All Your Game Guides Blog

It’s that time of week once again (well, was), and sorry for the delay, esteemed viewers and google search bots, more like Post-future-zombie-apocolypse Game Of the Week, amirite? So anyway, this week, we have a new release for you: City of Heroes going rogue. A pretty good game to begin with, it’s now boosted up with a whole new dimension of maps, enemies, and storylines, all ready for us, the players, to get up to our superpowered antics. The in-game story, another dimension has been discovered, called ‘Praetorian Earth’ (The original one being ‘Primal Earth’). In this Praetorian Earth, there have been wars, and one man, at least from the people’s perspective, helped them rise from this into a utopia: Emperor Cole, also secretly an archvillain called Nemesis. To resist his reign,there is (Appropriately named) The resistance. No more plot for you, readers/google bots, that’d give away valuable story-playing time. It’s actually kind of interesting to see how the players have reacted to both sides, neither of them being really good nor evil, they’ve basically resorted to calling eachother communists and the like. In terms of mapping, it’s also incredibly visual and unique, none of the maps having that same been-there-seen-it-before feel like the old version. Soundtrack, suitable, nothing really stands out to make it be like one of those games entirely based around the music, but who can blame them, seeing as this wasn’t really their intention. All in all, it gets a big thumbs up from me. Julz, however, treats CoH like the devil, so don’t expect him to give the going rogue expansion any slack.

10th week and we haven’t pissed off any particuarly major authorities! Woooo!

A charming little puzzle game that I only actually discovered recently, where you play: The doodle god.

In the beginning, there was the Doodle God. And so the Doodle God created four things: Fire, Earth, Air, Water.

What the player does from there is create EVERYTHING in the known world with it, by mixing these staple items and also mixing the products.

Along with that, every time you create something, it comes with a neat little often humorous quote relevant, such as “I don’t pay for electricitry, because I can’t see the goods.”

All in all, I had only minimal bones to pick with this one: The unchanging music (A looped set of songs would have been better) and the fact that it ended.

So todays game of the week is a lovely java game by Jagex, the same people behind Runescape, called Void Hunters. It’s not some epicly huge MMO, but a fun game you can hop onto with your friends and play a few rounds of.

The gameplay is unique, with you playing as a spaceship and getting a base chassis with a few guns, then during the round, usually lasting 10 or 15 minutes, dragging various bits of debris onto your spaceship, making it from a hunk o’ junk to a fearsome juggernaut. What I love are the different ‘builds’ you can go. You generally focus on one thing, such as mass fighter bays, with each one letting you spawn one small robot drone with a laser. You of course, need a lot of hull pieces to hold all of these big, heavy bays, and you therefore become quite slow. Another fun build is bomblet spray, a short range gun that does damage in a cone. I make a sort of wide semi-circle with my hull pieces, get bomblet sprays all in there, then fly right into the enemy, and do one tremendous blast.

There are a lot of fun game modes, such as the basic FFA fight it out, Arena, and more complex ones, like Convoy, where one team drags a convoy from point A to B, and the other team stops them. The games get interesting when you start countering them, for example countering my devastating bomblet build with long range sniper rifles and a lot of speed thrusters, to keep away from me. When you shoot an enemy gun, it’ll break, making them either wait for it to regenerate or go into the immobile repair mode, bringing more skill into it, making you have to avoid their shots while trying to hit their guns. And of course, when you take down your enemy, they start over, with a few of their old parts nearby, while you get some more of their old ship as loot to equip to yours.

There’s also a sandbox mode, where you fly around, building an impossibly huge ship, and spawning enemies wherever you want. I once made my ship a huge hollow circle lined with guns, and spawned enemies inside, instantly shooting them from all angles and vaporising them.

You’re not likely to get overly addicted to this game, but it’s definitely a fun way to whittle away a few hours with a friend, and definitely worth checking out.

This is a bit old, but still, it’s a goodie. From the maker of Dad’s Home and Dad’s at work, which, if you haven’t seen, may I say check it out, it’s a 2d brawler, where you play Dad, a balding man whose hair tends to catch on fire and pulls swords out of his mouth. When faced with police stations, he of course, rocks out real good-like. So as you can see, just your typical everday dad.

In the game, you follow Dad through his various adventures, the plot being basically: your boss is evil. Go to stop his evil plan, while satisfying the need to procrastinate by terrorizing the locals. In all seriousness, the game is pure lol really. You smash your bosses office, who turns out to be a real badass, by having the ‘Never-assume-a-man-does-not-have-ninjas-at-his-disposal’ factor. You never know what’s going to happen next in this game, and the bosses are really well thought out.

All in all, this gets a big thumbs up from us.

Also, watch dads home and dads at work

Yeah. Starcraft II. Tomorrow. It’d probably be neat to write a post tomorrow but I’ll be BUSY PLAYING STARCRAFT II occupied with something or another. So I’ll write it today.

Starcraft II. TOMORROW. It’s been 12 years since the first one, and oh god, I am looking forward to this. I mean, honestly, I’m too excited to even write out a good blog post. What’s that, you wanted actual content? NEIN.

Anyway, I advise getting it, it’s an AMAZING game.

Now, I know I’ve already written a review of Minecraft, but that was on the creative version, and this is completely different and my current obsession. Basically, you have to survive. Simple, it’s a sandbox game, do what you want and try not to die (Though it doesn’t really matter if you do).

As an example, let me give you a typical first day. You chop down a tree with your hands, make a crafting table, chop down some more trees and make some wooden tools, like pickaxes, hatchets, hoes and shovels. You use a pickaxe to dig into the ground and find a dungeon; a large randomized cave system with valuable minerals, and rarely, a treasure room. You mine coal and stone, maybe some dirt, then get back and make some stone tools. By now, it’s getting late, and to survive the enemy monsters that spawn at night, you have to build a base to hide inside. You get some more logs and turn them into planks, then build a simple hut, adding in your crafting table and a new addition, your furnace. Through the night, monsters batter at your walls, but to no avail, until you venture out near sunrise and slay some monsters for their valuable items, such as gunpowder.

So as the name suggests, you mine and you craft. You can play on peaceful, and just set up a huge base, or hard and spend all your time hiding in a highly fortified castle, or even somewhere in between. It has some very nice things in it, such as redstone, an electric like cable which you can use to link objects, such as, say, stepping on a pressure plate, setting off TNT which opens up the hidden river, which extinguished torches holding up sand, which lets down lava, with the water and lava meeting together, in casing you in obsidian. Ouch.

The graphics are definitely quite simple, but the pixelated mess seems to work really well. I love being able to get different skins, such as my TF2 spy disguised as an ingame mob, the highly explosive creeper. There is a multiplayer coming out in mere weeks, letting you build and mine with others, while also raiding the bases of others. We’ll have a server up, don’t worry.

The actual game is 10 Euros, or $14 AU, but it’s definitely worth it, especially if you’re interested in the free version. Though if you’re one of those guys who only plays games with guns and makes people think video games encourage violence…….NEIN, GET OUT! NEIN!

Anyway, I highly recommend it. HIGHLY.

I’ve recently developed an addiction to Indie games partly thanks to this game, which can either be costy or frustrating depending on which way I choose to go.

Dara: Regardless, World of Goo is a game where you basically try and create structures out of various types of goo, that connect to each other in whatever way you want really. There’s a few different types of goo, like highly flammable, explosive, sticky, detachable, plain, water (also called drool sometimes), sticky, beauty, ugly, balloon, albino, and I think I might have missed a few there. They all have fairly unique properties, meaning that the variety of puzzling levels are wide. There’s the typical make a tower/bridge, then there’s puzzle ones that involve doing things like setting a blowfish on fire, and just to make it clear, the last level of the first chapter is awesome (You have to get a monster to regurgitate some goos, then steal it’s eyes to lift the goos into the sky). The music gets kind of generic after a while, but plainly, it’s more than made up for by all the sounds the goos make whenever you try to use them. On top of the levels, there’s also the ‘world of goo corp’, where the main goal is to stack the spare goos from the main game into a giant, usually incredibly unstable tower, the height of which is actually recorded on a leaderboard, and as you stack, you also get to see how high yours is, compared to the towers of others, in the forms of clouds. Although the game does, in one chapter, promise the game to be in 3d, we are denied our extra dimension on account of an error message saying that the player is incompatible with: The world. Although plainly that little quirk is hilarious, it does mean that not a single aspect of the game is 3d, 2d graphics4life and such. Still, both the environment and the goos are quite good looking despite that, and suited to the games theme.

All in all, I highly recommend this game to anybody who isn’t a strong believer of not playing any game if it doesn’t have the 3 g’s (Guns, guts and gore. Not to be confused with the 3 g’s of teaching small adorable orphans on bring your puppy to school day).

Julz: I gotta say, I don’t own the full version of WoG, but I tried the trial, and it is a lot of fun. It has a very clever concept and a good physics engine, and as Dara said, basically involves connecting goo to reach a certain goal, like building a tower to a certain place, or a bridge. It’s definately worth the $10 in my eyes, but still, download the trial, give it a try and see if you like it. *Insert goo related pun here*

Okay, so I’ve found a new toy. And it I find it AWESOME.

Ever heard of voice recognition? It’s potentially awesome. Providing you have a shoddy microphone (On the note of shoddy things belonging to me, you guys should totally tell all your friends about this website so that we can afford basic personal hygiene and the likes. Seriously, practically charity. Blatant self-promotion man to the rescue and what-not) and a somewhat strange accent that tends to confuse both people and machinery (No idea where I got it from. Enlish-Irish-American cross I’m told. Which is weird because I was born and still live in Australia, and nobody I know actually has that same accent). Basically, after saying something about Peter preferring dictating to typing, (BILL GATES, WHO IS THIS PETER AND WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT HIS NEEDS OR PREFERENCES), the computer knows the tone and modulations of your voice, meaning it can guess what you’re saying, providing that you try and speak like you’re getting a stranger to “Put the gun down”. Meaning you can actually boss around your computer with ease, minimising stuff by the mere act of saying minimise that, and opening things by saying open such and such. Easy. And of course, you can dictate to your computer, telling it what to type, with some commands for highlighting and all that. Unless you have a poor-quality microphone. In which case it makes an absoloute mess of it. Which we forgive it for, because it’s awesome like that. For example, stuff like:

Nipples Nipples Nipples!
Becomes
If Nicholas napalm as Nichols

Psychic octopus says nein
Becomes
Some people to process nine

Pyromancery, pieromancery, and candypeon
Becomes
By an answering time answering and candied peel

IT CAN AUTOMATICALLY CONVERT ANYTHING I SAY IN TO 50′S STYLE STREAM OF CONCIOUSNESS POETRY. DO YOU NOT KNOW THE POWER I WIELD AT MY FINGER TIPS.
Becomes
Eliminate that puts into style fifties style stream of punch in the stylist tree only do not realize the home after that it’s

Who likes short shorts
Becomes
The dikes your two outs

Bob the builder, bob the builder
All to build a bolt the builder bolt

Seriously, I should make a book of these, pass it off as profesionally written 50’s stream of conciousness poetry. Once you’re used to it, you can actually run a continuos chain-sentence, basically creating a strange yet coherent sentence by saying random and incoherent words together.

If you have any requests, I’ll do them quicksmart. Or, as voice recognition would put it

The avenue quest sell to them quicksmart

This week we’ll be taking a look at one of those most lighthearted, simplistic Adventure titles that has ever graced this mortal coil we live in today. Well perhaps my opening line was a tad dramatic however if you’re interested in a sweet little episodic saga that has a whole cast of fun, enjoyable characters would profusely recommend Tales Of Monkey Island.

The Monkey Island titles have been churned out since the early nineties when pixels covered the screen like a cheap watercolor painting. It was released by Telltale Games of Sam and Max fame. This small developer are hardworking and are being financially hurt by the plague that is piracy.

Guybrush Threepwood; the mighty pirate is back to kick some ass and crack some puns in Tales Of Monkey Island. TOMI is a new spin of the series. Introducing a 3D approach which looks very smooth. The new Monkey Island 2 was released and the only reasons why I’m not talking about that is because I have an unappealing lack of bandwidth and funds to purchase it.

There’s five in the series so far and you could probably burn through them pretty quickly if you have a guide handy. The main appeal for me is not its puzzles but it’s immersing characters and voice-acting. These characters will bring out emotions and laughter like there’s no tomorrow. There such a fun game and I’d definitely recommend picking them up.

The game-play is very simplistic but unique because 3D puzzle adventure-games are hard to come bye. The puzzles are relatively challenging but not ridiculous. You know how it goes, scavenge for items, combine ‘em and then realize you’re missing one item that’s in some kind of secretive crate you couldn’t find.

The fun narrative and quirky art style creates a very fun, rewarding game atmosphere. Any of the Monkey Islands. Also, if you’re a fan of Monkey Island and Sam and Max check out Grim Fandango. One of the most highly regarded interdependently produced video games out there.

That’s it for FGTOW # 5.

You may or may not noticed, but posts I have reason to believe are spambots, or that I just don’t really like, I have changed their website to http://www.butt-taco.org/, and/or, depending on how I feel, replaced something important in the sentence with http://www.butt-taco.org/, butt-taco, or something equally silly.

Compliments to David Willis for allowing this to be possible

In all seriousness though, you mess with us, with your fancy spam bots that we are strongly opposed to/can’t afford yet

I will end you

I will hunt you down

There will be no sanctuary for your kind.

If you think all this is a bit harsh, well, it’s not the advertising their wares that I’m really opposed to, more the quality of said spambots.

That is all.

Please continue with your browsing of this interblag.

-A Mildly Pissed Dara