is over is put into a common fund, and the number of structures you can have each level is limited to a small number. Otherwise, it’s not that great; there’s a huge rash of tower defense games nowadays, and frankly I’m getting really bored with them. I don’t know why I play them so often.