Flash of Steel

Anomaly: Warzone Earth

April 11th, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · Me, RTS

First, the disclaimer. Anomaly: Warzone Earth is represented by Evolve PR, my employer. If you think that means something, I can’t prevent you from thinking that.

Other people, though, seem to be liking Anomaly just fine without the paycheque attached.

Anomaly is a tower offense game. You guide a small squad of forces through a map, changing their path so you can deal with new towers, roadblocks or a changing tactical situation. You don’t control the squad – you guide it, you heal it, you upgrade it by buying new units. But you are the super consciousness that tells it where to creep to.

The design of a tower offense game is pretty obvious on the surface. Just as a tower defense game requires different types of towers and ways to upgrade the ones in place, a tower offense game needs a way to give the creeps a fighting chance without constantly forcing you to spam units. The path should be clear and predictable since you don’t want to be forced to steer your attackers through enemy fire. In many ways, tower offense is as close to puzzle games as it is to tower defense. There is usually only a couple of good choices to make.

The small squad size couple with repairs is clearly the genius bit of design. By giving you a small convoy to pay attention to, 11 Bit Studios doesn’t overwhelm you with decisions. Choosing your path, deciding which towers to avoid and when and where to deploy your new troops are the big calls here. Setting the order for your convoy is usually the most important decision you’ll make. I love how the maps themselves are pretty fast, so failure doesn’t mean that you have to waste a lot of time. Though you will fail.

Oh, and it really looks great. If there is such a thing as a AAA casual game, this is it.

I have not finished Anomaly yet – things get in the way of my gaming more often these days. Stupid life. But I will finish it for sure. And hey, less than ten bucks on Steam. This and Magicka are the two best low cost games on the market right now and are two of my favorite gaming experiences of the year so far.

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Three Moves Ahead Episode 111 – Golden Voices for a Golden Throne

April 7th, 2011 by Rob Zacny · Podcast, Three Moves Ahead

Bill Abner and Dan Stapleton arrive to help Rob sort out the long-delayed Dawn of War II: Retribution episode. Rob isn’t wild about the campaign for a few reasons, and eventually he starts to figure out why. Bill dislikes Chaos Marines wailing on electric guitars, and he thinks that’s indicative of the direction the 40K universe has gone. Everything goes brilliantly until the show ends and Dan asks, “Wait, was I supposed to be recording?” Then Rob executes him, inspiring everyone to greater feats of podcasting next week.

Bill’s Retribution review

Listen here.
RSS here.
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Party of Two: Adventures in Riftlandia

April 5th, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · AAR, MMO, Rift

Let’s start with the fact that I am not an MMO player. Sure, I’ve dabbled. Experimented even. WoW. Anarchy Online. LotRO. But the genre doesn’t really speak to me unless I am running around a world with people I already know. Scheduling sucks (as any 3MA listener knows) and all of my friends are adults with adult responsibilities, and unless we can all agree at the beginning that we will kill monsters on a specific night of the week, then it’s not going to happen. Kudos to Julian Murdoch for always being able to raze Azeroth on Monday nights.

So when Bruce Geryk said “Hey, let’s play Rift,” I was not immediately excited. First, though I love playing games with Bruce, his schedule doesn’t lend itself to structured play. There would be a lot of “Are you able to play now?” talk and then we would get tired of that and we wouldn’t be able to find out where any of our other friends were…

But it’s Bruce. My homeboy. And when he says “I want to be a chloromancer”, you can’t exactly say no. It’s just too ridiculous to not want to see that even if neither of us really knew what a chloromancer was.

So we have started playing Rift. We’re both playing dwarves – he’s a cleric, I’m a warrior, and we’re both around level 7. We are dying a lot and deciding whether or not we really like this game, but so far so good. We will both be reporting every now and then about our adventures and impressions of the game.

First things first, though – Trion did a great job with the look of the game even if the quests themselves are kind of rote FedEx stuff. Yeah, they go the cheap and easy route by making every female in armor look cheap and easy, but the world looks alive and full of danger. Rifts themselves are dangerous public quests and the first one that Bruce and I encountered led to a lot of soul walking and respawning. The rifts will send out creatures and take over areas, knocking down wardstones…it’s all a mess that Bruce and I need to clean up.

Later. So stay tuned for this. It could get very, very ugly.

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Toronto Spring Meetup: Some Details

April 2nd, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · Me, Podcast

OK, let’s get this thing going. I want to meet as many friends, fans and followers from the Toronto/Southern Ontario area as I can.

The date is either Saturday April 23 or Saturday May 7. The location is still to be determined based on numbers and recommendations.

The time will be mid afternoon, probably 2:30 or 3:00 because that gives us time to have either a late lunch or a very early dinner.

I would prefer a location close to the subway lines for obvious reasons, and if anyone has a favorite brew pup they can recommend, so much the better.

In the comments below please let me know which of the above dates works best for you. It won’t be purely a numbers game, since my own schedule is in flux this month, but the more people there, the more fun it is for everyone. I promise to circulate if the count gets too high. (We’ve generally had around a dozen people at previous gatherings.)

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Three Moves Ahead Episode 110 – Three Daimyo and a Baby Mori Clan

March 31st, 2011 by Rob Zacny · Podcast, Three Moves Ahead

GameShark’s Bill Abner joins Troy and Rob to discuss Shogun 2, mortality rates among Japanese generals, and Bill’s enchanted copy of Shogun 2, in which everything awesome that can happen, does.

Rob’s Gamepro series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Bill’s GameShark review

Listen here.
RSS here.
Subscribe on iTunes.

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What I’m Reading

March 30th, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · Me, Media

One of the great things about working from home is that I can keep tabs on the people and sites I like almost at will while I cull things from databases and try to find outlets friendly to the types of things Evolve represents. Though my blog roll and contributors’ listings are good solid bets for good solid writing, here’s a post to remind you of some things that you may not notice if you don’t follow me on Twitter.

I remember when Quarter to Three started a zillion years ago as a site where Tom Chick and Mark Asher could write whatever they wanted. The front page atrophied for a little while until Tom started doing his own podcasts and now, with SyFy inexplicably pulling the plug on his great gaming blog Fidgit, he has turned to using that front page to write the sort of things he used to write there. He has pulled in members of the forum community to write game diaries of things they are playing from A-10 Warthog to Tactics: Ogre to Sims Medieval. And, even better, Bruce Geryk has returned to wargame writing with a compelling account of the awesomeness of War in the East. Great to see Tom make use of this space so well. Plus a couple of recent strategy game podcasts (Company of Heroes and Steel Panthers.)

One of my favorite new blogs is No High Scores. It comes from the pens of the core Gameshark staff but is separate from that. Bill, Brandon, Danielle, Michael and Todd are writing a group blog that has personality and focuses on things they are interested in. As a PR flak, I appreciate Bill’s editing of press releases and Brandon’s cooking posts are pretty fun. If you aren’t reading it, you should be. And not just because they are my friends.

Fog of Wargames, Blunt Force Gamers and Sugarfree Gamer are three wargame centered blogs that have entered my daily rotation. Still haven’t listened to Blunt Force’s podcast, mostly because I find I have little time for podcasts these days. But it’s on the list. Lots of AARs and analysis at these places, things I want to do more of, so please check them out.

As for books, I finally took the plunge and bought Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken. After GDC, I knew I had to get this book if only to see if it made more sense to me as a book than it did as talking points for a presentation. I may say more about it later. No surprises in the first hundred pages, but then I used to read a lot of books about games and science/psychology.

Of course, I am still reading my old standbys of forums and twitter and political blogs and the like. And the blogs written by my best friends, naturally. Fill the comments with things I should be following in the game world – new things if possible.

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