This week has been a bit of a family gaming challenge. While I have wanted to do nothing more than play No Man’s Sky in my now limited, school-started-back-this-week, gaming time, my daughter has wanted to play Minecraft every chance she’s gotten. And it’s understandable in many ways, both games are kind of Zen like and can really help you kind of unwind. In Minecraft it’s the soft *thud, thud* of placing bricks on top of the games soothing soundtrack that helps us forget the kid in class today that you wish you could rocket to the moon.
[Digressio] No worries about sending classmates into space, an after school game that we play to try to discern any problems that we might be having at school. Every day we tell each other three people we’d send to the moon and for how long (one week minimum, forever maximum) and I’ve found that it’s a better gauge of how the day went than the usual “How was your day?” which usually get “Fine.” as a response. Who knew it would be more fun to spend the mean kid in class to the moon than to tell your parents that they were being mean?
In No Man’s Sky you can actually fly through the space you want to send some select folks out into. It’s calming to explore planets and watch beautiful landscapes unfold in front of us and we collect resources and catalog plants and animals. We both found the games that we needed this week…but we still love our co-op play time.
This week we decided to try Weirdbeard Games’ Tricky Towers (PS4 and Steam) which was free this month as a part of Playstation Plus. This game was actually her choice as she had seen Stampycat do a let’s play of the game (Thanks, Stampy!). Tricky Towers is a new shaped based puzzle game that allows you to compete against others to achieve specific tasks, like building the highest tower. The games drops Tetris like pieces of various sizes and you must stack them on top of your ever growing pile of Tetris type pieces to beat the person you are playing against. The pieces wobble and sway and just when you think it’s stable and you just might win…the whole thing crashes to the ground and you are robbed of your hard earned victory….*cough* sorry. As I was saying, the game is a bit on the unpredictable side. And that unpredictability makes for lots of screaming and giggling from both of us. We have played a couple of hours of the game together and we loved it.
I will say that playing the game single player has not proven to be as much fun. The toppling towers quickly become extremely frustrating and not in a good way. Also there’s no giggling involved when your tower crashes. It’s a lot funnier when your competitor’s tower crashes just when they think that they have won. Tricky Towers is definitely a game that is best played with someone else. And Pea and I found that the gigglefest that we had while playing this game made our days a whole lot brighter! If you’ve got a PS4 it’s definitely a game that you might want to check out and play with your kid(s)!
