Pew pew!

If you grew up playing Apogee's raptor, like all the cool kids did, then you will love Not Your War. Well, I dont know if you'll love it because it is not viewed through the eyes of nostalgia and most of the mechanics, graphics, sound and "backstory" are completely different.
But the concept is the same: you play as some kind of plane-thingy, the camera moves up, enemies move down, your bullets move into them, everbody's happy. Except the enemie's mommys.

What sets this game ahead of Raptor though is the great music, the griddy and awesome graphics and the fact that it has some sort of backstory, told in stills with text.
Im sold on it. The only thing I still find kind of weird is the upgrade system. You just get to choose upgrades at arbitrary moments in the game. Don't know why or how.
Anyways, check it out, if you want to kill about an hour.

Guess what? A zombie game!

 This game had been suggested to me by someone in a comment and I would like to thank whoever did suggest it for that. Because Infectionator is simply awesome. You play as some kind of mad scientist who has the ability to spread a zombie-virus in some town and watch it and all the people become tasty treats to your new zombie army.
Dying people drop money (wut.) which you can pick up (how?) and buy upgrades for (from whom??) your virus with.
The game itself does not require great graphics or sounds, the retro look fits it well and the "bloop bleep" 16-bit-music creates a great retro-feeling about it.

 There are only minor issues I would like to adress though. First of all: there is a lot of less than subtle racism. You start in Africa in some tribe's village where people say token-sentences. You then spread to bigger African cities where all black people are apparently rastafaries and everyone in a suit is white. I have also not seen a single black woman in this game. All soldiers and police officers are white...

But I didnt mind that much. Becaus I thought it funny. Its so blatand that you cant take it seriously, really. Another part that was kind of annoying was the tutorial, that I mostly skipped, because itexplained the most self-explanatory parts while leaving out the ones that weren't (at least to me: it took me quite a while to figure out the update screen).
But despite these things, infectionator is really recommendable and quite a bit of fun if you want to procrastinate studying like me.

You guys

I am awfully sorry. I know, I am more than a week behind on my entry, but I got my finals coming up and I am in the middle of a theatre-season.
I hope you can wait another week. I think I will be able to put an entry up on monday, because I wont have any classes anymore after tomorrow.
We will see. Stick with me.
You are a great readership ;)

This probably does not fit into my category

But I will review it anyways. Because fuck you.
Today I am taking a closer look Age Of Chivalry, a source mod, available for free on steam (as long as you have any game from steam that uses the engine.)
It is designed by Torn Banner Studios, formerly known as Team Chivalry and thus they sort of do fit into this blog.
Anyhow, the game itself is a first person... well its not directly a shooter, though you do shoot sometimes so... uh... yeah. Let me say it this way: you control one out of nine classes of warriors with different weapons and armory, with each weapon providing you with at least three ways to damage your opponents and you hack and slay your way through different maps with different objectives. You could say that the game is sorta multiplayer-based, because there is no single-player campaign. Given the absurd stupidity of the bots the game provides it is no wonder however. Minecraft has better AI. Whatever, real men don't use bots. Real men go to the internet and do battle there.
And boy, did I do that the past week.
Now let me start with the downsides of this game, so I can then drown it in praise, because I believe this is a great project that could really go somewhere.
The biggest negative point is that this game does require a good internet-connection. And by good I mean it is unplayable with a ping over 60. Seriously, it isnt. I guess you can sort of understand that if you think that you have to parry melee attacks and react to your opponent in real-time, which gets pretty hard if you are 1/10th of a second behind. It happened to me quite often that I simply died without understanding why the fuck I was dead.Yeah, I got mad, but I got over it. Another minus is the level-design. Most levels are so fucking dark that it is impossible to tell who is friend or foe unless you can smell their breath and tell that they didnt eat the same thing you did because they have eaten at a different encampment. This goes along with the fact that some maps are unplayable with 32 players (which is the player-limit for most servers tho), because there is just a shit-load of people trying to get through a narrow pass. You then just need a single dude (me) with a big weapon swinging away and 10 of his comrades loose their head. Not cool, especially if you have voice chat on. Boy, I did learn some new swear-words. In so many languages.
Which brings me to the next point: the community. It is an unfortunate fact that many indie-games have a lot of stupid kids playing it. Especially this one lures them in with its over-the top violence and body parts sputtering around.
But that is it with the negative points. Really, there is nothing more I can hate about this game. And I am sure all of these aspects will be taken out with updates gradually (right? rrrriiiiiight?).
Now, why did I play this game so excessively over the past week? Simply because it is very intuitive. Well, it did take some time getting used to the delay of your attacks, but after you get that down you can start slaying. The taunts and voice outputs of the characters, the blunt noises of steel hammers crashing skulls and the agonizing cries of dying warriors create a dense and violent war-atmosphere. You experience hell on the battleground. Which is probably why the levels have to be so dark. Who knows.
Anyhow, I will just go and play another round or six until I finally stop procrastinating and start writing that novel. Hope you are not too sad, office drones. Next week I will review infectionator.

Just... why.

Hey there. Good sunday morning, isnt it?
You may or may not have noticed a poll on the right there (over followers and under the ads). I feel that I am giving out too many recommendations instead of actual reviews... but then again, this blog is for all of you office drones who just need to pass time between two assignments (or procrastinate like mad cunts). So yeah, if you feel I should do more reviews of games in general and warn you of bad ones, click the corresponding reply button.
Thank you.
Now to the review. Strap in, because this is not one of the games I like.
There are some game concept you can combine. Like, say, real-time strategy and role playing. (Well done in WarCraft III (to a limit), the Dawn of War series, etc.).
However there is about no concept that mixes well with these gem-games where you are supposed to match three of a kind. Especially not one that is in any way strategic, like a hero-line-defense game. (Especially since hero line defeneses make no fucking sense whatsoever since no general would send their troops down narrow paths.)
Well the game King's Guard tried to do just that. Surprisingly it fails at it utterly.

This already screems "I REALLY COULD NOT GIVE LESS OF A FUCK"

But let me start from the top. The game is about three heroes (a mage, a dude on a horse and a meleefighter), who... I dont know. The story was so poorly written I really gave no fuck about it.
Anyhow, for some reason these three dudes (and one dudette) chill out at some straight paths where enemies conveniently run right into the sharp ends of their weapons (or spells). In the "heroes" backs (I refuse to call anyone a hero without knowing their name or at least a good pseudonym. "Knight" is not a good pseudonym. Seriously, the heroes didnt even have names.) are the cities they are supposed to defend (or something. Again, I really didnt give a shit about the story). These are made up from colourful houses which can be re-arrenged for some reason. If three houses of the same colour are in line they disappear (which would probably enrage the inhabitants) and heal the heroes/provide money/provide troops for support. This must be the most complicated and least effective kind of magic I have ever seen.

Oh god the colours.

If four or more same-coloured houses are in line they spawn special tiles with special abilities and stuff like that. Yada yada yada, nothing that hasnt been done before. The problem? The special abilities spawned by aligning four tiles need to be timed well to be of any effectivity. Thus your eyes switch back and forth from the one-dimensional fields of slaughter and the color-clusterfuck on the right and you are left dizzy and confused. At some point I was just randomly clicking around for minutes until I realized I lost quite a while ago.
From time to time you get some equipment and put it to good use for your heroes, which is the only thing that gives the game any kind of tactical aspect, because different equipment unlocks different abilities and gives the heroes some kind of bonuses, which are in the end useless because the only thing your three faggy-coloured retards are good at is dying. Seriously, all of them (except for the sorceress) die like flies. And there isnt shit you can do about it. I am not trying to say that I have a problem with this games difficulty. I like difficult games and I really enjoy a challenge. But this game is difficult for the wrong reason. Because there is nothing you can do, except randomly shuffle tiles around in hope to find a combination that will give your dying dude some health points back. Making a four-tile combo is in the most cases simply impossible because of the big variety of tiles.
So the controls are utter horse-piss and everything else is too. Well the graphics are KINDA nice, but I could not even really watch them because I was to busy getting a seizure from tile-shuffling under pressure.

From time to time the game wants to help you, which felt more like an insult for me. It then points at a tile which you should move in order to get a new combo down. Sometimes however this is not that easily possible, so it just tells you to use your special abilities, which could be better used at another time.
So the only tactical element the game had in it's game-phase is completely useless.

I made it to level 15 I think, but only because of Operational Conditioning. Not something to be proud of, funflow!

Prepare to see that screen. A LOT.

Another thing that got me mad was the constant reminder that I should check out another game. I forgot it's name but I will make sure to ignore it if it is any way as bad as King's Guards.

What is it with me and zombies?

The graphics are not perfect. But it does shine in other areas.

I really have no clue. But the game I found is simply AWEMAZENDARY! Seriously, I can not stretch this enough. It goes by the pretty bland title "Rebuild" and is set some time after a zombie-apocalypse. Thanks to Sarah Northway (wait, a girl making a zombie game?) for letting me live through about an hour of turn-based strategy joy.

You play as the leader of a fortified area within a town with the wish to rebuild (hence the title). You do so by killing zombies in nearby areas, building fences around them, raiding the vicinity for food, farming, rescuing survivors and so on and so forth.
The gameplay is both simple and compley, allowing for quite a bit of strategy but still remaining easy to control. A randomly generated map makes it replayable (even if the quite low amount of variety in the areas does make it boring after two or so plays.)

 All the while you sit under quite a bit of pressure (depending on the difficulty), because you have to balance your survivors and your areas in order to have enough space for all of the people living in your fort, enough defenses and enough food at all time while still expanding your territory (because if you don't, you are going to fail utterly.)
This is spiced up with little notifications whenever you defend yourself against the hordes at night or when a team managed to succeed (or fail) at a mission. Together with individual names for each character, you get really close to the action, even though it is still turn-based. It feels as if you actually live in this fortress. I have never felt such good atmosphere in a Minigame.

Defending your fort is not as exciting as it could be.

I didn't even turn the music off (which I usually do because I love to listen to my own music while playing), because it fit the ambience so well.
All in all a great experience, even though it does not have any shiny graphics or actual action.

Oh no, not Anderson!

I dont think this is how this works.

Warning: This game is addictive! I have spent way too many hours playing it instead of doing important stuff!

That being said, let us start with the review.
Today I would like to talk about Digital Upgrade. I am told that this game is like "Doctor Mario", which I never played but I am just going to go with that comparison, since I can not argue against it. Digital Upgrade was created by Illuvas, Argentin & Redmoon Deejay and published by MaxGames. In it you have to build a computer virus by combining certain elements that drop from above to ones of a higher power.

All in order. Note the bar on the left side, it shows the order in which the elements evolve

 I am not a programmer myself but I am pretty sure
 that is not how you make a computer virus. I am also pretty sure that you can not make a cd simply by combining three floppies.
The elements appear above the playfield and you may control where and how they drop. The catch is that you always get two elements and they mostly don't have the same type, so you have some arranging and sorting to do if you don't want to drown in low-level parts.
Once the top of the playfield is reached it begins to blink red. You may not place any element above it or you loose.
Pretty simple, eh?
Yeah. That is also what makes this game so addictive. Once you understood how to arrange the elements for combos and stuff you cant stop. You simply cant. I played until I saw the elements in my sleep, arranged in lines, disappearing in bright flashes and spawning higher elements.
The only thing that really destroys the experience is the music. I dont know why, but I find it absolutely terrible.

Aw balls.

Well that is all there is to be said about this game, I suppose you better check it out yourself, it is worth it, if you can afford getting hooked to it.

Still alive (No Portal Pun intended)

I am sorry you guys but life is a bitch at the moment, so hang in there... you will get two entries this weekend. I prrrrroooomise!

100 Followers

You guys, I am so happy... 101 people follow my blog now (I can not think about a Dalmatians joke right now but I will include it in a post as soon as I make one up)

Shows that the most important thing in life is to whore yourself out to corporate marketing.

Guess who's back

Yes, my minions, I have returned from the cold, black hiatus that swallowed me.
I came to present to you: EFFING WORMS by Effing Games. This game does so many things so very right, it is just perfect for a lunch break or the short periods between two assignments.

Doesnt this scream "AWESOME!"?

If you are like me and enjoy cheesy horror flicks then you will enjoy this game just as much as I did.
In a nutshell you are a worm and you want to eat. Humans, Cows, Dogs, Tanks, Choppers, Mechs, Hovertanks... all that good stuff. And that is all you do. Inbetween levels, you get to upgrade your worm and get neat features, like spikes or a different type of skin.

Today's weather: Sunshine with a ninety percent chance of angry worm.

The problem? You can only choose one of two upgrades and you can make that choice only once. So you always have to think: "Do I want a fast worm, or do I want more health?"
However you decide, you grow in size and abilities until you become a massive monster and destroy everything that dares to walk around above ground.
The easy controls make this a blast. The worm steers sort of like a car in a racing game (see Freeway Fury), except that you will be drawn down by gravity if you are above ground. However, jumping out of the ground to snatch some choppers out of mid air is just more fun this way.

All of this is topped off with a nice icing of witty comments and the little elements, like protestors holding peace signs and commentatory to your upgrades.
I also really enjoyed the punk-rock soundtrack that is cranked up every time you come above ground, especially because it is quite cheesy.
Unfortunately this game is not perfect. It is very short and very easy, after level 5 or so you will not find any enemies that could pose a real threat to you and two levels later you find yourself in sandbox mode, where you are killing people aimlessly just to see that little score number on the bottom right corner rise.
Which is probably why Notdoppler gave this game a 13+ rating, because it degrades human life.
...
Not like I care. OM NOM NOM!