Ultimate Bravery

I'm here again to show you another awesome League of Legends game type separate from the normal, ranked and ARAM queues we're all so used to. This week I’m here to talk about Ultimate Bravery and man, is it fun!

Ultimate Bravery is a game type that basically forces you to follow a build path and itemization that's not necessarily the best thing out there for your character. In fact nine times out of ten it's absolute garbage; but that's all part of the fun and ridiculousness that this game type brings to the table.

The setup is fairly simple. You start by picking a champion you want to play, going to the Ultimate Bravery website and then generating a random build for that champ. The website will give you a few things you need to follow, first of which is which spell you need to max first. Secondly it will give you mastery numbers which lets you know how many points you need to have in each respective mastery tree. It also tells you which Summoners’ spells to take. Lastly it tells you what items you need to build; so you might end up playing a tank as an ADC or a hyper carry support. That's the innate fun of the game type: you never really know how you're gonna play each champ and to be honest, it’s a lot of fun. It forces you to play outside your comfort zone and like I said about hide andseek, it really teaches you about the mechanics and skills of the champions because you're normally more reliant on your skill and ability to play the game than on the items. It allows you to play the game in a “meta” free environment which I personally think is a lot more fun.

Over the last few seasons, League of Legends has been boiled down into the current meta, and to be honest I don’t ever really see it changing, especially with the fact that Riot has embraced it so wholeheartedly. Ultimate Bravery harkens back to the days when I first started the game and was leveling my account up back in season 1—which was almost like the wild west of League of Legends, back when you didn't need a jungler and going Blitz and Annie bot lane was the most OP thing out there.

Ultimate Bravery is a simplified version of playing that focuses more on having fun than winning at all costs. I definitely think most people should give this a try and it’s a shame a lot of people don’t know more about it or even play it, cause honestly, it's some the most fun I’ve ever had playing League. I really think more people need to give it a try. If you want to get a build you can have one generated here http://www.ultimate-bravery.com/and there's also community chatroom in the League client. Just join Ultimate Bravery; there's usually people setting up games (especially during peak hours). If you’ve got time for a normal you have time for a round of Ultimate Bravery and trust me, you won't be disappointed.

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Raising The Dead Tree

We’re back again with more zombie action this week. I’m talking about my most recent zombie acquisition: Dead Rising 3. It’s no secret that I love zombies and the Dead Rising series has been one of my favourites—the wacky weapons and open world have always made these games a ton of fun—and they’ve evolved over time, implementing new ideas well and adapting to changes and issues that arose in the previous iterations.

Dead Rising at its core is one thing: killing a ton of zombies, and there's nothing wrong with that! Over the years they've come up with more and more interesting ways to kill, maim and utterly destroy your zombie foes and the psychopaths that litter the post apocalyptic landscape of the games. In Dead Rising 3 however, they did a lot of cool things that solved a lot of smaller problems I had in the last two games, first of which was allowing you to create combo weapons on the spot. Now if you haven't played any games in the series I’ll elaborate: since Dead Rising 2, the games have allowed you to create more powerful weapons by combining two or more items. These weapons do more damage, give more XP and are more durable making them the better option in the long run. Now in the previous game you could only create them at crafting stations dotted along the map, but in Dead Rising 3 they’ve removed the crafting stations all together allowing you to create these badass weapons anywhere you want. There is a trade off though, you can only create items that you’ve found the blueprints for, which is a huge difference and somewhat limiting because in the last game you didn't need the combo card to create a weapon, it only served to show you a possible combo and make it stronger. This subtle change is surprisingly frustrating when you’re holding two items that you know go together but can’t do anything with because you haven’t found the blueprint that tells you so.

With that being said, this is a small complaint and after a while of collecting you’ll have all the blueprints you could want or need, it’s just a mild frustration when you find a baseball bat and a box of nails and your character has no clue what to do with them.

Another large portion of the gameplay is spent on combo cars which are basically a necessity for getting around the city. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that this isn’t an awesome addition to the franchise, I just wish it had been better implemented because a fairly large percentage of the game is spent traveling between the three major city hubs, across these massive bridges and roadways which are absolutely flooded with the previously living, so you are pretty much required to do a lot of driving which becomes tedious pretty quickly. The game really could've used a fast travel mechanic, at least to put you in a spot somewhere in each city, allowing you to hop around a lot quicker but instead they left you with the combo cars as your only real option, which while fun, lose their appeal pretty quickly as you slowly plow through an ungodly amount of zombies on all the roads.

The game itself is fun - don’t get me wrong - there are just small things that I found really slowed down the game and were kind of a take away from the previous version. All in all, the game is still a ton of fun and has a great story, the new weapons and combos are awesome and creative, and the gameplay is tons of fun. There's just a few small kinks that slow down the game. If you're a fan of the series or looking for a new game to play, I’d recommend giving this a try.

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Travel Back In Time With Conflicks

Being the resident dev on the blog, I might as well share a little bit of what Artifice Studio—The Company I work for—has in store for everyone in the near-ish future.

One of the main goals at our studio is to create games that have unique Universes. This is something you could definitely see with Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves. While the game was grounded in Canadian/Quebec history, the way it blended with our native folktales was distinct and I can confidently say there is no other game quite as Canadian as our own.

Now in comes Conflicks: Revolutionary Space Battles, yet again based in our history—the French Revolution— Instead of just taking this time period for face value, we added a little twist to the history. With our ancestors thrust into the depths of space, waging war amongst each other, who in their right mind wouldn't want to help King Henry the 8th expand his space empire? I know I do! Of course Greater Britain isn't the only faction in Conflicks, have a look at our story trailer for a better idea.

Along with creating unique Universes, we also like to blend game genres and create hybrids. For Sang-Froid we blended action-RPGs with a tower defense style game. We weren't the first to the party with this type of gameplay—Dungeon Defends and Orcs Must Die! both beat us to the punch—but if you go by what they say on the forums, we brought way more strategy to the mix in comparison to the other games in the genre.

With Conflicks, the goal is to blend a top-down real-time strategy with a physics based game. Picture a galactic game of marbles which sees the player flick (get it? Con-FLICKS) his/her units across space to do battle. You colonize planets and slam into other ships like bumper cars while hop-scotching across space shooting lasers everywhere. It's a ton of fun! Unlike in our first endeavor, Conflicks will include a multiplayer component (like every RTS needs to have) on top of what you can expect to be a very entertaining single player.

For more information on Conflicks, you can visit Artifice Studio's website where we've been keeping a dev blog. There you can learn more about the different factions and characters you will see in the game. Also don't forget to follow us on twitter either @artificestudioand while you're at it, show a little love to our own Twitter account @gamerbasement.

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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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Cliffhorse

Have you ever played Skyrim and ran up mountains on your horse and thought to yourself, "I wish this was a game?" Well Notch, the creator of minecraft did and he made it and called it Cliffhorse. Cliffhorse is a game but in definition only. It's more of a world sim in which you control the mighty and majestic Cliffhorse and you run around in your scenic sky island exploring and climbing cliffs. But beware: venture beyond the walls of Cliff Island and you will fall into the endless blue abyss that surrounds it.

The game, if you want to call it that, is incredibly simple: you run around and explore, climbing and descending the mountainous terrain. It may be simple but there's something innately fun about the way the game controls. For example, after the slow climb your horse gains momentum on its way down, allowing you to pick up a ton of speed...it’s hard to describe what exactly makes the game so fun it’s almost the ridiculousness of the premise that keeps you interested and playing.

Although you aren’t the only one in this world, there’s also a giant ball you can push around, which may or may not have been a horse at one point in time...the horse texture stretched across it possibly hints at something more sinister. The game is currently in “early access” and is free to play but if you do want to pay into it you can use Dogecoins, an online currency similar to Bitcoin.

Notch also made a point of mentioning there will be no guaranteed updates for this indie title. The game itself is more of a joke by Notch, who released it a few days before E3 2014, calling it “the future of gaming” but for what really just amounts to an April Fool's day joke, it actually has an interesting fan following and grossed 280 000 dogecoins (100 USD) in just one day.

I’d say the game itself is worth a shot just to experience it. Cliffhorse is a tiny download and barely a game but there's a charm about it that definitely makes it worth playing and I recommend giving it a try. It’s not the kind of game you're gonna pump 70+ hours into but it’s worth the time you're gonna take to mess around in it.

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