Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty

If you haven’t heard of StarCraft… well… what are you doing here? o.O Anyway, recently, as you probably know, Blizzard released StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty. My roommate and I were both betting on it being the best game of… well, basically ever thus far. It seems to be well on its way of doing just that. From the article (Found here):

“We’re pleased to announce that within one day of being on sale, StarCraft® II sold more than 1 million copies worldwide, making it the bestselling PC game of 2010 in under 24 hours of availability. By the end of the 2nd day, it had sold a total of 1.5 million copies worldwide, setting the record for fastest-selling strategy game of all time. We want to thank everyone who turned out for the midnight launch events around the world, and everyone else who has already picked up or downloaded a copy of the game, for making StarCraft II the biggest PC game launch of the year.”

Robokill – A Smash TV-like Flash Game

I was looking around the internet for some fun flash games to play the other day and I came across a game call Robokill. After playing only a small portion of this game, I immediately thought of the Super Nintendo game called Smash TV. In Robokill, you run around a series of rooms and defeat all of the enemies in your path to complete an objective for each mission. The game has a few fun customization options (Different weapons / utility items), random items that drop, and is actually quite challenging. The items that drop can have random effects on them (Such as freeze or pierce), which adds some more randomness to the game. The first few missions can be played for free here. However, if you want to play the rest of the game, you do have to pay for it 😦

Level Up! – A Game and a Book!

I originally read about the book “Level Up!” by Scott Rogers from his Blog, Mr Boss’ Design Lair. While the book is not out yet, and thus I cannot speak about how good it actually is or not, I must say I am quite excited about this book (Which is surprising, because I cannot remember a time in all my life that I have been excited for ANY book to be coming out!). In short, the book is about how to be a game designer, and how to design games to make them enjoyable to the user. Sounds good, right? The link to preorder it can be found here. Preorder it if you are as excited for it as I am!

At any rate, while googling for this book, I found a flash game called Level Up! (It can be found here. Go play it, before I accidentally spoil something :-D) In this game, your abilities level up as you use them. I had been thinking about making a game similar to this for quite some time, though I was planning on doing it to a space shooter game, where the weapons you use would level up as you use them, as would your ship’s agility, defense, etc.

I thought this leveling up mechanic was cool, and very much enjoyed the start of the game. However, (Spoilers coming…), at the end of a day in the game (About 5-10 minutes of playing), all of the levels for your abilities reset to level 1 if you lose to a boss creature, who is near impossible to beat without abilities that can be purchased throughout the game with crystals (Collectibles). That being said, any abilities that you purchase throughout the game stay with you, as well as remaining crystals at the end of the day. Also, if you lose this fight, all of the crystals reappear throughout the level, allowing you to collect them many times.

All in all I would say this is a pretty fun game, however, my roommate had a very different experience while playing through the game, and had a different view on the game.

I’m Back! – Free MMORPGs: Flyff, Rappelz, Runes of Magic

Sheldor back online!

Sorry for such a long AFK time. I finished school, went on vacation, and got a second job as a video game tester at Foundation 9 Entertainment / Griptonite Games (Now I’m working 7 days a week).

Anyway, my friend, my roommate, and I have been looking for games that all three of us can play. We’re all really into RPGs, so while we wait for Diablo III to come out (Which, unfortunately, will not be anytime soon), we decided to check out some free MMORPGs. Here’s what we found, in order from worst to best:

Game name: Flyff
Publisher: Gala-Net/gPotato.com
Developer: Aeonsoft
Platform: PC

Flyff is a good MMORPG for people that don’t play video games much, at least from what I could tell in the short time (Level 10ish) that I could tell. The monsters drop candy, the graphics are fluffy, and the gameplay seemed to be quite easy, although tedious. I only got 2 skills, and one of them actually did less damage, because it takes a long time to wind up, so auto attacking would do more damage. There’s no pathfinding when you click to move, and if you get caught on a small object, it’s annoying to get unstuck. All in all, I wouldn’t suggest playing Flyff, as it seemed like it would just be a ton of grinding.

Game name: Rappelz
Publisher: gPotato.com
Developer: nFlavor
Platform: PC

My friends and I played Rappelz for a lot longer than Flyff, though we didn’t get to end game or anything like that. Rappelz seemed to be a lot more hardcore than Flyff, aimed at your average gamer. From what we looked up, they have end game content, as well as decent PVP (There are three different factions). The skill system seemed to work well, and there is a cool combat pet system in which every class gets a pet. One problem that we saw with Rappelz is that there was one area (A ghost ship) that was ridiculously hard, even though there were three of us and it was a low level area. Also, as far as we can tell, only one class gets the ability to heal their pet, and when your pet dies, it doesn’t come back with full health. This would require the other classes to either wait for their pet to heal, or just not use their pet. Once again, we didn’t play this one all too much, but that’s what we could figure out.

Game name: Runes of Magic
Publisher: Frogster Interactive, Frogster America
Developer: Runewaker Entertainment
Platform: PC

Runes of Magic is the game we are currently playing, and will probably be playing until Diablo III comes out. RoM is basically WoW, but a little bit less polished. The skill system is a little bit different, and there are no talent points (So as far as I can tell most characters will be the same come end game). Also, there’s a dual class system which seems a little funny at first, but you get used to it. There are a few things that I think RoM actually does better than WoW. For example, a lot of quest items / enemies are highlighted on your mini map, you can put markers on your map for quests by right clicking tags in the quest log, and you can run toward certain quest tags by right clicking on them in your quest log as well. Other than that, the game is pretty much the exact same as WoW – quests, kill enemies, get professions, go through zones, etc. I haven’t found out how PVP works in RoM yet, but I think it’s just kill whoever you want starting at a certain level, which wouldn’t be that great in my opinion. I HIGHLY suggest playing RoM, especially if you want to play WoW, but you don’t want to / can’t pay for WoW.

Diablo II Game Update

Ever since I applied for a game designer / programmer summer internship at Blizzard Entertainment in January I have been replaying my favorite game of all time, Diablo II. After playing on ladder for some time, I came to find out that the ladder was resetting soon due to an update. At the time, there were some rumors about Blizzard adding a respecialization system to Diablo II, a 10+ year old game! I figured that these rumors were just that, rumors, but it turns out they were true! Blizzard has added a respecialization system to Diablo II after 10+ years! I think it’s just incredible that they’re still adding functionality after 10 years! I mean, everyone that I knew felt that it needed some way to change skills later on in the game, instead of being stuck with the ones that you chose, and now they have finally added a way to do just that! I think that’s just incredible. Thanks Blizzard!