Touch Screen Dinos!

Ever get tired of hearing how fantastic Hay Day is? Ever want to have your own farm simulator but with dinosaurs? Well I've got the game for you; however, you may want to be careful what you wish for. Dinosaur fever is in the works with the recent passing of Walking with Dinosaurs and teases of the new Jurassic World movie. Therefore, it's a good time to discuss Jurassic Park Builder for your tablet and mobile phone.

Firstly, the game is pretty heavily based off the first movie’s settings. You'll see the familiar Jurassic Park gates and the striped green off-road vehicles made famous by being stomped on by the big T-Rex himself. The game presents you with an overview of the heavily forested park and tasks you with demolishing patches of trees to allow you further expansion of your personalized park. Much the same as any other simulator, you have resources to replenish and distribute throughout the park. In this case, you have a harbor that allows you to gather green crops for your herbivores and meat for your carnivores. Both buildings on your harbor can be upgraded to provide more of the specific resources but it's so painfully long to get them upgraded to a satisfying rate that it's not really worth-while. This leads me to my first complaint: the game tries to keep you interested by intriguing you with the notion of "new" upgrades, "new" dinosaurs, etc. However, the progression is so painfully slow that it simply becomes a nuisance. Everything requires money or a large sum of resources, and if you don't have what you need then you may opt to spend real life cash to quicken the pace. Why? Why bother designing it in such a way that you feel the game forces you to have to pay for everything? The only time these mobile games have ever had me spend any cash was if it felt like a treat to myself, not a means to proceed through the game. It's a huge issue that slows the game down significantly enough that I may find myself deleting the game far earlier than I had planned.

Consequently, what should be the most entertaining part of the game, the dinosaurs, are also let down by the fact that it takes a millennia to get anything accomplished. For instance, the early game provides you with a Triceratops that you may feed and grow to provide you cash to develop buildings and scenery. However, the Triceratops takes so few resources that you end up dumping as much money and greens into it resulting with little leftover to work with. That's fine and dandy because the game provides you with mission objectives that reward you yet again with cash and resources that are then again dumped back into the Triceratops. Okay great, now I've got a larger Triceratops and I just unlocked the Dilophosaurus who you realize earns you far more cash than your Triceratops did, but at a far lower level. This is great if you didn't already spend all your money on your 'Tops. That my friends, is the biggest issue: you always find yourself in this purgatory of not having any resources or money to spend and therefore you click away at your dinosaurs to earn money. This simply reinforces the same issue of pace. All aspects of the game are slow. You can't get excited to obtain a new dinosaur because the five that preceded it used up everything you had and therefore you probably can't afford that new Allosaurus.

Incidentally, the game does offer some joy to dinosaur fans. It provides a well-rounded collection of dinosaurs, both famous and obscure. Not that I could enjoy any end game species because I simply couldn't make it there. There's also an interesting evolution mechanic for the dinosaurs. Every ten levels that your titanic lizard achieves, it can evolve. This allows it to be reborn as a baby but with a different skin pigmentation. Although the creature was reborn, it continues to level up where it left off; meaning that if it was evolved at ten, it would now be level eleven and so on. If you level your beasts high enough, you may enter an arena mode that pits your ferocious beasts against CPU-controlled dinosaurs in a deathmatch style setting. Optionally, you may also partake in a PvP tournament but, I couldn't be bothered because every match up was against a player who was at least four times my level. That being said, the combat animations for the dinosaurs are pretty sweet and almost endearing due to some of the design aesthetics. The Ceratosaurus in particular is a chunky piece of flesh and teeth who's a bit too cute to look menacing. Likewise, the sound design is great but also uninspired. The growls and screeches the dinosaurs make are fantastic but the music and sound effects of feeding them are kind of boring and unbelievable.

All-in-all, I would pass up on the game but if you've caught dinosaur fever and fancy a trek into the world of Jurassic Park, this isn't your worst option. There's some interesting items to be exposed to and if you love dinosaurs than I'm sure you want to get your grubby lil' hands on anything that has a T-rex for a logo. Just don't expect to see a Spinosaurus or anything particularly cool unless you invest a whole lot of time and money into the game. I'll explore the prehistoric scene further to see if I can come across anything better attuned to dinosaur lovers.

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Boom on the Beach‏

I’m very late to the party on this one, but today I wanted to review yet another mobile game. Boom Beach, from developer Supercell, shares many similarities with Clash of Clans (another Supercell game) but has some key differences which will most likely keep you addicted.

The game presents itself as a war-strategy game, where you land troops on a beach to attack an enemy base. Kinda reminds me of D-Day. Don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, but I feel odd about it. Your troops, of course, proceed to attack the various buildings, but you have no continuous control over where they go.

To remedy this problem, in comes the Gunboat. It stays at bay and provides support for your troops. Your gunboat can temporarily direct your troops, which is much better than Clash of Clans, where no such strategy exists. It can also heal troops or freeze enemy attacks, amongst other things. You are limited to the amount of times you can use the gunboat, so being smart with what the gunboat does is imperative.

Like Clash of Clans, attacks can be done with different types of troops. You got your Rifleman (basic soldier), Heavy (do I need to explain this one?), Zooka (ranged attacker), amongst others. You send your troops out on Landing Crafts, which can only hold 1 type of troop. Unlike Clash of Clans, when you send out a Landing Craft to attack, every troop on the boat will proceed to attack. This is not as controllable as Clash of Clans, because a) you cannot send troops one-by-one and b) you can only attack from the beach (as opposed to any side of the base). Maybe they’ll add paratroopers in the future?

Your base is pretty much the same as Clash of Clans, minus the fact that there are no walls built to defend your base. I’ll spare you on the details, but there are things that gather resources (Gold, Wood, Stone, and Iron) and defense options to, well, defend your base.

In Boom Beach, you can, of course, upgrade your buildings and troops, which take time. You are also limited to 1 building upgrade at a time, which is fine because the game allows you to stay busy with attacks on other bases. What I like is that it doesn’t take much time to train troops again if they end up dying in battle, so the game feels more fluid in comparison to Clash of Clans.

The in-game currency is Diamonds, which you find scattered across the map or gained if you complete challenges. I use them if I’m out of a resource I need, but there’s barely a time when I’m short on Diamonds. Yes, the game wants you to buy the in-game currency with real money, but it’s not as forceful as in Clash of Clans. I can commend Supercell for being less “gimme your monies” because they’re probably swimming in it nowadays.

On that note, Gold in Boom Beach becomes quickly useless. Before long you'll end up just like Supercell, swimming in money with no use for it. As far as I can tell, you can only use Gold to upgrade your troops, but you end up maxing out your troops’ stats fairly quickly in the game.

Overall, the game is an improvement on the Clash of Clans formula. There’s much more room to strategize your attacks, by selecting and supporting your troops. It’s much less intense in terms of grabbing your money and keeps you more involved. I’d recommend you download this one as a good time-waster.

P.S. Supercell, your next game should have pirates.

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Turn Me On Unturned

This week I’m back to talk to you about a game that encompasses not one but two of my most common topics—it’s an early access game about zombies called Unturned. At first glance Unturned looks like someone's attempt at making a flash rip off of Minecraft. But if you look past the blocky graphics the gameplay is actually quite good. The game itself is stable and relatively bug-free, which if you compare it to most of its counterparts in the early access genre that’s saying quite a bit.

The game can also be played in a few different ways. There is a single player mode where you are a lone survivor traveling across an island inhabited by the zombified remains of residents and military personnel. Your goal is simple: survive, explore and salvage as much as you can. The concept may be simple but the game has no lack of items to discover and a plethora of weapons and crafting options giving it a lot of depth and replayability. You’d be surprised how much there is to find and discover. Once you establish a settlement of sorts, Unturned allows you to go on what I like to call salvage runs—essentially gassing up a car and driving around from town to town looking for new gear and weapons, while continuing to fight off hordes of zombies. It really makes you feel like a survivor. Add in the experience and leveling aspect of the game (which is used to increase your different traits: be it offensively, defensively or just survival skills in general) you’re slowly but surely becoming more attuned to your environment, which is what a real survivor would over time. And that's all just the single player aspect.

In multiplayer there are a few differences, the most important of which being PVP. Now for the uninitiated that's player-versus-player and there's a certain change in feel when you start playing PVP which is the same in every zombie movie and game...other people are dicks. The game goes from you versus the world, to you versus the world and everyone else in it. That's a huge jump in difficulty because other players are better equipped and a lot smarter than your run of the mill zombie, then add in the fact that you drop whatever it is you're carrying on death puts a big target on your head, which leads to some shaky alliances and gangs of "pre-mades" running around tearing up the place.

The last game type is arena mode, which is kind of a survival multiplayer that's zombie free but just as dangerous. There's not much to say about it, it’s a kill or be killed world out there and it’s basically a mad grab for weapons and gear; it’s fun and can get pretty exciting but it speaks for itself.

As I said, Unturned is still in development but it’s fairly polished at this state and as you’ve seen, I’ve been enjoying it thoroughly and there's no reason you shouldn’t get this game because it won’t cost you a cent. If you feel like you absolutely need to pay money for this game or you just want to support the developers, you can pay five dollars for the gold edition of the game which gives you a bunch of in-game boosts and items including: better loot drops, exp boosts and access to gold servers which have better ping and are more stable than most. I’m not gonna tell you to go out and buy this game, because you don't need to buy it, just go download it and give it a try, it’s not gonna cost you a thing and you’ll probably end up liking it. I downloaded this game on a whim after watching some gameplay footage and it hasn’t disappointed me yet. So if you’ve got some free time, give it a try and hopefully you won’t shoot me in the head on some random server.

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My Gripes With Freemium Games

I finally did it: I stopped playing Ogame for the second time now. Unlike my prior experiences with the game—getting ripped a new asshole by some d-bag and then quitting—I feel as though the largest culprit for me dropping it is a humongous lack of time / brain power I do not wish to dedicate to a game in which I get nothing out of.

Like most freemium type games, everything you do in Ogame is in real-world time. For instance, building ships takes a certain amount of time (say 30 minutes per ship), as does building up your mines to collect resources (which can sometimes take days to complete). Putting these aspects aside, since they aren't even responsible for my disdain, I mainly stopped playing Ogame because the process of protecting your resources from thieving jerk-offs is really annoying. Basically the only time anything is safe is if it's being transported between planets. Having to constantly pool my resources from all my planets and then set up a long enough transport so that I can sleep and won't get attacked is hella annoying. I know it's part of the game and while I played it I accepted it, but sometimes my life just doesn't accommodate this demanding playstyle. It would also be a huge plus if this game had a phone app.

But now on to my main gripe: What the hell is even the point? In Ogame, for every 1000 resources you spend, you gain 1 point towards a score. With these points, everyone gets put on a leaderboard and is weighed against one another. I ended with 120k+ points, ranking me in the top 300 out of 1100 players. Pretty much the sole purpose of this game is to see how high you can get. What about in other games though? What is really the all-time purpose of games like Farmville or Clash of Clans? I have no clue.

The worst part about all this is that somehow people still spend money in Freemium games! Even in Ogame the developers implemented some form of monetization. The funniest part about that is when I played Ogame originally about 7 years ago, there was no pay option. Once the freemium game model came to light on cell phones, they added it in. I understand these games are probably just not geared towards me, but like I just don't comprehend what would compel people to waste money on a game with ultimately no purpose. I would rather just go to the casino and drop all that money on red at the roulette table.

So what is it about these games? If you play one fairly regularly, what game is it and please tell me what it is you get out of it? For me, I guess I just see them as a time-sink, kinda like watching sports—it serves absolutely no purpose other than having something to do instead of nothing. Big disclaimer, I am not knocking sports in any way, I love sports and would much rather waste my time yelling at a TV screen when my team is losing than playing a Freemium game.

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Transformers Universe: Fun In The Cybertronian Sun

Ah, I've finally gotten the chance to cover a Transformersgame, a free one at that! Introducing Transformers Universe, a free-to-play action RPG developed by Jagexfor the PC. Incidentally, the term MMORPG has been given to the game, however there's a lack of roaming and instead the game provides quick multiplayer action. In other words, it's a multiplayer mode on steroids. Therefore, if you're looking for a story-line or single player option, your best bet is the two HighMoon Studiogames that I'll cover in a later review. The only sliver of a narrative here is "kill the opposing faction," works for me.

Firstly, I love Transformers and consequently, I have high expectations from any form of media that delves into the franchise, excluding Mr. Bay products which I go in with the lowest expectations possible. My initial reaction to the concept of Jagextaking over the reins of the Transformers universe was one of relief. I never played Runescape, but it was popular enough for me to hear of it, which means it's good right? Maybe not, but the company had a backing. They had a concept, developed it and by Charlie standards, they did a good job. Now, enough of this chit-chat, on to the game!

               

Transformers universe provides you the opportunity to take your preferred side in the legendary Cybertronian war. Shall you defend freedom on Optimus Prime's side or ride the waves of conquest under Megatron's regime. The game takes place loosely within the Transformers Prime universe. The aesthetics follow suit, a mismatch of the 1984 generation-1 cartoon and the bay-verse complexity. It's a decent look, though it took me a while to get used to the fact that they no longer had noses. Petty, I know, but noses are important. Do you even smell bro? Now I've made a "bro" joke and my reputation is now tarnished.

               

Furthermore, after you make your faction selection and pick out a name for your commander, you join the fray as one of three initial bots or cons. The three choices consist of a damage dealing sniper, a well rounded warrior and lastly, the medic. I personally picked Triage,the initial Autobot medic. I always found that in any multiplayer game, there was a lack of support and Triage seemed to hold his own very well. Once your choice is made, you load into your base of operations which allows you to either queue for Multiplayer matches or exit into the PvE area. At any given time, this will be the most crowded area in the game. The base definitely makes it easy to meet fellow players and form a team to meet your needs.

Let's begin with the cons, no pun intended. High Grand, which is the PvE area, is incredibly boring in my opinion. You are given a decently sized area to drive around in and complete missions that generate every fifteen or so seconds after your faction completes the last mission. Every time you decapitate easily agro-ed Terrorcons or unforgiving turrets, you're awarded energon cubes which were initially used to repair your 'bot after its demise. Due to a recent patch, the death mechanic has been changed as to no longer require repairs. This makes energon a little less desirable with its only use to create consumables. Secondly, you get relics at an incredibly slow pace. The relics are used to purchase new combatants to play as along with re-sprays for said characters.

Furthermore, the Autobots being the "good bots," it probably attracts a lot more players and I find myself constantly teamed up with beginners who have no idea what they are doing. Everyone starts somewhere and when I started off, I had no idea how the game was played either. However, it's been a few months now and I use a better 'bot than the newbies alongside a higher ranking and level and yet I still get teamed up with them. Healing three other guys who don't know what they're doing for six matches in a row gets to be frustrating. The last complaint I have is that I wish a bit more was going on in the base, if you happen to play at awkward times when no one is there.....it's surprisingly dull. That's it! On to the good stuff.

               

The character selection is wonderful. Hopping into the hangar, located in the base, allows you to see all the possible bots you can acquire and they're all beautifully designed. They all have a unique look and their own set of skills and weapons. There's just about anything for anyone at this point and with constant additions to the roster, anyone's play-style will be met. My character of choice is Meltdown who is a mechanist. This class sustains itself by healing itself when damaged, healing others, knocking back opponents and slowing 'em down. He packs a decent punch too and looks totally kickass.

The gameplay has come a long way as well. It's so seamless now, going from bot to truck feels great and vice-versa. The special effects are a treat to the eyes, what with the Decepticons getting wings and tentacles when they proc a skill. The world is colorful and believable despite using a lower graphical engine than what most people are playing with nowadays. The community and mods are all friendly and competitive. Saving up a ton of relics and getting a new 'bot is satisfying. Getting revenge kills are exhilarating. Nothing beats taking down that one 'Con who's dominated your team. Lastly, the game is in open-beta. They're constantly improving and adding more content and it's all free. There are micro-transaction options but it's hardly a pay-to-win game. You can become a "founder" which means you donated a ton of cash and they allow you to play as three exclusive characters, but they're not overpowered. As long as you're not playing the starter characters, you can take 'em on.

For my final thoughts, being a closed-Beta tester, the opportunity was given to me to see how the game has progressed and boy, did it ever. The open beta and the patches have drastically improved the game. Having a higher traffic and fixing all the oddities here and there have made this game easily recommendable. Transformers fan or not, it's an enjoyable experience. It's worth it to try out at the very least. Lots of fun, lots of action, what do you have to lose? It's free!

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Naxxramas Is Cursed All Right

Blizzard recently released a single-player campaign of sorts for their online collectible card game (CCG) Hearthstone. It's called Curse of Naxxramasand while it did its job of getting me to load up the game again, it wholeheartedly failed to keep me engaged.

The format Blizzard chose for this content was episodic. Basically every week for 5 weeks, a section (or wing as they call them) of the Naxxramas dungeon unlocks and people are able to play it—provided they have put up the cash. Now if you get in early enough, the first part of the dungeon is free, if you wait too long than you have to pay for it like the rest (apparently you have one month from the initial release on July 22nd, 2014). Personally I think the first part of any episodic content in this format should be free, as the whole point is to make it so compelling that people want to pay for the rest.

The problem is Blizzard failed with that last point. I was really expecting this dungeon to be a real single-player experience, with its own narrative—I wasn't expecting anything crazy like new gameplay—but it didn't even have that! Naxxramas boiled down to 3 "boss" fights, which are just glorified bots. No narrative. No dungeon path either (I was maybe thinking something along the lines of a simpler Puzzle Quest map, but it didn't even have that). Without anything to keep me engaged with this content, why the hell should I even spend any money on it Blizzard?

The cards you get are the only real incentive to even purchase this content. You get 3 distinct cards for beating the 3 bosses and a legendary once you best all 3, each of which is themed to the dungeon. You also get another card for a specific class once you beat a challenge with that class. Basically you have to beat a specific boss with a specific class using a deck they give you, not one of your own. There are 2 such challenges in the first wing of the dungeon. In total you get 30 different cards after completing all 5 wings.

Getting all 6 cards in the first wing—which entails you beating all the bosses and challenges—took me roughly an hour. This is pretty lame since each wing is supposed to cost you $7 (or 700 gold, which is the in-game currency). Just for a frame of reference: purchasing all 5 wings at once is $25, and if you got the first one free than the remaining 4 wings are $20.

Back on point: very short + pretty easy = not very good single-player content. The only thing that almost saves it but doesn't at all is the fact that you can play the bosses a second time on a hellishly-hard difficulty. So hard that it actually made me want to not play anymore.

Maybe I'm just a little butthurt; I don't know, but I spent more time trying to beat the bosses on the "heroic" difficulty than I did beating the rest of the content. The worst part is that defeating the bosses on this difficulty doesn't even net you anything. Truthfully, saying that might be a bit pre-mature, as apparently if you beat all the bosses from all 5 wings on heroic it will unlock you a new skin for the back of your cards...whoopty-freakin-doo. I was able to beat one of the bosses on heroic in the extra 2 hours I spent playing Naxxramas, and it literally just came down to random luck. The advantages each of these bosses have are just so astronomical that I felt you needed all the luck you can get to defeat them. If I spent another few hours I could probably beat the others as well (I got really close to beating the second one) but I just don't think it's worth it.

Final Thoughts

Good try Blizzard, but in my opinion Curse of Naxxramascould have been so much more enticing or entertaining. Add a story, like an actual mini-adventure, instead of just making them simple AI battles skinned in a fancy face.

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Cash Of Clans

So for the past few months, I’ve been playing Clash of Clans. In case you haven’t heard about this game, it’s for mobile devices (iOS and Android) and made by developer Supercell. This game is so popular it’s getting ads on TV. Crazy.

The premise of the game is bare, but enjoyable. You build a base and defend it, while attacking other bases. You mine for 3 resources – gold, elixir, and dark elixir – and use them to upgrade and build new buildings. It’s well presented and allows you to create a clan to attack other clans. You get a variety of troops to attack with, so this allows for strategic planning of your attacks.

Please don't attack me

As a freemium game, building takes time – sometimes days – but you can purchase gems with real currency to speed up time. You can get these gems for free as well, by clearing bushes, trees, and rocks that grow on your base, but it’s insanely slow. Makes you wonder how much money Supercell is making off this game. Well, this fairly recent article states that the company has generated almost $900 million in revenues. It’s also valued at roughly twice the amount of Take-Two Interactive.

I myself spent $10 on it so far, but I don’t plan on spending a penny more. The freemium model allows customers to gauge how much they value the game: clearly, I value it at $10, while someone else could value it at $1,000.

Giving consumers this option is a smart idea, but I believe it’s used in the wrong way most of the time. Freemium games tend to put time constraints, almost forcing people who, in this day and age, don’t like to wait days for in-game upgrade to complete. On the other hand, you can literally play these games for countless amounts of hours, due to their simplicity. Sure, there are literally hundreds of these kinds of games out now, but they’re good time-killers.

The truth is: these games don’t have any story. The developers make a simple game, balance the mechanics, and put time constraints to have consumers pay them. They prey on our want to have things done faster. This causes us to value these types of game differently from one another.

All your money are belong to us!

Shareware is fairly similar, but overall more honest to the consumer. Old DOS games used to offer the first chapter or a small part of the game for free to lure gamers into buying the game. Sounds perfectly fine to me. Other developers release demos, which is a similar concept as well. Moreover, you’ll find many programs or apps that are free, but add features for some money. Keywords: add features. Most freemium games don’t add features, they just allow you to play faster.

To me, Clash of Clans is the ultimate example of a freemium game. How is it possible that Supercell, a developer with no track record, is valued more than Take-Two, who has published the Grand Theft Auto and BioShock series? Because everyone has a smartphone, mobile games grow exponentially in popularity but also tend to crash. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same fate for Supercell, since it’s already happening to Zynga.

Final Thoughts
Freemium games allow the consumer to price the game however they see fit. Most developers of these games implement the freemium aspect in shady ways to force out as much money from people as possible. The combination of freemium games being made available to every consumer with a smartphone results in the widest audience attainable.

This pricing model has worked magically for one-hit-wonder developers to turn big, quick profits. Casual gamers don’t seem to mind paying for the option to speed up the game—an option that adds no true value to the game. Developers aren’t going to change until consumers tighten their wallets.

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No Pain, nOgame

I recently returned to playing this game called Ogame, which is a massively-multiplayer online browser based game—meaning all you need is the internet to play it—and it's all based in space. Being an online game, some people can be really annoying and I'll get into that in a moment. I originally played Ogame 7-8 years ago for about a year or two. I had a fairly substantial grouping of colonized planets all in one star system and my home planet had a pretty hefty defence... Then some jerk-off sent an armada at me, destroyed quite a bit of my base and I lost interest. Fast forward to now and I felt like having a time sink. I will note however that this isn't the first time I've tried to start playing this game again.

Basically everyone starts off with a single planet and you must construct mines and such to build up resources so you can improve your technology. Eventually you can colonize other planets and attack people. Think of many free-to-play cell phone games and you've got the right idea for how Ogame plays.

Game screen, click to enlarge

As I had stated before, online players can be incredibly irritating sometimes. The game is built around everybody living together, so there is bound to be some combat between players. A large portion of players that build up fast tend to farm resources off other players. The more moral of these thieves tend to go after players that are inactive, but since I joined a new server, no one is really inactive yet.

It was bound to happen: I was attacked, which I have no inherent problem with. I saw it in time (sensors FTW), and I spent all my resources so when his cargo ships got to my planet, he would pilfer nothing. Among some of the things I built to relieve myself of my resources were some rocket launchers, which are the weakest defences you can build. You would think this would be the end of it; he would see I'm actually playing, not taking his crap and instead of wasting time, he would farm a weaker target. But no I get this message instead:

Wrong move
message saying you were online = we both save time and I'll stop farming you
building missiles and trying to kill my cargos = I'll have to come back with fighters

Have a good game ;)
         
Heremor  

He's trying to steal from me and has the gall to talk to me about etiquette? I don't know, maybe I'm just being pissy, but if he wants to "farm" resources off players, that is a risk he is willing to take. I owe him nothing; if he sends out an attacking fleet, he should be scanning the target constantly to see if anything has changed. At least that's what I do when I attack someone.

Sorry, I'm not sorry. 

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