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Mycelia Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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What IOS games have you been playing?

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10 Jul 2015 15:18 #205964 by Michael Barnes
Dang, Splendor is REALLY good...they really went for it. The base game is the same and it plays REALLY well on the phone- easy to get into and finish in ten minutes or so and some good challenge with quality "personality" based AI. All the math is done for you. It's just as pleasant, easy going and fun as the real game.

But they did more than that. There are also these solo "challenges" that are framed like some kind of historical quests. They have you do different things, like score a certain number of points in X turns or within a time limit. Some have the cards come out in a certain order so there's a puzzle aspect to it. They REALLY stretch to make the mechanic work in the settings, but who cares, it's fun.

A touch expensive at $8, but the quality shines through.

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29 Jul 2015 17:09 #207407 by lj1983
Worms 3 is free today...I love the worms games

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29 Jul 2015 18:09 #207409 by Michael Barnes
I've been tooling around with a couple of free to play games, believe it or not...I got bored the other day and thought I'd see what the deal is with some of these "social RPG" type games that are really popular in Asia.

Terra Battle was the first I looked at. It seemed really promising- Square Enix production values, a pretty cool boardgamey SRPG concept...but man, the paywall hit hard on that one. It wasn't long before I got into battles I just COULD NOT win. Much of the game was pretty esoteric too- currencies, timers, stats that do who knows what. It was pretty, but got the boot. It's supposed to be really good, but I just didn't get the hook. Total expenditure- $0

So next up was the king- Puzzle and Dragons. I actually really liked this one. It's a match three/team building/monster breeding thing sharing some genes with games like Puzzle Quest and Pokémon. The only thing is that the standard progression is way too easy, and the special dungeons- where, of course, the real loot lies- are way too hard. And how they 'get you' is by offering you a continue when you lose. It takes a Magic Stone (the premium currency), which of course you can also buy right there for .99 cents. If you don't continue, you lose all of the monster eggs and stuff you've won to that point in that dungeon. Which isn't a huge deal, really...at least not for patient adults. The monsters are fun to breed and evolve, and the game just constantly throws "free" stuff at you...which of course, you will blow right away. The game rewards you for "checking in" every day, which is kind of nice, and come to find out the "social" element is really just friending people at random whom you borrow monsters from. There is no actual socialization. And then, having friends use your monsters in their games gives you more free stuff. The stamina bars so far haven't been an issue- there are a couple of high level dungeons I can't do it but when I'm out of stamina, I usually feel like I'm ready to do something else anyway until it recharges. Total expenditure- $0. Verdict- a fun puzzle game if you play it casually and just kind of enjoy the collecting and upgrading, but serious play would likely either frustrate you or start costing money.

Then I went to the game that dethroned Puzzle and Dragons as the #1 mobile game in Japan- Monster Strike. It's SHOCKINGLY close to P&D in execution and it almost seems like the same game. Same elements, monster fusions, evolutions, same format. But the gameplay is totally different. It's essentially marbles with special powers. Your monsters are balls on the playfield, you pull back and fling them into other monsters. There is a neat mechanic- when your shooting marble monster hits another one of yours, it triggers an effect on that marble. Maybe it blows up, shoots a bullet hell pattern or fires giant lasers. There is a minor skill component, but I'm not convinced that there's really much strategy beyond bringing the right kind of team into a dungeon. Take water, not fire, monsters into the volcano for example. Like P&D, it's light, fun and has a lot of the same positive qualities. But it has that continuing thing too, and when you get into the really hard dungeons it just sucks away all of your stones...and then, temptation. I gave in twice, but only because the dungeon I was doing would unlock Cthulhu. No problem with the timers/stamina or anything like that here either, but I'm also not a nine year old kid that wants to play it for five hours straight. There is actual co-op in this one, unlike P&D. Total expenditure- $1.98. Verdict- probably a little more engaging than P&D since it has a dexterity game element with a cool set of mechanics.

After that, I hit up a new called Card King: Dragon Wars. It's made by the folks that made the Adventure Time Card Wars game. Once again, the P&D model is clearly the template because it also looks and feels a lot like P&D and has a lot of the same features. But this one has some very, very cool gameplay that I'm really digging. Each monster you collect/breed comes with a set of cards that go into a deck. It's a head-to-head card battler, but it's very different than Hearthstone. You get energy each turn, and it increases over the course of a game. You can summon one of your monsters into battle (20 energy), and then each has a "drag" attack that costs energy. When you attack with a monster, you draw a card from that monster's selection. These cost energy as well- they inflict buffs/status effects, trigger attacks, and so forth. Monsters have a ton of health, so they duke it out for a while until you completely KO the opponent's lineup. So far it's really good, and out of the games it is the one I'd be most willing to spend more than $5 on. But I have kind of hit a wall and I'm in a "battle line" that I can't beat. I may have to just grind the earlier levels for materials to upgrade my core monsters. Total expenditure- $0, but I'm thinking about the $4.99 "starter" pack. Verdict- really fun card battler with these newfangled social RPG elements, very high quality but won't likely dethrone Hearthstone anytime soon.

I've also gone back to Earthcore- I found out that the game is designed by Michal Oracz (Theseus, Neuroshima Hex), so that made me want to take another look.
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29 Jul 2015 20:28 #207416 by MacDirk Diggler
Um.... Uh... Barnes? hearthstone called. it misses you.

BwWaaaAAAahHaAaaaAaaHHaaaaHAaaaahaaaaaa

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29 Jul 2015 20:34 #207417 by Michael Barnes
Zing! Well, I'm about to buy that $50 preorder so that will be our "make up sex".

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29 Jul 2015 20:51 - 29 Jul 2015 20:52 #207419 by Gary Sax
Crazy to think just how much money is being made in that space. I still have a pretty negative view of the whole thing, but I know that just makes me a grandpa or whatever. I would have ethical qualms working at a hardcore free to play like that, the way they deep analyze people's lizard brains to extract money. Same way I'd struggle to work at say the DoD or at a "open forum" social media site like Reddit.
Last edit: 29 Jul 2015 20:52 by Gary Sax.
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30 Jul 2015 18:14 #207511 by Michael Barnes
I hear you Steve...I'm pretty much against F2P myself, but you know I was thinking about it and it really does kind of get back to the old "quarter per play" model of the arcade, in kind of a roundabout way...and with a lot more psychological engineering going on. It's really kind of interesting to see how they deliberately go after the "whales"...there are so many little triggers that I can see someone that has no self control just completely blowing out their wallet on these things.

But the thing about it is, if you are immune/have a high resistance to these kinds of tactics...these games (but definitely not all F2P) really can be completely free. As long as you aren't dead set on collecting all 1000+ monsters, competing for the top of the leaderboards or anything like AND if you are commited to casual play (which means NOT playing for two, three hours at a time) then I find that they reward you for your time sufficiently to keep you interested at that level of play. You might still run into a situation where you don't have enough banana dollars or whatever, but if you don't mind playing an old level again to get a higher rating/better reward another time then it kind of doesn't matter.

If you want it NOW...step right this way, paying customer.

The games with build timers are the ones that I think are particularly pernicious because they tend to start out with really short build times...and as you play, they get longer and longer until you're looking at 24 hours and up for something to finish. UNLESS you pay. I think that is super-shysty. The above games tend to limit your play with "stamina", but both P&D and Monster Strike have 1-cost events so you can play more or less any time you want. Going for the big, high payout event costs more. But you know, it actually adds a great sense of risk to the game when you spend a lot of earned currency to try to take on one of those...and there again is where they trip a psychological trigger when you fail 3/4 of the way through and have the option to pay to continue.

What it comes down to is that if you know what to expect and play casually around the dreadful "freemium" mechanics that are really there to attract the people that will drop $99.99 on the "bucket of gems" or whatever, then there are fun games to be played in this space.
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10 Aug 2015 10:01 #208220 by lj1983
Loot and Legends - designer says its a IOS port of Card Hunter. simple dungeon crawl/tactical + deckbuilding between levels.
Negatives: F2P if that bothers you, but no paywalls as far as I can tell. and requires an constant internet connection.

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10 Aug 2015 13:02 #208225 by Feelitmon

Gary Sax wrote: Crazy to think just how much money is being made in that space. I still have a pretty negative view of the whole thing, but I know that just makes me a grandpa or whatever. I would have ethical qualms working at a hardcore free to play like that, the way they deep analyze people's lizard brains to extract money. Same way I'd struggle to work at say the DoD or at a "open forum" social media site like Reddit.


The F2P hooks don't really work on me for some reason--I've never spent a dime on F2P stuff despite playing the crap out of them--but I'm pretty much the same way. I did work at a similar company in my first job out of college though. This was the early 90s and it was a company that made telephone-based games (remember 900 numbers?) based on Let's Make a Deal, various sports, the McDonald's Monopoly game, and so forth. The idea was that you would pay a flat fee and per-minute charge for the call, and the better you did at the game of course the longer the call was. People could win real prizes, although not exactly top-of-the-line ones. I worked customer support, and one of my biggest tasks was identifying the obsessed people, the ones who would rack up thousands of dollars in telephone bills playing our stupid little games. We worked with AT&T and got real-time stats on usage to help us spot these people, and I would call them directly at home to try to talk them down from the obsession. Such a weird post-graduation job, now that I think about it.

Anyway, back then we needed to prevent obsession in our players because they would just renege on their telephone bills and we'd have to hassle with their local telephone company. The best possible players from our perspective were the ones who consistently played, even constantly played, but most importantly played moderately. I would bet that F2P video games are the same way. They get nothing when Junior buys $1000 worth of "continue playing" gems on his dad's iPhone because Dad will just raise a fit with Apple, threaten to call the State Attorney General's office for enticing minors, etc. The steady drip-drip-drip of a few dollars here and there is far better.

Eventually I had to leave that company, incidentally. The job was pretty grim even compared with my adventures in food service, so that should tell you something, LOL.
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24 Aug 2015 11:34 #209140 by Michael Barnes
Tried a couple of new IOS games lately...

Galactic Keep was announced like six years ago (then it was subtitled "Dice Battles"), and it had a cool hand-drawn art style and looked promising. It finally came out last week, and man, it FUCKING SUCKS. It's gotten good reviews from some VERY doe-eyed reviewers who are not seeing past the retro Star Frontiers atmosphere (which is great) and really digging into the gameplay. It's terrible. It's a very simple dungeon crawler that takes place on an open world map with a death mechanic that is inspired by the under-played Zombi U- a party member dies, you have to send another out to get their stuff and bring them back. The problem is that there is actually ZERO gameplay here. Combat is literally selecting one of four options and watching two icons bump into each other. The characters each have a once-per-turn special. Blocking heals a little health. Maybe this all opens up, but it's so crappily designed that I don't really care. I can easily simulate the nostalgic feeling of looking at Star Frontiers books by simply looking at Star Frontiers books. I can't believe that in six years of development no one said "hey, we really need a zoom function on this map".

Demon's Rise is another dungeoncrawler, it looked interesting because it has 24 classes and gameplay that was billed as being a cross between WHQ and XCOM. Which it kind of is, but with lots of special abilities and combos possible. There is 3/4 of a potentially great game here. But the other 1/4 is clumsy, awkward and kind of terrible. It's the classic indie game problem- heart and concept are there, execution is not. Interface is awful, graphics are just above crude and there's little instruction. Maybe with some updates, I don't know. But this is one of those cases where I don't know why you'd bother with this over WHQ.

Pac-Man 256 is brilliant. It is pretty much exactly the Pac-Man game you'd expect the Crossy Road developers to come up with. Should be huge, will probably be huge.

I adore Doctor Who Legacy. It's one of those usually-not-good F2P match threes, but it's respectfully done and PACKED with Doctor Who fun. Every Doctor is in it, all the companions, all the monsters, etc. It's almost a 1:1 clone of Puzzles & Dragons, but I prefer this...it doesn't have all of the breeding, but it also doesn't have timers, multiple currencies and all of that stuff. The paid stuff is almost kind off to the side, tucked away, and the game never really asks you to buy anything. And it's always updated, they just released a new one last week that adds a kid's mode and some other new features.

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