OK. This was weird. I barely played any games this weekend other than a few with Mr. N'Gai Croal.
On Friday I played "PixelJunk Eden Encore" with N'Gai Croal. We were enjoying the new triple-seed-activation move but were otherwise struggling to find what was good about the new levels. Then we discovered the madness of a level with moving platforms. Not bad, but I recall series designer Dylan Cuthbert saying to me at Game Developers Conference that he'd prefer to make new "PixelJunk" games instead of expanding existing ones. I'm with him.
N'Gai and I also played "Maboshi's Arcade," a collection of three simple geometrically based games for WiiWare. Each game can be played in a window on the screen, so I took the left window and played a "circle" game. N'Gai played a "square" game. Oddly, his gaming and my gaming had nothing to do with each other. (A glowing IGN review says I'm wrong about this, but I haven't seen what they're talaking about). I then tried the square game too, which is like playing "Snake" if the snake's tail was on fire and the goal was to set everything in the level ablaze -- it's a smart little game. The peculiar WiiWare game also allows you to unlock a version that can be sent to your DS, something I haven't been able to do yet.
We played some "Burnout Paradise Party" on the PS3. "Party" is the game's relatively new pass-the-controller multiplayer mode that is downloadable was an expansion to the core game. Players take turns tackling the same challenges. I'd played it with my wife and I'd liked it. N'Gai and I dug it too.
I showed him "Bit.Trip Beat," the latest critical darling on WiiWare. It's a music game that riffs on "Pong"-style gameplay and ranks with "World of Goo" as among the service's best offerings. But/and it's hard.
And… that's it. I watched my wife play some "PixelJunk Monsters" on Saturday, but, otherwise it was work, some nice weather and some other life duties that kept me playing. Signs of warm weather cutting into my gaming time? Could be.
Next: I keep waiting for the mailroom guy to deliver me "Excitebots," which so pleasantly surprised me at GDC.