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| | February 10, 2006
Hearts and Flowers, Hearts and Spades
Ahhhh, Valentine’s Day. When a young woman’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of… well, chocolate, really, but also romance! As I’m already madly in love, my only concern this Valentine’s Day is dropping enough hints about chocolate. Somewhere out there, however, might be a reader who is still looking for Mr. (or Ms.) Right, and this column is for you. | |
| My grandmother assures me that, in her day, the best way to find romance was to be an excellent cook, accomplished homemaker, and graceful dancer (once she was out of the room, Granddad added that it didn't hurt to look dead-sexy in a bathing suit). Fortunately, these days a girl can succeed simply by going online and “laying down some hurt” in the latest multiplayer action game. I guess there's something inherently attractive about a female who can wreak mass obliteration with a virtual rocket launcher.
Of course, if you prefer Hearts to Halo, Checkers to Call of Duty II, and Bridge to a BFG, there are still plenty of opportunities to find true love online! Let’s take a look, for example, at MSN Games player deehoney_52. Her preferred game is Spades, and she’s been playing in the “Basement” Spades room for the last eight years. Although I have no idea how many of these games she may have won, she definitely took home the biggest prize: she’s now happily married to Tech1A, a nice man she met while playing.
As a bit of added coolness, the couple will be celebrating their third anniversary this year with fellow MSN Games Spades players a-plenty at the 2006 Basement Bash (a live, player-run event in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 21-23 – if you want to know more, just hop into the Basement lobby and ask!). Wish I could be there to celebrate and play, too, but I’m not sure I know how to deal cards without using a mouse any more.
Next up are TotalDitz and Clearly_Insane (two nicknames that seem destined for each other). They first met in 1998, playing Backgammon on MSN Games (well, okay, it was The Zone back then, but you know what I mean). After five years of online friendship and several face-to-face meetings, true love blossomed and they decided to tie the knot… at a Backgammon party in Vegas, surrounded by their online buddies and fellow players!
It must be true that the families who play together, stay together. And the MSN Games community has always seemed like one big (occasionally dysfunctional, but basically great) family to me. | |
| If You Build It, They Will… Play Dominoes!
So of course the big news around the office right now is Dominoes. This game has consistently topped our players’ wish lists for years, so I have to admit there’s been a lot of stress down the Dev hallway over the last couple of months. The last few weeks of developing a game are always insanely busy, of course – there’s an apocryphal story in the industry about an artist at Bungie whose wife reported him missing while he was in “crunch mode” on Halo 2 and hadn’t been home for three days – and there’s an added level of pressure when the game is something that so many people are looking forward to.
I wish I had a digital camera. I’m going to need to get one for future columns, I think, because there are some things I’d love to show you here in the MSN Games office. On the wall outside the Dev area, there’s a cork board with all these pictures on it: each one is a screenshot from a different Dominoes computer game. The team put them there so they would always remember what they had to do to make their own game even better.
I’ve heard that their top two concerns were making the bones look and sound just right, so that you could almost feel the weight of them in your hand. A good game of Dominoes is like a trip back in time to the days of velvet and lace dresses, crystal glasses, and civilized conversation… if you can’t imagine yourself at a jacquard table on a well-appointed, gaslit train, then it’s just not good enough.
Anyway, this whole long-winded story is just to explain how incredibly happy everyone here is right now. In the first month that the game was online (and this was in preview, before we even started advertising it!) people played more than a million and a half games of Dominoes!
Programmers, as a rule, don’t high-five each other. But they’re not above whooping audibly when they hear news like that. After all the hard work, it’s fantastic to know that you’ve succeeded in making your players happy. So big kudos all around to project managers Lonewolf@zone and Joshuah@Zone, artist SoulRavenSpirit, tester PopularFriend, and developer Bowser@Zone – if you spot them online in the game, be sure to “school” them in the art of playing Dominoes. | |
| Tech Time
I will cheerfully admit that this is not one of our most common technical issues, but now that people are logging in to check out the new Curious George-themed Jigsaw (so…darn… cute!), it seemed as good a time as any to ward off potential frustration:
“Dear Moxie: when I open a Jigsaw game, some of the pieces are missing. How do I get them back?”
This is almost always caused when the game files become corrupt (whoa, quick mental image there of your hard drive sneaking out at night to take bribes… I need to cut back on the caffeine). It’s an easy fix, so if you’re missing some jigsaw pieces, just follow these instructions and they’ll be back before you know it.
See you next week! | |
