Teeny Tiny Playing Things: Minigames

During a recent game of Magic: The Gathering, one of my opponents used a card called “Mine, Mine, Mine!”. For anyone who isn’t familiar with this example of silliness, this means that every card that you have in your library becomes part of your hand. “Mine, Mine Mine!” is part of the more humorous set of cards released during Magic’s life. Natuarally, the idea of comical cards in an otherwise serious game amused me, so I decided to look up some of these “jokers in the pack” and came across a card which (had I the spare cash) I would definitely buy. The card in question is “Enter the Dungeon”, which requires a sub-game of Magic to be played, under the table, literally. This mini-Magic-game made me think about other games-within-games. Now I know that’s a rather large topic to cover, so let’s take a look at a much smaller piece of it: minigames. 

Let’s start with some definition: what would count as a minigame? I personally would define it as any game which exists within the game you are playing, yet does not directly contribute to the game’s standard goal. For example, during a playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas, a player will experience lots of opportunities to play Blackjack, Roulette or Caravan. These small table-games are minigames: they are games within the game, that earn caps (money basically), and though, yes, caps help you buy stuff which can help you to win the game, it is more of a by-product than anything.

Like Fallout: New Vegas, other games (such as the Fable series) also feature gambling-based minigames. This is totally understandable for a few reasons. One, gambling is addictive and can encourage a player to spend more time on the game; two, rewarding the player with currency makes it a positive activity for the player, increasing their overall satisfaction with the game; three, gambling is a straightforward template for a minigame as its popularity and simple motives allow it to be translated to pretty much any setting. Bethesda’s Rage also uses this template in its holographic gunslinger board game. You place a bet, roll four dice and depending on what you roll, the gunslinger either kills his four attackers or is killed by them - simple, addictive and actually quite a clever concept for a game. (I have a feeling I may turn it into a drinking game when this article is posted). The second of Rage’s minigames consists of simply getting into a car and racing it. These minigames are all quite easy to find, but there are some that lurk in the shadows, put there as a reward for those who are diligent enough to find them.

"I want a cup of tea!"

I am of course talking about easter-egg minigames. These little biscuits are incorporated into games more for fun than advancing the storyline or developing character relationships. Such an example is found in the funfair campaign in Left 4 Dead 2. You and three of your zombie-hunting buddies have stumbled across an abandoned carnival. After a few levels you may think to yourself, “Wow. Valve have really tried hard to bring variety to the scenery.” when travelling through the sideshow section.  These attractions aren’t all just for show. There is a working “Whack-a-mole”, “Strength Tester” and “Shooting Gallery”, all with achievements aplenty, including one of the hardest achievements of the game (but I’ll leave that to you to discover for yourselves). Other hidden minigames require some more “out-of-the-box” thinking, like the low-res games hidden in Call of Duty: Black Ops. These arcade offerings are another basic way to incorporate minigames into stories, even in games where you wouldn’t think they would fit.

"Could you identify the zombie that "ate all your pies" please."

Starcraft 2 features one of these “How did they have time to fit that in there?!” minigames in the form of ‘Lost Viking’, a top-down space shooter. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great idea. The 16-bit graphics and complete change in genre give the player a welcome break from tackling those pesky Zerg. But is it all worth it? If you play a game you want to play a game, right? You don’t want to worry about the outcome of yet another game within this one. So why do minigames keep cropping up?

I believe it is a combination of two reasons, one financial and one more heartfelt. The first reason being an elaboration of something I mentioned earlier: because it makes us feel like we’re getting more value for money. If we spend time on the minigames we take longer to finish the actual game, which means that we perceive the game to be longer than it is and have more content than it does, associating the developer with value for money. The second reason is that minigames are fun. Not just for the player but also the developer, they give a chance to change the pace and to add a lighter side to what could be a very dark and heavy game.

Whether you enjoy minigames, search for them and take full advantage of them, or hate them, avoid them and couldn’t care less about them, it must be admitted that they are incredibly useful and sometimes even powerful devices within the gaming industry, for changing how we feel about a game, helping us become more immersed in it or cementing the realism of an environment or world in which a game is set. For this I feel they must be respected, but what do you think? Do you feel more satisfied after playing a game incorporating minigames? Are there any noteworthy games-within-games that I’ve left out of this article? Let the world know.

I’ll see you in a nook or cranny that most people don’t investigate.

Zombies Through the Ages

No dissection of geek/nerd culture would be complete without briefly mentioning zombies. Whether you enjoy taking part in the co-op, horde-hustling action of Left 4 Dead, or watching the gritty lonesome road of 28 Days Later, we geeks know that one day we will need to get ready for the dog eat dog (or human eat human) world of the zombie apocalypse. Yet with so many iterations of infected, what sort of undead are we likely to face? In this post I hope to cover as many as I can so we can all be prepared.

Like most popular fictional incarnations, the roots of those loveable brain biting blokes are in ancient mythology, in this case Sumerian. They are featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh though could even date back further, the texts reads: “I will knock down the gates of the Netherworld, I will smash the door posts and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living.”

"Good News for the more fashionable amongst you. In a battle of high heels vs. chainsaw, high heels win."

While many pieces of literature including work by H.P. Lovecraft and H.G. Welles touched upon themes that were reminiscent of what we now think of as “the zombie” it was of course George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead that gave us what became the traditional image of the undead, shuffling slowly with an appetite for human brains, though it was a relatively long time before zombies evolved in full view of the public. Films such as Braindead and My Boyfriend’s Back, despite explicitly showing zombies’ hunger for human flesh rather than just brains, did not rise to fame very quickly at all. It was the next generation of media that showcased this alteration: the video game. Specifically the first Resident Evil game, released in 1996. Even that, however, showed zombies as the sort of creature that you wouldn’t need to worry about providing you had limbs which could propel you at a “non-backward” velocity.

This is where the zombie archetypes that we are more familiar with today come into play. Films such as 28 Days Later, the Dawn of the Dead remake and House of the Dead feature what my friends like to refer to as ‘the urban zombie’. Faster, more agile and more intelligent, these creations are more typically referred to as ‘infected’ rather than zombies. The common factor with all these undead monstrosities is that their brain must be destroyed in order to render them harmless (and dead…again).

So there we are. A quick trip through the history of the zombie. If you’re still worried about how to survive the zombie apocalypse, you’re perfectly sane, as for one, it’s a scary thought, and two I haven’t actually told you enough to survive. I know, I'm evil. But hopefully we are now all more aware of exactly what will be eating our brains, and everybody knows that it’s not how long you can survive against a zombie that impresses the girls, but how many facts about them you can reel off before experiencing that bite that goes straight through the speech centre of your brain. Sleep well everybody! As always, questions or comments are very much appreciated, so leave them here.

I’ll see you shuffling along at the end of the world.