It’s easy to see Forbidden Island as a cheap cash-in. After all, if you read through the instructions the first thing to pop into your mind should be Pandemic. Which would pop into your mind anyway as the author of this game is Matt Leacock, the creator of said anti-virus co-op board game.
Forbidden Island blatantly uses the same mechanics and that initially makes it a bit hard to swallow. Instead of infected cities you now have parts of an island giving way to the sea as you and your fellow players scramble across it in order to retrieve four cur-… I mean four treasures by discarding four similar coloured city car-… I mean treasure cards while being at a research sta-… I mean treasure site.
It really is scathing when you put it like that, but it also misses the point. There are gazillions of games out there using the rather successful auctioning mechanic, why wouldn’t a single author be allowed then to use a successful formula he devised and streamline it a bit. Because that’s what Forbidden Island does with the Pandemic source material.
There is no game board with cities to keep into account, it is instead created randomly from tiles. And while faffing about with the virus cubes was all nice and dandy, Forbidden Island replaces those with tiles featuring three states: good, flooded and gone. That’s about it. There’s less materials to keep track of and the flow of the game is thus a bit lighter than you might be used to in Pandemic. That’s not to say the game is simple to the point of it being too obvious. Especially the roles of each player can cause a few rule conundrums, but they don’t ruin the game’s feel.
The one thing I have against the game, is that it feels a bit silly to collect the treasures. While the cures seemed to be a correct abstraction of Pandemic’s goals, the treasures are a weird non-event for Forbidden Island in comparison. They kind of keep out of the game entirely and don’t feature within the game’s board or something like that; they’re pretty much four elaborately sculpted McGuffins. It’s basically a result of each treasure having two tiles it can be claimed from, otherwise they could have been placed on the tiles. It makes the treasures kind of intangible, which is probably meant to be countered by the prominent sculpts they received.
In the end it’s a useless nitpick. The game itself is far too much fun, and like in Pandemic you can spend quite some time finding a proper sequence of actions only to find it wrecked when the water rises at exactly the wrong moment and swallows parts of the island.
It is an excellent game then with a solid feel thanks to the materials and a fast turnover. You won’t be waiting long in this game and it certainly won’t take hours to complete (the manual suggests half an hour). Forbidden Island is thus a fast-paced Pandemic that swaps its epidemic mechanic for a shrinking playing field. An excellent evolution of the formula and a great game to introduce to casual board game players.
It’s odd. I expected to at least be playing something. Casual games and such. The type of games everybody is talking about. But instead I found myself deleting the last games from my HTC Desire last week after noticing I hadn’t touched them for weeks. Suddenly, I had an Android device without games.
Of course this is the cue for iPhone owners to come out of the woodwork and start shouting how “Android has no games”, much like a PS3*, but that’s just fanboy-talk. I did have some games on there: Rush Hour, a digital version of the plastic puzzle game of the same name; Galcon, a quick-to-play real-time strategy game, Gem Miner, part platformer and part mining game and Drop7, a truly excellent puzzle game which can stand proud next to Tetris, Puyo Puyo and Panel De Pon.
All of them deleted. Why? I simply don’t play any games on my mobile as I don’t spend any time on them. Initially I thought it to be my incompatibility with casual games. I’ve been a core gamer for the better part of my life and presented with casual games I find myself longing for ‘real’ games. Except that I don’t. Flight Control HD is a truly excellent game, which I enjoy very much. On my PlayStation 3. And mobile games like action-RPG Zenonia are great fun and exactly in my genre of preference, but playing it on an Android irked me.
What I did notice, is that I consume games differently than casual players. Whereas casual players will fill wasted time with small games, I find myself dishing up games as the main course. I consciously play games. They aren’t there to fill some space of time; they are there to be enjoyed thoroughly.
So I need to be at home, grab a cup of tea, slouch on the couch and stare at a screen soaking it all up and not play it on a device that might suddenly wake up and demand my attention with a phone call. My phone is my communication hub after all and I want it to be that first and foremost.
In other words, I just reasoned myself into buying a tablet computer, didn’t I?
Last Saturday had a pleasant surprise in store. What started off as helping a mate out with notebook-troubles, turned into a single unbroken run-through of Shank‘s co-op mode. Shank of course, being the scrolling beat’em up by Klei Entertainment. The game itself is rather good, with some great opportunities to create and set-up combos, as well as having a solid flow to the proceedings. Even more so with two players.
But the game really starts to shine during the boss encounters. These encounters truly are co-op experiences. You can’t just take these characters down by simply slashing into them ad infinitum or going at it alone while your mate hides in the corner. Nope, you really need to work together! So you both need to dodge that tag-team attack, just one isn’t enough. And one person stunning that wrestler is useless if the other doesn’t take advantage of it.
It’s really amazing how well the mechanic works and you should really play the game if only to experience these encounters. It works so well, that after a while you start to miss it in the meat of the levels themselves, where you can pretty much both ‘play solo together’. Sure, there’s the odd set-up to take over an enemy from your counterpart and finish him off for good, but the excellent team-work required with the bosses is nowhere to be found. If there is such deep cooperation present, it’s usually through sheer luck.
But maybe that’s something Klei can work on for the sequel.
Thanks to my sister a part of my not-so-repressed memory has been unearthed again. This commercial from the early ’90s was part of a series promoting ‘awkward’ candy in the Netherlands: gummi boobs, licorice gull faeces and foam dirty diapers among others.
Oddly enough, viewing this now in the ’00s makes me expect an immediate public outrage, while I don’t seem to remember people being that shocked by it back then. Were we really that much more easy going in the ’90s? Hard to imagine. Especially as people in the Netherlands are currently aghast with the portrayal of Sinterklaas (the Dutch origin of Santa Claus) as a serial killer in the upcoming film Sint.
To be honest, I think I prefer a world and age in which we can eat gummi boobs and laugh.
There is no game board with cities to keep into account, it is instead created randomly from tiles. And while faffing about with the virus cubes was all nice and dandy, Forbidden Island replaces those with tiles featuring three states: good, flooded and gone. That’s about it. There’s less materials to keep track of and the flow of the game is thus a bit lighter than you might be used to in Pandemic. That’s not to say the game is simple to the point of it being too obvious. Especially the roles of each player can cause a few rule conundrums, but they don’t ruin the game’s feel.
