Month: April 2012

Thoughts on Tera

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night the Tera open beta started for people who pre-ordered the game. Today everyone can get in.

In my online community the general reaction to Tera seems to be something like “Meh, I guess I’ll try it.” I don’t know too many people who are super-stoked to play but I think people are curious since it’s been in the works for so long, and since it has such a controversial art style (female armor tends to be very very tiny).

I’ve been known to play a game just so I can slag it with authenticity and I think some of my friends are playing Tera for just that reason.

So here’s a report on my level 1-8 experience.

Developer En Masse has added a prologue to the game. They labeled a blog post about it “Improved Early Play” and boyo, did they get that wrong.

The Prologue is done really poorly in my experience. You’re thrown into the game at level 20 with somewhere between 6 & 10 skills that you won’t understand. You’ll be trying to read help text that pops up in different places and formats while all kinds of in-game chaos is happening.

Now in all fairness I was attempting to play with a controller at this point which probably made things worse. MMO players all know that Space is Jump, but they don’t all know that the B button on the controller is Jump (if in fact it is…I don’t remember). So I was trying to figure out that when the on-screen prompts said “Press F to speak to this scantily clad NPC” I needed to pull the Left Trigger, plus I was figuring out the skills at the same time.

Anyway it was a real mess to me and I almost quit. I’m glad I didn’t though. The Prologue lasts a few minutes and then you go back to the original start of the game where you’ll be level 1, learn all that stuff again at a more measured pace, and gain experience with the skills as you earn them.

At that point I went back to mouse and keyboard but tonight I’m giving the controller another go. Any time I can avoid a lot of mousing it’s good for my arm.

I decided to play a Slayer. That’s a melee class carrying a sword that’s taller than he is. He’s pretty fun to play. Early on I just had a basic attack and a dodge. I found I can dodge through enemies, so what I’d normally do is smack the bad guy until I saw he was going to unleash an attack, then dodge through him. The mob would then land his attack on empty space and I’d attack his back. Fairly frequently you’ll knock a mob down, which feels pretty satisfying.

The combat in Tera is a little different from most MMOs. You don’t lock on a target (maybe you can, but I never did). Instead you have to aim and swing. It can take some getting used to but I felt a little more engaged in combat than I normally do. On the other hand, it’s no Kingdoms of Amalur. This isn’t super-fast-paced arcade combat.

The Slayer generates MP by attacking, and then expends it by firing off skills. I have my main attack on left mouse button, dodge on the right, and by the end of the night I had skills bound to 1, 2 & 3. They were a knockdown attack, a forward dash and a whirlwind area of attack skill.

I have the feeling ranged classes will feel a lot different than melee classes, but we’ll see.

Beyond the combat, Tera is an Asian MMO. You’ve got Story Quests that unlocked every few levels, and side quests to fill in the gaps. So far I haven’t had to do any “grinding” but I’m already seeing a lot of mob model reuse. Y’know “Fight 4 Young Foozles” then “Harvest the spleens from 5 Foozles” and then “Kill 4 Elder Foozles” and then “Bring me the pelts of 5 Ancient Foozles” and all the mobs look the same except for the name over their heads.

Everything so far has been pretty linear but it’s early days yet.

There’re systems I haven’t really dug into. Your health is related to your Morale. You improve Morale by hanging out at a Campfire. As Morale drops, you max health and MP drop too. You can find pre-existing campfires or you can carry them in your inventory.

While you’re gathered around a campfire you can toss in Charms that you get as drops and quest rewards. When you do this, you get some kind of buff…and so does everyone else at the Campfire with you. I guess the idea is to encourage people to gather together to max out buffs.

Likewise gathering with friends is supposed to get you more materials. Stuff like that.

We’ll see. So far Tera feels like exactly the ‘tourist game’ I thought it would be. I’ll play it to ogle the beautiful landscapes for a while, but don’t expect it’ll be a game that holds me for more than a few weeks. In a year it’ll go FreeToPlay and I’ll come back and do it all again. 🙂

TGIF Gaming Wrap-up for 4/20/2012

Posted on by Nimgimli

MMOs are like crack [well, not really, I’ve never done crack but I’m pretty sure MMOs are a lot better for you]. I think I’ve quit the habit and next thing you know I’m sucked back in.

Purchases This Week
Some Gold to spend in Tribes:Ascend
And I switched my Dragon’s Dogma pre-order from 360 to PS3
Oh, and I bought the current Humble Bundle for $15

Played This Week
It’s been the kind of week where last weekend feels like it was years ago. I vaguely recollect playing Tribes:Ascend and enjoying it in limited doses. 2-3 matches is all I can take before I have to go do something more relaxing…I get really worked up playing that game! LOL.

I also got my first taste of Diablo III last weekend after I finally took advantage of the beta invite I got in November. As I feared, it played hell with the RSI issues I have in my wrist. But I enjoyed it. So much so that I’m considering just wearing a wrist brace and playing it, but that sounds really self-destructive.

I continue to plug away at Legend of Grimrock but honestly these online games have their hooks in me again. I managed 3 hours of it though. I was switching between Tribes and Grimrock Friday night and Saturday.

Sunday night I popped back into Guild Wars with the hope of adding to my HoM points. After I whined here I got some fresh advice from Jazz and Scott and played some more. My new goal is gearing up in order to make Eye of the North less brutal. Raptr says I played for 7 hours this week.

Then Dusty and Arislyn lured a few of us into trying the free-to-play version of Aion. I just got my wings when I got distracted AGAIN.

Last, the open beta of Tera. Raptr isn’t tracking it yet but I played until much too late last night.

Plans for the Week to Come
My plans never really pan out, do they? As of today I intend to play Tera over the weekend while the beta is going (our characters will roll over into launch so this isn’t ‘lost’ time) and then hopefully back to Guild Wars. On Tuesday the demo for Dragon’s Dogma comes out and I’ll be taking that for a spin. Otherwise…who knows? I’d like to dip back into Tribes before my slightly-angry skillz atrophy, though. (Get it? Instead of mad skillz I have slightly-angry skills…oh, never mind.)

It’s a crazy spring for MMOs. Diablo 3 (not an MMO, I know, but seems to be a game lots of MMO players are interested in) and Tera have open beta weekends this weekend. Guild Wars 2 has a beta weekend next weekend. Tera launches on May 1 and Diablo 3 on May 15th and The Secret World beta weekends have to start really soon given that game launches in June.

Busy busy busy!

Struggling with Guild Wars 1

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last weekend I picked up Guild Wars again. I had this vague idea that maybe I could accumulate some Hall of Monuments points for Guild Wars 2 (which, like so many others, I dutifully pre-ordered as soon as I could). It’s probably not a fair way to approach a game: I’m playing it to squeeze something other than fun out of it, after all.

So my first goal, according to some guides I read, is to complete all the campaigns, starting with Eye of the North. I log in, head to Lion’s Arch and jump into the crevasse. Off I go!

Now I am admittedly playing Guild Wars as a solo game, with a full team of heroes backing me up. I’m playing a Ranger currently, so mostly I stand back and pew pew arrows into the fray. Except I go through energy like a redneck goes through Old Milwaukee on a hot Saturday night. So I do a lot of waiting for energy to accumulate. Still, with this swarm of characters the difficulty isn’t too bad, unless we get adds.

But here’s the thing. One of the strengths of Guild Wars is there’s almost no leveling curve. Experienced players, I’m told, hit level 20 in 7.8 seconds or so. It took me much, much longer than that, but I’m at level 20 even though I’ve yet to complete any of the campaigns.

Today’s MMO players, I’m told by some, don’t like leveling…they like the end game, and Guild Wars is all about the end game.

But for me, leveling is damned fun! I love progression. It needn’t be levels. It could be skill points or something. But I like pushing some indicator forward. I know that’s shallow, but it’s what I like to do. Hey, I know people that squee with delight when you give them a sheet of bubble wrap and tell them they can pop all the bubbles. People are funny animals.

So I’m working on helping out the Asura in Eye of the North. Mostly I’m traveling. I don’t have any of the map explored so I gotta walk. And of course fight.

And here’s where Guild Wars grinds me down. I fight through a couple zones and then I do wipe. Actually things go totally to shite and I die and res and die and res a few times in a single fight before we wipe, so now everyone has a big fat death debuff. I look at the clock and it’s getting late and I have to be up early tomorrow. I have no idea if I just need to get to the next zone line or if I have several to cross yet.

And so reluctantly I fast-travel back to the Outpost I’d most recently vacated and shut down for the night.

And I feel kind of like I wasted my evening. The combat wasn’t very interesting, I didn’t get any levels, the loot that I found was mostly odds and ends to give to Collectors, or cheap weapons that I’m not sure what to do with. I just feel like I made no progress. Next time I play all those mobs will be back and I won’t be any stronger, or any better equipped, or any richer.

Now I get it. That’s what a lot of people LOVE about Guild Wars. For them, this is when it’s time to tweak out character builds so those fights are easier this time around. This is the SKILL involved in Guild Wars and is what makes the game so unique.

My problem is I dunno how to do that. I feel like, for my main character, I’m using all the skills that I have and that are worth using. And for my 6 heroes I’m frankly kind of overwhelmed. Mostly I dump most of their points into 1 specific attribute and 1 generic attribute (Expertise or the Energy one for mages that gives more mana) and then load up the skills associated with those attributes.

Studying the Wiki, trying new ways to arrange my skills and charging back into the fray to see how it turns out this time well.. it kind of feels like work to me. I just want to go out, kill stuff and get experience points and cool loot and get more powerful that way. I’m a simple guy. I play games for fun, not for challenge. My job is challenging…when I get home I kind of enjoy turning off the thinking cap and relaxing.

Lucky for me there’re 8,023 MMOs that let me go out and get experience points and cool loot and not think too much about it. I’m not faulting Guild Wars and for the people who love developing the perfect build, I’m really happy Guild Wars exists; those people don’t have many options.

But me, I’m just struggling. I need better gear and I’m not sure how to get it. I think my Ranger needs skills I haven’t found. He’s so dead dull to play at the moment. I want to get more powerful so I can slice through these mobs like a hot knife through butter so I can finish the endless quests these Asura want me to do, not replay the same zone over and over, coming away from it empty handed every time.

I just want my HOM points, darn it! And like I said at the start, that’s probably the single most unfair aspect of my relationship with Guild Wars. I’m not approaching it like a game now. I’m approaching it like a chore I have to get done before Guild Wars 2 comes out.

TGIF Gaming Wrap-up for 4/13/2012

Posted on by Nimgimli

Happy Friday the 13th!

Wow, I’ve had a crazy gaming week. Going to PAX really re-energized my gamer soul, as well as crumbling my will to resist new games. 🙂

Purchases This Week
I pre-ordered both Tera and Guild Wars 2 this week.
I pre-ordered Dragon’s Dogman for Xbox 360. Who will be my pawn!?
I bought Shoot Many Robots on XBLA.
Legend of Grimrock launched (I had it on pre-order).
I got a review copy of Anomaly – Warzone Earth on XBLA

Played This Week
Oof, where to start. Aside from the games I dipped into at PAX, I played Super Stardust HD on the Vita in the hotel room.

While at the show I got codes for a LOTRO mount and a DDO mini-pet; these prompted me to revisit both those games, playing about an hour of the first and two hours of the second.

I jumped into the Tera beta when I got home, got to about level 3, then the beta ended. Doh!

I also got codes for weapons in Shoot Many Robots so I bought that on XBLA (was planning to get it on PC…still might) and spent a couple hours playing that Monday night. For once in an Xbox game I sought out multiplayer matches and never managed to connect to one. Sad…it’s a really fun game.

Tuesday night I spent playing Anomaly and that, too, was a heck of a lot of fun.

Wednesday was about Grimrock. I was SO hyped for this game, and it didn’t disappoint. Loving it so far. I also tried out Warhammer: Wrath of Heroes, which hit open beta. I didn’t like that AT ALL (personal preference, not meant as a commentary on the quality of the game). Uninstalled that within an hour of installing it.

And Thursday Tribes: Ascend came out of beta. I played 3 really fun matches of Capture the Flag then had to quit before my heart burst from the constant adrenaline rush. I’m getting too old for this shit. 🙂 So I went back to Grimrock. Oh, and I logged into SW:TOR but felt kind of over-whelmed by the compulsion to tweak my UI and the need to re-spend skill point, so I quickly logged out. Did collect the pet Tauntaun I got from PAX though.

That was more gaming than I’d done in months. Lola Thunderpaws is pissed because our evening walks have been so short, and the house is a mess. I’ve moved catching up with RSS feeds to bedtime, but that means my novel reading progress has dropped to nil. Still, it was a damned fun week of gaming.

Not that I -touched- any of the games on my “Currently Playing” list. I guess I need a new list!

Plans For the Week to Come

Fluid. Tera open beta starts on Thursday for those of us who pre-ordered, and they say they aren’t wiping characters between open beta and launch, so for all intents and purposes the game is launching Thursday for me. I don’t expect Tera to be a game that holds my attention for more than a week or two but like I said, PAX eroded my will power. I’d had no intention of pre-ordering before I saw it on the show floor.

Until Thursday, definitely more Grimrock and I’d like to play more Tribes while I can still be semi-competitive (I figure the audience will get way better than me within a few weeks). I want to check out using a LOTRO soldier outside of skirmishes, and I was really enjoying DDO.

Seriously, I have way too many games to play. I think I’ll put all the names in a hat and just draw one out!

Bioware: No good deed goes unpunished

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday Bioware announced that customers with a level 50 character will be getting a free month of access to SW:TOR.

In response a certain segment of gamers (a sub-section of those who play SWTOR and don’t have a level 50 character) got really angry. They’re pissed that Bioware values the level 50 owners over them.

I think Bioware’s mistake was wrapping this bribe (because let’s face it, this is a bribe) in a marketing angle. They called it a loyalty reward. I’m sure that’s not what it is. In fact, the title of this post is totally inaccurate because this free month isn’t a good deed at all. It’s an investment in SW:TOR’s future.

Here’s what I think is really happening:

Back at launch or even before launch, Bioware was talking up the story aspect of SW:TOR. Players wanted to know what happens once their character’s story was complete, and Bioware said they had a series of additional content planned to keep the stories going.

To the best of my knowledge, very little of this additional story content has materialized (I should note that I don’t have a level 50 character even though I’ve been playing since early access). I’m guessing the majority of the team has been working on getting version 1.2 out so the game has the basic functionality of other programs, like UI windows that you can move.

I’m betting that level 50 characters who aren’t interested in rolling alts are getting bored and leaving the game. Bioware needed to buy some time so they’re offering those players a free month to stick around while they aimed the team at delivering the next chunk of story content.

So I wonder what these angry customers would have thought if Bioware had said something like this:

——

To our level-capped players. We know we promised additional content to keep you engaged in our game, and we know we haven’t done a good job delivering that content. With Patch 1.2 out there we can now focus our efforts on extending your character’s story. This new content isn’t ready yet but it will be soon.

By way of apology, we are offering you 30 days of free game time in the hopes that you will stick around. We think you’ll find it worth the wait.

——

Would transparency have made a difference? I’m not sure. But by calling the free month a loyalty reward they definitely opened themselves up to very valid criticisms that customers who’ve been there since day 1 and have a gang of sub-50 alts are no less loyal, and in fact may be more loyal, than customers who joined in March and charged right up to level 50 on their single character.

Bioware’s logic must be “You haven’t hit 50, so you still have things to discover. These level 50 guys have seen it all so we need to bribe them to stick around.” but that isn’t playing well among gamers.

Tangential thought:

I wonder if we’re seeing the end of Beloved Bioware. Between the ending of Mass Effect 3 and SW:TOR in general, the developer seems to have gone from a company that can do no wrong to a company just like any other game developer: one that has both enthusiastic fans and vocal detractors.

Are MMOs the kiss of death? Blizzard was a beloved game developer before World of Warcraft came around. Now there’s definitely a loud Blizzard-hating group of gamers out there. Is Bioware going through that same transition?

Legend of Grimrock combat video

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you weren’t around for games like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder you might find combat in Legend of Grimrock to be a bit challenging. I decided to record the first difficult fight you’ll encounter in order to demonstrate the dungeon 2-step. (This is from level 2 of the dungeon and my characters are all level 2 as well.)

When you step on the central tile in this room, the door behind you shuts and 3 skeletal knights enter the room, one at a time. With 3 enemies your options are fairly limited so your first goal is to kill one of them as quickly as possible while keeping your party alive. You’ll see that I focus on one then switch targets. I did that because my rogue in the second rank was taking heavy damage. By turning 90 degrees I took her out of danger (but put the even squishier mage in harm’s way).

Once you’re down to 2 enemies you can start moving around the room. This was basically the original form of kiting a mob. Our gaming roots on display!! With 2 baddies (as long as nothing goes badly wrong) the fight becomes fairly easy.

Casting a spell is a bit cumbersome and you’ll see me fizzle once because I chose both the rune for the fire spell and the rune for poison cloud. The devs have said they made casting spells deliberately more difficult than other forms of combat as a kind of balancing technique. They WANT you to get frantic and mis-cast, like I did here. Evil devs!

Also note [spoiler] that each alcove that a skeleton comes out of houses a lever. When you pull all 3 of those levers the doorway to the room opens. You could quickly do that and escape into the hallway if you’re nimble enough, and from there you can kill the skellies one at a time.

First Look: Tribes:Ascend

Posted on by Nimgimli

A long long time ago, Dynamix, at that point a division of Sierra Online (someone will correct me if I have my history wrong) released a team-based shooter called Tribes. Tribes was awesome because of its unusual weapons and its jetpacks!

In my long history of gaming, I’ve sucked at 99.99% of them, but I was OK at Tribes. It was a bit slower paced than most shooters and some of the weapons required a bit of tactical thinking. I was serious enough about it that I joined a team, went to practices…the whole 9 yards. Good times.

Then at some point someone found a way to exploit the physics of the game so you could “ski” down hills. Suddenly dudes in heavy armor were just as fast as lightly armored scouts. Dynamix seemed to think that was actually pretty cool and opted not to fix it, so I moved on to other games.

There was a Tribes 2 that I paid very little attention to but I think it included skiing as a mechanic.

And now we have Tribes:Ascend, a free-to-play iteration of the franchise. It’s still a team-based shooter with jetpacks. Skiiing is an integral part of the game, but since it was balanced for skiiing from the get-go that’s not as much of an issue. The way skiing works now is that you hold down the spacebar when going down hill and you’ll stop running and start sliding. It’s a sci-fi game and they have some lore about it but whatever. The point is you gain a bunch of speed going down a hill then use your jetpack to assist going up hill. Do it right and you can get up a good head of steam.

Anyway, the game came out of beta today and since it’s free I figured I’d give it a go. I wasn’t expecting much.. you can’t go home again, right?

But much to me surprise, I had a lot of fun with it. I even captured the flag once… unheard of for me, and I got a lot of assists and saves since most of the time I was playing defense. I’m sure a week from now the Tribes community will have gotten so good that I’ll once again be hopeless at it: I don’t have the dedication or the reflexes to keep up with serious players. But that’s just me. I have faith that you can do better.

Before I play much more I may need to read up a bit. I just jumped in with a generic class. There are turrets and generators and stuff and I’m not sure if anyone can build/repair them or if there’s a class for that. I’m also not sure what generators do, to be honest.

There’re a ton of classes and weapons, a lot of which cost $$ to unlock. I’m not yet convinced Tribes:Ascend isn’t Pay-to-Win but for now I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.

I played 3 matches. My team won 2 and lost the third. All three were Capture the Flag and the only hang up was that there were a lot of stalemates when each side had the other’s flag. With the skiing system it can be really hard to catch up with a guy who has built up some speed so it’s pretty easy to just run and run with the flag way out on the fringes of the battlefield.

Anyway, I give it a tentative thumbs-up. Definitely worth the asking price at least! If you’re at all into team-based shooters, there’s no reason not to try it.

First Look: Legend of Grimrock

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is going to be really short and no-frills since it’s pretty late and I didn’t have the presence of mind to take screenshots or anything.

Legend of Grimrock launched today and from my first couple of hours playing I’m going to say it’s delivering exactly what developer Almost Human Games promised they’d deliver: old school party-based dungeon crawling with updated graphics. I freaking LOVE IT!! I wonder how many others will, though. Lots of people say they want old school games until they actually start to play them. 🙂

When you first fire up the game you can use a pre-rolled party if you want to miss out on half the fun, or create 4 new characters. There are only 4 races: human, minotaur, lizardman and insectoid. I went with a Minotaur Fighter and a Human Melee-based rogue for my front ranks, and a human Archer Rogue and a human Mage for the back row. That’s how I assigned my skills anyway.

I choose normal difficulty and resisted the temptation to go truly old-school and turn off the automap since I had no graph paper handy. 🙂

Movement is turn-based and uses basic WASD controls. Q&E turn you 90 degrees, A&D sidestep. You can look around with the mouse but mostly you just use it to click on stuff. Combat is time-based. Click on a party member to have him/her attack and then a cooldown for that party member starts. Magic is a bit more complex. Clicking a magic user brings up a panel of runes. Choose some runes and click Cast to cast your spell.

So the game starts and my 4 party members are… totally naked with no gear. I start wandering through the hallways scrounging up cast-off weapons. I did get a knife for my melee fighter, which was great since he’d trained in daggers. But my Axe-Trained Fighter wound up with a mace and my Missile-Weapon trained back-rank Rogue wound up picking up a few rocks she could throw. My Mage experimented a bit and quickly figured out a short range flame spell.

Early enemies come one at a time and aren’t too tough if you have a Mage shooting fire out her palms. Health regenerates by itself, slowly, and there are plenty of doors that you can close behind you if you get low on hitpoints. Monsters don’t seem to heal while they wait around for you to come out and finish them off. There is a food gauge but most early monsters drop chunks of meat you can eat. I assume running out of food will mean you won’t regenerate health, but I’m not positive about that. There’s also a Rest option to speed up healing time but I assume (maybe I should look for a manual…I’m assuming a lot of stuff) you have to be somewhere safe. I locked myself in a small room when I used it.

Light is an issue. You probably want to yank a torch off the wall and give it to a party member if you want good light as you explore. In fact, grab a bunch of them because they do burn out (though if you stick a burnt out torch into a sconce it magically springs back to life).

Puzzles abound, most of them obvious up near the top of the dungeon. Throw a rock on a pressure play to open a grate, press the loose brick to swing open the hidden door. That kind of thing. There are shrines that resurrect and heal your party, but they seem to be 1-use objects.

I only made it to the second level of the dungeon tonight (and level 2 with my characters) but wow… this is EXACTLY the game I’d hoped it would be. It was like I was back on my Atari ST playing Dungeon Master again. Though you can’t repeatedly slam a gate down on a monster to kill it (man, did I abuse that trick back in the day), and the one time I trapped a monster in a pit it respawned back at its starting point.

Almost Human promised an old-school gaming experience and they delivered it. If you’re really nostalgic for the old days of dungeon crawling, but can’t stomach 1987’s graphics, then definitely check out Legend of Grimrock. Even if you only play it for a few evenings you’ll get your $15 ($13.50 if you hurry) worth of fun out of it. But be warned…if you just THINK you want some old school gameplay, you might want to wait for a demo or something.

Also, and I kind of hate to say this but…this would make a GREAT iPad game…

First Look: Anomaly – Warzone Earth for XBLA

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you’re a PC or mobile gamer, 11 Bit Studios’s Anomaly – Warzone Earth might be old news to you. The game originally came out on PC about a year ago, on iOS last summer and on Android earlier this year. Now it’s finally made it to Xbox Live Arcade and in turn I finally got around to giving it a try.

Anomaly is a tower defense game, inverted. Instead of placing towers to ward off incoming attackers, you control the incoming attackers trying to get past, or take out, fixed emplacements. You’ve got two tiers of control in order to accomplish this.

First there’s a strategic map, accessed any time by hitting the Y button, where you plot your route to your destination. Your troops all follow roads in a single file line (at least in the first half dozen levels that I got through) and at each intersection you determine whether they should turn left, turn right, or go straight through the intersection. You can jump in and out of this map at any time, tweaking the route your troops take in response to battlefield conditions.

Once you’re done on the strategic map, your view changes to a nicely rendered map of the city and you appear on the field as a commander unit. He’s a pretty fast, quite durable unit with no offensive abilities. His job is (minimally) to draw fire, to run around and collect power-ups dropped by air support, and to use these power-ups to help keep your units alive. The three power-ups I’ve encountered are Repair, Smoke and Decoy. Repair forms a short-lived auto-repair circle on the map. Any unit that travels through it gets patched up. Smoke offers limited cover in a section of the map, and Decoy draws fire from all enemies within range (until the decoys are destroyed). There’s a least one more type of power-up that I haven’t uncovered yet. Some kind of Bomb. Yay bombs!

As you travel along the map fighting towers (your units, other than the commander, move and attack autonomously) you’ll also encounter nodules of ore. Destroying those converts them into cash. Cash is used to purchase or upgrade units. You can do that any time by pressing X. You can buy new units, upgrade existing units, sell units, or re-arrange the order of your units. In the 6 missions I played I was exposed to 3 kinds of units: an APC with good armor but mediocre firepower, a crawler with weak armor but good offense and range, and a shield unit that had no offense but placed a shield around the units in front of and behind itself.

As for enemy towers, there are basic machine gun towers, beam towers that you should only take on from the sides or behind (not always easy when you need to factor in the limited choices the road grid offers), Behemoths that are very powerful but slow to aim, and some kind of lightning tower that I haven’t quite figured out yet.

And that’s about it so far in terms of game mechanics. I’m playing through the Story Mode: chunks of an alien space craft have fallen to earth and covered Baghdad and Tokyo in strange domes. What’s going on inside? My military unit has been chosen to go in to investigate, and kick some alien ass at the same time. It’s not an epic tale but it’s enough story to keep your interest and get you to play just one more mission.

The game looks great and plays really well with a controller. It comes with some Xbox-y unlocks like stuff for your Avatar and so forth (I don’t play a ton of XBLA games these days…maybe these are standard features now?) and you get scored on each mission so there’s replayability there as you strive to earn more medals.

Like I said, I’ve only spent a couple hours with the game, so don’t consider this any kind of definitive review, but I had a really good time playing. I’d avoided the game on PC because I was pretty burnt out on Tower Defense, but I was offered a review copy of the XBLA version so I figured I’d give it a shot. I was very pleasantly surprised. Turning the tables and making you the attacker is a nice twist on the genre.

Old hands at the game may be tempted by the 6 Xbox-exclusive ‘tactical trials’ that 11 Bit Studios has created for the XBLA version.

Anomaly – Warzone Earth is 800 Microsoft Points, and of course there’s a free demo available.

Kickstart This: Gravitaz

Posted on by Nimgimli

Here’s the latest project to coax me to click that seductive “Pledge” button over at Kickstarter: Gravitaz. This is a near-future racing game similar to Wipeout. Of course, if you’re not a Playstation person you might not know what Wipeout is, but I think the early gameplay in the video below pretty much sums it up: high-speed, low-friction racing with weapons.

So why did I back this one?

First, Developer Glass Bottom Games is made up of industry veterans, most of whom were working on Lego Universe before forming their own studio. I’m confident they can deliver the product.

Second, they’re not asking for a lot of cash: $25,000 is their goal. We can hit that easy!

Third, their pledge levels are really low. It only takes a $10 pledge to get a digital copy of the finished game (PC & Mac are the initial target platforms). After that you can get all kinds of extras, but $10 is pretty damned cheap.

Fourth, full disclosure, I follow Glass Bottom Games co-founder Megan Fox on Google+ and she’s good people. I want to see her studio thrive.

And fifth and most obvious: I want to play this game!

If they go past their initial goal they’re hoping to bring the game to iOS too (what, no Android love??). I’m hoping we go sailing past that puny $25K figure and get to the kinds of numbers where we backers can start chanting “TRACK EDITOR, TRACK EDITOR, TRACK EDITOR” (it sounds good chanting that, right?).

Anyway, check out the early gameplay in the video, read the pitch over on Kickstarter, then decide if it’s worth $10 to play the game they’re describing. To me, it was worth $30.