Highly polished (free) turn based strategy game: The Battle for Wesnoth Review

It has been a long time since I have posted anything here.  A problem that I tend to have is that games that I feel very anxious about reviewing, in the fear that I am not doing them proper justice.  Battle for Wesnoth is a game I have been playing on and off for at least four years.  It is an excellent game, and I feel I finally wrote an excellent review of it.  Enjoy:

The Battle for Wesnoth is a free open-source fantasy turn based strategy game. Players take turns recruiting moving, and attacking units on a hexagonal map. The game allows you to play single player or multi-player with up to 9 players in the same game. You are also able to create your own units, maps, and campaigns. Although each unit can have several abilities, traits, defense values, and alignments, the game is still very easy to learn. Beating the harder campaigns will require some practice however.

Note: Click the images to see the enlargements, especially the ones on the left.

Gameplay:
In Battle for Wesnoth you take control of an army and its leader(marked with a gold crown). The leader is usually a better than average unit that you are unable to recruit. The leader is able to build the rest of your army by standing on a keep and recruiting other units. You are able to recruit units until you run out of gold. The picture below shows a leader in his keep, with two flagged villages south of the river, and some unflagged villages north of the river.

Gold management is an important part of the game, especially in the campaigns. Every unit costs you 1 gold per level per turn unless it has the loyal trait. The only normal way to get gold is to move one of your units onto a village. Once you have flagged a village with your color, it will generate money for you each turn, until someone else moves a unit onto the village. While you can ignore gold once you are done recruiting for the level most campaign levels will let you carry over some gold from the previous level. Not having the gold in the next level might prevent you from recalling key troops and cost you the game.

Villages also are able to heal units for up to 8 hit points (or cure poison). This healing takes place at the beginning of a player's turn so if you see a wounded enemy unit move onto a village, try and take it out or it will eventually regenerate to full strength. Village control is very important, especially if you are playing as a faction without healers. The only other way to heal is to have a unit not move or act, and this will only restore 2 hit points.

The general object of the game is to defeat the opponent's leaders, although many of the campaign maps have alternate goals. You lose the game instantly if you lose your leader, or anyone else deemed important (usually marked with a silver crown). Although your instinct might be to keep them away from combat entirely, this will keep them at low levels and make them very vulnerable near the end of the campaign when units are more powerful and deal more damage.

Units:
The Battle for Wesnoth has over 200 different units you can control, split among the six playable factions and non-factioned monsters and critters. Typically you'll only be able to recruit base level units such as the elvish archer or spearman. You will have to level them up to be able to see the high level units.

As the units do battle with eachother, every participating unit will gain one experience per level of their opponent. There is an additional bonus of 8x the opponents' level for the unit that strikes the killing blow. When a unit levels up they are fully healed, and may be able to become a stronger more specialized unit. 

An example of the in-game help.

The elvish archer for example can become an elvish ranger or an elvish marksman. Both have more life and do more damage than an elvish archer, but the marksman has a bonus to hit enemy units, while the ranger is able to become invisible if it is in a forest and no enemy units are next to it. A good mix of units is essential to making a successful force. When you have the option to upgrade, be sure to click the links to the great in-game help so you can see both possible upgrades.

Units usually have an alignment: Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic. Chaotic units fight best at night, Lawful units fight best during the day. Neutral units are unaffected. If you are playing a chaotic army, versus a lawful one, you may want to give ground during the day and reclaim it at night, rather than being exterminated.

To make units a bit more unique, each living unit is assigned up to two traits on creation. Quick is an example trait, it allows the unit one extra move per turn, but reduces maximum hit points by 5%. Undead units usually only get the undead trait, making them immune to poison.

You can rename the units you recruit and as they become more powerful you may become a bit attached to them. Unfortunately, you cannot complete most wars without a few people dying. A good strategy is to always recruit a few base level units on each map. You can use them to screen your elite units so that you lose more base units than elite units.

Combat:

A bowman attacking a thief.

Combat in Wesnoth can be a bit overwhelming, but is pretty simple once you realize a few things. First most units have multiple attacks modes. If you look at the picture to the right, the bowman can select to use his bow or his short sword to attack. Attacking with the short sword will cause the thief to counterattack if he is still alive. Attacking with the bow has the chance to do more damage and will prevent the thief's counterattack since the thief has no ranged weapon. Why wouldn't the bowman always use the bow? Well against a thief it would always do more damage, but you might not want to kill the thief to allow another unit to collect the experience bonus from the killing blow. Also, using a ranged attack against a Grand Mage would be a bad idea, as Grand Mages have very powerful magic attacks at range and weaker melee attacks.

Combat statistics.

In addition to attack modes, units have a defensive value based on the terrain they are in. This is resolved as a chance to be missed. So if you move a bowman into a village that shows 70% over it, that means that enemy units will only be able to hit the bowman 30% of the time. The final factor in combat is resistance, which can increase or decrease the damage a unit takes depending on the attack type. For example, skeletons take less damage from slashing weapons than they do from magic or blunt weapons. Luckily, the game will do the math for you and show you the percentage outcomes of your attacks if you click the Damage Calculations button in the combat screen.

Game Modes:

A list of units available for recall.

Campaign mode is the real draw to the game. They tell epic stories ranging from 3-30+ individual maps with cut-scenes and in map dialogues. It is important to pay attention to the objectives, as not all of them require you to defeat the enemy leaders. Some campaigns will allow you to collect items to further improve whatever unit steps on the item.

Once you are past the first stage of campaign mode, you will have access to the recall command allowing you to bring in any unit you have controlled in any previous stage for 20 gold. These units will keep all of the experience, upgrades, and items they have picked up. This is usually the only way to see the Level 4 and Level 5 units.

Multi-player lets you play with up to 8 other players. You can play on their servers, host your own game, join someone else's game, or play hot-seat on one computer. You can select your faction and leader and other than that it will be a normal game. Has the possibility to be a long game.

Skirmish You can go into multiplayer and play a map against computer players, but with only one map to play through you likely will not be able to advance your units enough to see high levels. Other than being able to choose your faction and leader and to try a new map, there is no reason to play this over the excellent campaigns.

Pros:

An example Cut-scene.

The game comes with an extensive manual, with links between topics reminiscent of wikipedia. All of the information you need is readily available through hyperlinks, with a lot of nice background reading provided if you are interested.

The artwork and music is beautiful and helps build a sense of immersion in the game.

The Artificial Intelligence is very good without cheating. It will prioritize finishing off wounded units, killing your healers, and knocking out units right before you level them up. It is obnoxious, but the challenge makes winning that much better.

Many games advertise themselves as free, but have in game purchases or ads. This game has neither. Everything is actually free, which is very refreshing. (Except for the iphone version, which in fact costs money)

Cons:

Although I love this game and I love being able to play games while I'm not in front of my computer I feel that the iOS version of this game does not work. In some maps you control 30 or more characters, and moving and attacking with them becomes a hassle when you have to tap repeatedly to do it. The tiny view of the large maps becomes an annoyance as well. Although things are likely not as bad on the iPad, I would say avoid purchasing this for iOS. It is much better played on another platform.

May lead to one more turn syndrome.

Although I really love playing the game and would like to make my own campaign, the markup language required to create your own campaigns is overwhelmingly complex to learn.

Final Thoughts:

If you at all interested in turn based strategy games than you should give The Battle of Wesnoth a try. It will not cost you anything (unless you ignore my advice) and you will find epic stories, great music, nice (if dated) graphics, engaging characters, and a ton of replay value. There is a ton of user generated content available for download through the program itself. Extra campaigns, new units, new maps, and a lot more. Again, there is no charge for any of this downloadable content. How many games can say that?

Dungeon Raid

I actually found out about this game over a week ago and I have been attempting to bring this review to you since then, but this game is very addicting!  On to the review.

Dungeon raid is a puzzle RPG for iOS, but I have to stress, it is not like Puzzle Quest.  In a good way.  (I really liked Puzzle Quest, but the computer cheats.  End of sentence.)  Back to Dungeon raid, the basic game is a matching game, match at least three tiles and something happens.  To match you simply draw a line around the tiles.  As you can see above, diagonals are allowed, and you can even cross the line over itself on a diagonal if you need to.  Matching three tiles gives you the benefits of the tiles you clear, but every tile beyond the third one has a chance to give you an extra tile.  You can increase the percentage to 100% by leveling up in the game.

The catch is that after every match you make, any skulls on the screen attack you.  The skull in the screenshot has 3 numbers next to him from top to bottom that that is his attack, defense, and life.  The combined attack of all skulls on the screen minus your armor comes out of your life which is the red pot in the lower right.  

Here are the different types of tiles that you can match:

• Skulls, matching three or more skulls does your base damage to it. (The number below the skull at the bottom of the screen or 4 in the screenshot)  Skulls are only cleared if you do enough damage to bring its life below zero.  When you clear a skull experience is added to the green bar at the bottom of the screen.
• Swords, by themselves do nothing, but when matched with a skull they add the weapon damage to your attack for each sword in the match. (Weapon damage is the number below the sword at the bottom of the screen or 2 in the screenshot above)  So two skulls and two swords would hit both skulls for 8 damage following the numbers from the screenshot.
• Potions, these restore your life when you match them.
• Coins, which fill up the coin box in the lower left.  When the box is filled you can select one new piece of equipment, which will typically upgrade maximum armor, health, or weapon damage.
• Shields, which replenish you armor to make you take less damage from monster attacks.  Any shields that you pick up when your armor is full start to fill up the blue upgrade bar at the bottom of the screen.  Once this is filled you are able to upgrade one piece of your equipment.  There are many different types of upgrades, including the possibility to upgrade any stat, add life stealing to your attacks, counterattacking the monsters, and more.

As you clear skulls and build experience, you'll level up which will let you pick skills to use.  The skills don't cost anything to use, but after they are used you need to wait for them to become ready for use again.  Picking the same skill multiple times during level ups will reduce the cool-down time by one turn.

The stats on the skulls slowly increase as you play so you need to try and get the most out of every turn or you will be overwhelmed.  The bonus tiles you get from the larger matches will add up quickly into more upgrades, levels, and equipment.

To make things interesting, every so often a super skull will appear with special powers.  These powers range from nice things like being worth tons of money but running away after a few turns, to bad things like freezing tiles so they can't be cleared, to really bad things like preventing damage to all other skulls until its dead, or turning one sword into a skull each round.

Killing these boss skulls can drop trophies which will let you unlock new classes and level up classes.  Classes add a lot of replay value to the game.  Each class has a specific perk and flaw that they start with, a special skill that only they can use, and a new race.  Each race has an ability, and a mortal enemy (One of the special skulls that gets additional powers).  As you advance the class's level, you unlock the ability to add in other class' perks, flaws, and skills.  

Skill choice screen.

The class select screen is shown on the left, and the perk select screen is on the right above here.  As you can see the rogue is level one right now, so I don't have the option to customize anything, but he does get +10% bonus gold chance that the default adventurer wouldn't get.  Unfortunately 3% of the shields that appear will be broken and worthless.  The starting race for the rogue class is very good, and you need to level the class to five to unlock the race to be used in a different class.  The last tab is the skill tab.  The skill showing in the tab is the classes' special skill, it will always appear on the first level up, and cannot be replaced with another skill.  You can unlock it for use in other classes by leveling the class to level 10.  You can also customize which skills appear in the game by dragging them up from the lower bar to replace the ones on the grid.  You gain this option every other level up in the class.

The game has four difficulty levels for you to go through as you become more skilled in the game.  It also has a very through tutorial mode right off of the main menu.  With ten classes, perks, and flaws, and a lot of skills, you can really play this game many different ways.  It is easy enough for a non-gamer to pick up and love, but the harder modes will provide a challenge unless you get a strategy down.

My current favorite strategy is to combine collection skills with Treasure Chamber.  Treasure chamber makes it so that any new tile that falls down is a coin until your next move.  Collection skills pick up all of one type of tile giving you credit for the tile and bonuses, but do not count as a move.  This can lead to getting multiple screens worth of all coins, lots of upgrades, and a good chance of surviving that next Assassin skull that drops down.

Those four skills combo very well.

Summary:  This is easily the best game I have played on my iPhone.  If you play games on your iPhone you should try it.  There is a lite version that you can play for free as well as the full version which costs $2.99.  If you get half as much play out of it as I have, it is worth several times the asking price.  Go get this!

Battleheart

There are an amazing amount of iPhone Games, but most don't end up on my phone.  Battleheart is the first new game (or app) to make it onto my phone in several months.  One of my friends recommended it to me, and I have to say, it is the best iPhone Game I've played this year! (so far) (sample size is also 1).  Without further ado:

Battleheart starts with a little intro on how to play and than its off to the first level with a knight and a healer. The game-play is fun and simple; drag a damage dealer to a monster to get them to attack, and drag a healer onto a party member to heal them.  When a melee monster is hit with a melee attack he will change targets to whoever hit him.  You can use this to keep them from killing off your magic users.  Ranged attackers are uncontrollable, so should generally be taken down first.

After the first level you can use the tavern to hire more party members up to a maximum party size of four.  As you go through the map, your characters gain gold and experience.  The art is very nice, with everything including the monsters looking fairly cute.  Each character also starts with a skill that you can activate by clicking on them and tapping the icon in the upper left corner of the screen. 

Every 5 levels you can assign them a new skill at the Academy.  The skill that the character starts with and the skill at level 25 are chosen for you but for every other skill point you can select one of two choices.  Usually, but not always this is a trade off between damage or support.  One of my favorite parts of the game is that once you make a skill choice, you are *NOT* stuck with it, you can change it at any time and without fee at the Academy.  I cannot stress enough what a welcome change of pace this is from Blizzard's draconian skill policies of the past.  (I'm looking at you Diablo II, World of Warcraft and all the imitators of both)  Moving on.

The money you get can be used to hire new characters at the tavern, buy equipment at the merchant, or upgrade equipment at the armory.  The armory is also where you equip your characters.  Each character can equip a weapon, armor and two accessories.  You can upgrade weapons or armor to the next best item of its class, but it is massively more expensive than buying it at the merchant or finding it after a map.  (You always find one item after each map.)  The only thing is the merchant sells a random mix of items that changes after every battle, so upgrades might be your best bet anyways.

The game has over 30 stages, in which monsters attack you in waves.  These are for the most part easy, until you get to the last 8 or so which are a huge step up in difficulty.  There are five boss fights, and these are anything but easy.  First they are immune to any support skills, they have area of effect attacks in addition to a punishing close range attack, and they all repeatedly call regular monsters in to back them up.

There are also arena stages where you can fight to win rare items.  In my experience this is a waste of time.  If you are having trouble beating a stage, replaying a normal stage will get you gold, experience, and an item.  An arena will only get you an item unless you clear it, and lasts much longer than a normal stage.

One thing I didn't like is that the later stages and the boss fights were very hectic.  (The only thing that comes to mind as a comparison was raiding in World of Warcraft, except you are playing all ten characters yourself.)  At times you need to be moving and using skills with all of your characters at the same time.  And while I found that you can use multiple fingers to do this, my hand makes a better door than a window.  I was a little frustrated with losing a stage due to not being able to input commands fast enough.  A Balder's Gate style combat system (real time but with the ability to pause to enter commands) would have been nice.

No achievement system is in the game yet, but real vampire hunters don't do it for the points.

Final Thoughts:

It took me about 12.5 hours to complete the game and almost all of it was enjoyable.  For four out of the five bosses I had to grind some levels in order to beat them.  Still, it is as I mentioned a lot of fun, and the large amount of characters give the game some replay.    It only costs $2.99, but is a good price for the amount of time it entertains.  Most console games are around 20-30 hours for 20 times the price.

Doodle Devil

It was brought to my attention that the creators of the Doodle God game has a new game out for Halloween, Doodle Devil.  According to its advertisement in the store, this game will let you destroy everything you created in the Doodle God game.  Well that sounds like a change of pace from the tough element creation plaguing the end of Doodle God.  Let's check it out.  It should be noted that this costs the same amount as Doodle God, $0.99.

Spooky

Does the promise of a new type of game play interest you?  Well don't get your hopes up, because by destroying the world what they actually mean is creating a bunch of new elements.  These elements you are a assured will destroy the world for you.  Gotta watch out for nasty things like Friendship and religion, they will apparently destroy the world.  The point is, if you enjoyed playing the original game, you'll likely enjoy this.

The game play is clicking two elements to create new ones.  Some are logical, such as computer and computer creates internet.  Some are attempted social commentary such as television and human creates zombies.  It does prove that you are better off using the internet than watching television though, you still become a zombie, but you get friendship too!  Some combinations only make sense in hindsight such as human and copyright gives you lawyer.  Some don't make any sense to me whatsoever.  Rat and air creates dove.  I've heard pigeons are the rats of the sky, but I never heard doves lumped into that category.  Hints are obviously really useful in this game as a lot of the combinations did not seem logical to me at all.

Additionally, there is currently as of 11/8/2010 a bug with the hint system.  When I only had two elements left, the hint that shows you some of these elements may combine brought me to two categories full of elements, none of which reacted to form new elements.  I dutifully kept at it, eventually testing them all.  It put me to brute forcing the last combinations though, which isn't a ton of fun.

This game is not connected with an achievement network yet, so there is no way to show off your progress.  You can, however, spam your element creations on Facebook, if your are seeking a way to get your friends to hide your status updates. Clicking extras will let you download two images to your phone.  Under credits you can donate an additional 0.99$ whenever you feel like it.

Final Thoughts:
If you love Doodle God, and want to play what amounts to one chapter of the same game for the price of four with no mini-games or achievements, then this is for you.  In their defense they have promised to update both games, but as of right now, I say just stick with Doodle God.  The mini-games and quests are needed to avoid boredom from setting in.

Doodle God

Some Early Combinations

Today we'll look at another of the most popular downloaded paid apps, Doodle God.  Doodle God is a puzzle game in which you combine simple elements to make more complex ones.  You begin with the four traditonal elements: Fire, Water, Earth, and Air.  Simply tap or click the elements to combine them.  At the beginning, there are many physical combinations which are pretty easily conceptualized, such as Earth plus Fire gives Lava or Lava plus Water gives Stone and Steam as shown in the picture to the right.  I hadn't played anything like it before and it is entertaining trying to make new things.  Some of the matches are non-physical like Fire and Water gives Alcohol (Firewater).  These are harder to find, but the system does allow you one hint every few minutes.  (On the mobile version you can get a hint every time you enter the app, so you can kind of cheat the timer that way.)

Doodle God costs $0.99 on the iPhone and iPad, but is free to play online. (The game isn't on Android, but there is a game on android called Alchemy which is almost exactly the same.)  You can play it on their site or on Kongregate to get two badges.  To complicate the issue, however, the developer publishes updates to the mobile versions, but so far does not update the web version.  The updates cover three chapters and take the total amount of elements up from 115 in 14 categories to 248 in 26 categories.  This greatly extends the life of the game as the early elements are much easier to find anyways.

With Chapter 3, you can create games in order to unlock a matching mini game called MatchTrix.  This was a very good idea, as by the time I got to this point, I was quite a bit frustrated with the main game.  Elements slowly fall from the top of the screen, and by matching elements that create new elements they disappear, but now the newly invented element will also fall.  You can setup chains of combining products for more points.  Also by tapping the falling element you can switch it for whatever element is in the box at the upper left.  Its similar but different from Tetris.

Chapter 4 gives you Bejoined, a Bejewled style game.  It unfortunately becomes near impossible to make any matches that progress the game once you get above 60-80 elements.

The music that comes with the game is good, but there are voices that comment on your progress.  They are so annoying that you may want to smash something after listening to them for long enough, especially if you are having trouble matching.  Thankfully, the developer allows you to enable or disable music, voices, and sound independently.  The artwork on the little icons is decent as well.  Each discovery gives you a fanfare and a little quote, some of which are also entertaining.

Pros:

• Free or cheap.
• Simple but addictive game-play.
• The mini-game MatchTrix is change of pace and a lot of fun.
• Open feint support!

Cons:

• Later matches can be more trail and error than anything else.
• Voices are very annoying, especially if you not able to make a match for awhile.
• Disparity in the different versions can be very annoying.
• You can create Quick-Silver and Cyborgs, but no evil T-1000s.

Final Thoughts:
Doodle God is a fun game to play, despite some of the matches being insane.  (Nuclear Bomb + Demi-God gives you Flowers?!  How are you supposed to think of that?)  The mini game that pops up once you invent games is a very welcome change of pace after getting the last few matches.  There is no lite version, so if you are interested in playing it but uncertain about plunking down the dollar, check it out online first.  Worth looking at

Urban Rivals: Levels 1-15 and making clintz

Since I've seen a few of my readers on Urban Rivals, I thought I'd post up a few tips and ways to make money.  If you haven't heard of it, click here to read my initial review or just scan the article for typos.  The first few levels go very quickly, and the first goal is to get to level 7.  Once you are there you can make clintz a lot faster.  As you work your way to level 7 keep these things in mind:

General Tips

• As soon as possible, try to narrow your deck down to one or two clans.  This will allow you to have active clan bonuses every game, which can greatly help your chance of winning.
• If you are playing on the website, you should see two modes available, non-random and normal.  I suggest switching your game to non-random as soon as possible.  This will make it so that whoever has the highest attack always wins.  I can't really write a strategy guide for random mode other than kiss the blarney stone, keep a fish scale in your pocket, or whatever you kids do these days.
• As you level up more game modes open up to you, and more ways to make clintz to buy better cards.
• Make sure you check out any new cards your opponent has.  There are a few cards that can do 12 damage in one shot, so don't be taken unaware.
• If you are playing in non random, and the two cards end up with the same attack, the one with less stars wins.  If the stars are equal, whoever played first wins.
• The player with the most stars out plays first.
• Completing missions is a good way to get going.  Missions can give up to 2k clintz, 15 credits, or rare cards!  Check out mission details on this wiki.
• Remember to use you bonus XP frequently, as it refills fully when you level up.
• There are some useful posts on the general help message board as well.

Level 7-Daily Tournaments
Every other hour there is a tournament that lasts for one hour.  If there isn't one currently going on, that means the next one starts at the top of the next hour.  Joining a tournament is simple, simply join the Fights Type 1 or Fights Type 2 rooms and do a quick challenge.

As a beginner, you are unlikely to win the Tournament, but there is a 50 clintz prize for participating.  The tournament is based on how many points you score in a game.  A loss is worth a base of 3 points and a draw is worth a base of 4 points.  A win is worth a base of 8 points.  You get extra points for defeating a higher star card with a lower star card, for winning by KO with pillz left over, and for winning with more than 12 life.  (Tests have shown that gains from having extra pillz or life may be limited to 2 extra points per battle).  Most of the points come from beating high star cards with low star cards.  A 16 star deck will rack up a lot of points for every win.
If you withdraw or get timed out, you will be hit for a -20 point penalty and if you finish with a negative Tournament score, you get no clintz!



If you can finish in the top 1/3rd of a Tournament, you get an automatic credit added onto your account.  Additional winnings go out to the top 150 places in the tournament as follows:


Clintz jackpot:
Starts at 10000 Clintz and increases after each battle by adding the double of the Clintz won in the battle.
1st - 5th: 2% each (example for a 350 000 Jackpot: 7 000 Clintz)
6th - 10th: 1% each (example for a 350 000 Jackpot: 3 500 Clintz)
11th - 25th: 0.4% each (example for a 350 000 Jackpot: 1 400 Clintz)
26th - 50th: 0.3% each (example for a 350 000 Jackpot: 1 050 Clintz)
51st - 100th: 0.2% each (example for a 350 000 Jackpot: 700 Clintz)
101st - 150th: 0.1% each (example for a 350 000 Jackpot: 350 Clintz)
Higher than 151st: 50 Clintz each
The 1st player will also receive a bonus of 1 000 Clintz

Certain times of day are more active than others, this means a higher jackpot, but harder to place.  A few are really easy to place in, during late night/early morning for Europe and America.  You can see all this information by clicking the game tab, Game modes, Tourney, History.

Level 15-ELO Tournament
ELO is a week long tournament, with the highest winnings in the game.  Its a point system that resets every Monday.  You start on Monday with 1k points, and that increases or decreases based on how you win or loose fights in the ELO room.  ELO uses the same basic deck as Type 1, with certain overpowered cards being banned.  In order to take home any winnings, you must play at least 5 games and finish over 1k points.  That will net you 2 credits and 150 clintz.  The rewards get good quickly though, for finishing with 1200 exactly I won 707clintz and 5 credtis.  The rare cards that are given out are usually worth at least 1k clintz, and the collectors are worth 10-1000 times as much!  The competition can be rough, but as I said, a lot of the overpowered cards are banned from this mode, so it is much safer than Type 1 and 2.


ELO Tournament prizes:
* [Cards] 1 Collector card(s) for 12 random players from the ELO Tournament Top 100
* [Cards] 1 Rare card(s) for 50 random players with more than 1200 ELO points
* [Credits] the 1st wins 50 Credits.
* [Credits] the 2nd to 25th win 20 Credits.
* [Credits] Players beyond 25th, over or equal to 1300 ELO, win 10 Credits.
* [Credits] Players beyond 25th, over or equal to 1200 ELO and below 1300 ELO, win 5 Credits.
* [Credits] Players beyond 25th, over 1000 ELO and below 1200 ELO, win 2 Credits.
* [Clintz] 1st wins 4% of the Clintz Jackpot.
* [Clintz] 2nd wins 2% of the Clintz Jackpot.
* [Clintz] 3rd wins 1% of the Clintz Jackpot.
* [Clintz] 4th to in 0.5% of the Clintz Jackpot.
* [Clintz] 11th to in 0.25% of the Clintz Jackpot.
* [Clintz] Players beyond 25th and over 1200 ELO split the remaining 86.25% of the Clintz Jackpot according to their ELO scores.
* [Clintz] Players beyond 25th and over 1000 ELO with at least 5 games played receive 150 Clintz (not taken from the Clintz Jackpot).

Angry Birds

Do you like swiping your finger across your iPhone, Palm, Android or Nokia smartphone but lack a compelling reason to do so?  Well then I might have the game for you.  Angry Birds is a very addictive puzzle game that has you swiping your finger to slingshot birds at the pigs that stole their eggs.  Along the way you'll most likely have to destroy various structures built of wood, glass, and stone.

The story plays out through cut scenes after certain levels.  The gist of it is an epic adventure of a group of limbless birds who have somehow managed to produce eggs.  Naturally, the are upset (angry) when some (equally limbless) pigs steal their children.  The main goal is to pull your finger back and release to send the birds flying towards the pigs.  Although you start out with the plain red bird, you eventually get birds that split into three, explode, boomerang and have other skills.  Also the puzzles get more and more complicated as you progress.  In the screenshot you can see me whiffing on my first shot.  The bird in flight was launched from the slingshot at the left, and the two red birds on the bottom are my last two shots.  The game starts off just that simple.  Hopefully you can aim better than I can when trying to screenshot something.

The game costs $2.99 on the iPhone, although there is a lite version to test it out.  The beta version is free for the android and has more levels than the lite version.  That's not fair!  Try it out for yourself, but it is probably worth the price for the amount of game-play you get. This game seems to have the Tetris effect; many people who rarely play games will happily play this for hours.

If you want a walk-through for each level and the locations of the hidden golden eggs click here, don't buy one of the several pages of apps that offer the same thing.

Pros:

• The game has been updated several times at no cost, providing more birds, and more levels.
• You can play a round in less than a minute, making it ideal for a mobile game.
• There is an achievement system that lets you share your level of obsessiveness with your friends.

Cons:

• Can kidnap you or a loved one for months.  Its that addictive.
• Not a lot of variety in game play.

Final Thoughts:
Angry Birds is well worth the price.  It is fun to play, and that's not just my opinion.  Angry Birds is the #1 paid app in just about every country that has the concept of money (and some that don't).  This game is a lot of fun and if you are a perfectionist, will keep you busy for months.(Seriously)  If you don't have a smartphone and want to try the game, Rovio plans to port this game to the Computer, Playstation Portable, Playstation 3, possibly the Nintendo Wii, and DS, and perhaps certain deli-meats.

Urban-Rivals

With a long weekend here, I feel like I should review a game so you all can have something to do if there is  rain.  Clearly your choices are do something outside or be locked in a room with only a computer to entertain you.  Also you have no ability to use search engines and no games on the computer.  Also you like whatever I like.  Also you read my blog.  Well that narrowed things down a bit.  Moving on...

Urban-Rivals is another online trading card game although it is nothing like Elements.  You get a deck with at least 8 cards, and in every game you draw 4 at random.  These 4 cards go up against your opponent's 4 cards.  Each card represents one of the 600+ characters in the game, divided into 21 clans.  All matches are against other people, so some of the matches get quite intense.  As you play the cards gain experience, and level up, somewhat similar to that popular Nintendo series... (Warning, the linked song may become lodged in your head.  I'm sorry.)

Each card has a power(the blue number) and a damage(the red number).  You and your opponent take turns playing cards, and which ever card has the higher power wins and does its damage to the other player.  The catch is that every battle both players get 12 pills that they can use whenever they want.  Each pill multiplies the characters power.  Playing one pill would make this guy have a power of 12, 9 would give him a power of 60.  This means that you can really win against anyone, not matter what kind of cards they have if you can out-bluff them.  It really is a lot of fun.

Roger and you!

The cards also level up as I mentioned before, although each card has a maximum level.  Cards usually unlock their ability when try reach maximum level, indicated by all of their stars being filled in and the experience bar turning purple.  In the case of the card above, he gets an extra 8 attack added after the pill multiplication phase.  Finally he has a clan bonus on the bottom, this only activates if you have at least two characters of the same clan in your hand at the same time.

Urban-Rivals has a variety of different modes you can play in, twelve system run tournaments every day, a daily lotto, and a week long tournament are all free to enter.  Players are free to create their own events at any time with any rules they want.  Another nice thing is that in the week long tournament, players get to vote on which cards should be banned for each week.  So if you feel a card is overpowered, strike it down!

As you play you earn clintz, which can be used to buy currency on the player market, credits which are used to buy new characters or clintz, and experience which allows you to play in new game modes.  The game has a large achievement system, with each achievement unlocking new cards, credits, or clintz.

Pros:

• Its Free!  It has an iPhone App, which is also free.
• There is a ton of things going on in the game, and as you level up by playing, you gain access to a large amount of new game modes.
• There are millions of players around the world.  There are usually 5-10 thousand games going on at any  given time, so its not hard to find someone to play with no matter what game type you are interested in playing.
• There are frequent updates.  In the month I have played this game, they have introduced 4 new cards, and retired 2 to collector status.
• It gives you practice with those multiplication tables.  If you need that sort of thing.

Cons:

• The beginner instructions leave a bit to be desired, especially in the browser version.
• There is no starting player guide.
• Math could be useful here.  Some people don't like that.

Final Thoughts:
This is probably my favorite game right now.  I found it a month ago through a banner ad, and it is very entertaining.  It also costs you nothing to try it.  The massive amount of game modes, characters, and other players make it always interesting to play.  A lot of the cards are pop culture references and are fairly funny if you get them.  Oh if you do decide to play, send me a friend request or list me as your sponsor, I'm playing as 38thdoe there too.

Plants vs. Zombies

You may have heard of Plants vs. Zombies, it is a tower defense style game where you defend your yard from the undead using different types of plants and fungi.  This game has been ported to just about every system except for the Android phones.  No idea why they seem to miss out on all the games.  You can find Plants versus Zombies for Windows, Mac OSX, iPhone, and next year to the Nintendo DS as well.  The price ranges from 2.99 for the iPhone app to around 19.99 for the Windows version.  Pro-tip: The iPhone app is cheaper.  The other versions have additional features to make up for the price discrepancy.

The game itself is pretty simple, you plant sunflowers to generate sunlight, which you use to purchase offensive and defensive plants.  Zombies enter from the right side of the screen and attempt to get to your house on the left.  When the game starts off, you have weak zombies, one plant type, and only one lane to defend.

Look a "screenshot"  How advanced.

You earn a new seed packet at the end of almost every level, and the game ramps up to five lanes to defend.  The zombies start wearing armor and using interesting tactics.  The battle does not stay on the lawn, but progresses to the pool and the roof as well.  The difficulty builds at just the right speed, making this is a very enjoyable game.

A later level.

There is a lot of humor packed in the game as well.  All of the plant and zombie descriptions are worth reading for this reason.  The designer of this game also made Insane Aquarium, which was a fun flash game from a long time ago.
There are a few achievements to get, a lot of them are quite difficult to get before you complete the game the first time, so there is a lot to come back for.

Pros:

• A very simple to understand game, but the slowly building complexity keeps it interesting.
• The game has good music and effects.  Also they make a good music video.
• Once you beat the game the first time, a lot of extras open up, so there is good replay value.
• There are 49 types of Plants, and 26 types of Zombies, so there is a lot of variety.
• The game has quite a few references, and the developers have a good sense of humor.

Cons:

• Playing this game could lead to a reliance on plants in a real world zombie attack.  Early studies have shown most plants to have neither the inclination to defend their owner nor the singing voice of the plants in the game.

Final Thoughts:

Even though it costs $2.99 on iPhone, the amount of play time the game has makes it worth the price.  I easily spent 100x the amount of time playing this as I spent using Epicwin.  It might not seem fair to compare a productivity app with a game, but since there are more efficient cheaper or free alternatives for productivity, it seems okay to spend the same money on a game.

We all know that I have pretty high standards.  This means that if I actually go on the record as liking something, it is either really good, or the developer's taken my family hostage and are forcing me to write a good review in exchange for their release.  Worth looking into in either case.

Even rarer that my approval however, is the approval of my wife, who is not a gamer.  If you see this seal, you know this game might even be liked by your non game playing friends.

Pretty Snazzy, huh?

Don't ask how long I spent making that... I'm not proud.  Well, maybe just a little proud.

Iphone Games: Civilization Revolution

There is a ton of applications for the iPhone, even if sometimes it is hard to find what you are looking for in the wealth of fart-based-applications (currently over 120 when I gave up counting).

I was going to review two games today, but I had way too much to say about Civilization.

Civilization Revolution

Most people who have played computer games have either played or are familiar with the Civilization series.  Starting with Civilization launched in 1991, and extending to Civilization V (which is currently in production), Civilization is a fairly epic series consisting of ten games (counting Alpha Centauri) with more than five expansions.  If you haven't played the series, the games are turn based strategy, and start you off with the first settlers of a civilization.  You are charged to found a town, research technology, expand your empire through conquest or settlement, and not run afoul of the 4-6 computer players trying to do the same thing.  They are all really fun games, but as you progress each turn gets longer and longer as you manage your growing amount of cities and units.  It is typical to keep saying "one more turn" until you've played far longer than you planned.  On to specifics:

Civilization Revolution costs $0.99 which is pretty cheap for Civilization on your phone.  A lite version is available for free, but limits you to 3/16 rulers, 2/5 difficulties more importantly stops your game before you enter the modern age, which comes pretty quickly.  You also are unable to save your game.

Pros:  

• The graphics and sound are good, and the interface works quite well with the touch screen. 
• Most importantly though, Its Civilization... on your phone.  This is a very good thing.

Cons:  

• You have no control over map generation, and every map is fairly small.  Its not uncommon to have all your opponents on the same landmass.  
• There are quite a few naval units, but no compelling reason to build any of them, due to the lack of oceans.  Maybe this was a needed concession to get the game on the phone, but I really enjoy playing on sprawling maps.
• There is no way to turn off battle animations, which get old pretty quickly.

Final Thoughts:  The game seems to go pretty quick and easy on King and below, but Deity is very challenging.  Something that you only find out if you read the on screen instructions to the very last page is that you can combine three of the same units into an army which is much more powerful.  This is fairly important to do.  Units gain experience and odd abilities such as additional move or damage.  Every so often you still see odd things such as archers taking out a tank.  

If you have ever played Civilization before and liked it, I would recommend downloading the full version for a dollar.  If you haven't played it before, it is certainly worth your time to download the lite version.