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Dec 15th, 2012 at 08:15:08 - Swords & Soldiers (PC) |
Quick post about this one...I can't play too much Thief at one time so I keep tossing other things in the mix and taking Thief breaks. I think I got Swords & Soldiers for free in a humble bundle or something. I didn't want it, as with many of the games I've gotten in bundles or for free places, but since I have it I feel obligated to try it.
It's a neat idea, a 2-d sidescrolling RTS. It's kinda cute, sorta fun, and pretty simple. There are 3 factions, the Vikings, Chinese, and Aztecs, and each has their own little skill tree with maybe 10 things you can upgrade. You build miners to get gold, and just start upgrading the skill tree and producing units. The only structures you build are towers. Then you have an automatically replenishing mana pool which you use to cast some spells.
A few examples -- the Vikings have standard melee and ranged units, other slow-moving melee units that hit multiple targets, a catapult that does mega splash damage, you can learn a heal spell to heal individual units, a lightning spell to damage individual units -- the aztecs have necromancers who will raise corpses, super speedy melee units, standard ranged ones, a gas bomb spell you throw that does poison damage to enemies....Each faction has a 'super move' you can learn. The Vikings call down Thor's Hammer which does mega area damage and acts as a tower. The Aztecs can send a boulder rolling from one end of the field to the other, crushing everything in its path, and you can make it jump to avoid your own units. Sounds neat, right?
I played the whole Viking campaign, most of the Aztec campaign, and about 1/3 of the Chinese campaign. The earlier levels especially are super short, like 2-3 minutes long. They never exceeded 8 minutes or so, except when I would get in these awful stalemates where it was just like army tug-of-war from side to side across the screen. I couldn't push past them and they couldn't push past me. I eventually just stopped playing because the tug-of-wars are so annoying. There's really no story. It's just dumb/silly stuff about the Vikings trying to find barbeque sauce for their meat (because hey, Vikings love meat, right?), the Aztecs escorting their prize chili pepper to the chili pepper contest (because they like spicy food, right?), and the Chinese one I didn't really make it far enough to figure out what their plot was.
Final verdict: Enjoyable diversion from your other games for a couple hours. Put it down if you start getting bored and forget about it.
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Dec 13th, 2012 at 19:18:00 - Tower Defense: Lost Earth (Other) |
I fear I may have hit a wall! There are 5 big areas with a bunch of levels each. I'm at the next-to-last level in the 3rd area and am really struggling to complete it on Hard. I've been on this about a week. The level is a really simple lay-out, just a sideways U and only one type of enemy, the fast runners. It's a 'survival' mode level, which means enemies come in waves for 11 minutes, getting progressively tougher, and you just have to keep the core alive til then. I should note the way waves work in this game. We'll say wave 1 has 5 enemies. Then wave 2 has 8. Wave 3 11. Wave 4 15...Wave 10 has 30. Then all the enemies get a health boost and it resets...Wave 11 has 5, Wave 12 has 8, Wave 13 has 11, etc. So the difficulty of the waves increased from 1-10, then resets with a harder 0 point and increases again from 11-20, resets with a higher 0 point, and so on. So you get these moments of respite when it resets where the enemies are tougher, but there are much fewer of them.
Anyway, on this level, the hard waves are insane. I've developed a couple staple tower placements for the level, the first being a laser tower on the top-right of the sideways U so that it shoots all the enemies along the top straight. Bump the laser to level 2, and then begin a series of slow and assault towers. I was placing them on the entrance at the far left, but I've switched and put them closer to the laser tower to double up at the curve in the U shape. Last time I tried substituting those for rocket towers, and that didn't work, but I may try to interweave rocket and assault towers. I have found that slow towers are necessary for this level, the first level I've really used them.
At some point, every time, enemies start making it through my gauntlet up top, so it's smart to keep enough money at all times to be able to build a slow and assault tower on the bottom to catch stragglers. I am still figuring out the optimal time and spot to do this because it doesn't always help much. Most of the time, once one enemy gets through, a handful of them get through, and one assault tower doesn't cut it. I have put more laser towers at all the corners, but that doesn't seem to be very cost-efficient since the majority of enemies are dead on the top straight anyway. Fully upgrading 2 or 3 more laser towers just to catch ones that make it through is a ton of money.
I can make it to under 2 minutes most of the time, but I just get overwhelmed. I just need to keep tweaking placement of slow and damage towers, and I think I will try switching out some assault towers for much heavier-hitting and much more expensive rocket towers. The problem is that I rely on these laser towers, which do an awesome job for a long time, but enemy health ends up outpacing the damage they can do and enemies start making it through the upper gauntlet. Hmm.
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Dec 12th, 2012 at 21:41:56 - Sanctum (PC) |
Paused Thief, tried Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath but my computer thinks its .exe file is a virus and I don't feel like messing with it, so I moved to Sanctum.
Played Sanctum an hour and very much enjoy it so far! I played a demo a year or so ago, and the full version is immensely better. The demo just dropped you in a level and said 'go.' You didn't get to choose your weapons or towers, so I was surprised by those options. Sanctum is an FPS-TowerDefense game. If you played Orcs Must Die, it's sort of like that. You set your towers and then can run around the map shooting enemies as they traverse your death maze. The game definitely assumes you have experience with Tower Defense, as it gives you like 8 guns to choose from and like 12 towers immediately. You make a 'loadout' with 3 guns and 8 towers.
I've played half of stage 1. There are 5 stages. Stage 1 has 20 waves. I took all the default guns and towers, which, if I can remember, is an assault rifle, sniper rifle, and freeze gun. The freeze gun doesn't seem to have much utility. The assault rifle is my staple, quick firing, can lob grenades, and takes a while to overheat. The sniper rifle is essential for shooting armored enemies. There are various enemy types with strengths and weaknesses, and this particular type has thick armor that can only be destroyed by "a high powered shot," which I figure means "aka, sniper rifle." That'll break the armor, then the towers whittle them down into nothingness. Enemies do seem to get tougher as waves increase. Those guys first took one sniper shot to destroy their armor. Now it's two. Luckily, you can upgrade weapons and towers using money that you get in between stages like any TD game. So far, I haven't hit an upgrade cap. I have some level 5 towers and I can still upgrade them, though it's getting quite expensive.
Towers are handled a bit differently and it's pretty damn cool. Instead of just placing towers, you have to place a 'block' first. Then you put a gun on/in the block. Blocks by themselves are used to reroute enemies. One thing I love about Sanctum is that you do have to do rerouting. The levels (I assume - I'm only on the first) aren't all preset with narrow paths that you simply line with towers. There are a lot of potential paths and spaces for enemies to run to the core. Although there are preset spots to build blocks, there are a lot of them and it makes for lots of tinkering. So, put blocks to reroute enemies, and build guns on the blocks. I can't remember all the different types I have right now. There is a gatling gun, which is your basic one, high fire rate, big-ish range, relatively low damage. There is the laser, which does high damage but takes some time to recharge. There is some kind of scatter shot thing that I think sprays an area, but doesn't always hit everything in it. There are plates you can put on the ground (which is more like Orcs Must Die) where if enemies walk over them, they are slowed, or take more damage, or whatever. There are very neat 'televators' that allow you to quickly navigate the map. You just open the overhead view and click a televator you've built, and zip, there you are. Televators, as you can guess, also lift you up so you can get on top of the blocks. These things are super important to place around so you can move quickly, shoot enemies from above, have line of sight to build towers on top of blocks, and so on.
There is no pause function, but you have an indefinite time to plan and build in between waves. You do the 'build' phase first, then hit Enter and do the 'wave' phase. Get your money, then 'build' phase, then 'wave' phase...And it tells you what enemies are in each wave, 5 waves ahead, so you can plan in advance. The only downside is that, I imagine, if you don't pick a necessary tower or gun at the very beginning of the stage, you might be screwed somewhere along the line and have to start over. I could be wrong, but like this time I had to have a sniper rifle. What if I didn't select the sniper rifle? Would I have to start the whole stage over? I suppose prepare for everything! Another great thing, in light of Thief, is that there are checkpoints every few waves. The bad thing is that you can't manually save, so if you are about to make a potentially stage-breaking decision, you can't go back to beforehand if you cross a new checkpoint. Anyway, nothing bad has happened so far. Hopefully these aren't really issues going forward!
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Dec 12th, 2012 at 07:33:01 - Thief: Deadly Shadows (PC) |
My last 'play an old game' experiment didn't go so well. This one is better, but is driving me insane because it doesn't have any autosave feature. No autosave, no checkpoint, no mission selection, no nothing. I found this out the hard way when I died after an hour or so and had to start the whole game over. I've since not thought about saving when I should have thought about saving probably 20 times, died, and lost a lot of cumulative time.
I realize that autosave features are a rather modern invention in video games, and that I take some form of autosaving for granted. As a kid, I had no problem manually saving games. I have no problem nowadays manually saving at 'save spots' like in RPGs. But pretty much every other type of game saves automatically when you move from one area to the next, at some loading screen or another, after a tough fight, after finishing a mission, at set checkpoints, etc, etc. I feel that this is something where, if your game doesn't have an autosave feature, you will piss a lot of people off.
Thief is outstanding otherwise. I had no idea this was such an important game, but it *obviously* is influenced by early Elder Scrolls games like Morrowind, other FPS stealthy games like Deus Ex, and whatever else that I've never played. And having just played Dishonored, Thief feels like an earlier version of that. It's very similar in many ways, and focuses exclusively on the stealth part. Your character, Garreth, is a terrible fighter. But he's sneaky and agile and invisible in shadows. You have a dagger, a bow, and various types of bombs. For the bow, you have different arrows that do different things. Water arrows put out fires to create shadow. Moss arrows coat the ground in moss allowing you to walk across previously noisy metal surfaces quietly. Noisemaker arrows draw guards' attention. It's clever and fun. You can one-shot guards with your bow or dagger if they are "unaware." If they see you, they become "aware" and actively search. You can't one-shot them in this state, must wait for them to give up looking for you.
The AI is basic. They patrol in set paths, just waiting to be killed. But they will respond (predictably) to noise and search. They notice dead bodies and blood, which alert them. Although the shadow element is nice, it is silly when they can't see you 1 inch away. Sometimes they get stuck in doorways. Today, in an interesting occurrence, I died and was ready to reload my save from 15 minutes earlier when the guards said something about taking me to prison. Huh? Sure enough, they put me in jail this time and I had to escape. First I had to find my things in the requisition room. I was trying to figure out how to get in, when I saw a guard open the doors. Aha! I can follow him in. He went in and shut the doors before I could get in. Then...he couldn't get out. I think he locked himself in somehow. It was amusing.
Anyway, I'm really agitated by lack of autosave. I played almost an hour tonight and just kept doing the same parts over and over because I keep forgetting to save. The game is wonderfully engrossing, so I don't think about stopping to save! So I'm going to take a break from Thief, try another "play an old game" experiment, and come back to it later. I do want to continue. When I'm not reloading old saves, it's very fun.
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