Category: Games

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Free To Play Ruins Star Wars: Tiny Death Star!

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Star Wars: Tiny Death Star is created by NimbleBit the same people that made the very successful Tiny Tower.  It is published by Disney Mobile and Lucas Arts.  It is out for pretty much every major platform, but I would advise against it.

The game starts off well with Emperor Palpatine telling Darth Vader his new plan to finance the Death Star by getting people to move in, pay rent, and buy stuff.  It is very funny and it fills in one of the major plot holes of Star Wars: “How the heck could they pay for the Death Star?”

The writing is fantastic and funny.  It pokes fun at Star Wars, but with more than a little love. It also has a great look, and characters from the Star Wars Universe have never been cuter.  All of them are in this game with their own little cut scenes.

After that it quickly goes down hill.  Like many RTS type games, you are in charge of planning out the apartments and stores for the people known as Bitzens, but the rates that these things build or restock is ridiculously slow unless you spend Imperial Bucks which of course can be paid for with real bucks.  Also if you want things to run well you need to hire VIPs which again you can pay for will real money.

If they balanced this game well it would have been worth quite a few dollars, but in its current state it is unplayable unless you pay, and once you start paying there is no telling how much it will cost.  With the Star Wars license, geeks like me would have paid for a good game, but to be nickel and dimed every three seconds is just too much.  If they come out with well balanced flat fee game, I would recommend it, but not as it is.

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Why I Wanted A Next Gen Console!

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The PS4 is out for the press as of yesterday, and out for the general public tomorrow.  The Xbox One will have a similar release next week, but as the reviews are coming in for the games for these consoles the scores look pretty average.  So why did I decide to keep my pre-order on one when there isn’t anything great to play?  Potential.

Consoles generally always start off slow.  They have a limited number of games, and their menu’s need tweaking.  There are always glitches of some kind, but the potential of what people can do once they understand the hardware is always mind blowing.

People have been on COD: Ghosts for only running at 720p on the X1, and 1080p on the PS4 with some major frame rate drops, but you have to remember that this is the first time out of the gate with these new machines.  It took awhile for Xbox 360 games to look better than the original Xbox, but now looking back they aren’t even comparable anymore.

So you would think that after a paragraph like that I would be telling you to wait a year to buy a new system, but I am not.  Being able to try the new ideas and abilities of the machine as the games come out is exciting and fun.  Having the system in hand as developers learn to use the potential of the system is a great feeling!

Plus it really isn’t that expensive.  People look at the cost of the PS4 at $400, and the Xbox One $500 and complain that it is just too much money, but really it is not.  If these consoles last as long as the last ones did, I could be using this thing for eight years, so that is only $62.50 a year.  Plus with the rate of inflation these systems are right in line with the Nintendo Entertainment Systems of old.

I can’t wait for next week (probably the week after that due to shipping) to get and setup my new box of potential.  Developers you have a lot of potential to use, and I can’t wait to try it!

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Use Your Imagination With Scribblenauts Unlimited!

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I have always wanted to play around with the Scribblenauts franchise, and thanks to the recent Humble Bundle I was able to do so very cheaply.  Scribblenauts Unlimited is the fourth game in the Scribblenauts franchise, but the first to come to a home console the Wii U and to Windows PC.

The story is about a young boy Maxwell with a notebook that can create anything he writes in it, but this has made him spoiled.  One day he meets an old man who wants some food, so Maxwell plays a trick on him and creates a rotten apple.  The man is angered by this, and puts a curse on his sister that is slowly turning her to stone.  The only way to fix the curse is to do good deeds for people and collect the Starites that appear when they are happy.  Get enough Starites and save your sister.

The gameplay is very simple.  You walk around and find a challenge or some unhappy people and create things that fix the problem or make the person happy.  You can create just about anything provided it is not copyrighted or vulgar, unless you get the Wii U version and you can summon Nintendo characters.  You can also edit the objects/people around you by either adding adjectives to change the object’s attributes: For instance if you see a beggar you can add that he is a rich beggar, and he will have a bunch of money.  You can also edit them in a truer since by opening the object editor that looks a little like MS paint and change all of the object’s attributes:  Like turning a phone booth in to a flying phone monster.

The one problem with all this power is that it makes the game pretty simple, and for me the biggest challenge is just remembering how to spell what I want to make.  However, it is still very fun just to see what crazy things I can come up with to fix the problem at hand.  The graphical style is quite charming as well, and makes the whole world just fit together.

This game is quite good, and if you have not played a Scribblenauts game before this seems like a good place to start.  It works quite well on the PC since you can use the keyboard to type out your commands.  Due to its low difficulty, it makes it the perfect game to just relax and play around with, or let younger gamers exercise their creativity.  I think the game is currently $20 on Steam, but it is always going on sale, so it can be an affordable addition to your game library.

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Shmee Plays The Dark Mod 2.0!

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Do you like the Thief Games?  I like the Thief Games, but The Dark Mod was made by people who love the Thief Games, so they decided to make their own version of them, but update them a bit using the Doom 3 engine.  Things really went their way when Id Games released the Doom 3 Engine as open source, so now you can download and play The Dark Mod for free on Windows and Linux, and you don’t have to install Doom 3.  They really should change the name of the game now that it is no longer a mod.

If you have never played Thief than you are missing out.  The game is a first person stealth game where you club people on the back of the head or shoot people from the darkness with your bow and arrow and of course steal stuff.  All based in kind of a steam punk dark ages world.  The Dark Mod is exactly the same, but with a minor difference.

The Thief games always had an overarching story, but The Dark Mod is a series of fan created missions that you can download in game, or find them on the forums.  They also encourage you to make your own missions and share them with the community, so there is a lot of content.

As you can guess, I think this is a pretty great game, and since it is free and it runs on the older Doom 3 Engine there is no reason not to download it and see if you like it as well.

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A Hands On With Ascend: Hand of Kul!

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Lately I have been playing around with the new Free to Play RPG Ascend: Hand of Kul.  It is free for owners of the Xbox 360 with Gold Accounts.  It is the second Free to Play game for the system:  The first being Happy Wars.

In this game you play as a Chaos Giant in service of a new god, and you are trying to help them take down the Titians.  The Titians are the old gods that have gone mad and are just eating people.  So you hack and slash your way through the country side while occasionally throwing humans at the bad guys.

This game runs on the currency of souls.  The more you have, the more cool loot you can buy, and the more you can upgrade your spells and perks.  As you may have guessed you can get the souls two ways:  By killing bad guys and converting worshipers, or by just getting out your credit card and buying them.  They do a pretty good job of letting you earn enough souls in game to be fun, but they do taunt you with the idea of just buying cool stuff all the time.  In every menu you will see more stuff you can buy.

They also have a leveling system that allows you to gain more health and access to more powerful weapons and spells, but the catch is that you can only level up five levels unless you Ascend (It’s the title of the game!).  Every five levels you get a chance to pretty much kill your character and change him up a bit, and make him more powerful.  You can save your stuff if you want to spend the souls to add item pillars so your new character can have your gear from your last one.

The next big feature is that you are not playing this game alone.  Tons of people are playing the same levels at the same time you are and you can see them as kind of ghosts while you play.  You can curse them or bless them as you see fit, or you can even challenge them to a little one on one combat.  They of course can do the same to you.

Speaking of combat.  It is pretty standard hit with the ‘X’, hit hard with ‘Y’, spell with ‘B’, and interact with ‘A’, but it is still fun.  There are combos and stuff to mix it up a bit, but you will hit the ‘X’ button a lot.

I was surprised how much I liked this game, and I am glad that you can play it and advance without paying all sorts of cash, but it is unfortunate that you could just plop down $100 and win.  Which is clearly what they want you to do.  It is free, and that is a good price for a game, so I would suggest checking it out.