Acadamagia: The Making of a Mage Review
Feb 16th
Black Chicken Studios’ Acadamagia: The Making of a Mage is a life simulation. You’re a first year student at Acadamagia and you’re going to be a mage. The game takes place during your first year of school. Future releases will continue the adventure of the 4 other years, but lets focus on just this game. Yes, there are similarities to this game and the Harry Potter series, but it is more than that.
Acadamagia is an interesting text based indie game. Yeah there are pictures in the game and music as well (you can turn the music off if you want to listen to your own and probably will once you’ve played it as long as me). Both the images and music are nice and fit the game well, but there isn’t much in the matter of outstanding in this case. What Acadamagia boils down to is more of a choose your own adventure sort of deal.
There are set events as well as random events. Not to mention adventures you unlock and can choose to take as you go along. In all events/adventures there are usually multiple skills that can allow the successful completion of the mission. Making any mission completable by virtually any type of student. Yes, there are exceptions where you will have none of the skills needed to complete. That is why you make friends.
The game also supports the creating of your own clique and making friends with students then inviting them into your group when they are high enough with you. Once you have a clique going, be careful to not bring in someone the rest of the group doesn’t like. I did this and my group broke in half. The purpose of these friends is that during an adventure you can use them to perform a part that you can’t do. Say you need to perform a musical feat but you have a music skill of 0 or 1 but a friend has an 8, ask them to do it for you and you could beat that part. This is an option you must use wisely since you can’t use them again, at least not in the recent future.
Now the kicker is going on adventures, making friends, studying, training skills, and going to classes all must be juggled in your weekly schedule. Skip too many classes and you will get a detention. While you may learn new skills in detention from the teacher that you may not have learned otherwise it does take up future time slots. Get into too much trouble and you could be forced to lose part of your Saturdays.
All of this makes for a great game in my eyes. You do need to like reading, because that is what you will be doing constantly in this game. The game is great for the casual gamer, the reader, and has a lot of little things for more in-depth and serious play. While most choices may not seem to matter for the outcome of this game finishing certain adventures in this game is said to have an effect on future games. Yes you will be able to carry over your first year students into the next game, or start new ones. This one features plenty of free DLC and updates including adding new familiars to the base game as well as adventures and events.
Overall this game is a fantastic text game with plenty of paths and choices creating a rich story for any character you create and has great replay value. With so many adventures and random events your sure to see new things each time you play. Not to mention so many different spells and actions that become available throughout your play.
I can’t stress enough how much I liked this game. I give it a 5 out of 5 personally, but I know this game will be hard for action gamers to really get into.
Defenders of Ardania Review
Jan 6th
Ever played Majesty 1 or 2? Well, that is the setting for Defenders of Ardania. Published by Paradox Interactive and Developed by Most Wanted Entertainment, Defenders of Ardania takes a different spin to the tower defense genre, although not too much of a jump. While this game will be coming out on multiple platforms, this preview/review was done with the PC version.
Defenders of Ardania is all about protecting your kingdom as well as assisting others in protecting theirs. The key aspect to the game is it isn’t all about placing your towers. You are playing both sides in this TD game as you build towers you will also be sending out troops to take out the enemies castle. Battles are not always one on one, sometimes you have partners and sometimes they do. Another big change is that you can not place your towers wherever you want. You can even place some in the pathway to force enemy troops to go around them. All this and your buying troops to send down the path to destroy your enemies castle.
Another interesting limitation to placing your towers is that they can only be built within 4 squares of another of your towers. So to control the field you need to build your towers fast and cross the field to get the best positioning as soon as possible. This can give you a huge advantage over your opponent. Although they may take the time to build the better blocking route to prevent your success and holding the key points may not seem as important if they manage that. Between the 3 races, there are multiple towers to build each with their own advantages and disadvantages.
Sending out your troops is your only way to victory though. You must take out the enemies fortress or it will only be a matter of time before they take out yours. Either that or you will be at a stand still. This almost occurred with me when I made a clumsy and heavily mistake filled tower placement layout at the beginning of the stage. This can drastically alter the route both your troops and the computers will be forced to take. Also much like any good tower defense game there are multiple types of units you have the ability to send out in waves. Further into the game you will gain access to more troop types as well as the ability to send out more waves in a row without having to wait.
One of the last big things about the game is the use of magic. You can use resources to cast spells of different types. The first spell you gain access to is to repair the damage to your castle. This is a spell that can be extremely useful. Other spells destroy towers or units. This brings a lot of real time action to the match.
With a myriad of tower types, troop types, and spells the battles are quite interesting. I especially like how only some troops will attack enemy troops or enemy towers, this adds a great degree of thought when it comes to hiring your next set of troops. Not only that but that they become better the more you use them and eventually a hero troop will be purchasable for that troop type. These guys are nearly unstoppable.
Where this game truly looks to shine is in multiplayer. I was unable to test this theory though. It is set up to be a great TD multiplayer experience. Something I believe many tower defense players really are looking for.
This game has been released for the IPad. PC and console releases are planned but no release date has been announced to my knowledge.
From what I’ve played I give this a 4 out of 5 especially if the multiplayer holds to the single player aspects. I just can’t wait to see myself getting crushed by the TD fanatics out there.
Indie RPG Dreamscape Review
Nov 17th
Dreamscape is a lot like Alice in Wonderland, in its own way. You’ve got a snide talking cat, a viking rat who may be as close as you get to the mouse at the Mad Hatters table and you even have a talking flower to boot. With the main character feeling pretty lost and confused about the worlds in which she travels, I couldn’t ignore the similarity. The premise of Aldorlea‘s Dreamscape is that Erin’s boyfriend has disappeared into the land of dreams, but not before he gave her a device to enter others dreams. With this device you must find your boyfriend and return back to the real world, until then on with the fanciful adventure.
Dreamscape plays pretty much like any 16Bit style RPG does. As you play you gather more team members each with there own unique abilities and preferred weapons and equipment. Although this isn’t a merry band of Humans, Elves and Dwarfs off to save the world. Nope it is just Erin and a strange collection of people/beings you meet in the dream worlds. You will jump into the dreams of people you meet and can exit the way you came in or jump into the dream of another person you meet or person within your party. This allows a lot of back and forth into different landscapes, something you will need to do to advance farther in certain realms. You won’t be worrying about random monsters though, they appear on the screen for you to avoid or confront depending on you.
An interesting aspect that adds some difficulty to the game is the lack of a healing item inventory. Within the dreams you will find food of all sorts that will heal your party. Certain characters more than others depending on the food type. The true kicker is once you pick it up it is used immediately and removed from the map. So you need to use them sparingly and make sure it is the right item for the character needing healed most. There is a bit of a safety net as far as healing goes. You can use a fairy that appears near where you start, at a cost. If she heals your party the dreamworlds will react and make the game more difficult. So using her can be more headache than help.
The scenery is great, one minute your in Egypt’s desert then the next minute you could be in London at night while it rains, or a mouse cave full of cheese. All this adds to not only the atmosphere, but the freedom of the game. Between the cute jokes, character banter and ever shifting atmosphere things always feel fresh and interesting. The story may seem to fade out at points, but your still roped in to seeing what the next dreamscape will be like or who/what will be the next character or danger you’ll face.
This RPG may seem a little bit too cute for some, but that doesn’t make it easy. Even if you put it on the easier modes. With tons playtime hours of adventuring it’s also not your quick indie RPG romp. You’ll be setting aside a fair amount of time to uncover the mystery of the dreamscape and what your boyfriend was so afraid of.
I never felt to lost in any particular dungeon, nor did I find it impossibly complex to advance through things. I give this RPG a 4 out of 5 for the interesting story and area layout, not to mention the diverse worlds you enter as well as it’s old school game play, and the hours of playtime you will get out of it.
Anomaly: Warzone Earth Review
Nov 14th
Anomaly: Warzone Earth is an iOS and PC game created by 11Bit Studios. For the purpose of this review we will be focusing on the PC version of the game. Anomaly: Warzone Earth is essentially a reverse tower defense game. Instead of building the towers to prevent attackers, you are the attackers. Aliens have crashed on the earth and it’s your units job to figure out what is going on and stop anything bad from happening. So you have to enter the alien crash sites and destroy the weapons that they have set up.
Anomaly has a lot of neat tricks in its hat to make it interesting and entertaining. Each level you have a new mission sometimes multiple missions. In one case the mission is to reach a certain point before a specific time once you do that though the level isn’t over you are assigned a new mission to accomplish. So playing it smart early on in a stage can help a great deal later into the stage. So as commander, who apparently likes to run along side the military convoy you are off to save the day from the alien threat.
So how is Anomaly played? It’s a point and click game for the most part. You use the mouse pretty much exclusively, which makes it pretty easy to get used to, that in no way means it makes it easy though. Although the game does walk you through all the steps to playing, very nicely. So what are the basics. You scroll back to enter tactical mode from here you will be able to change the route in which your military caravan is going to travel. This is very important throughout the game as paths become blocked by dangerous material that would damage or destroy your units or new towers appear that you hadn’t accounted for. Scroll forward to go back into the active mode. Left click somewhere and the commanding officer (You) will run to that location. Right click somewhere and it brings up a ring of 4 possible abilities. At first you won’t have all four. Click on the one you want and the commanding officer will run there and use that ability.
You can lose during a stage by all units being destroyed or failing some objective. Stages do have checkpoints and when you reach one you can continue from that point or the beginning of the stage depending on how well you were doing when you made it to that check point will answer that question. I know I had a few points where it was better to start the stage over than to continue beaten and battered at a checkpoint right before I failed.
The game has a decent storyline to explain out why you are taking part in the next mission. It does well to keep the flow of the game going. The voice acting isn’t bad, I liked it to be honest. The music and sound effects are nice and the games visuals are good, and I don’t mean good for a tower defense game. The game has some real polish to it and is not what I expect from most indie games.
As an add on there are two bonus modes available to unlock after you have completed that section in the game. An online scoreboard has you competing for the best rank as well as medals for each stage to show you what you did well at and what they believe you could have done better at. The only thing I can see being a downside to this game is that it isn’t multiplayer. For me this wasn’t an issue, it’s a great game and it stands on its own with just single player.
I give this game a 4 out of 5 only because tower defense is a niche genre. I can’t say this game is for everyone but, it is really worth your time to check it out.
Minecraft and A Few Mods Review
Oct 30th
This game has killed so much of my time to not write about it would be a sin. So here is both my reviews of Minecraft and a few Minecraft mods. Mojang the makers of Minecraft have put together one heck of a java game. Minecraft has spread like crack in the gaming community, something most indie developers never see.
So what is the deal with Minecraft? Well, it’s pretty simple. First, the game is really easy to play. It has 2 modes of play with a third mode of play coming out in the next edition. The two modes are creative and survival with a hardcore survival mode coming out in 1.9, 1.8.1 is the current official release at this moment. Creative mode is just you building whatever your heart desires in a landscape of random layouts. Although, you can create the same map over and over again by using a map generation key. The second mode is survival mode which is as it sounds survival is the key with all the fun of creative mode, except with the challenge of monsters and having to obtain the materials to survive and build. The third mode, hardcore survival will have the same thing as survival mode except upon death the world is deleted so there is no trying again with what you may have done.
Keeping the game simple enough for just about anyone to grasp the game uses blocks for pretty much everything. So as you wander around these block based worlds what you want to do is pretty much up to you. A common theme to sandbox games, except in Minecraft there are no bosses to hunt down no real objectives. Creative mode is just as it says. It gives you access to all the blocks in the game without limit. So if you don’t like to fight or have to survive you can build like it’s a virtual Lego wonderland. Really who doesn’t have fond memories of playing with blocks.
Survival mode has monsters also known as mobs that come out at night to kill you, whether you come out of your shelter to face them or not is entirely up to you. That is unless you didn’t build a shelter before your first night. In survival mode you craft materials, tools, weapons, and armor to face the threats of the night, caves or just hunting for food. As of 1.8.1 you actually need to eat regularly to survive. You can build small farms of wheat, sugarcane, and watermelons to aid in your survival or hunt for cows, pigs, and chickens. You can even go fishing if you build a fishing pole. It is all up to you. Mine as much as you want or just explore the huge map that is built for you. You can build a portal to enter a lava filled dimension called the Nether if you want a change of scenery.
With the next version of the game looking to add more structures to the Nether realm, another dimension called the End, NPCs that spawn in little villages, and an potion table, Minecraft is continuing to expand and add more with each update. It’s hard to find yourself bored in this game, but if you do there is a large modding community for Minecraft that adds all sorts of new and different options to the game. Giving you a virtually endless array of possibilities.
Not to mention there are tons of servers with different mods or just standard play of creative or survival mod out there to allow for a great multiplayer experience. Some might require you to install certain mods, but many just require you to talk to the person running it via IRC or forum emails.
By itself I would say Minecraft easily is a 5 out of 5, with decent replay value. With the mods though it has an inexhaustible level of replay value. I’d say one of it’s biggest downfalls is the silence that comes fairly often.
Now as I said I wanted to talk of a few mods that I find extremely enriching to the game.
MAtmos – This mod is a simple sound mod that adds nature sounds and wind sound as well as a number of other sounds that may seem unnecessary, but truly does bring a lot of life to this game. It also solves the silence issue when the music isn’t playing. Hearing the wind blow when on a hillside or mountain or the little birdie sounds of the forest. It’s a great mod that doesn’t change the game by adding tools or blocks just cleans up the silence.
Dr Zhark’s Creatures – This mod adds a ton of mobs to your game. From hostile mobs, water mobs, animal mobs and hunter animal mobs. You want cats in the game along wolves or foxes and bears, maybe sharks or even a dangerous ogre then this is the mod for you. It adds a large quantity of mobs to the game with a gui that makes it easy to customize the rarity, in its most recent version it even has the ability to edit the rarity of the standard mobs of the game. If you are looking to add more animals to the game or even more nasty monsters this mod offers both. I would say it is a must have for anyone looking for more life in their Minecraft world.
Humans+ – This mod adds a number of NPC factions to your world. If you feel a bit lonely wandering around this mod might be what it takes to solve that one. It adds, Knights and Samurai, Hunters, Assassins, Elves, Bandits, Desert Bandits, Pirates, and Peasants and a few other factions. All your actions involving these NPCs effects how different factions may see you. Kill a bunch of hunters and the bandits may fight with you since you crossed over to the evil side. Kill a bunch of animals in front of the elves and you can be sure they will attack you. This mod adds quite a bit of people running around in the wild trying to kill you and each other, but it does make things interesting. It’s biggest issue seems to be that in general the knights almost always attempt to kill you so it never seems viable to side with them. Although it is fun hacking down other people instead of a bunch of creepers and spiders all the time.
The next two mods I will talk about aren’t really done but can and do work well enough.
Twilight Forest – No it has nothing to do with the Stephenie Meyers book about vampires. The Twilight Forest is a dimension mod, which means it adds another dimension much like going to the Nether. Twilight Forest is a dimension of perpetual twilight. In other wards both monster and animal mobs can spawn at all times. So you are never really safe. What really makes this world worth exploring is that you are in a huge forest canopy with trees taller than some mountains in Minecraft. The ground is lower so you won’t be able to dig as deep but you don’t need to hills have ores and tons of monster mobs that defend them. There are Hedge Mazes, and Ice Walls, and currently one courtyard with the Naga as a boss for the mod. You can choose whether you want to take it one or not. Even if you don’t climbing to the top of the tree canopy is quite a site and makes for a very interesting world to visit. This is a great mod with a lot of potential.
Tale of Kingdoms – This mod is fairly new to the scene, but just fantastic. If you play and want to build a castle, but at the same time you want to spend your time mining and killing. Then this mod is for you. It immediately adds a guild that you join where you learn what it takes to be a king. This is pretty much done by slaughtering enemy mobs with your fellow guild-mates. Once you’ve earned enough you can take a builder out somewhere of your choosing and tell him to build there. He will build the out castle wall and request Cobblestone and wood to build more buildings. The castle can be upgraded to tier two currently and it does take some time to acquire the materials to build the buildings, mainly the wood that is. Once you hit tier two you can hire guardsmen for your castle, but even before that you can hire guilds men as body guards. You can also sell many of the Items you may find useless to the guild or shop once you build one and use the money from those items as well as the critters you kill to purchase better tools, weapons, armor and just about anything else. This gives you a lot more freedom to play the game as you like, while giving you an optional goal. Although this mod isn’t completed and an Enemy kingdom is planned in future releases as it stands now it is a lot of fun and adds a whole new feel to the game. Worth taking a look at if you are even a little interested in modding your Minecraft.
All of those mods are compatible with each other in 1.8.1 without any issues that I have seen and create a very hectic and dangerous landscape, but it sure is a lot of fun. Don’t limit yourself to these mods check out others as well. These mods and many more can all be found at http://www.minecraftforum.net/
Trailer Park King Review
Oct 29th
Okay, Trailer Park King is a definite twist from the last game released by Freelance Games. Fans of Starchon shouldn’t expect this to be anything like it. Trailer Park King is a “who did it” point and click mystery game for XBLIG.
The game plays off the jokes you might expect of trailer park life. The main character seems to have no real job or ambitions except the next girl, pretty much the cliche of the trailer park guy. When your hit with the mystery that you have to solve, you will do this through talking and finding items to use and give to others to get them to talk to you. This game is very simple and to say more about the plot would be a bit to easy to give it away.
Needless to say the artwork is nice, as well as the voice acting. So enjoy the pretty pictures and silly jokes while you can. The game ends far to quickly with it being easy to get through in 20 to 30 minutes. Nothing you search for is hard to find and all the puzzles are pretty simple.
Overall, I was left wanting more of both the game and a challenge. I thought maybe if I made some alternate choices or answers in the game it would add some re-playability. It didn’t, no matter what answers or choices you make they all lead to the same results, one way or another.
So sadly I could only give this game a 2 out of 5 and hope they either make a longer more challenging point and click mystery or make another Starchon.
Sengoku Preview Review
Sep 11th
On Sept 13th 2011, Paradox Interactive will be releasing Sengoku for the PC. Sengoku is a strategy game that takes place during the Feudal wars of Japan. It’s big thing is that it takes a different approach to the genre than most games. It’s not all about battles although they have their place..To take Japan in this game will take a lot more cunning than that.
So let me start of first by saying that this game is not for the casual strategy gamer. It is complex and political and takes some strategies you may not be used to employing. A lot of the game play is through your relationships with leaders of other clans as well as members within your own clan. With all the clan leaders out to take the position of the new shogun, You have to decide is that going to be you or are you just helping someone else out. It’s your responsibility in the game to lead your clan to victory.
Unlike a lot of strategy games there are no actual difficulty levels in this game. The difficulty is decided by the clan you pick at the start of game. As you look through the different clan leaders you will see the difficulty level the game would be by playing said clan. It’s not that the game is harder or easier on you in AI it is just that some clans are already established at the beginning of the game while others are already at war and may be losing. A number of factors are at play so choosing a clan with a high difficulty is pretty much starting with a clan that is at the bottom of the totem pole. With so many clans to chose from this really gives you an opportunity to see many sides with the game.
Now what makes this game stand out is the honor system. Everything you want to do will come down to money and/or honor. If you have a neighbor that you want to get rid of but he has never attacked you, to do it your going to have to pay honor. If your honor is too low you may be asked to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) in order to restore some sense of honor to your remaining clan. This is especially important because if the clan leader you are playing dies by any means, you will take the role of the clan’s successor. In Sengoku you will arrange marriages for your children with the children of other clan leaders to forge bonds as well as create a proper succession. All while attempting to keep your honor high enough to do the things you need or want to accomplish.
With everything from choosing a clan religion to hiring ninjas to perform acts you don’t want to be credited for Sengoku has a lot to offer. Once you get the hang of what is happening on how to perform these tasks yourself, you can find that there is a great deal of strategy in this game. Although this may take a few rough starts where you feel completely helpless and overwhelmed with the options and controls. The menu system isn’t the easiest thing to maneuver and I make a strong recommendation to reading the manual and watching the video below for assistance in getting a grasp of the game.
While the game plays with time constantly passing and you taking your actions in real time. This can become problematic so you can speed up or slow down and even pause time. This allows you to set up a number of actions all at once as well as take a look around at what is going on throughout the rest of Japan. If it wasn’t for the ability to pause time to issue out commands I am sure I would have completely drowned in the interface.
I will say that Sengoku is not about great graphics. You don’t go down to the battlefield to control your troops in battle, so if that is what you want in a game you will be disappointed here. From my experience graphics are not what makes a great strategy game. So if you can get a handle on the menu system and ignore the fact that this isn’t the best visual experience, you will be in for a different style of war and strategy.
In the end I highly recommend this game to serious strategy gamers. I give it a 4 out of 5, but I think the casual gamer may struggle with this one, I did at first. Don’t give up though and once it all starts clicking this game is really fun.
Sengoku comes out on Sept 13th 2011 for $29.99 you can get it from gamersgate.com
The Demo can be found Here
Motorbike Stunt Agent Julie Review
Sep 5th
Now this game has a title that is a bit of a mouthful. Motorbike Stunt Agent Julie is an XBLIG title created by Mattini Games that is a little Excitebike with 360 degree shooting added in for good measure. In some ways it reminds me of some old side-scrolling action games.
MSAJ has one of those stories that seems straight out of an 80′s action flick. The twist being that the arrogant military hero isn’t a guy. It’s agent Julie who has been spending her time since she left her motorbike recon team as a daredevil in a carnival. The story starts up with her old commanding officer coming to her and asking that she come back for a special mission that only she can handle. From that moment on the game continues with a number of I’m the best cocky scenes as the story progresses. The scenes are cutscene images with voice acting as well as the subtitled text that is option. Sadly the voice over was not optional and would have been much better if they were speaking their native tongue versus English. We had the subtitles already so it would have been easy to follow.
This game had 2 modes of play, a campaign mode and a mission select mode. With 20 levels of motorbike stunt shooting action, you are rated on how well you do in each level. A nice feature the game has is that if you don’t care to play the campaign you can play the missions in mission select mode. Each mission you beat unlocks the next mission. The same happens as you beat the missions in campaign mode so you can play the campaign and unlock them all or just play mission select to do it. I thought this was a nice touch and change of pace.
As far as how to play this game, well it’s pretty simple. Your LTrigger is your brake/reverse while your RTrigger is your acceleration. Your left control stick controls your spinning as well as your rocket boost. Pressing forward leans you forward to do forward flips in the air, while pressing back causes back flips and pressing up at any time kicks your rocket boost into action. Be careful not to rocket boost while angled downwards or you propel yourself down to the ground front wheel first. Your right control stick controls the direction you are firing. By successfully doing stunts, such as 2 front flips and the destruction of 3 mines and landing it would increase your stunt bar. When the stunt bar fills up you can press a button to heal yourself, in the later levels this becomes very important to your survival. When you use your rocket boost the bar decreases in energy, but will refill on its own.
The key to this game is destroying the enemies in front of you while doing stunt jumps that allow you to heal yourself. Each level is made up of multiple check points that you have a time limit to reach which then extends your time to reach the next check point. So it becomes important to not crash as that this slows you down a lot and makes you a prone target for enemy fire. Whether you play the game in campaign mode or mission select your scores are kept locally for each level giving you the ability to go back and attempt to beat your previous score and ranking.
Graphically this game isn’t all that in the actual missions. With the ground always looking the same outside of its shape the turrets and tanks all pretty much use the same color giving the game a rather drab look while playing. While the music for the game at first seemed pretty good the fact that there is only one song that is repeated over and over again began to make the music grating.
While this game is a little fun to play when you play a mission here or a mission there. It didn’t give me the urge to play any levels a second time through. Another downside is that occasionally my gun would stop doing damage to the enemies. While it would show that I was still shooting at them it would fail to do any damage and I would have to crash land to get it working again. When this happened it would be extremely irritating, but not game ending. A good thing about the game was it’s ease of learning and the levels really did have a feel of increasing difficulty without any major jumps in difficulty. While all the missions did feel pretty much the same even if they were meant to feel different the only change seemed in the boss missions.
I give this game a 2 out of 5, I just couldn’t get into this game as much as I wanted to. I suggest picking up the trial before buying this one. If you are really looking for something that has that Excitebike feel this may be the game you are looking for.
Extra Life 2011 Update
Sep 2nd
Now that September has started, that only leaves a month and a half till Oct 15th 2011. The 24hr gaming marathon to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals needs your help and contributions. The amount I’ve raised so far has been pretty low, so each and everyone of you really do matter. Don’t wait till the last minute to donate if you are interested, that is usually when I tend to forget.
If you’re wondering what I’m talking about their is more info on my previous article located here. If you are wanting to help with a donation just click here and click on the support button to make your contribution. In my eyes no contribution is too small or too large. Give what you can for the hospitals. Remember donations through me go to the Children’s Memorial Hospital, but others are working to raise money for other hospitals, and you should be able to search for them as well.
Remember this is a good cause and let’s show them what gamers can accomplish when they put their minds to it. Don’t be put off by the lack of donations help be the motivator for others. And remember I am open to suggestions on the Indie games I will play for those 24hrs. I want your opinions on this one.
To Donate go to this page: Extra Life Donations
To Read more about it from them go to this page: Extra Life Info
Niji Review
Aug 31st
Ever wanted to see a rainbow colored fish climb a waterfall or get zapped by lightning? Well, now you can thanks to Niji an XBLIG from Binary Madness. If you like climbing games and some nice colorful art please read on.
Niji is a very simplistic game. At least in concept, while it can be pretty challenging to beat the game it does offer a number of play options. Niji has a single player story, endless and survival mode. Story mode you are on a rescue mission. Endless mode is pure climbing until you run out of your five lives. Survival mode is how long can you last with only 1 life. Your scores are all kept on a local leaderboard.
Multiplayer also has 3 modes that allow for 4 players locally to compete on the same screen. No split screen action here so falling behind can really be a killer. The multiplayer modes are Last Fish Standing, Time Attack, and Point Rush. Last Fish Standing is simple all players are given a set amount of lives and the one that survives is the winner. Time attack is a point based match with infinite lives, get the highest score before the time runs out. The last mode is a great mode for the game, but also seems a bit hard to attain even in just a two player match and that is Point Rush. In point rush you set a certain amount of points as the goal and the first one to obtain that amount wins. The downside to that last mode is that the lowest point value is still so high that it quickly becomes taxing and tedious for all the players just for one player to reach even the lowest goal.
The controls are pretty simple in this game. Your left stick is your directional movement of left or right. The A button is your swim, jump and double jump button and B is your trick button. You make your way upward by swimming up waterfalls the clouds create and jumping from one water fall to another. Every time you press A the energy meter goes down so you have to keep a decent pace without over exerting yourself or you’ll fall to your death. Jumping from one waterfall to another as well as doing tricks increases your multiplier/combo and will greatly increase the points you earn when a combo is ended. You do have to watch out for the lightning clouds they can stun you and that could make you fall to your death as well as missing the next waterfall. If you manage to go through 7 clouds without dying you will get a super boost up higher into the climb. All this is down with the screen slowly advancing up or quickly if it has to keep up with you.
In multiplayer one of the major downsides is that since you share the same screen as all the other players it is very easy to find yourself losing a life because of the speed of a fish that has gotten a little bit of a lead on you. You also can mess them up by coming back into play higher than them and quickly forcing them off the screen. This is what makes point rush very difficult and time consuming since the constant deaths keep cutting your combo’s short.
When all is said and done though, Niji is fun game for short periods of time and a good game to play with the family. 3 out of 5 in my book.
