The colourful cast of Poker Night at the Inventory

All of us here at Armchair Diplomat have spent some time playing poker, at varying levels of seriousness.  While the others have all moved on to other, more interesting hobbies I still play regularly and Matt decided that meant I should be the one to review Poker Night at the Inventory.  Keeping in mind it’s a casual game I’ll do my best not to get all VPIP balanced ranges on y’all… here goes!

The premise of Poker Night at the Inventory is simple.  The Inventory is a club, it’s poker night and you’re there to play.  Your opponents are Max (from Sam and Max), Strong Bad (of Homestar Runner fame), the Heavy Weapons Guy (from Team Fortress 2) and Tycho (from the Penny Arcade series).

Each game has a $10,000 buy in and the winner takes all.  You never run out of money so you can play as many times as you like.  The game keeps track of how far up or down you are and each game shouldn’t take much more than 30 minutes to play.  Forget about all that though because, as we’ll discuss in a little bit, this isn’t really a poker game.  It’s actually a vehicle for getting the abovementioned characters together to engage in some witty banter.

Your opponents never stop talking.  Sometimes it’s prompted by the game and sometimes they just talk among themselves but they’re always jawing away.  Max is the deranged bunny rabbit we’ve come to know and love over the years, Strong Bad is Strong Bad-y, Mr Weapons delivers a good deadpan Arnie-esque line and Tycho’s dry nerdy wit balances things out nicely.  You don’t have to be a fan of their respective franchises to enjoy it but there are some in-jokes there for those in the know as well.  It’s reasonably clever too, and if for some reason the cards interrupt someone’s story they’ll wait until the distraction is over and then resume their story.  They’re not just responding to what’s happening on the table.

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The article title rhymes!

Let’s just get it out there: I’m not a puzzle gamer. They just shit me, I get frustrated and tend to start throwing things; keyboards, tantrums, etc.  But after picking up World of Goo as part of the Humble Indie pack, I’ve been secretly playing it whenever I can.

World of Goo is really quite good. The premise is simple: a bunch of goo balls need to get to the pipe leading to the next level. They can do this by building structures (bridges, towers) by joining to each other, and there’s different types of balls to play with (oh grow up!). Some are single-use: they can be placed in a structure, and that’s it. Others let you dismantle the structure at your whim, others stick to surfaces, others are like water and will ‘drip’.

It can be a bloody hard game at points. Unlike other bridge or structure building games, the goo balls have an amount of flexibility, so if the structure isn’t as strong as it needs to be, it will bend, flex and topple. And naturally, some levels have hazards that must be avoided: spikes, blades, and a range of other sharp pointy things. All of which will burst your goo balls, rendering your lovely bridge a little less structurally sound.

The difficulty of levels is a little inconsistent. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the alternating challenge means you get to do simple, fun levels in between the incredibly tricky ones. There are also a good selection of challenges to overcome. Some focus on structural integrity, building a large bridge in as few ‘blobs’ as possible or building a huge tower that, if you don’t place your goo balls properly, will send your tower toppling over. Others require very little building, relying on timing and simple shapes to get through the level.

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The Humble Indie Bundle event has now ended, and was a great chance to get your hands on $80 (RRP) of cross platform, DRM free indie games, for as much (or more importantly, as little) money as you like.

The games that were on offer:

• World of Goo
• Aquaria
• Gish
• Lugaru
• Penumbra

Now, the stats: the event raised a total of $1,273,541, with over 130,000 contributions. The average contribution was $9.18, excellent considering the payment system was set up for pay-as-you-like.

Total Revenue by Platform

Good to see the Mac and Linux people donating more (less users, but higher donation amount per user); I guess it’s just because we aren’t used to games that actually run on our systems…

Fingers crossed, we’ll see more of these type of events; I like the fact they are a great way to both raise money, and get indie games out there and known!