The Egg Of Worlds

I recently purchased Animal Crossing for my Gamecube, and an e-Reader that came with a number of cards for my GBA. Animal Crossing is fun so far; the equivalent of virtual Sea Monkeys that you can write letters to. There are a lot of cute little activities you can perform as an avatar wandering around the world you create - digging up fossils, catching fish, performing deliveries for other avatars, and writing letters to them (of course). The game has a lot of depth - I'm hoping I can get one or two other folks to set up shop in my town who will play regularly, or to find another person or two who have towns I can visit.

You see, the coolest thing about this game is that it's extensible. With the e-Reader attached to my GBA, and my GBA attached to the Gamecube, I can actually add more data to the game. Additional characters, music, items, patterns for clothing... all you do is scan these cards that you purchase separately through the e-Reader and they get uploaded to your memory card. The cards have this micro-dot code written onto them that runs through the e-Reader and gets interpreted by the GBA for uploading into your world. Other towns that get created by other people sprout different kinds of characters, different kinds of fish and insects, and different fruit trees - and you can actually cross-pollinate all of these things between worlds. There's even another miniature tropical island world that resides on the GBA when it's hooked up to the game ("Animal Island").

I'm sure that we're only a decade or two away from incomprehensibly complex virtual worlds. How long before we attain such a level of complexity that sentience arises naturally in such evolutionary systems? Will my Gamecube rise up against me, a la the machines in the Matrix?

Game Night

This past Tuesday Android, Zss, and Creatrixx participated in game night. We played "Phantoms of the Ice", an Alan Moon / White Wind game left to me by Chris J., and as Android brought his satchel o' gaming doom, we played "Shaufenster".

"Phantoms" was great - I won! Woo! It's a hockey game with forwards, defenders, and goalies; they are valued from 0 to 11 and when you play a game against someone else's team, you play them off of one another kind of like war. The idea is to win nine games, and then have a multi-game playoff with the second highest scoring team to determine the champion. You also get to draft new players by pulling them off of replacement decks or trade with other teams by randomly taking cards from other people's hands. It's a fun little game.

I also won at "Shaufenster"... it was a good night for me! The idea of Shaufenster (or "shop window", in German) is to collect sets of cheesy jewelry and cash them in for money. The objective is to get the most money, of course. You collect sets of jewelry in your safe, and then put jewelry up for sale in your shop window. Every turn, people get to choose whether or not they will add to their safe or whether to pick up the "purchase turn" card which determines his or her priority in purchasing from shop windows. It takes a little bit to really figure out good strategies for this game, as the value of your collection changes according to what you have in your safe (more incomplete collections devalues items) and selling to other people also nets you money... it's a little difficult to explain without demonstrating with the cards.

Anyhow, much fun was had by all. Are you coming next Tuesday??