Family Feud has been on television for almost thirty years, save for a few years where the show was interrupted and not on television. It started in 1976, with then celebrity panelist and Match Game regular Richard Dawson at the helm. The idea for the show was simple: take one of the most popular parts of Match Game – the audience match segment – and turn it into its own show, with the most popular panelist as host. Since its incarnation more than thirty years ago, Family Feud (much like The Price is Right) has become a part of Americana, with throngs of families facing off against each other for a change to win giant sums of money... and possibly humiliate themselves in the process by giving legendarily dumb answers.
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After one-and-a-half hours of elevated struggle, I forged a slim column of Shermans into Owen420Canada’s home base to steal a victory. He had spent all of his action cards and spare units the round before, foolishly dropping a massive Tiger to the right of my last tank in a last ditch effort to save himself. He probably didn’t know that he couldn’t attack right after deploying the unit. After wasting the tank, he positioned a tiny squadron of Nazi riflemen on his most precious of tiles. He dug in, meaning he would be able to attack first when I began my assault, but I began the round rich in airstrikes and spare units to sacrifice for precious extra points right before the final dice roll. It was with relish that I ripped the German flag from the battlements.
This week, the Left 4 Dead 2 demo was released. Never before has the release (or even the demo) of a Valve product been anticipated with such virulent, disparate agendas and points of view.
There are a lot of annoying catch phrases used by the video games press. From “suffice it to say” to “all in all,” they often have to do with the totality of a game. Just as pervasive are the terrifying comparative phrases. Everything you play is a clone, a wannabe, a killer, of something, some game. These phrases are an inescapable part of the way we talk about games (right now at least). We haven’t figured out a proper way to discuss a game on its own merits, so every discussion relates back to other games, other experiences. To hear people talk about Torchlight, you would think that the only way to talk about is to speak in unending comparative statements.
The city-building strategy game is not the powerhouse it once was. It has been ages since a SimCity graced our hard drives, and many other city-building and strategy games have either been dormant, or broken off from the main genre, heading toward strategy, army building, and RPG territory. Cities XL is a welcome site then, coming as it does with so little competition, aside from the latest Tropico title. Cities XL offers us the ability to link our cities, from one player’s to another’s across a vast, teeming planet of player created cities.
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