First impressions of fleets
- Is this Harpy fleet?
- No, this is Cormorant fleet.
- Is this Harpy fleet?
- No, this is Cormorant fleet.
- Is this Harpy fleet?
- No, this is Cormorant fleet.
True story.
First impressions of fleets Read More »
Android Games roundup
Stuff I liked, mostly puzzle games
- PixelWorld #1 – awesome, but too hard
- PixelWorld #2 – awesome, but too hard
- Traffic Jam Free – nice
- Phit Droid – nice
- Bunny Shooter Best Free Game – fun for a while
- Fruit Ninja Free – fun for a while
- NetHack
- Great Little War Game – nice
- Zen Bound 2 – ok
- Nun Attack: Run & Gun – cool Jump’n’Run
- Pixel Dungeon – a superb Roguelike
- Pixel Towers – controls are a little fiddly on the phone
- Marvel Puzzle Quest – mhm
- Power Line – nice, like A Virus named TOM minus some features
- Scrambled Net – not unlike Power Line
- Tangled – nice
- Word Search – technically good, has horrible words in it
- Souls TCG – actually kind of nice
Stuff I had installed but never tried?
- Fieldrunners HD
- Minecraft PE
- The Oregon Trail: Settler
- My Little Pony
- The Game of Life
- Astral Commander LITE
- Ocean Tower
- Spirit Stones
- Hoplite
Stuff I hated
- Angry Birds Rio – I really don’t get it, got bored after 10 minutes.
- The Hobbit: Kingdoms – this was somehow horrible
And yes, “My apps” on the play store is quite handy for such a list.
What now?
In summary, I am not too impressed with all the Android games I tried. I loved hardly any of those, I liked a few, but mostly they entertained me for not very long.
I’ve never been a big “mobile” gamer, my only real console was a Game Boy Advance that I used from 2002 to 2005 maybe, thus I will speak in terms of what I know:
Everything twitchy is out, as I hate the controls on the phone (Tetris, Dr. Mario, Xenon 2).
Same for Jump’n’Runs and Racing basically. (Super Mario Land, Mario Kart)
I am not in the mood for RPGs right now, so anything like Zelda, Golden Sun or Pokémon is out.
And I’ve never been a huge fan of Mega Man, Castlevania or Metroid.
Picross could work well I think. And Great Little War Game reminds me of Advance Wars of Final Fantasy Tactics.
Android Games roundup Read More »
A tale of two new worlds
Played WildStar again yesterday for the first time in like 2 weeks because of vacation and stuff. It is fun, still. Levelled a pair of Chua (my Esper and an Engineer, both Scientists) to level 12, can’t wait for housing. A bit undecided about Megaservers. On the one hand I don’t see a big problem, but renaming always sucks (even only adding a surname, I remember SW:TOR. I hated the Legacy and then still having to rename a char after a forced server transfer/merge – meh)
In the evening I had a craving for some strategy and building things, so I dug out the old Anno 1503 (The New World) box (so it really is more than 11 years old) and it actually ran quite ok. Everything that was annoying is still annoying though, of course. Maybe the time has come to look for a discounted copy of Anno 2070 (2011) or Anno 1404 (2009) now. As long as you can manage to run a decently long game without any warfare I’m set.
A tale of two new worlds Read More »
Is this what the summer hole feels like?
According to Twitter I hit Level 50 on my Spellslinger on August, 3rd – did a week full of dailies, then finally levelled another toon (Human Exile Female Medic) to 15 – which was great fun, by the way – and stopped playing for 2 weeks. Like, not played anything. Watched a few seasons of tv series on DVD and had other stuff to do, but no gaming. Hardly any time, not in the mood.
Today I did the dailies again. Although I hate dailies, WildStar is still a fun game. I just hope I’ll find back to a more regular playing schedule mid-September and maybe finally try some instances.
Is this what the summer hole feels like? Read More »
Completed: Game Dev Tycoon
At today’s Steam Summer Sale I grabbed Game Dev Tycoon for around 4 EUR. I started to play around noon and just now, after 6h I am finished.
Small intermission: There’s only a handful of games I really ever completed, on the SNES I just remember one Clay Fighter title, for example – I usually give up somewhere midway, and this week I already completed 2, yay me.
So, the game is about running a small game studio from one man in a garage to being a multi-million (I didn’t manage billions) company with employees.
I like the art style, it’s basic, but absolutely good enough. The music is nice and did not annoy me even after 6h despite being a little repetitive. I never worked in games development, but it’s a pretty damn accurate portrayal of software development in general, just enough details to not be wrong, without needless stuff players are probably not interested in (imho).
Apparently I unlocked 15/33 (45% of Achievements).
- I got surprisingly few things to criticize:
- The “selected features” when creating a new game are somewhat like a tech tree, i.e. you replace “Stereo Sound” with “Surround Sound”, but the UI does not group them. So either you throw the old ones out in your new game engine (which is kind of final and you might not always want to do that) or you click around a little too much. Cheap win for UX. (nice to have)
- Events that occur to you can’t be postponed. No problem for donation calls or something, but just at the end (without spoilering) I would have liked to send my whole team on vacation for a month before they undertook this massive event that popped up and I could just accept or decline. (Surprisingly, the only non-exhausted developer came ahead. I snickered.) (The game doesn’t punish you, but would be nice and would add depth to your decisions)
- Game Conventions should need planning. This one G3 (hehe) is announced to be “in 4 weeks” – but I have no timetable, if I can ship my game just before. Then again the game apparently does not care if I announce Vaporware or have a fresh title. (nice to have)
- You can speed up most info dialogs by clicking, just not the 2 of them: visitor numbers from game conventions and reviews for your game. Why, why, why? “Click for instant text and dismiss the animation after the 10th time” – this was really annoying in the end. But to be fair it made me get up every hour and fetch a drink or something. Maybe educational 🙂
- After playing for some hours you have just too many games and they are presented badly in the Game History. Bonus points for allowing arrow keys, but next playthrough I will open an Excel sheet on the second screen or have some pen and paper handy. I don’t miss that from the 90s games – but I think it could help, unless the Game History would be presented better (gets tedious after your first 20-30 games) for games to be grouped, filtered or sorted.
- That’s it – not much that was not super fun.
Oh, and here are my final stats:
Completed: Game Dev Tycoon Read More »
Whitevale finished
After a few days of slacking and playing other games I hit 30 today and finished up Whitevale.
I liked the zone, but it was a bit much running around.
A few notes on professions:
- One Tailoring quest seems to be bugged, I can’t discover the recipe
- As a Tailor, Relic Hunting seems a bit pointless. Saving the mats up for now.
- Cooking seems very complicated, haven’t started yet.
Spellslinger is still fun to play, but a bit squishy. If my pocket Warrior doesn’t have aggro, I have to shield and stun and heal quite a bit.
Whitevale finished Read More »
Weekend wrapup
Thanks to the prolonged Pentecost weekend there was stuff happening.
OK, I didn’t level that much because we finally had some sun ’round here, but still… Spellslinger is nearly 21 and Stalker is 15 and has a lot and a mount.
I am not 100% happy with questing as a duo. Yes, people can disagree – but the Soldier quests are quite ok, you just kill a little bit more stuff than usual, but the Settler quests really end up costing time. And again the challenges (especially pickup) that start when you just made a little plan to clear out that camp. We’ve taken to taking turns on those, so one is grabbing everything, the other is killing mobs in the way – but it’s just ok, not really amazing.
But! … the game is still fun, although that raid attunement stuff Syl posted about did not sound fun at all… Basically I hated the Karazhan attunement back in TBC already and this sounds like a lot more work… but at least I haven’t yet decided if I will raid at all. Que sera, sera.
New WildStar Library/Addon: NogaCharLib/NogaCharExport
So yeah, didn’t play much today but dug a bit deeper on the Addon development front and this is the outcome:
- NogaCharLib on GitHub
- NogaCharExport on GitHub (not yet released to Curse)
This is how would use the Library in your own addon:
local NogaCharLib = _G["NogaCharLib"] local currency = NogaCharLib:GetCurrency() local base = NogaCharLib:GetBaseStats() local misc = NogaCharLib:GetMiscStats() local all = NogaCharLib:GetAll()
Whereas the Addon has just one SlashCommand, namely /nogacharexport, which opens a window to copy your character data as JSON. The README in the aforementioned GitHub repo has example output.
New WildStar Library/Addon: NogaCharLib/NogaCharExport Read More »
Bugs and Addons
As much as I overall love the experience (reached level 19 and 11), some quests (especially Path quests) can be awfully bugged. Even worse, unlike in other games, a relog did not help so far.
I had one Soldier mission that was only fixed after maintenance and now I am on the Explorer quest “SCAVENGER HUNT: Relics in the Rubble” which never lets the bar fill up to show where to dig, then after doing the 2nd part it does not even let me dig and the mobs that might drop the item in question… won’t. Reading forums again shows several people had that bug and spent hours killing with no result. As a programmer myself I know that bugs happen – but often you can work around them or avoid them, for quests it’s a bit hard, they’re kind of in the middle of a workflow.
Another thing that bugs me are the Mordesh quest givers in early Celestion. I mean, I know WoW is omnipresent, but letting them behave like the Forsaken and even give them the same voices… really disappointing.
On to nicer things, I am using these Addons right now, they all seem to run fine:
- Galaxy Library
- CustomFOV
- GroupRadar
- RestXPReminder
- JunkIt
I also starting playing around on my own, the WildStar NASA wiki is a good start, but it’s a tad slow (maybe only from Europe) and not very elaborate yet. I signed up and hope to contribute a bit.
Things that are awesome:
- Rover
- /reloadui is quick and keeps chat history. This is priceless for Addon authors, especially if you’re just mucking about learning the API.
Slow progress
Didn’t have that much time to play the last 2 evenings, so my Spellslinger is Level 17 now and questing in Galeras and my Mordesh Stalker is Level 8 and bouncing around Woodhaven. Game’s fun, but oh boy, are Challenges annoying. I usually love this kind of stuff, but not when it’s interrupting my questing. I tend to hate to be shoved into doing things the minute someone else decides it would be a good time… Especially if it’s a game. And yeah, you can do them later, but somehow you probably still feel pressed to do it now – you’d be killing those mobs anyway. Ah well, not everything can be awesome, right?
Speaking of awesome, this lore video is it.