Every weekend there are new sights, sounds, and taste to consume. There are other sensory inputs that tickle my brain too, but saying there is stuff to feel sounds creepy. This is a weekly journal of my weekend endeavors. Enjoy!
Gunpoint
I've been following allowing with Gunpoint's development since early 2011. Before it had great art and a smooth jazz soundtrack. The core concept stands up on it's own just fine. 2D stealth and puzzle mechanics. More specifically rewiring the electronics in the building you are infiltrating to remove obstacles. The light switch, you know, the one that turns on lights. Now it opens the door you wanted to sneak through or better yet short circuits the socket next to a guard and murders him. If it was just that it would be a good time, but it also has the art and soundtrack mentioned earlier. Plus a story that is worth reading and interactive dialogue that is pretty damn humorous. It's a great game. I just wish there was more of it, I completed it right at three hours. What you get in that three hours though feels like a new experience in gaming. Maybe? Or maybe it is just Elevator Action evolved. It is a marvelous little game either way.
The Man with the Iron Fists
The Rza writing/directing/acting in his own movie, is a piece of information that would have created no pause in me in high school. I was in a full 36 Chambers spiral. I would have been there for the midnight release. Then came Bobby Digital and the downfall of the clan. When he (Rza) popped up producing the Kill Bill soundtrack though, it seemed like a perfect match. 9 years later, after studying under Tarantino, Rza put out his own film. A small part of me wanted to believe. Then the reviews came in and I knew in my heart of hearts that I shouldn't see it. Well over the weekend I did. It was not good. Bad writing, acting and editing. The only thing that kept me watching was decent fight choreography and illogical devotion to the Wu.
Kingdom Rush: Frontiers
A long anticipated sequel to a game I've probably logged near one hundred iPad hours with. I played through the regular game, then three all levels of difficulty and then finally through the DLC. I wrung it dry. So when Frontiers came out this week and was getting mixed reviews for being more of the same, I signed right up. More of the game I already loved, sure. There are slight changes to the formula and plenty of new towers and enemies, but at it's core is the game I wanted. Heroes now have persistent levels/skills and feel more useful on the map. The harder difficulties and challenges are still tough as hell. It is more like a Kingdom Rush expansion than sequel and I am perfectly happy with that.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Kingdom Rush. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Kingdom Rush. Sort by date Show all posts
Monday, June 10, 2013
Monday, August 27, 2012
Weekend Review: August 25th & 26th
Every weekend there are new sights, sounds, and taste to consume. There are other sensory inputs that tickle my brain too, but saying there is stuff to feel sounds creepy. This is a journal of my weekend endeavors. Enjoy! This weeks post turned into a walk down memory lane.
Liknuts
Tha Alkaholiks
were somewhere down the chain of my Wu Tang phase in high school. I bit hard on their sound and my first car probably has an imprint of the CD art in it. Liknuts is the combination of The Liks and The Beatnuts. Another group I spun a lot in my youth. Tash and Juju kill it on the track above. I hope to see more of this collaboration in the future. P.S. Though their website looks like a late 90's hot mess.Kingdom Rush
Between Iron Brigade and Kingdom Rush I have been getting my recommended daily allowance of tower defense games. It is the best one I have played on iOS so far and looks the best doing what it does too. I beat it this past week and this weekend I jumped into the additional challenge modes. Which go quick, but are brutal.
10000000
Another app that got a fair portion of my weekend. 10m is a match three paired with an Atari-esqe dungeon crawler. The upper half of the screen is a side scrolling adventurer, who encounters monsters, looked doors and chest. The lower half is a match three, where the tiles represent the solutions the adventurer needs to advance. Swords and magic wands for monsters and keys for everything else. You collect resources along the way too. Which you use to upgrade (more time, stronger weapons, perks, etc). Really sinking my teeth into this one.
Day of Defeat: Source
Day of Defeat was a mod for the first Half Life back in 2000, I played it on a 56k modem in college, if that helps date it. I played a lot of it. It was the first game I played competitively. When it became an official game thanks to Valve, I kept playing it. When it was re-imagined on the source engine I transitioned to it and kept competing. DoD in all it's forms is probably in my top 3 games played (hours)of all time. Now it has been ages since I played it though. Over the weekend I installed it (source version) and went back. The nostalgia came rushing on. It still looks great, plays great and is a lot of fun.
Magic
Back in middle school I read a lot of comics and at some point I got into collecting comic cards. Mostly for the the art, they weren't useful for anything beyond that anyway. In 7th grade when I first heard about Magic the Gathering
, I thought cool, cards, art and game. I promptly bought a long box full of cards from a kid on the bus. A week later I realized none of my friends wanted to play it and I sold it back. Not until this past Friday did I play again.One of our tabletop friends is moving away from Richmond and a few of the guys were getting together to have one last game night. The problem, for me, was that it was going to be all Magic. I own no cards and did not want to buy any. Thankfully the host, Chuck, hooked me up with a deck. After two learning rounds we jumped into a free for all game format. It was a lot of fun and by the end of the night I at least understood what my deck was good at and what I might do to make it better. I don't plan to run out and buy a million cards anytime soon, but I'd definitely play again.
Monday, August 26, 2013
Weekend Review: Aug 24th & 25th
Every weekend there are new sights, sounds, and taste to consume. There are other sensory inputs that tickle my brain too, but saying there is stuff to feel sounds creepy. This is a weekly journal of my weekend endeavors. Enjoy!
Theft of Swords (redux)
I wrote briefly about this series (The Riyria Revelations) back in 2012. I finished book one and was a bit underwhelmed by it. I'm pretty green when it comes to fantasy novels. I spent high school reading classics for class and John Grisham for me. A bit of Redwall in 6th grade, but when I actually picked them up I started with ASoIaF and then Name of the Wind. Heavy ass hitters in the genre. So my expectations were fairly high. Seen through that lens ToS feels more like a dungeon master turning his pen and paper game into a novel. I gave up on reading book two on my kindle, but recent saw the series on sale at Audible and picked it up. This time I approached it by taking it for what it is, not what I wanted it to be, which was Rothfuss or Martin's next work. I enjoyed it. The characters are too black and white and the plot leaves nothing to the imagination, but it is great motivation for my own pen and paper planning (Dungeon World).
Spark Master Tape
Spark Master Tape is an enigma. He's dropped two fantastic mixtapes (Syrup Splash & Swoup Serengeti) in the past year and no knows who he is. He rhymes over really grimy beats with vocals that are chopped and screwed into anonymity. I've been listening to both tapes for going on three weeks now and Swoup is right up there with Run the Jewels for mixtape of the year. Give it a listen.
Plants vs Zombies 2
When I wrapped up the original PvZ I was a bit surprised at how abruptly it ended. It felt like it was just becoming a challenge and I expected and wanted it to go on for 2-3 more hours. That was three years ago and for three years I've operated under the assumption that I wanted more plants and zombies. In that time though I've played some stellar tower defense games (e.g. Kingdom Rush) and got slightly burnt out on the genre. So when PvZ 2 dropped last week and was almost entirely the same game play wrapped in new aesthetics I was disappointed. I don't want to start from the beginning of the difficulty curve and build my way up again. I have a skill set that makes these early levels tedious and joyless. No thanks.
Theft of Swords (redux)
I wrote briefly about this series (The Riyria Revelations) back in 2012. I finished book one and was a bit underwhelmed by it. I'm pretty green when it comes to fantasy novels. I spent high school reading classics for class and John Grisham for me. A bit of Redwall in 6th grade, but when I actually picked them up I started with ASoIaF and then Name of the Wind. Heavy ass hitters in the genre. So my expectations were fairly high. Seen through that lens ToS feels more like a dungeon master turning his pen and paper game into a novel. I gave up on reading book two on my kindle, but recent saw the series on sale at Audible and picked it up. This time I approached it by taking it for what it is, not what I wanted it to be, which was Rothfuss or Martin's next work. I enjoyed it. The characters are too black and white and the plot leaves nothing to the imagination, but it is great motivation for my own pen and paper planning (Dungeon World).
Spark Master Tape
Spark Master Tape is an enigma. He's dropped two fantastic mixtapes (Syrup Splash & Swoup Serengeti) in the past year and no knows who he is. He rhymes over really grimy beats with vocals that are chopped and screwed into anonymity. I've been listening to both tapes for going on three weeks now and Swoup is right up there with Run the Jewels for mixtape of the year. Give it a listen.
Plants vs Zombies 2
When I wrapped up the original PvZ I was a bit surprised at how abruptly it ended. It felt like it was just becoming a challenge and I expected and wanted it to go on for 2-3 more hours. That was three years ago and for three years I've operated under the assumption that I wanted more plants and zombies. In that time though I've played some stellar tower defense games (e.g. Kingdom Rush) and got slightly burnt out on the genre. So when PvZ 2 dropped last week and was almost entirely the same game play wrapped in new aesthetics I was disappointed. I don't want to start from the beginning of the difficulty curve and build my way up again. I have a skill set that makes these early levels tedious and joyless. No thanks.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Weekend Review: Dec 29th & 30th
Every weekend there are new sights, sounds, and taste to consume. There are other sensory inputs that tickle my brain too, but saying there is stuff to feel sounds creepy. This is a weekly journal of my weekend endeavors. Enjoy!
Super Hexagon
Long form gaming on the iPad rarely sticks with me (See: me not playing Walking Dead since I wrote about). If I do log long hours on a mobile game it is usually one that I can chip away at in bite sized chunks (See: Kingdom Rush). Super Hexagon has no progression or through line, but what it has in spades is bite sized game play. My longest round ever was 29 seconds. It is simplicity defined. Minimal graphics, dope sound track and twitch play that you can get better at or totally regress back to square one on. I can fire off 4-5 rounds in under a minute usually. Which is exactly what I want from my mobile gaming.
The Signal and the Noise
Ethan gifted this book to me for Christmas, that was already on my "to read" list for 2013. Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is about the mountain of data we face everyday and the ability to glean accurate predictions from it, while not getting it all wrong. It covers the origin of FiveThirtyEight, the housing bubble, baseball and much more. I'm not finished with it yet, but so far it has read like a guide of the pitfalls I need to avoid at my job (data analysis) in the coming year.
Spin Drift (NSFW)
Another gift from Ethan. This time in the form of a heads up on a web comic he had not read, but thought I might enjoy. He was right in that I read Spin Drift from start to it's latest release in one sitting. Drawn in by the art at first and then hooked hard by the story. It reminds me a lot of Saga in it's star crossed fantasy lovers. Right down to the he with horns and she with wings bit, but this is a different tale altogether. Well worth a read and something I will keep coming back to in 2013.
Super Hexagon
Long form gaming on the iPad rarely sticks with me (See: me not playing Walking Dead since I wrote about). If I do log long hours on a mobile game it is usually one that I can chip away at in bite sized chunks (See: Kingdom Rush). Super Hexagon has no progression or through line, but what it has in spades is bite sized game play. My longest round ever was 29 seconds. It is simplicity defined. Minimal graphics, dope sound track and twitch play that you can get better at or totally regress back to square one on. I can fire off 4-5 rounds in under a minute usually. Which is exactly what I want from my mobile gaming.
The Signal and the Noise
Ethan gifted this book to me for Christmas, that was already on my "to read" list for 2013. Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is about the mountain of data we face everyday and the ability to glean accurate predictions from it, while not getting it all wrong. It covers the origin of FiveThirtyEight, the housing bubble, baseball and much more. I'm not finished with it yet, but so far it has read like a guide of the pitfalls I need to avoid at my job (data analysis) in the coming year.
Spin Drift (NSFW)
Another gift from Ethan. This time in the form of a heads up on a web comic he had not read, but thought I might enjoy. He was right in that I read Spin Drift from start to it's latest release in one sitting. Drawn in by the art at first and then hooked hard by the story. It reminds me a lot of Saga in it's star crossed fantasy lovers. Right down to the he with horns and she with wings bit, but this is a different tale altogether. Well worth a read and something I will keep coming back to in 2013.
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