Richard Morgan’s A Land Fit for Heroes
Gollancz and Liber Primus Games have today released a new trailer and art assets for their new joint project, Richard Morgan’s A Land Fit for Heroes.
Silkroad Online Teases FPS and MOBA with Content Update
Joymax is teasing an upcoming update for long-running fantasy MMORPG, Silkroad Online.
Minion Master
Minion Master is a tactical board game, where players battle with armies of miniatures summoned and controlled via a customisable deck of cards. It is currently available from the website and on Desura, with a campaign for Steam Greenlight running.
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Demo
The demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning came out on Steam last week.. an action RPG in a colourful fantasy setting, with four playable races and a fully customisable set of skills and abilities.
The game has been developed by 38 Studios and Big Huge Games, but is published by EA, so on launching the game I had to log in to my EA account. Doing so unlocked a few items for use in the full game, if I go ahead and purchase later, as well as some themed armour for Mass Effect 3.
Players start as a blank slate, risen from the dead thanks to the powers of the Well of Souls. After dragging myself out of a pile of dead bodies, I went in search of the exit.. finding starter gear, some gnomes, attacking Tuatha Soldiers, and eventually, the gnome researcher working with the Well of Souls.
The Tower was eventually overrun by the attacking forces, and on the way out I had a final battle with a Rock Troll.. a chance to string a few moves together after being shown the basics of weapons and magic.
At this point, my character’s abilities with each weapon was the same, but I liked the dual-wield daggers best. During the exploration part of the demo, I found some better-quality daggers with bonus acid damage.. and after levelling up and spending some ability points, I was able to make a rather nice dashing combo too.
Levelling up provided me with a skill point, which I used to improve Detect Hidden, allowing enemies and treasure to appear on the mini map, and ability points which I used to increase damage with daggers, as well as unlocking the Shadow Strike ability. This was all personal choice: I could have chosen any combination of abilities from Sorcery, Might or Finesse to suit my gameplay.
Reckoning Mode was interesting.. accessible after filling up the purple Fate meter, this gave me extra power and allowed me to finish off weakened enemies with special, and rather showy, moves..
I got different moves each time, too 🙂
The demo was reported to contain a few bugs and glitches: the first of these for me was the worst, as I had no graphics! A friend told me this was down to having a Radeon, and to turn off post-processing, which fixed it. Elsewhere, I had the odd short freeze, as well as text which appeared and then disappeared too quickly for me to read it. The developers were aware of this, and replied to a thread on NeoGAF. Apparently the demo was created by a third party, from older code, and so the full game should be free of these.
Bugs aside, I think this demo was very well done. It allowed me to see the basics of the game, get an idea of the forces at play, and then explore the world as I pleased for up to 45 minutes. For me, this was long enough to see that I’d enjoy playing it.. though I will probably wait till I’ve cleared some of my backlog before picking it up.
Coal Collector!
The Great Gift Pile objectives are turning out to be a mix of quick and easy tasks and longer, more difficult challenges..
Atom Zombie Smasher: KringleJammer was fairly easy to get, as was the Rock of Ages: Snowball War. Audiosurf: Candy Stripe required only the collection of red and white blocks in a line, but it took me a while to find something on my PC that played at the right pace to generate the blocks I wanted. “Still Alive” was giving me blue blocks, so wouldn’t do for this!
Beat Hazard: Survive Christmas 10 required me to survive for 10 minutes.. and it took far longer than that! After several attempts of under five minutes each, I realised I had unlocked some perks which might help: the Ultra DLC added Micro Missiles and a Reflect Shield which just about let me last long enough to complete the objective.
A harder achievement was the deliberate loss of a game in Fate of the World, where instead of trying to save the world, I led it towards global thermonuclear war and the Let it Glow achievement! After a few attempts I ended up consulting the internet for tips on how to get the ‘right’ ending.. it turned out to be a rather tight list of instructions while hoping for the right random numbers to be generated each turn. I think actually winning this game, as opposed to playing for an achievement, will be next to impossible as all territories seem to get annoyed with you very quickly! 😀
For another deliberate loss, I also tried to nuke Santa in DEFCON.. but found his movements too unpredictable, the AI too eager to react, and my supply of nukes too low for me to get him. I quickly got bored of this, so I checked out the tips on the net again, and reduced the number of cities to 5 per territory, but then found the game crashing almost as soon as I launched a nuke! Something to do with the latest update and Windows 7 🙁
Another not-quite-game objective was Winter Assault.. survive a 30 minute match on Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Retribution, on one of the winter maps. Four of us joined the game, with one going AFK immediately.. only interested in the achievement itself.. but three of us met in the middle to trade blows until we’d met our time requirement! I wished for more Great Unclean Ones, but settled for a squad of Chaos Dreadnoughts instead 😀
With the completion of all these objectives, I’m collecting lots of coal along with vouchers which probably won’t get used.. two are for Valve.. I already own all their games, as do all my gaming friends. Although, if anyone does want them.. 🙂
I did win one game via the giveaway.. Silent Dreams’ Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes, a fantasy role-playing game with strategic combat and a sense of humour. The games in this giveaway are provided as a token, which can be added to your own inventory or traded.. so if you already own the game you win, you can give it away or trade it for something else.
A friend bought me Space Pirates and Zombies by Minmax Games, which I tried briefly last night. After stumbling through the first couple of missions, I decided I need to be somewhat alert to play! 🙂
The Steam sales are ongoing, and I also picked up ACE Team‘s rather Monty Python-esque Rock of Ages, mentioned earlier, and Croteam‘s Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter, and Serious Sam 3: BFE, with the first two games below £2 each, and Serious Sam 3 at a reasonable price, considering I wanted a copy for me and a copy for Tim.
Other women spend their money on shoes: I spend my money on games! 🙂