Neural Optimising Workouts
by The Rook
I swear, if someone gave me this as a gift, it'd be used as a lap tray to hold all my cheesecake
I’ve never really been one for exercising; I do some walking to get to work and I would walk around the pool table when I play (that does count right?) but I don’t go out running, visit a gym or attempt exercises at home. Nintendo have attempted to get us more healthy with the Wii and the Wii Balance Board whilst people like me are sitting in front of the TV playing games. I did buy EA Active for the Wii in an attempt to try and do some form of exercising, I got as far as opening the box and reading part of the manual. I prefer to relax when I play but over the years I have always found time for one type of workout; I have found different ways to exercise the grey matter.
Now… if we take a trip down memory lane and go back a number of years, back before our consoles were household names, before the internet, before our favourite 80’s movies, back to when I was a kid (somewhere between 7 – 10 years old), I remember buying my first puzzle book. My mum thought it would be too difficult for me, but I felt I could handle it, and so I bought a book of the devilishly cryptic and brain straining puzzles known as word searches, ok maybe not so much a strain of the brain as a test on the eyes.
This led on to trying other types of puzzles: spot the difference (more taxing than it sounds), crosswords, code wheels, logic puzzles as well as some not confined to a page but physical objects like The Tower Of Hanoi, Rubik’s cube and slide picture puzzles. Rarely do I complete any of these puzzles anymore, with the last paper based puzzle I learned probably being Sudoku, and I’ve played versions of this on both the PSP with Carol Vorderman’s Sudoku and on the DS through Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training games.
Yes... it's real. Click it. Try it.
It was no surprise then that I had a love for text based adventures games as well while I was growing up. The games may have simply been words on a screen but the games were full of puzzles to solve and this just clicked with me. That’s not to say that we don’t have puzzles in other games too, far from it. My favourite puzzle game of recent years has to be Portal, which has you going through a number of test chambers by using portals placed on walls, floors or the ceiling to complete puzzles and reach the exit of the level. You start off by going through the portals that the game creates, while further into the game you get the portal gun allowing you to place an orange portal and a blue portal, you go in one and out the other. A simple enough idea but it does lead to some creative thinking required to figure out how to place your portals and was thoroughly enjoyable, roll on the sequel. It had that ‘one more go’ (OMG) effect to it, that you would complete just one more test chamber, or you would just look at the next one but end up completing it anyhow. Portal was the first game I played when I bought The Orange Box collection and I played and completed it in one sitting because it was just so much fun. There were occasions when I got stuck that I would just stop and sit there, trying to think out the solution to reach that next part of the level.
When I first heard of Professor Layton And The Curious Village and how it was a collection of puzzles I knew it was a game for me. I was not aware of the story element of it at first but I have enjoyed both it and the sequel, progressing through the story by completing puzzles, lots of puzzles, some of these are quite taxing and will really have you thinking but always satisfying when you work them out.
One of the earliest games I got for my DS was a game called Another Code: Two Memories which stated it utilised all the features of the DS to solve puzzles and some of the ways it did this just amazed me. There was one puzzle which had a dusty picture and I couldn’t clean it with the rag, I couldn’t move the dust by brushing the stylus across the touchpad and for a while I was stuck. The trick to this was to blow into the microphone socket and you would blow the dust off the picture. I loved how this worked and it was certainly different to playing on any other console. Some of the other puzzles in the game also had solutions that were unique to the DS and its capabilities.
The latest puzzle game I played is another DS game (I’m sensing a theme to my DS games) called Scribblenauts. I’ve only played so much of it so far and there’s already an announcement about a sequel. For those that don’t know, Scribblenauts is game that lets you solve puzzles by using words, but in a different way to other games. One example is you have to get three flowers to a girl, there is one on the ground close to you, there is one near an angry bee and there is one across a stretch on water which has a piranha in it. To complete the puzzle you have to use objects for your character to interact with, but which objects are up to you as you call up an onscreen keyboard and choose whatever you think will work. Some good creative thinking can come in handy or even just some random crazy thoughts. I had tried using a flaming torch to scare away the bee, we fought and I burned it, another time I walked towards the girl, passed a barn and sent the barn on fire; the barn was not needed, just background, but it was funny to see. The piranha was the death of me many times, even when I caught it with a fishing rod and brought it onto land, (stupid deadly fish). To tackle the bee and piranha I tried typing in death, sure enough the grim reaper came and I was able to dispose of the bee and the piranha, the grim reaper does not play favourites and will kill you too if you are in his path. To cross the water I typed in helicopter and was able to fly to the last flower. This was just my way of completing the level but there are many others, the game’s tagline is ‘Write Anything, Solve Everything’ and will get you thinking.
Word has it that Auguste Rodin's inspiration came from not knowing what to do during a session of Disc Twitching
Puzzles have always been a part of my gaming life, whether that involves, words, numbers, physical objects or in game problems to solve. As much as a good puzzle can make you scratch your head for a while I also experienced this when trying to come up with titles for the articles I write. Some people use the subject in their titles as word play, such as Rob’s article ‘Natal It’s Cracked Up To Be?’ about Project Natal, [an article on this very site]. Sometimes these titles are quite clever, sometimes they are really cheesy (this is probably how mine would be) but it’s a form of word play that amuses me.
The first non-review article I wrote for this site took me nearly a week of thinking to come up with a suitable title, so I then decided to think of titles first, figure if I could write enough about it for an article before setting down to write anything. This did not always make it easier either but I have used this method for all my articles posted on here to date.
If you scroll to the top of this article and click on my name you can see the list of all the articles I have written for this site. If you disregard the reviews (Borderlands First/Fresh Looks) and concentrate purely on my other articles, you will see the titles are one long acronym that ends with this article. That was a bit of fun word play for me, time for a different approach.
Last five articles by The Rook
The Rook says “Now We Know”
I love games with good puzzles in but either the puzzles don’t exist anymore or I’m just better at them. It just seems to be a case of banging buttons untill it works in most console games. I’ll admit that professor Layton looks good but I’m not buying a DS for it. I remember Reading about an iPhone that’s coming soon that’s like it I’ll try dig out the name for you. And that wordsearch has drove me mad all day I’ve got crackdown and crysis and that’s it. I keep thinking I can see alan wake but can’t.
I think I’ve played most of the games you mention here, and I especially enjoyed the Professor Layton games and Portal, which was also the first game I played after installing the Orange Box. I spent all of the day after Boxing Day playing it that year, and liked it so much that I even wound up buying it again when it came to XBLA.
Sticking to the DS, you may enjoy the Ace Attorney games; they’re text adventures with a strong leaning towards puzzle solving in order to work out who the murderer in a court case is. And also the Lost in Blue trilogy of games, all on DS, where you have to try and survive being shipwrecked on an uninhabited tropical island, using only what resources you can find to create tools and weapons.
Liked the crossword you’ve got up there, too… found most of them; Lee, Alan Wake is on the bottom row, mate. Heh.
I always played games that made me think, even before I was into electronic gaming. My parents were a little odd in that they’d buy me things like Yahtzee (word and number… that’s Numberwang!) and strange little puzzles that I’d never seen before. One of them was called Pythagoras, which was basically a load of plastic shapes that made up a complete square… from memory there was a single square, and the rest were triangles of varying degrees. It came with a little booklet full of silhouettes and the idea was to work out how to create each of the shapes in the book using only those individual shapes, but you had to always use all of them. I loved it, and that’s basically what got me into text adventures – the idea that the game was based on thought rather than obvious decisions from a visual perspective.
Years later, I spent pretty much all of my gaming life immersed in RTS or Sim games. It’s only actually recently that I’ve ventured into the realms of “shoot stuff and run around mental” territory. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE running around shooting shit up, but I also miss thinking. The games I’ve played recently have little or no thought requirement… which is sad, but it’s also a lot easier to indulge in escapism to get away from the annoyance of running a business and a break from running GL. That said, I’m looking forward to the next game that requires a bit of thought.
Lee… if you print out the wordsearch, cut it out, then fold each of the corners in on itself, it actually spells out a hidden message that I chucked in just for you
I want to love puzzles but my brain can be useless at them and I get frustrated
I shall have a nosey at the wordsearch at some point, esp after seeing Lee struggle with it so much!
Modern point and click adventure games are pretty much made for you then – still a healthy niche, and there seem to be more and more DS titles now which are more puzzly than most bits found on other platforms. I suppose that they lend themselves well to the DS wich is great for just whipping about for a quick play (oh errr).
Am getting more and more enticed by Scribblenauts the more I hear about it.
I’m still waiting for a shop to drop Scribblenauts in price, it sounds fantastic but as with most succesfull DS games, they just wont lower the price. It’s the kind of creativity I love in games that allows a non-creative person to play. I always have the great ideas I’m just not too good at doing them.
I did the same as you Rook with Portal, I did it in one sitting beause my Jaw was just agape the whole time, it would have been rude to have just walked away. I got a bit frustrated for how far the game had to spend teaching you everything rather than just letting you think for yourself but once I broke beyond 18 into the final stretch, well I was in my element. And it’s a fascinating game to watch someone else play too, especially non/casual gamers. Watching the way they tackle problems from a purely logistical point of view, rather than that of a mind of an FPS or RTS fan is fantastic.
The pure puzzle games always tempt me but I’m ultimately put off by how tired I generally am when I eventually get the time to sit and play something. I should probably look into getting 1 or 2 for the DS as I tend to find myself with 10 minutes here and there and it would be great to do whilst away from the desk. But ultimately, I’m pretty beat most the time and my mind gets enough excercise across the day, it’s nice to play stupid and explodey before I eventually put Doctor Who on and go to bed
You engage me Rook
@Adam – Scribblenauts is the perfect game for 10 minute breaks, each puzzle can take less than a minute to complete but it’s the thinking time involved to work out how to do it in the best way or going back just to see how crazy you can be. The price may drop when the sequel comes out, other than that check your local supermarkets, they sometimes have games much lower.