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+ Official Site
I really really want to like T-Crew. The game is an rpg platformer, you and the other players fight through various levels trying to gain experience and items while accompanied by your respective T-Crews. The T-Crews are little monsters that float behind your shoulder. T-Crews posses 9 different skills, but they can only learn 6. However, you can carry 4 with you at any one time. The game play and the T-Crew system is very engaging and fun. What I can’t stand is the level/mission room aspect of this game, which is pretty common among Korean mmos. I really feel it interrupts my game and keeps me from the full game experience.
June 26, 2008
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Bugs Rider is currently in closed beta. Therefore the community is pretty small right now and currently game play data is not saved to the servers, which means your progress is lost whenever you close your client. All that aside, I really like it. Once the game opens up fully I think Bugs Rider will be a very good game. It reminds me very much of Gunbound, you are given a series of machines to pick from each with different styles of attack. Stages are divided between matches and missions. Missions feature typical fast-paced shoot ‘em up action. An open beta announcement hasn’t been made yet, but GameNGame usually has a fast development cycle.
June 22, 2008
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Personally, I didn’t care for Aeronauts. My biggest problem with the game is that it is slow to start and when you actually get past the tutorials and into the more juicy game play you have to go back and play the tutorial stages over so you can get enough experience to play the next missions. I suppose this wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the community was a little bigger and you could play more dogfight matches, which allow you to fight/compete against other players, but right now the community is pretty small and you can’t count on getting your experience that way. Other than a few odd localization quirks, I found Aeronauts to be an interesting game.
June 19, 2008
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My opinion of NeoSteam is that it is another game suffering from over-hype. It sounded great. I really really wanted to like it, but I could only stomach about 20 minutes or so. The game is still in closed beta, so any problem could be fixed before the game is officially rolled out. My two biggest problems are that the graphics seemed unforgivably jaggy to me and that there was practically no explanation on how to do anything or where anything is. This is particularly unforgivable in this case as there is no explanation of factions or classes, which are somewhat essential to game play. Regardless, hopefully this particular issue will be fixed by official release time.
June 17, 2008
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An interesting item of note. OpenSim is a virtual world server for creating specialized or general virtual worlds like Second Life. It also seems worlds built on OpenSim can link up.
June 16, 2008
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My impressions of Stone Age 2 can be summed up in one word: “blah”. For me there seemed to be a large amount of hype surrounding the game, but after playing it I can safely say that I am disappointed. When you start the game you are allowed to determine your character’s elemental affinity, this in turn determines your starting creature/pet/monster/whatever. After that you can catch any monster you want, however you can only use a certain number of monsters in battle and this number increases every five levels or so. You have to keep monsters happy by feeding them and not dying very often, a happy monster performs better in battle and learns new skills quicker. Battles are random and turn based, occurring around every twenty steps or so for me. Characters are given access to a “den” which they can decorate, use to store items, store monsters, and breed monsters. My biggest complaint is that there really isn’t very much concrete information about game play at this point. I don’t know anything about monsters, what abilities they have, etc. Which means I have no actual reason to capture one other than it looks cool (or less stupid than the others). I don’t know what the overall story arc of the game is supposed to be. Am I just walking around fighting because I have emotional issues with animals? But I suppose all that can be excused by the fact the game is still in closed beta. This random battle system, however, is awful. I hate random battles in mmos, and in this particular game random battles get tedious fast. The file size of the installer is 1GB+, which is a little painful considering the quality of the graphics. All in all I expected better of this game. However, Stone Age 2 is in closed beta which means that the game hasn’t technically entered it’s final phase yet, and most of these problems might be eliminated.
June 14, 2008
Yeah, I’m back to my computer.
Also, I’ve disabled pings and trackbacks for this blog. I’m sure none of you care.
June 13, 2008
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Dragonica is described as a fantasy sidescroller mixed with a 3D environment. The game includes a pet system, as well as the ability to buy a house and a shop. The game features a multi path job system, with three beginning classes and one hidden. Again, Dragonica is coming from IAHGames so whether or not it will be a free to play game or have an IP block is still unknown.
June 12, 2008
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Top Speed is a standard cart racer, run around and shoot other people, currently in cosed beta. This iteration of Top Speed is coming to us from IAHGames, who can be a little wishy-washy about the terms of their releases. I wouldn’t be surprised if IAHGames charges for Top Speed or initiates an IP block.
June 11, 2008
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Urban Rivals is a pretty standard strategy card game. Players receive battle points and experience after each fight, which they may use to upgrade cards in their deck. Tournaments are held regularly and offer useful prizes. The cards are numerous and offer a wide range of abilities and stats.
Other items of interest:
+ Urban Rivals Database
An Urban Rivals blog/fansite/card database
June 10, 2008
