just in teractive : Contender Quest: Stevedore's Waterfront Puzzle

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6 January, 2009

  Contender Quest: Stevedore's Waterfront Puzzle

When I went to college I got a Mac, and I stopped playing most computer games. Except, one series of games available for my machine: the Warlords series. Puzzle Quest has much of the same feeling - top down kingdom management, heroes, quests, magic items, somewhat anonymous fiction and art, but good rock-paper-scissors unit-matching gameplay.

Now the Warlords developer Infinite Interactive has replaced rock-paper-scissors with a more immediate form of fun - lining up colored bits. Can you find three in a row of the same color? Proceeding in the lineage of Connect Four, Tetris, past Puzzle Bobble, into Bejeweled and Zuma and Luxor. Matching colored tiles! With experience points and epic story mapped over them.

In comments on Joystiq, Thrawn writes: "Stay away! The game is too addictive. The RPG components make you feel like you're getting something done." Ahah! Where have we heard this before?

Or, as Penny Arcade put it: "The competitive mode certainly has a luck component - we are talking about a genetic descendant of Bejeweled, after all - but the abilities, equipment, and skill loadouts layered over it do much to rein in that chaotic force. They seem to be gesturing at the broad outline of a vast genre here, one whose sensual contours entice."

I believe I've seen the same vast genre - mapping experience points and items onto other forms of computer activity. Xbox Live added points for playing games and created the Xbox Achievements meta-game. Seriosity has added experience points and currency for items. Amazon's Askville has added quests and experience points and levels for web searching. With Duncan Gough, I'm adding experience points, levels and items to ordinary web surfing: we call it "Passively Multiplayer Online Games."

So let's look at what we have here in Puzzle Quest: epic fantasy trappings, boilerplate kingdom-in-danger story, Westernized-anime art, Gregorian chants and early music loops. It's a bit hard on the eyes, maybe hard on the soul - I'm 32 years old. I've read Tolkien, Pullman, Martin, Weis & Hickman, even Jordan. I don't find fantasy retread comforting; I feel like my life is slipping away faster than normal when I am saving unremarkable kingdoms.

Still they must be commended for using what must have been a small budget and a dedicated team to make an indie game that is widely selling out and causing people such gaming excitement. Probably, if I'd spent more time playing Bejeweled, like Thrawn perhaps, I would say, "ah yes! Finally, Bejeweled that matters!" But I am not a colored tile matcher by nature.

It's an intruiging construction - instead of players picking from menus of commands to solve conflicts in an RPG, slap in a totally orthogonal mini-game. A bit like Puzzle Pirates, hmmm? In Puzzle Quest there's no conceit for the setting - me and a skeleton pulling out our boards and laying out our tokens? Penny Arcade drew up the same question:

The game could have appealed to me by embracing the minigame game I played against Zombies and bats and rats and so forth - showing them toting their gamepieces, all of us somehow beholden to strange three-in-a-row rules. Or, if it had a sense of humor. Where's the Keef the Thief today? Even Might and Magic had surrealist wit about their bad guys - fighting killer Cuisinarts and so forth.

Our teacher, Patricia Pizer, had us play this Puzzle Quest game for homework. She asked, what other theme could we map on to it?

Contender Quest: Stevedore's Waterfront Puzzle

Let's try On the Waterfront the Elia Kazan film about mob ties to the longshoremen in 1940s New York. This is a fitting theme, since the game board can be a bird's-eye view of men moving shopping containers to make similar shipments stick together, or to trap mafiosi or cops inbetween them, etc.

Players could choose a character class: longshoreman, priest, petty criminal, police cadet. Then they each try to work within the warehouses to straighten out corruption and making transnational freight more efficient. Noble quests such as "find the missing shrimp shipment before it goes bad" and "somewhere in that warehouse is a load of insulin for diabetic children."

Your foes could be time (perishable goods), cops, mafiosi, hobos, informants, miscreants, ne'er-do-wells, a wide range of villiany awaiting their chance to rise above the orcs and rats we've slain too many times.

Experience points is a perfect system to map onto this profession: can you rise from Longshoreman to Stevedore? Can you earn the golden cap and hook?

Posted by justin at April 2, 2007 10:40 AM

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