Advance Wars is this great little turn-based tactical game series from Nintendo. There have been a number of advance wars games on the nintendo handheld systems and by and large I’ve liked them all to one degree or another. I’ve been playing Battalion: Nemesis on Kongregate this week and it’s by far the finest advance wars homage I’ve seen. Gameplay is pretty straightforward – it’s a turn based strategy game where you use resources earned from the facilities you control to build units that you maneuver around the game maps in an effort to kill off the cpu player’s units. The world is a cartoon style near future with tanks, planes, infantry and so on. The production values are amazing for a flash game and there are two campaigns to work through. It’s definitely worth checking out if you like turn based strategy games and especially tactical ones.
Category: Gaming
Friday fun: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Back in the day there was the sword of fargoal, a simple little role playing game for the commodore 64, and I thought it was pretty damned good – so good I’ve written about it several times. In college I ran across several similar games on the old classic macs, and this in turn led to the discovery of roguelikes, a class of computer role playing games with complex interfaces, deep and complex character enhancements, and randomly generated dungeons. I’ve played many of them over the years and written about them occasionally. Unfortunately due to the complexity of their interfaces and their spartan graphics I’ve had trouble convincing many of my friends to give them a try. This post is another in a series that’s attempting to correct that.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a riff on Linley’s Dungeon Crawl. They’re both of a mind when it comes to gameplay elements: strip it down to the core, diving ever deeper into a dungeon that’s overfilled with fiends out to get you on a quest to retrieve the orb of zot at the bottom. They’re similar to Fargoal in that regard, though they layer in a fair bit more complexity, adding things like character classes, a complex inventory system, spell casting systems, and more, but they’re still relatively easy to understand. Stone Soup has grafted on a mouse interface that makes the game mostly playable just using your mouse, and it’s why I mention it here – if you enjoyed Fargoal back in the day, give Stone Soup a try – it’s great fun. Head over here to get yourself a copy for any operating system you’re likely to be running – just make sure to grab a copy with ’tiles’ in its filename – that’s the graphical version of the game. The other files are the ascii (character graphics) versions for purists.
Friday fun, this time with physics – Totem Destroyer
Here’s a great little friday fun link – a flash based puzzle game. Every level presents you with a golden totem sitting at the top of a stack of blocks. You can click to destroy 1 of these blocks every couple of seconds, which will cause the block to disappear. Your goal is to get the totem safely down without causing it to fall too far, and destroying the blocks can destabilize the tower the totem sits on, jenga-like, so you have to think carefully about where you remove blocks. Add in a few different block types and scoring based on how quickly you can retrieve the totem on each level and you have a simple little lunchtime diversion for your friday afternoon. Check it out!
Friday fun link: Ownage
Flash based, runs in your browser. Remember old side scrollers like double dragon or metal slug fondly? Add guns and grenades, effective graphics, and mouse and keyboard controlled run and gun gameplay and you have Ownage, a simple little game that makes for a great lunch break. Check it out!
Praise for bytearts Rock Band guitar repair kit
I love Rock Band – it’s one of my favorite videogames of the last year or so, and it’s turned me into an unexpected fan of ‘party games,’ something I’d been pretty skeptical of in the past (Mario Party? Super Smash Brothers? Pshaw!). Everyone I’ve turned Rock Band onto has loved it, and Susan and I are looking forward to Rock Band parties at her place this fall. The one fly in the ointment has been the guitars – there’s no way to sugar coat it, they’re simply unreliable pieces of crap. Why a Chinese or Taiwanese factory can churn out reliable DVD players for $20 but can’t produce a reliable $60 plastic guitar is beyond me, but it’s been a frustrating experience. I’ve had to disassemble the first guitar I bought at least a half dozen times in attempts to ‘tune’ it so that strums on the strum bar would register, using instructions I found online. This worked, but it would eventually creep back out of alignment due to what is in my opinion a flaw in the design. To the credit of EA, the publisher’s of Rock Band, they’ve had a pretty generous return policy on the guitars so far, but I basically concluded nothing they could do for me would permanently fix this issue due to the design flaw. Fortunately I found a link in the official Rock Band forums to Bytearts, who manufacture a replacement circuit board/microswitches/mounting hardware for $20 shipped. I installed this on Saturday and love it. The installation process was relatively simple, and the difference in the guitar performance is amazing. For the first time since I’ve owned the game I feel like I know for sure when *I* made a mistake when I’m strumming versus wondering if it was the crappy hardware failing to register. I celebrated this by buying the new Who pack and had a blast Saturday afternoon playing through all of it. It’s great.
Anyway, if you’ve got a Rock Band guitar that’s failing to register strumming reliably, consider checking out the Bytearts kit, it’s fantastic. Meanwhile, I’m on to the next challenge, which is finding a way to fix the unreliable Overdrive mode tilt sensor. I bought a second guitar and the thing came out of the box unable to reliably register Overdrive. Curses to the hardware designers at Harmonix – Great great game, shitty shitty guitar hardware.
Rock Band: immensely useful forum thread for instrument repair
So you bought Rock Band or Guitar Hero, and you love it, but your guitar broke/keeps breaking or you’ve heard there are modifications you can make to it to make it play better. You’ll find this thread really useful – it collects every known repair and mod known in one handy location. This helped me find a fix for my constantly breaking guitar. Screw Harmonix for paying the shoddiest factory on earth to produce these things, btw – I can buy a DVD player for $50 that lasts for years, but their $60 plastic guitars don’t last a month and cost me an extra $20 to get em working. Anyway, check out the thread, it’s great. I’ll write up the repair I used seperately since the folks who made it, bytearts, deserve every little bit of google-fu I can contribute.
Public service announcement: Bioshock for only $15
Bioshock is the spiritual successor to two of the greatest videogames ever made, System Shock and System Shock 2. I rarely solve games, and while I don’t think Bioshock really lived up to its heritage, I did play it through to the end and agree with the generally positive reviews it got. This weekend Valve is offering it for only $15 over on Steampowered. If you like atmospheric shooters with some light RPG elements and great plots, there’s nothing else like it on the market and it’s definitely worth playing through. For $15 it’s a steal.
Friday Fun Link: arachnophilia
You’re a spider in a web, and bugs are flitting about, occasionally getting caught in your web. Your job is to eat captured bugs, build out your web, and repair the damage bugs inflict on it. Controls are simple – click to eat a bug captured in the web, click and drag between two points to spin a new section of web. You have to balance your need for food, which grants health and more fluid for web spinning, against your need to build out your web – the larger and more tangled it is, the more bugs you can catch. Sound fun? Check it out – it is. Requires a recent version of the flash plugin and plays nicely in the browser.
Friday fun link…make your own fun!
Today’s friday fun link is something of a cop out. A poster to one of my favorite gaming forums mentioned this list of the top 100 indie games. There are samples of virtually every gaming genre, from action to rpg, including free, shareware and commercial offerings, and there are tons of excellent games in the list. I’m familiar with at least half of them but was psyched to find a number of unexpected gems in the list. Heavily biased towards Windows but many of the games, especially the roguelikes and rpgs, have linux/osx versions available. Enjoy!
Friday fun link: more free team fortress 2
Team Fortress 2 is perhaps the greatest online fps ever. To celebrate this week’s release of new content for the Pyro class in the game, Valve is again allowing anyone to play for free, starting this friday at 11AM. Get yourself over to steampowered and download the client, then have some fun! My advice would be, pick a class with long range capability. Everyone will be playing Pyro this weekend, meaning the soldier, sniper, heavy and engineer will be enjoying a fabulous turkey shoot.
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