theSchap's Blog

Who: Devel­oped and Pub­lished by Mini­clip (miniclip.com)

What: Frag physics fun

Where: Many themed worlds

When: NOW! $0.99 on iTunes

Why: Blow­ing stuff up is always entertaining

Physics is the sci­ence that just keeps giv­ing in video games. Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Where’s My Water, and Fruit Ninja are just some exam­ples of games that use physics as a prime game mechanic; maybe you have heard of them? Frag­ger is sim­i­lar in mechan­ics, and throws chal­leng­ing level design and explo­sions on top of it.

Void of any story, your goal is to blow every char­ac­ter in the level apart with small explo­sives, most often grenades. You chose an angle and strength for the tra­jec­tory of your frag and let go, much like you did in Kitty Can­non back in the day. Once it stops, or comes very close, it will explode set­ting of trig­gers, destroy­ing bar­ri­ers, or dis­unit­ing your foes. This con­cept is sim­ple enough but the game­play lies within the level design.

Desert Strike is the name of the first world you must deface by blow­ing every­thing up. It is also the name of a ter­rific game on the Sega Gen­e­sis that occu­pied much of my youth. Things start out pretty sim­ple. Some punks are hang­ing out in holes and behind walls hop­ing you are inca­pable of plac­ing your fin­ger on the screen and then lift­ing it. Dif­fi­culty pro­gresses quite nicely, giv­ing a player the chance to get a feel for how pow­er­ful this SWAT dude’s arm is. At per­haps the 8th level, because the guy stand­ing at the top of the crates is sur­pris­ingly hard to take down, you will real­ize you are out of ammo… FAIL! Though, now you mean busi­ness. Each toss is care­fully planned. Some­times you may even take out two birds with one.… frag, and by birds I mean Counter Strike-like ter­ror­ists. Your rat­ing, 3 stars max, depends on the num­ber of grenades you have once the level is clear.

If you are hav­ing trou­ble on a spe­cific level you can view the solu­tion or skip it, but these are in lim­ited sup­ply and addi­tional ones cost REAL money. A “SAVE MY SOLUTION” fea­ture is a nice addi­tion. It lets you show off your amaz­ing under­stand­ing of physics when applied to grenade tossing.

There are sev­eral Achieve­ments to unlock and Frag­ger works with Game Cen­ter, so you can com­pete with your bud­dies. Com­plet­ing a level often gives you remote bombs that you can set off when­ever, and at some point you get infi­nite ammo, but I don’t remem­ber the exact require­ment for that. The remote bomb buff will help you tremen­dously if you are a com­ple­tion­ist and want to go back through lev­els with per­fect stars. This is cur­rently what I’m work­ing on, and some lev­els are still extremely dif­fi­cult to per­fect. One of the best Achieve­ments asks you to ENRAGE 3 ene­mies and blow them up. To ENRAGE (I can’t seem to type that with­out using caps) some­one you must bean them in the head a few times. Yes, it is funny.

I do have a cou­ple gripes, but the main one is com­mon with any, “aim & fire” mechanic: pixel per­fect accu­racy. Some grenade place­ments require a per­fect angle and power level to attain, and force you into a throw then reset loop until you find the sweet spot. This can feel extremely monot­o­nous. That paired with lev­els requir­ing a sort of pro­gres­sion with the eagle eye shot at the end will make you put the game down. This must be how they sell the Skip and Solve packs. Another small irri­ta­tion is the UI flow. There is no way to exit a level from the com­ple­tion screen, and no way to exit a world from the in game menu. For exam­ple, now that I’m going through lev­els and try­ing for all 3 stars I want to go into a spe­cific level, fin­ish it, and return to the level select screen or even the world select screen. Cur­rently I have to choose Next or Replay to reload a level and then exit to the level select screen. Only from there could I go back out to the worlds. It’s a minor nui­sance, but there’s no rea­son it needs to require that many clicks.

Frag­ger cur­rently has 12 worlds with around 30 lev­els a piece. These worlds are quite unique, and give every­thing just enough of a new taste that it feels dif­fer­ent from before.

Desert Strike & Lost City have a very sim­i­lar theme. You’re a counter ter­ror­ist erad­i­cat­ing ter­ror­ists in new and old urban areas.

Planet X places you on an alien world rid­dled with shin­nies and slimies.

Atlantis puts you into some under­wa­ter ruins with shirt­less dudes that look like ‘Baby’ Brent from ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’.

Artic Storm was released around Christ­mas last year I think so every­one is bun­dled up to look like santa, but that doesn’t mat­ter you still want to blow them up.

Heart Attack is where things start get­ting a lit­tle strange, and I assume this came out last Feb­ru­ary. No longer are you a law enforc­ing offi­cer. You are Cupid in a dia­per, armed with deadly hearts, and forc­ing your love explo­sion on heart bro­ken ban­dits. They die in an explo­sion of hearts so I assume you have helped them.

Hor­ror Ville brings Frankenstein’s Mon­ster out for you to bom­bard in dilap­i­dated build­ings just in time for Halloween.

Ancient Times throws you back to the mid­dle ages against dumb-witted goons in Egypt, Rome, Greece, and South Amer­ica. Your weapon of choice this round is a golden ball of some sort. Golden apple maybe?

Honey Bunny is another hol­i­day themed world. This time you’re wear­ing a bunny suit and chuck­ing deadly eggs at painted tar­gets. It seems a lit­tle sick.

Trea­sure Bay was def­i­nitely inspired by ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’. You’re can­non­ball tot­ing avatar can hardly stand up. I found the inte­gra­tion of pirate items into the con­struc­tion of the lev­els par­tic­u­larly well done in this world.

Mon­ster Dash … I can’t help but think of River City Ran­som when I see the art for this one.

Stick Man makes me happy. I don’t know if it reminds me of the stick men duels from for­ever ago, but this world is entertaining.

The lev­els cre­ate some great puz­zles that range from mak­ing tough throws, to destroy­ing bar­ri­ers to launch­ing other explo­sives in sequence or tan­dem in an effort to reach a hid­den enemy.

Quan­ti­ta­tive Review:

• Game­play: 9.6 — The qual­ity and vari­a­tion in level design that’s crammed into the lim­ited real estate of a phone is ter­rific. The game could use a few alter­na­tive bonus fea­tures like napalm grenades, or clus­ter bombs. Even if they some­what break the game, some­times the reward for beat­ing some­thing as intended, should be rewarded with some­thing ridiculous.

• Visual: 8.9 — The visu­als are quite good, but noth­ing ground­break­ing for the iPhone. The dif­fer­ent themes are well designed, but I’d like to see a bit more vari­a­tion in the ene­mies. Per­haps some defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics in their visu­als to estab­lish a type of neme­sis through­out the worlds.

• Sound: 9.1 — Sound effects were pretty stan­dard, but the sound­track is great. There is some bad ass music in the Mon­ster Dash world, and there’s a song in Heart Attack that will bore itself into the base of your skull.

• Pre­sen­ta­tion: 7.8 — The whole nav­i­ga­tion thing is a pretty irri­tat­ing, but the rea­son it dropped below a B are the ads. You can’t load up the app and com­plete a new level with­out them pimp­ing one of their other games, and you will get harassed to rate the app often, even if you have already taken the time to do so.

• Humor: 8.6 — The devel­op­ers def­i­nitely had a sense of humor with this game and the level themes are a strong indi­ca­tion. Just read­ing through the list above you can tell things are get­ting more and more silly as you go along. I look for­ward to a new world!

• Over­all: 8.8 - Frag­ger has been in my arse­nal for a while now. I’ve lost my progress a few times though phone upgrades and jail break­ing, but I con­tinue to go back and play through it.

It has been quite some time since I threw a Star­craft II related post up here on the blog. Hell, it has been a while since I’ve updated this blog at all before this week, but I vow to be vig­i­lant! I vow to type stuff! And I hope to get into Dia­mond League before Dia­blo 3 comes out. Why that time­line? Well…

1. The game is a ways out yet. This gives me till AT LEAST March 7th when the game is cur­rently rumored to be released.
2. Once Dia­blo 3 comes out, it will occupy all my game time, so Star­craft II will likely fall by the way side. I’m sure I’ll still get the urge to play once a week or so, and maybe Dia­blo will feel too easy and it won’t hold my interest.

So in an effort to get to Dia­mond, I have been try­ing to play a few games every night. This usu­ally means about 30–60 min­utes of game time each night. It’s not going to make me pro, but I’m hop­ing I can at least get promoted.

Who: Devel­oped and Pub­lished by Nim­bleBit (they sure are)
What: Sim Tower condensed

Where: Eight bit world that can only go up.

When: NOW! Free on iTuens

Why: Stack­ing pix­e­lated stores for lit­tle peo­ple to NOM NOM through is quite addict­ing for 53.6 sec­ond spurts.

What makes mobile gam­ing so pop­u­lar? Eas­ily acces­si­ble? Sim­ple to pick up? Rel­a­tively cheap? Those are all good rea­sons, but add addic­tive game­play and the abil­ity to play any­where at any­time and you have Tiny Tower. Tiny Tower can be played in under a minute at a time. If you’re wait­ing for your lunch order, you could build your own deli floor, staff it, and start gain­ing money toward your next floor.

You begin the game with a lobby as the first floor, where you go from here is up to you, as long as it’s up. I was amazed by how much the size and aspect ratio of a cell phone screen catered to a game like this. It felt nat­ural to flick up and down between the floors ensur­ing their employ­ees were busy.

Each floor can be filled with 1 of 6 dif­fer­ent busi­ness types: Food, Ser­vice, Recre­ational, Retail, Cre­ative, and Res­i­den­tial. A res­i­den­tial floor can house 5 biti­zens max. These guys pay rent, and are will­ing to work any­where within the tower. This tower is their only world, they know noth­ing out­side of it so I sup­pose they have lit­tle choice. The tower seems to have a wide vari­ety of things to do so it’s pretty all inclu­sive though I’ve never seen a bath­room. They do seem to hang out off screen to the right from time to time so maybe they take care of that over there.

Each biti­zen has  their own unique tal­ents rang­ing from 0–9 in each of the 5 busi­ness areas. Plac­ing them in a busi­ness that cor­re­sponds with their skill will reward you with faster stock­ing and over­all more coin. Plac­ing a full pro­fi­cient (9 skill) biti­zen in an accom­pa­ny­ing job will reward you with a tower buck. Tower bux can be used to expe­dite stock­ing floors, construction projects, upgrad­ing your ele­va­tor, and other things. Bux can also be gained by find­ing a lost biti­zen some­where in your tower. Mis­placed biti­zens can be fired and rehired some­where else, or if you dis­like them you can kick them out of the tower all together. Occa­sion­ally you will roll a biti­zen of all zeros and ones and it won’t feel too bad evict­ing them, but it’s easy to get attached to these lit­tle guys. They come in all sorts of dif­fer­ent fla­vors. The amount of vari­a­tion in such a lim­ited num­ber of pix­els is pretty incred­i­ble, and their envi­ron­ments look great. 8 bit graph­ics will never die.

The floors of this pocket tower are just as var­ied as their inhab­i­tants. Frozen yogurt, hat shop, com­edy club, phar­macy, cof­fee house, and many more will be con­structed at your request. Choos­ing a busi­ness type that’s in high demand, or could be stocked with some very tal­ented unem­ployed biti­zens is a gen­er­ally a good idea. These floors will take a while to be con­structed, which takes longer the higher you go, but once com­plete they are ready to be staffed with up to 3 biti­zens and 3 items or ser­vices. Stock­ing takes some time too, and it depends on the type of busi­ness you are run­ning. Mak­ing a sand­wich takes less time than build­ing hos­pi­tal for exam­ple, and each sub­se­quent item per floor takes a bit longer, but nets a higher profit so it’s best to fully staff and stock every floor.

All this time wait­ing for things to build and stock items can be part of the fun. Spe­cial char­ac­ters will show up that speed the process up and deliv­er­ing them to the desired floor via the ele­va­tor is a large part of man­ag­ing your tower. Also, with every­thing hav­ing a count­down, you can sched­ule your Tiny Tower around your day. Going to bed? Build a new floor or stock some­thing that will take all night then watch it make you money the next day. The app can eas­ily send you push noti­fi­ca­tions when some­thing needs your atten­tion so I found it fun to set sev­eral 15 minute actions at once then just wait till I was pushed a noti­fi­ca­tion. Tiny Tower inte­grates itself so well into the lulls of your day it’s hard NOT to play.

Quan­ti­ta­tive Review:

• Game­play: 8.4 - The game is very sim­ple to play, but it’s hard to tell if you are play­ing it well. Most of the enjoy­ment comes from tim­ing every­thing per­fectly so you can set up as much as pos­si­ble the next time you load up the game. You feel best when you spend the least amount of time in the actual game because you set every­thing in motion that you could. The lack of “active” game­play is made up for in the games abil­ity to fuse with almost every rou­tine dur­ing your day. Walk­ing to a meet­ing, brush­ing your teeth, cook­ing a hot pocket, and yes of course mak­ing poo.

• Visual: 9.3 — The 8 bit graph­ics strike a cer­tain chord of nos­tal­gia back to the NES days. It’s fun to see what each floor will bring and Nim­bleBit adds new and inter­est­ing biti­zens to the game from time to time. I can’t get over the hilar­i­ous “nom nom” ani­ma­tion the biti­zens make as they con­sume items on a floor.

• Sound: 8.5 -  Sound is fairly min­i­mal in this game. Most of the sounds come from alerts or UI inputs. This seems like a con­scious deci­sion as it can get a lit­tle noisy when you have 50 floors.

• Pre­sen­ta­tion: 9.8 — As I’ve said, the joy of this game lies in small bits of man­age­ment. Get­ting in, set­ting a bunch of timers, and get­ting out in less then a minute is made pos­si­ble by the quick load­ing of the app, and great in game per­for­mance. The 8 bit graph­ics and ver­ti­cal lay­out of the world make it pos­si­ble for you to scroll through a seem­ingly infi­nite num­ber of floors. I have 50 floors ren­der­ing on a iPhone 3GS and the per­for­mance is flawless.

• Inte­gra­tion: 10.0 - I can­not think of a bet­ter, more casual way for a game to inte­grate with your every­day life and I’m sure things have got­ten even bet­ter since I last played.

• Over­all: 9.2 - Between the art style, sim­ple inter­face, and abil­ity to play for sec­onds at a time I found Tiny Tower very addic­tive. The strengths of mobile gam­ing mate­ri­al­ize in Tiny Tower, and no mat­ter how busy you are day to day you down­time that could be filled with this mall like sim. Now if only they could inte­grate more mul­ti­player fea­tures, like allow­ing you to zoom into the tow­ers your friends have built. Tiny Tower is the ideal mobile game for the new wave of casual gamers.

This is a prob­lem I have been run­ning into a lot lately. It wasn’t until I put about a hour into Bioshock 2 and found out I couldn’t SAVE, that I got frus­trated enough to want to fix it. Let me reit­er­ate that. I bought a game, but couldn’t save my progress until I was signed into my Win­dows Live ID. This DRM shit is get­ting out of hand.

So the prob­lem is this: 80048821

Basi­cally Win­dows Live doesn’t rec­og­nize your user­name, or your pass­word is wrong so it’s unable to authenticate.

Surf­ing the Google will point you at a vari­ety of cul­prits. The most com­mon is to open a list of ports on your router. Oth­ers have you check your ver­sion of Games for Win­dows, rein­stall the game, or even hack some reg­istry files.

Solu­tion?

Your pass­word IS wrong! Appar­ently pass­words with spe­cial char­ac­ters trip up the whole sys­tem and you can’t log in EVEN if your pass­word is cor­rectly inputted. It’s rec­om­mended to use alpha-numeric char­ac­ters only and stick to 6–10 characters.

Do I even have to point out the irony of Microsoft requir­ing a sim­pli­fied pass­word for it’s online envi­ron­ment to access it’s own game sys­tem on it’s own OS?

Google+ or G+ is an inter­est­ing name. It’s sim­ple, easy to remem­ber, and takes own­er­ship over a very pop­u­lar math­e­mat­i­cal sym­bol. It is also quite bold. I won­der if it will be able to live up to the hype. Not just the hype of being Google’s effort in the social net­work­ing site wars, but also the hype that the name implies. “Plus” is defined as being pos­i­tive, more, or adding to some­thing to cre­ate a greater value. Google rev­o­lu­tion­ized search engines and in many ways the Inter­net as a whole. For a search engine that sur­passed 1 Bil­lion unique vis­i­tors just a cou­ple months ago, the con­cept of a “+“Google is some­thing quite momen­tous. The stan­dard is now set and I sus­pect even Google is a bit intimidated.

Star­craft II has been boom­ing in the last cou­ple months with pro tour­na­ments pop­ping up all over the place.

I did another small write up of a cur­rent tour­na­ment still in progress over again on the Clan eP web­site, which now has a new look! If inter­ested, go ahead and check out my write up of the cur­rent HD World Tournament.

Just to give some of you an idea of just how pop­u­lar Star­craft II and eSports is becom­ing, here is an abridged list of some of the tour­na­ments out there for pro Star­craft II gamers held here in the United States. Keep in mind, this list leaves out S. Korea where Star­craft is a national sport!

IGN Pro League

MLG Colum­bus

North Amer­i­can Starleague

TeamLiq­uid Starleague

A GUI used to add flaws to a sealed pack­age so it can later be inspected by trainees for flaws.

Sorry, either Adobe flash is not installed or you do not have it enabled

This is a spray­paint GUI I designed for a sim­u­la­tion which allowed users to change dif­fer­ent set­tings. These set­tings and changes emu­lated that of a real spray gun.

Sorry, either Adobe flash is not installed or you do not have it enabled

Find­ing a good com­mu­nity in any online game is very impor­tant. It’s some­thing that can keep the game fresh and excit­ing as well as pro­vid­ing a great social out­let. In a com­pet­i­tive gam­ing cir­cle this is espe­cially impor­tant as find­ing peo­ple that can chal­lenge you is essen­tial. As any­one who knows me “in the real world” will attest, I’m not very good at keep­ing in touch. I’m bad at return­ing phone calls, and often pre­fer a text. I check Face­book a cou­ple times a week; Maybe. Best exam­ple of them all, a party or friendly gath­er­ing can often feel like an intru­sion into an oth­er­wise cre­ative, or nerdy night.

In my last post New Level of Nerd, I men­tioned the Star­craft II clan eP or Eter­nal Plague. I was drawn to them because of that tour­na­ment which allowed peo­ple such as myself, Plat­inum Lea­guers, to com­pete for pro­fes­sional coach­ing. I have since joined their writ­ing staff and my first assign­ment was to fol­low the recent MLG Dal­las. I spent a large deal of my leisure time last week­end watch­ing the tour­na­ment stream, which was tough tech­ni­cally, but overly enter­tain­ing. If any of you out there are inter­ested in eSports go ahead and check out my write up at MLG Dal­las 2011 Post­mortem, and check out the MLG site for your­self. You may find it some­thing else to veg out with a beer and snacks to on Sundays.

Remem­ber how, way back, I said I had migrated over? Well, as I’ve been delv­ing deeper into the cat­a­combs that are wordpress.php, and data­base secu­rity jar­gon, I noticed that noth­ing really worked. Images were miss­ing, nav­i­ga­tion was spotty, plu­g­ins were implod­ing, and noth­ing seemed like it wanted to jive peace­fully with it’s new home, and word­press 3.1.

Read More »