Last Post?

I have no desire to play kudos, yet when i force myself to play it i find myself playing it for quite some time... hmmm.... I also constanlty find myself comparing it to the sims. Because both games are life-simulators (or simulations?) i guess it's not hard to see why i do this. It's just that the sims is sooooo much better. For example in the sims you can have a pet (with the pets add on) and it actually moves, you can interact with it, teach it tricks etc. Kudos also allows you to have a pet (I have a cat), but it's just a little avatar sized picture of a cat. You just have to make sure to buy it food. (I usually by 100 days worth of food so I don't have to go shopping). Anyways I hope that I made a point about how Kudos does not meet my expectations as a player. I want the sims level of interaction or better!

I have no real desire to play spades online anymore. I think it has something to do with the atmosphere. Although the chatroom is a good idea, most of my comments are ignored by other posters. I rather play the game in real life with my friends, I think it would be more fun personally.

Spades and Kudos Updates

I haven't had much time to play recently, although I played tuesday night, but forgot to blog. Anyways what I wanted to mention was that in Spades i read the additional rules. The game is not hard ot pick up, i htink i said this before. I also made a mistake, i thought that picking up cards didn't count unless they were spades, but this was incorrect. Thus, I am able to bid a number of tricks and actually meet this bid. If you make a bid and go over you get additonal points, but i think they are called bag points, and you can only do this ten times or you'll get a penalty. That explaines what happened in t he first game i played.

Kudos: i forgot if i mentioned this before, but i hate how they only have a few skins for the characters. The graphics also suck. I read in some article that you can download updates, but there does not seem to be an option in my game, so the lack of character skins is definitely a negative for me.

Spades

While Kudos is very easy to pick up... Spades is a little more complex. It's controls are easy, as I previously mentioned it's point and click, but it has rules that you have to remember and get used to. Spades isn't that hard to play once you understand the overall concept and basic rules, which aren't hard to grasp if you have played other card games.

Here's some things I made note of today:

1. Partners: I've witnessed some really great chemistry between people... or maybe it's cheating, but some people really seem to play well together. I guess if you play with someone for a while you both find a niche, maybe one person makes the big plays, while the pther person tends to play safe. Since me and my partner have been playing for only a week, it's a little harder to create that sort of rapport.

2. Challenge: I like that the games can be challenging -- if you are playing some great players. And at the same time easy --- if you are playing noobs. Also you really have to think and concentrate while playing (at least I do... and take risks/chances, bigger bids!)

3. Unpredictability: I like that the games can be unpredictable, espeically if you are playing with three other players you never played with before. You neevr know how the game will turn out.

4. Happy: I won a game. I'm glad i finally won a game. Also me and my partner managed to beat a higher level opponenet, which felt good since we're noobs.

5. Addiction?: No, I'm not addicted to this game. It's fun and all, but I can easily walk away and ocntinue my life. If it weren't for this project I would not play this game so often.

More on Kudos

OK so I was really dreading playing kudos again. Last time I played about 4 hours straight, and I thought, "ok, i've pretty much did all i can do." Here's why:

The point of the game -- you're a 20 year old who's a dead end loser, no education, low end job, no friends. The game plays until you are thirty and the point of the game is to see if you can turn your life around.

So basically I had a decent job where I was making some excess cash, i had a decent education and i had a few friends. so i thought the next time i played the game it would be old. But anyways when I played today I played for quie a long time. The only reason I stopped playing was because the game crashed. During that time I furthered my education some more, did more socializing and got a better job (I'm making a 6 figure salary now).

So now I think I'm over the game, I'll probably play again just to see what happened when I am 30.

Controls

The control for both games are very easy. It's simply moving the mouse and clicking on the objects, pressing buttons and icons for kudos and clicking cards and buttons for spades. This is actually something i prefer in a game, since i really hate complex controls because it makes the gameplay difficult for me, becasue on top of playing the game you're trying to remember 100+ keys. So this is one plus to the games.

More Spades More Kudos

The Look, The Feel...
Kudos looks... well it leaves a LOT to the imagination. I don't know if i mentioned this before, but the interface is very simple, very bland. I think there's a total of three different screens you see during the game!!

Spades looks, well what can you expect from a card game. You have your standard table with the back of everyone's cards visible, everyone's cards magically fly to the middle of the table. It's your standard card game, so it's objective is not to wow you with it's graphics, nor is it supposed to. so I guess I can't really complain. Oh yeah i think we have to mention somehting baout sounds in our report. Spades spounds involve these weird beeping/clicking sounds. Plus when the spades are broken you hear a sound. If you click something your not supposed to, i.e spades when they're not broken you'll hear a weird beep. I think they should have some background music. I think if msn teamed up with some music artists they could have the artist music playing with an ad for their cd. But then again i just turn on windows media player while i'm playing so i don't even pay attention to the sounds they're pretty pointless to me.

Spades Update

I lost my first ever spades game! Me and my partner were winning for most of the game, but then we ended up losing by a lot!!! Our final score was 3. I tried betting nil, but somehow failed, there mus tbe more to it then simply not picking up any spades. I'll read up about it. They didn't mention this part in the instructions.

Update: There is a more in depth instructions guide in the actual game itself. I'll read it next time I play.