Ah, sidekicks. Where would we be as players without them?

Probably talking to ourselves a lot.

A good sidekick (a good supporting character, really) can make a game shine. Here are descriptions of ten of my personal favorites. Can anyone name them all?

1. A huge, orange behemoth summoned from the ground and given one purpose: to DRIVE! Or to change oil and adjust timing belts, if no driving jobs are available.

2. A hyperkinetic rabbity thing with a high voice and a penchant for extreme violence.

3. A fat redneckish guy with gold sunglasses who has his selfish moments, but in the end is always there to help you out. And eulogize you, if need be.

4. A dumb blonde reporter who turns out to not only not be dumb, but is a great shot and never needs rescuing.

5. A female archeologist-turned-psychic who happens to be the person who knows the most about the lost city you’re investigating but will only help you if you let her come along.

6. A happy-go-lucky, childlike robot that follows you everywhere.

7. A gravel-voiced, cigar-chomping space marine who just happens to always be there for you when things go south.

8. A young Japanese girl who always wears ceremonial robes, has a huge appetite for cheeseburgers, and can channel the dead.

9. A duck with a bad temper and a horrible speech impediment and a dopey, but loyal, humanoid dog.

10. A friendly, lovable white German Shepherd who can be trained to play ball with you, find treasures and attack your enemies, and helps you escape a horrible castle. (Warning: a toughie.)

Good luck and have fun!

Just as with last week’s Name That Game, a lot of games introduce new metals, minerals or gasses in order to increase the personality of their games. Such substances are collectively known as Unobtanium.

So here are ten of these substances! Can you tell me in which game you’re collecting, fighting over or blowing up the following…um, “stuff”?

1. Tiberium

2. Tarydium

3. Endurium

4. Terrazine

5. Megacyte

6. Bendezium

7. Timonium

8. Sinisite

9. Raritanium

10. Materia

Good luck and have fun!

Money. It’s a thrill, and it’s a part of practically every game in some form or another.

But some games aren’t satisfied with just dollars, or even gold. Some games try to give their game worlds personality by renaming the in-game currency.

Below you will find fifteen of these alternate currencies, and your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to identify which games use which currencies. Some entries may have more than one correct answer, as usual.

1. Gil

2. MUs

3. Caps

4. Gildars

5. SPs

6. ISK

7. Moolah

8. Denarius

9. BC

10. Guitar Picks

11. Loonies and Toonies

12. Zorkmids

13. Studs

14. Halos

15. Pennies From Heaven

Good luck and have fun!

There are a whole lot of games that give you an “operator”. An operator doesn’t just give you objectives at the start of the mission – they’re constantly in communication with you. They hear everything you say, see everything you do (usually justified only vaguely in the game), update you on your progress, tell you when mission objectives have changed, give you useful information and if poorly implemented can really annoy the krep out of you. The odds of you actually meeting them in person are really low.

So, here’s a list of twenty operators…can you tell me what games they’re bossing the player around in?

1. Moya

2. Janice Polito

3. Irving Lambert

4. The Guildmaster

5. Otis

6. Rebecca Lansing

7. Atlas

8. EVA

9. Shinatama

10. Roy Campbell

11. Dan

12. Cortana

13. Mercury

14. Mike One Juliet

15. Anya

16. Zyzyx

17. Alex Jacobson

18. Major Zero

19. Augustus Sinclair

20. You

Creating great villains is a lot harder than creating great heroes. A hero is an everyman, someone the viewer/player can associate with, and as such you can almost leave them a blank slate and the player/viewer can still think they’re awesome.

But villains need motivations. And since stopping them is the whole point of the game, villains need plans.

Today, we look at games from the villain’s point of view! I actually had to search long and hard for games that had better villain motivations than, “I want money”, “I want revenge”, and “All things must obey me”…which is probably a testament to the quality of video game writing.

So, name of the villain and the game he does his nefarious deeds in, please!

1. Our glorious country will soon feel the jackboot of another. I’ve defended her to the best of my ability but I’ve failed and the enemy will soon be here. There is one man who is most responsible for the enemy’s technological superiority…if I travel back in time and eliminate him I can save my beloved country. What could possibly go wrong?

2. I’ve perfected a system that allows human augmentation using nanotechnology in a way never seen before. My two test subjects even work as secret agents for the United Nations! And the world is in shambles – corrupt governments, incurable diseases, full of people with no hope. (It’s entirely possible I had a hand in all this but, hey, omelets and such.) If I merge with the artificial intelligence that now controls all communications, I can remake the world into a much better place than it ever was before! So why is one of my proteges now trying to kill me?!

3. I’m a cop, and I’m good at what I do. I’m in charge of controlling the gangs in this city, and I’ve discovered that the best way to do that is to manipulate them into killing each other. But there was this other cop who didn’t see things my way and…well, it didn’t have to end the way it did, but it did. But I know there’s a criminal coming back to town after hiding out on the other side of the country for five years. I’ll pin the crime on him, which will put me in the clear and also get him under my thumb. Just so I can keep doing my job for the good of everyone, of course. What could possibly go wrong?

4. Four thousand years ago, we exiled an alien species to a remote sector of the galaxy for their crimes; part of their punishment was that they were never again to use spaceflight. Now we have just discovered an FTL energy signature coming from one of their colonies. After arriving at the colony and inflicting the appropriate punishment (the destruction of every living thing on the planet’s surface), the aliens return in their spaceflight-capable ship and drive us off, then attack us at every opportunity, which surely proves their guilt!

5. I used to be able to travel between two parallel dimensions, but now I’m stuck in the wrong one. Also, the people here have kind of figured out that I’m not a nice guy. But I’ve discovered that there’s another person who can jump between the dimensions! If I switch bodies with him, I can both assume a new identity and go back to my home dimension! What could possibly go wrong?

6. I’m a galactic entity, and I’m dead. I was killed many years ago by another galactic entity and torn into pieces, each of which was hidden in a different part of the world. But that was many thousands of years ago, and I’ve discovered that I can influence the humans near my “parts”. Every time a human seeks out one of my parts I can possess them with that part. Eventually enough of them will get together to resurrect me, and there’s no way that the Power of Love could ever possibly stop me!

7. EAT ALL THAT IS NOT ME AND MAKE MORE ME.

Good luck and have fun!

In this episode of Name that Game, all the games described involve humans aiding eldritch abominations (or something equally powerful) in the hopes that they’ll be rewarded after said abomination has eaten everyone else. Needless to say, this never works out well, but they keep trying…

1. In this fantasy game, a man creates a cult to serve as the means to open a gateway so that a powerful, dimension-hopping magical entity can enter the world and take over. He ultimately dies when he badly bumbles a ritual, not only tearing him to pieces but allowing three evil shades to take possession of three members of your party.

2. In this fantasy game, umm…a man creates a cult to serve as the means to open a gateway so that a powerful, dimension-hopping magical entity can enter the world and take over. You finally defeat him by entering the world he has created in his mind and killing him, then go on to deal with the demon…in a rather oblique way.

3. In this horror game, you play as a man desperately searching through a nearly abandoned town for your daughter…who you eventually discover has been kidnapped by cultists so they can sacrifice it to their elder god so he can enter the world and take over. And unless you’ve done everything right, they win.

4. In this fantasy game, living cultists willfully aid undead wizards and warlocks and help them achieve their goals in the hopes that they will become powerful. (Instead, of course, they become zombies.) Then after they’re dealt with, more cultists willfully aid an extraterrestrial-extradimensional being’s attempt to return to this world, knowing full well the death and destruction he’ll bring, again because they think THEY’LL be spared and made more powerful. After THEY bite the dust, even MORE cultists release an imprisoned, insane dragon who believes he is the personification of death itself. His attacks scar and change the entire world, and he makes no bones about the fact that his goal will be fulfilled only when every living creature is dead…yet the cultists continue to fight for him, believing that “death” is code for “change that benefits me somehow”. The people of this world are SO stupid.

5. In this game set in World War II, a single secret agent is sent deep into enemy territory to investigate claims that the Nazis are trying to summon supernatural forces to help them. They are. The agent trails them through several locales, slaughtering tons of Nazis along the way, but arrives just in time to see the summoned demon turn all the Nazis involved in the ritual into his undead thralls. Of course, since he’s a one-man-army, he manages to destroy the demon along with his entire crew.

6. In this post-apocalyptic game (see, I have to keep mentioning the setting ’cause the plots are so similar), there’s a church full of people serving/protecting something in the basement. That something, it turns out, has a hobby of taking “pure” (IE, non-irradiated) humans and turning them into horrible, hulking, asexual brutes capable only of the most base reasoning, which it then plans to unleash upon the few remaining knots of civilization left.

7. In this game, a young man who has lost a young woman he cares about makes a deal with the Ultimate Evil, who tasks him with killing the sixteen guardians who hold him in check. After doing so, the Ultimate Evil does bring the young woman back from the dead…before promptly possessing the young man.

Good luck and have fun!

Okay! We’re trying something new for Name That Game. Rather than use screenshots (which I either have to find or take and either way can now be googled), I’m going to present a series of descriptions of games with a common theme – in this case, human/alien first contact and interaction, and you guys are going to try to guess what games I’m talking about. I will NOT be limiting the games to the PC; classic games and console games will also be used. The person who posts the comment with the most correct responses gets a no-prize! (Which is no prize. Get it?)

So here we go!

1. You and your crew are transported to another world that once held sentient alien life. Alone and with limited resources, you must contend with strange weather, ancient and malfunctioning technology, and a substance that makes you immortal but is highly addictive. Eventually you persevere and save not only yourself, but the entire alien race, who had been trapped in an alternate dimension.

2. You’re a special agent, sent to investigate a ship’s distress beacon. Once on board you find the ship overrun by Giger-esque aliens who want nothing more than to eat you for lunch. While you have laser weapons with which to defend yourself, the mission isn’t as simple as “arm the self-destruct and get out” because there’s at least one survivor who must be rescued. Meanwhile, the aliens hatch their latest, massively-evolved offspring – a white specimen that is immune to all of your weapons. (Warning – this one’s a toughie.)

3. You awaken on a ship to discover it overrun by intelligent, assimilating, hive-minded aliens who want to add you to their collective. The alien hive-mind is evolutionarily adaptive, constantly throwing dangerous new life forms at you (the biomass for which it got from…er…eating the ship’s crew). You also have to deal with not one, but two psychotic artificial intelligences before you can finally blow the ship to smithereens and escape in a pod.

4. Your idyllic planet is suddenly attacked by a hostile alien force; fortunately the government has a well-equipped army specifically created to deal with these alien attacks. Funny how they always seem to show up after the attacks are over… Using your Nosy Reporter Skills, you discover that not only are the government forces in league with the aliens, but you yourself are the reason they are attacking!

5. Aliens attack Earth en masse, literally out of the blue. After the efforts of individual countries to stem the tide prove futile, a multinational organization is created specifically to counter the attacks, which you are made leader of. While you’re initially outgunned and all your soldiers are complete rookies, through experience and researching alien tech you finally gain the upper hand and not only push the aliens off earth, but end the invasion by destroying their forward base on Mars.

6. You wake up to an ordinary morning, only to discover that your best friend is an alien and the Earth is about to be destroyed. After narrowly avoiding getting destroyed along with it, you end up jetting around the galaxy (and back and forth in time) in order to…well, we don’t know. The game ends on one of the best/worst cliffhangers in gaming history.

7. They’s up in your base, killin’ your d00dz. Return the favor.

Good luck and have fun!

Okay, this is another “I have a point to make so that actual naming of the game won’t be hard” posts. Here are five “classic” top-down RPGs.

Can anyone look at the terrain tiles of these games and tell me what I noticed about them?

Let’s name that game! Trust me, it won’t be hard. It’s indie, but it’s a, you know, popular indie.

Name and developer, please! If you win, I promise that the next time I cast fireball I’ll make sure you’re out of the blast radius. Even if you’re the warrior and get to wear plate and have TONS of hit points. Cheater.

File this one under “cool stuff my friends have done”.

Name and developer, please! If you win, I’ll let you have my stapler. No, it’s not a red Swingline, but it staples just fine and that’s what matters, right? Right?

EDIT: For the first time ever, I didn’t even get one guess. The game is Gibbage, by Dan Marshall of Zombie Cow Studios.