Cosmic Encounter

Here I am, still ill as a dog, with some viral throat/ear/chest infection, can't sleep, gargling with my own juices, and I stumble upon a rather fetching web based board game conversion called Cosmic Encounters.

COSMIC ENCOUNTER ONLINE


It's all about battling against and with 3 other aliens, to land a colony on their homeworlds. You send ships out to the encounter, and then you recruit allies, and then you throw encounter pods into the battle to boost the attack points, or negotiate booty from the encounter. It's all rather bewildering at first, and I'd recommend going through the quite well put together tutorials, before venturing into a real game. I stumbled into a game as a Guest and watched the fireworks and my mind explode. It is quite simple, but it has certain subtleties that are not obvious. The obvious subtlety is that the alien race you are randomly assigned (one of six in the free or guest game), each having a specific special power that usually defines their mode of play. Like each ship actually having the power of 4 ships for the offensive alien race. Or one where the oppositions encounter pod value is revealed to them before they select theirs, or, one where losing a battle can be turned on its head as a win. I've found, with the limited number of games I've played that even though theres a lot of rallying together with the aliens, this isn't a game of loyalty, its more a game of selective diplomacy. You win the game if you gain 4 new colonies on other worlds. If you kick an alien off three of his home worlds he loses his special ability. And there are artifact pods, that have special functions that can be played at crucial times to negate powers, release ships trapped in warp and to destroy opponents ships etc. All in all, the more you play it, the more woven the secret to winning seems to become.

As a free account, you only have a limited number of aliens available to you. If you're willing to cough up some money then you open up even more game specials and styles. It seems a perfectly interesting game with just the basic six though, at the moment. There didn't seem to be a lot of players online, around 20 when I logged on, but most of them were friendly and you can join a game with bots if you just want to test out your game without the competition of real people. It's a visual stylised feast of a game, works in Flash. Might be worth a look see for those slow lunchtime sessions, because the average game seemed to last about 20 minutes.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

What I am about to write, will most certainly be biased heavily towards the positive. I like Ghost in the Shell. I like the Anime, the Manga, the concept, the stories, the whole shooting match. So the chance to play a game based around the anime is quite a dream for me. This isn't a novelty though, because I've played the PS1's Ghost in the Shell game too. And I liked that too. Anyway, with that out of the way, GiTS:SAC is quite a competent 3rd person action platformer. Most of the usual 3rd person action dynamics are there, the jumping, crouching, clinging, side-shuffling, shooting, melee combat are all in place. It could almost be described as Tomb Raider-esque, with bigger guns. What makes GiTS:SAC stand out for me, is that all this 'expected' action takes place inside an episode of GiTS:SAC. If you stripped away the narrative, and the nuggets of information thrown at you, or the lovely rendered cut scenes, then you'll have a bog standard 3rd person action platformer. The fact that it is gelled together in a typical GiTS story line, and you get to play either Major Motoko Kusanagi, or her trusty beefcake sidekick Batou is icing on the cake, which will probably do it for fans of the series, and make no difference whatsoever to the ambivalent gamer.', 'The control mechanism for the game is quite odd to begin with, there are a lot of basic moves, such as shoot that are assigned to the L1 shoulder button, whilst melee was L2 and jump was R2 and grab was R1. Essentially you could perform all the main assault or platform moves from the shoulder buttons leaving your thumbs permanently attached to the two analogue sticks, for constant position and aiming control. Once you get used to it, its quite a nice setup, but it does have that learning curve when you feel like you're fumbling around and whacking shoulder buttons without reason. There is an unfortunate double click on the jump button that basically does a spectacular 360 flip through the air, looks brilliant, but is annoying if you're trying to grasp that ledge and have mistakenly double tapped the jump, when you meant to single tap the grasp.

The Major is wonderfully rendered and she has the more supple and lithe moves of the two. Her wall jumping and mid-air acrobatics form the main core of all the games platformer sequences. Many of the levels take place on high complex structures that plunge you to a scary death, if your gymnastics stray. This can be a little frustrating, the same way the insta-death moments in some of the Tomb Raider series got on your wick. But, most of the danger can be avoided by performing the correct aerial tricks. Most of the platformer areas have a logical route through them, and with a bit of exploration and rooting around you can usually find the expected path. Whether you can perform the moves is a question of knowledge and dexterity mixed with a small amount of luck (sometimes). The Major excels at melee combat, so much so, that you enter a cool Matrix like Bullet Time as you land the killing blows. Melee however, doesn't use the complex button skills that the platform game requires, essentially you mash the L2 shoulder button as much as you can when you are in close proximity of the enemy. The kicks and punches fly according to quite spectacular animation of the Major and then you get to the coup de grace. It's pleasant action, that is great to watch, but slightly mundane to execute. I found with the Major, if you could position a jump properly to land in melee range, that knocking out all sorts of enemies with all sorts of kung fu moves was easier than having the troublesome bother of aiming you current weapon sight and letting rip with sub machine guns or assault rifles. The gun kill was often longer to achieve and much more unreliable, playing as the Major.

Batou is a big hulking character with a penchant for big guns and lots of them. You can forget the acrobatics, you can forget melee combat, get the guns out and start spraying. He's also quite a dab hand with the sniper rifle. Gun play in the game is surprisingly satisfying. You only have 2 gun slots though, so you have to pick and choose as you navigate an area. The shotgun is a nice one-shot put down, but it has limited ammo, and difficult to re-load without finding other enemies wielding the same gun. So you generally end up with a bog standard SMG (which can be restocked with ammo from most kills) and a specialist weapon of choice for that level, such as a large rocket or grenade launcher or sniper rifle.

The puzzle elements to the game come in the form of obtaining permission codes from specific enemy, where you hack their corpses and gain the appropriate data, you can then open a give door, or turn on a specific mechanism to progress through the level. There are instances where you "ghost hack" an enemy soldier, or robot, and you can control them for a limited time period. However in order to gain access to the ghost, you have to match locking spinning discs, in a kind of timing puzzle. It begins out fairly easy, but as you progress through the game, this ghost hacking becomes very challenging indeed. The discs spin quite fast and your brain has to match a circular pattern of peaks with a large circular pattern of troughs. Since they're both spinning fast in different directions it starts to get a little spooky and difficult. If you can pull it off, then you can gain extra recon info using robots or there was one level where you could ghost hack a sniper in a tower, then proceed to snipe all the other snipers in their other towers. Specifically focussing on that sniper level, you were in a dockyard with a bunch of sniper towers overlooking the area. As you enter and move around, you notice between cover that a laser sight beam focuses on your head, you have to be nimble and quick to move out of the way, because if not, you get the slow-mo headshot animation and the Major is no more. You had to cleverly use cover, and duck and weave tactics to get through that level. Really enjoyed the sense of impending doom as soon as the laser sight scoped in on you.

Overall, GiTS:SAC doesn't do anything astoundingly new, but what it does do, is give you almost an episode of GiTS:SAC that you can participate in. The original voice actors of the TV series do all the voices in the game, that adds to the authenticity of the game, that takes the action game above its acceptable level of gameplay, and into the realms of being involved with your favourite anime. Of course if you aren't a fan then I think your experience of the game will be only satisfactory.

Untold Legends

I finally got my copy of Untold Legends, and it is good. You'll enjoy it if you like Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance, or Champions of Norrath, or Dungeon Heroes style action RPG. It's an action button masher make no mistake. From my brief play, it seems to give you a lot of cool equipment up front, like weapons with specials and trinkets to enhance your armour, way before it feels like you should be earning those sort of things as loot. I mean I've got some modifier runes installed on the rough patchwork stuff I was given when I started the adventure at level 1! From the few bosses I have encountered it still seems like the game can present a challenge. But it just feels a little wrong to have a level 2 alchemist wander about with a glowing and shimmering double headed axe.

The classes seem a bit odd, Knight, Beserker, Druid and Alchemist. They all rely on melee a lot, even the Alchemist, with casting really only providing support damage to the melee. I guess in the single player game, then you're going to have to melee more often than not, simply because you have no-one to stand at the front and take the damage, whilst you waggle your fingers. Tried a Druid too, although again at these levels I'm guessing melee figures big in the only way to progress.

The graphics are excellent, and you can zoom close in for some hot boss action, or pull out to watch the horde fall. The play areas seem a little too small, but dungeons tend to consist of lots of these small rooms interconnected, with a boss at the end. Some story, enough to get you to the next quest boss.

The action is non stop, frenzied fun though. This is the definitive action RPG game your'e going to get on a handheld for a while, nearest thing you'll get to it though, is the Lord of the Rings diablo-fest on the GBA. And if you're comparing the two, theres no comparison.

If only my fat hands wouldn't ache so much using that bleeding analogue PSP thumbtack. Why they situated it at the bottom of the console, so that youre like pinching the handheld and twiddling your thumb in small circles is beyond me. I'd have much preferred it if they'd have swapped the d-pad with the thumbtack, since most of the games I have use the tack.

Alien Shooter

Fook me this is the biz, the bees nollocks! Imagine unimaginable amounts of alien horde swarming towards you in narrow science lab hallways, breaking out of walls and generally coming to dismember you. Then imagine having a leather clad honey (or leather clad butch) depending on your persuasion, with twin desert eagles blazing away, with shells falling all around, and pulsing techno beats rattling your brain. Then imagine, if you will, picking up a shotgun and emptying that into the green menace, out comes your minigun and you chain spray them all over the walls, they still keep coming, so you flip out the grenade launcher and thin them out a touch, to nail them hard with your plasma gun, instantly turning them into mulched goo! Nightvision equipped its time to crawl through another dark infested lab.

http://www.sigma-team.net/alienshooter/index.htm

Time limited demo available for download. I just bought the full version for £12 (inc VAT). It's isometric top down view (ala Diablo etc), it uses the WASD or cursor keys for movement (or right clicking the mouse) and it uses the left click of the mouse to empty your chambers. So the firing and the movement are separate mechanisms (ala Zax the Alien Hunter). My favourite. Gives you plenty of options to backtrack and lay suppressing fire, or circle strafe round a leggy horde to drop a grenade in the middle. The environments are nicely constructed with blowable walls, and doors that need power to open them, and walls that burst holding fecking millions of the things. The nasties are suitably menacing in very large numbers, bigger bipedal aliens and spitting crawlers etc are all there.

Blowing shit up hasn't been this good for a long time, and the action is relentless. You collect money and ammo on the way, health here and there. You use the money to buy equipment before the next mission. The bint decked out in full red armour (90% damage absorbtion) carrying a minigun is pretty impressive. The music is nice, although I haven't heard many different tracks, it goes plinky plonky for a while, until the horde start emerging then it picks up with the pounding techno, "kill em all". Theres one slight niggle, in that if you use the mouse totally to move and shoot, the pathing AI of your character to the next click point, is virtually non-existent. She'll bang into the wall in a straight line more or less and won't move unless you click somewhere else. This isn't a problem at all if you prefer the more responsive keyboard movement control mechanism. I wouldn't advise using the mouse for both movement and shooting, it slows the action down because you're having to worry about getting to where you want to be, whereas with WSAD I'm already there, and I'm already circling the perimeter of a seething mass of nasties. Gun sounds are great. Empty shells make a clink as they hit the ground! I try to keep the minigun stocked with ammo at all times, but for clearing the wooden boxes that sometimes carry equipment, the two pistols are sufficient. They have infinite ammo. Be careful not to clip a oxygen tank strewn across the floor or kaboom baby, say goodbye to that red armour. You can use the liberally sprinkled oil cans and gas tanks in the environment to organise ambushes that will take only a single bullet to initiate.

Top bloody stuff, this. If you like masacre of aliens on a grand scale its worth a butchers.

Star Wolves

http://www.excalibur-publishing.com/starw.htm

http://www.starwolves.ru/en/about.php (description of ships and weapons)

Well, there is considerable quality in the actual FMV that starts the game off, facial renderings and lots of detail on the skin of the main hero show that some effort has been put into this. It's a crying shame that the vocal talent seems to be out of sink with the graphical talent on offer. The narration is choppy and unconvincing, banal would describe it better. Like someone reading something nonchalantly off crib cards. Some of the cast are caricatures of square jawed heroes and hairy, butch, but dull Russians (the game was developed by a Russian company!). You could summarise the introduction to the game (and the actual game itself) as enthusiastic effort, but lacks polish.

The game comes across as an RTS/RPG hybrid. More Homeworld in origin, but based around small scale combat, and personal development of a few key characters. Which is a nice blend really, it takes the middle ground between games like X2 (http://www.enlight.com/x2/) and freelancer (http://www.microsoft.com/games/freelancer/) and large scale conflict like Nexus (http://www.nexusthegame.com/) and Hegaemonia (http://www.hegemonia.info/). It's all about progression within this small scale team of pilots. The tutorials are quite slow but do deliver the information needed if somewhat verbose. From the outset though, you'll find the interface 'quirky' to use. It's not really bad, it just seems to be sluggish to respond and not very intuitive. Certain functions like altering the camera angles and zooming in an out are fine and adopt standard UI convention from many other games however, moving and attacking are a little fiddly and sometimes the game doesn't seem to register the command until you repeat it once or twice. I'm sure with more hours at the helm of this game, the interface will smooth out once you get used to its foibles - its just a bit jarring at first.

Graphical wise, the game looks good. The expected star patterns and nova and star flares are all there, the craft look convincing if a little over painted and colourful. They move and respond as they should in turning arcs and even bounce off each other convincingly, their vapour trails leaving corkscrews in the darkness of space. The initial combat is all about combining your mother ship and her firepower with your fighter wing (your hero and a wing man) and taking out roving pirates. Small cannon weapons pepper the darkness with blue tracer fire and missiles are suitably flourescent and visual when they impact. Turrets on the mother ship align themselves against the enemy, whilst your fighter wing will dogfight waves of pirates making runs as and when. It hasn't got the 'oooh' and 'ahhh' factor from Nexus, with a web work of colourful lasers and constant pounding rockets. It's more of a personal affair concentrating fire on small groups and working at the closer level, battle certainly is less of a light show and more of a matter of combining the specialities of your hero and his wing man onto the enemy. I started out with the hero specialising in basic gunnery and missile capability, whereas the wing man has a large discharge sniper gun and I set him off down the route of ranged bursts and electronic countermeasures. The choice to develop the pilots starts right from the off, after the first patrol sortie. You are awarded experience points of sorts to spend in your chosen skill tree. There are four main skill trees to follow, based on gunnery, long range sniping, electronics and salvage.

I initially tried to place my mother ship in a 'safe' area in space and sent my two fighter crew out to battle the pirates jumping in through a captured portal. However, my fighter wing had major problems making any progress against what seemed to be a much more agile pirate ship. There was a pirate trainer transport stationary in an asteroid belt, presumably mopping up ore, so I could concentrate my fire on that and easily destroy it, but even with my long range wing man, we couldn't quite pick off this pirate fighter who was circling us and chewing away at our shields. I guess the ships and weapons available to us were just not up to the job. So it was time to call in the mother ship to add her firepower to the mix. As soon as she lumbered into weapons range the pirate had trouble with her four mounted turrets blazing and my fighter wing. Job's done. Had to dock the fighters with the mother ship to restock with missiles then I went the rest of the mission in the mother ship, un docking the fighters as necessary.

Missions start as soon as you enter an area, and the initial mission was a patrolling/killing pirates simple sortie that resulted in some money and another area to jump to. On the Mother ship after the mission you can trade equipment and spacecraft and buy more arms and special system equipment (if you have the money). No doubt the key to the game is kitting your fighters and mother ship out with appropriate weaponry and using the most appropriately trained pilots to fulfil the missions objectives. I bought a speedier fighter craft, and fitted it with a remote repair module, in the vain attempt that it could repair shields of the main fighter during combat. I have yet to try that out. In the next area there seems to be two more missions leading on, and presumably this fork is where I have the choice to take the story either way. So it looks that branching missions is the mechanism by which the game takes a step away from the more conventional linear progression.

During the game, the music that accompanies the action, is quite odd. Sort of Cowboy in space music, with howling rock guitar sometimes and steel guitar other times. It reminded me very much of Enterprise, without the singing. Perhaps a spaghetti western in space, sort of thing.

Overall, from just having had a couple of hours play with the game (including tutorials), I would have said its an interesting attempt at bringing the scale of space conflict down a notch, personalising it, and flavouring it with some RPG touches on the characters you use. The ham fisted vocals and underplayed visuals (compared with Nexus) means its probably going to remain an enthusiasts curiosity than gain any wider appeal. The awkward UI will go against it right from the off, plus the awful cheesy voice talents. However its obviously a labour of love for the developers and it does have that interesting niche appeal that could make it a staple in the space fanatics diet. I'm certainly looking forward to see how the RPG elements play out in completing the actual mission objectives, and also see whether the more money and power and ships you acquire it scales up without losing the personal touch.