General
Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
.I am playing Scribblenauts Unlimited, which is good. I discovered today that the game does not have “beer” in its dictionary. It does, however, have “shoggoth” and “parantha.” Guided by American standards for what is acceptable in children’s entertainment, you can kill people with rocket launchers, but alcohol is edgy. (“Naked” is an acceptable adjective. It puts a big mosaic over the object.)
: Zubon
Cute, simple tower defense themed around rodents protecting a barbeque from dinosaurs. I cannot speculate on why herbivores are holding a barbeque or why they killed cows.
The game crashed five times in the first hour of play. Honestly, you could end a review there.
Gameplay is made exceedingly simple by the low number of moving parts and the limited number of places to put them. You have a lot of flexibility in where you could place most towers, but there are only so many places where it would be sane. Each tower has a different shape, so you can see in a few seconds how the level is meant to be beaten. Drop towers, collect coconuts, win. There is increased flexibility over time as you can pick more towers and in greater variety, as in Plants vs. Zombies, but I don’t think this really deserves to be mentioned on the same page as Plants vs. Zombies.
The preciousness of the graphics would put Japan into insulin shock. This, combined with the simple gameplay and low difficulty, suggests it as a game for small children, although you would not give this to anyone unless they have already played PvZ to the point of boredom. And maybe not then.
Cute, briefly amusing, but not especially good. Wait for a really good sale if you get it at all.
: Zubon
Your game has various sources of gear or whatever your unit of character advancement is (usually gear). You might get it from quests, crafting, events, PvP, single group dungeons, or raids. Of course, whatever sort of gameplay you favor is the one that should produce the best rewards or at least have a chance of eventually earning something comparable to the best. In games with raids, especially progressive raiding, raids usually produce the strongest gear. And I have always been pretty much okay with this, despite never being all that interested in online synchronized dance recitals.
Because what are you going to do with the best weapon in the game as a solo player? None of the solo content assumes that you are going to have an extra thousand DPS, so you will just blow through it even quicker. Of course, by the time you get the best weapon in the game (TV Tropes warning, happy Monday), you don’t need it, so it is even more of a cosmetic reward. You will probably enjoy solo content less if you have raid gear that trivializes it. You do not need raid gear unless you are raiding.
But I know we have some readers who do things with MMO content other than enjoy it, so perhaps you have your reasons.
: Zubon
For some reason, this 2006 post appeared in my RSS feed. But of course, the writings of Wilhelm Arcturus are always fresh and ready to be mined for new insights. Such as:
I have not avoided groups in the past because I am anti-social. … I have avoided groups because they make leveling take longer in WoW. Solo play, for levels, is rewarded in WoW. When you group, your exp per kill is reduced, time taken to finish drop related quests goes up dramatically with each person you add to the group (so you do kill more, which mitigates the exp per kill loss somewhat, but a lot of the exp is in finishing the quest, so your exp/hour is still taking a hit), and unless your group all has the same quests, somebody is usually waiting for everybody else to get to their quest.
This of course brought 2008 to mind:
If it is designed as solo content, you gain little to nothing for bringing a friend. Indeed, it might take the two of you longer to do it together than it would to do it separately, say if you each need to loot a dozen ground objects that despawn after they are looted; you would have been better off each going alone, five minutes after each other, rather than going together and waiting for the respawns.
Both of which reinforce the point from yesterday that grouping brings with it the potential for great upsides and downsides. If most of the leveling game takes away most of the upside, that leaves a lot of distance for the increasingly common “solo MMO” to fall.
Which are perhaps some reasons why we are seeing the rise of MOBAs and a renaissance in small group games where you bring your friends rather than trying to seek the questionable benefits of a matchmaker service.
: Zubon
Single-player gaming lacks the peaks that you get in good multiplayer gaming. It also lacks the troughs in bad multiplayer gaming. Your gaming preferences are going to be strongly influenced by how much weight you place on the most extreme experience versus the average experience and your relative weight of positive versus negative experiences.
If one really horrible thing can ruin your entire night, PvP will almost inevitably be a harrowing experience for you, and any multiplayer gaming is a crapshoot. Beyond just the effects of anonymity, wide exposure teaches you that some people are just genuinely horrible human beings. And they want to share that with you.
If you are the sort to laugh it off or counter-troll, the downside of PvP and multiplayer gaming is limited for you. If you seek conflict rather than avoiding it, the internet will always have more for you. If you remember the positive and forget the negative, the downside is temporary while the upside is lasting.
If you evaluate the quality of the evening by how many minutes you were having a good time, something like EVE Online will rarely be a good night for you. Scouting, mining, traveling… the median minute of play is pretty dull. Granted, the average minute of MMO play is poor relative to most other niches, but PvP gaming with lengthy downtime stands out as low average quality. If you evaluate the quality of the evening by the best minute in which you were having a good time, nothing is going to top PvP and multiplayer. If you place more weight on extreme rather than average experiences, even strongly negative events can be rated highly because you take the ebb with the flow.
A related factor is the context in which you will tolerate all this. You might tolerate perverse randomization but rage against human maliciousness. You might laugh off human stupidity but rage against poor design. You might tolerate poor design as long as the company is good. Introverts will have an extra weight against negative multiplayer interactions, because those are excessively psychologically taxing.
: Zubon
I have argued before that seeing a game’s achievements tells you a bit about how the developers expect you to play and therefore whether you are likely to enjoy their game design. Even without explicit categories, you can see that a game awards achievements for beating the game, for 100% completion, for beating bosses with one hand tied behind your back, for exploring all the corners of the game, for killing 10 million rats, etc. It says something about the game or the developers if there are hundreds of achievements or they skew towards one category.
In Prime World: Defenders, 46/80 achievements are for defeating each of 23 maps with one of two hands tied behind your back; you will get some of them on accident, others take some relatively precise work like beating them with exactly 1 life left.
Two of the achievements I had not through are power of 10 achievements. If you scroll down to the least achieved achievements, you see “build 10,000 towers” and “win 500 games.” Does this game expect you to grind and reward you for it? Look at the math in the title. A game with 23 maps has an achievement for winning 500 games. Even with procedurally generated content, that is a LOT of times per map.
: Zubon
Continuing further in Prime World: Defenders has answered some questions.
Yes, the rarer towers are unambiguously better than the basic ones. Early on, my mostly upgraded wooden tower was boring but practical. As a great lover of DoTs, my fully upgraded poison tower is awesome yet practical, but the better towers are generally of the rarer rarities, and they can be upgraded further from there. I am told that the dragon tower is especially excellent for the mid-game, but I have yet to find that card, instead finding multiple sun and lightning towers (crushing individuals and groups, respectively).
Yes, the later levels are balanced around a resource grind. You must complete side missions to collect and upgrade cards, or else your numbers are not big enough to complete the main maps. There is a daily login prize for some reason (currently disabled by bug), so you could theoretically just wait instead of grinding, and you will be ready for those later maps sometime in 2015.
This game reinforces the critical importance of threshold values. An attack that does 50% of an enemy’s hit points is worth about as much as an attack that does 90%. Not exactly, because you can mix heavy hitters with fast or AE attacks, but there is a huge difference between 99% and 100%. This is where the better towers and upgrades become critical.
Oddly, the game has some anti-farming code. I found the 4th boss trivially easy and repeated it to see how quick I could complete that map. The 4th boss is now worth 0 silver and 0 xp. You are supposed to farm, but you are supposed to farm the random missions. I have reached the point where I need to farm the easier random missions to beat the harder random missions to farm rarer cards to beat the main missions.
Hmm, maybe I just need that much farm for beating it cleanly. I am caught in the circle of farming. Back to the regular mission chain! [Update: nope, needed a little more farming. On tower defense, the margin between “can’t beat it at all” and “can beat it 100% perfectly” is small.]
: Zubon
I am about half-way through the campaign of Prime World: Defenders. It is tower defense with collectible card game elements, which sounds like a game designed for me. Tycho at Penny Arcade has similar gaming tastes, so his recommendation convinced me to pre-order before a really good sale. And hey, pre-ordering gives you a little sale plus some little bonuses.
If you like tower defense, you will like Prime World Defenders. It has minimal mazing elements, mostly choosing which towers to build and (slightly) upgrade along fixed paths. Enemies and towers have the standard mix of air/ground, fast/slow, groups & splash, stealth, healing, etc. You have spells (1 until you buy talents) and no hero unit; this is not action tower defense like Orcs Must Die! or Dungeon Defenders. You can buy talents to improve overall effectiveness.
The collectible card mechanics are the non-standard element. It operates at three levels. First, towers and spells are cards. You get the basic cards as you progress, and there are rarer cards to be found. Having found relatively few, I do not have an indication that rarer towers are absolutely better, but they can be upgraded further. Upgrades are the second level: you can recycle cards to level up other cards, and artifact cards have no purpose except to recycle for larger values. Evolution is the third level: you can recycle duplicates to level up a card in a slightly different way, which unlocks the ability to upgrade the tower on a map. Towers therefore have two level counters: towers can become permanently stronger, and then within each map you can pay to make each a level 2 or 3 tower.
This advancement is both good and bad. To me, in terms of quality of play, it is on balance bad. It makes balance difficult, because the same difficulty does not work for fully upgraded towers and fresh-from-the-pack cards. My one fully upgraded tower minces enemies, and I cannot imagine how devastating a fully upgraded rare tower must be (unless that balance went badly in another direction and it is not worth finding and upgrading them). It is hard to get a satisfying challenge under these circumstances; you do not know if you have good strategy or just good numbers. Difficulty is so far aimed low, so you can complete the levels despite poor strategy or low numbers, and you can go back later to complete them with no leakage and/or either achievement. I like that this also allows you to play around a bit more instead of looking for the One Strategy that meets highly tuned difficulty.
If that is good grind for you, you will love this. There is procedurally generated content so you can get some variety in map layout and enemy composition, and you could spent weeks collecting and upgrading towers. If you would prefer to skip leveling and have all the content tuned for the level cap, Defense Grid will probably be more to your liking.
: Zubon
These are a simple man’s thoughts that didn’t make it to full posts:
Warframe is a really nice third-person shooter with some ninja-magic effects. The Canadian team seems to have a very good grasp of everything from updates to the cash shop to their technology. Things can get a little grindy, but it pretty much equates to playing anyway. I dislike grinding/buying classes, but for players unwilling to pay the cash shop for classes, the grind seems very reasonable.
I’ve slowed down a lot with Minecraft Feed-the-Beast. I feel like the tech game is mostly over, and now I’m thinking of shedding everything and heading in to the Twilight Forest. The highly anticipated Aether 2 mod seems like it might get released this weekend too. It is an amazing dimension mod in its own right, but the mod team added dungeon instances to the mod. Continue reading Thoughts Throughout a Rainy Week
Tower defense themed around light and dark, memory and forgetting. Somewhat interesting, but not undeserving of its 68/100 metacritic score.
Shad’O makes heavy use of a fog of war mechanic. Most of the map is covered except for a few points of light. Building towers extends the light. At the start of a level, you are given a brief glimpse of the whole map, then you get a red line showing where the enemy will be headed beneath the fog.
Shad’O falls into the unfortunate sort of puzzle game that knows exactly how many resources you have and balanced around it. Except for the special levels that can mix in a bit of randomization, so good luck there. You have X much light coming in, so you will have X light worth of enemies. Some companions (towers) are better for some enemies, but if you build a mix, you are pretty much set.
Except on the levels when that will get you killed. Most games sold as “strategy” would shy away from blatantly screwing over the player, dealing devastating damage if you do not prepare specifically for something you did not know was coming. Shad’O has no such compunctions. The first couple of times a new enemy is introduced, you do get the warning “there is only one way to defeat this enemy.” That stops, and you instead need to recognize that a monster spawn sound was unfamiliar, scroll to the spawn spot, and click on the new enemy type before it hides beneath the shadow; next see if you have time and resources to respond to it or do you need to potentially restart? (You don’t need to kill every enemy of every wave, but do you want to wait until the last wave to find out that you were an enemy or two off because of the new surprise monster? Also, Shad’O does not feel the need to limit itself to one of those per wave.) The level will usually have quite a few of whatever this new thing is, so re-do any plans you might have had to focus on this new type, while still having something in place for every previous enemy type. Shad’O will also toss in unmentioned environmental effects, say disabling half your towers while the new enemy is rolling through. There is a spell to counter that. Didn’t spend the skill point to learn it? Go repeat a previous level on Nightmare difficulty to unlock a skill point. There is no skill point reset. It is not all that difficult, but it seems balanced around the assumption that you will play half the level, find out what this level wants from you, then reset and play the level for real.
The level graphics are rather nice. The cutscene graphics and voice acting are rather poor. You must install Quicktime to play, which is a dealbreaker for some people. The story, as far as I played, is somewhat obvious and telegraphed. The sound effects in the first boss fight confirming that are a rather nice touch. Graphics get in your way in that the game is fond of excessively long animations. For whatever reason, the slow animation of summoning a companion is more annoying than waiting on tower construction in another tower defense game.
Somewhat interesting, but neither highly enjoyable nor recommended. I might go back and finish it just to see if it gets more interesting once you unlock all the towers, presumably in the last third of the game. I’ll update if my assessment changes.
: Zubon