Portent

MMO is short for Massive Multiplayer Online and refers to games where lots of players play er online- in games like World of Warcraft, Everquest and many more.

Metaplace looks interesting and I have signed up for the Alpha. The idea is that they provide the technology to let you set up a game, puzzle, role playing game in 5 minutes. Mind you, I don’t expect anything to be brilliant with just five minutes work- call me cynical. But you can reuse others work- inherit from them, with their permission. Metaplace’s technology provides the back end scalability to let lots of players interact in your world with 3D or 2D technology.

Each game is a website but with links to other games, well if nothing else it will provide lots of work for artists. Questions I have are – what are licensing terms regarding commercial use? How much logic can i put in to the backend server? If I make money out of this, what do I have to pay or is it even allowed? But it looks very interesting.

Warning – The site appears slow, I expect it is getting a lot of traffic so be patient!

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I think this has been well thought out. Some levels are very easy whereas other take a bit more effort.

You get a set number of bombs on each level and have to propel the main character to the exit door. On some levels there are barrels which explode after a while or tnt which blows immediately. Add in crates and it gets interesting. As you can see I’ve reached level 19 so far. Not easy as on some levels you have only one bomb- eg level 16.

You don’t have to solve all the levels in one go. Once you’ve done a level you can restart anytime at that level. Nicely implemented with great graphics. Recommended.

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Just as everyone probably has a novel in them, I think there are those with a boardgame design. Producing them is not so easy though as you have to design the game, test it, make the game bits, buy in the parts then try and sell it. A mate of mine John Harrington (who I haven’t seen in 10 years) of Fiendish games produced his own games. Lots of Blood, sweat and tears.

This site provides such a service. Actually they seem to do everything (you still have to design and test it), but after that it’s print-on-demand and order fulfillment. Similar in its way to lulu.com which does print-on-demand books. GameCrafter also do a fair bit to market your game via the site and trade shows.

While you are prototyping you can buy game bits from them. Unfortunately at the moment, it’s a US service only; so US customers may be able to buy a game that you produced but you can’t if you live outside of the US! Given that Europe, well Germany is the main source of good boardgames it’s to be hoped GameCrafter will start providing an export service. They take 50% of the price which gives you more of the pie than through traditional retail outlets which they say (and I believe them) is 30%.

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Unless you are a techy, specifically au fait with programming in C++, you’ll have trouble getting past the check points which ask you C++ questions. This was part of a marketing initiative by Sun earlier this year to promote programming tools. That has now finished but the game remains. It’s nicely implemented in Flash.

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Once again I’ve combined two screens to give you a better flavour of what the game is about. The left screen is the Bot designer where you buy parts to build your bot- you need a body to start with then add armour plating and various guns. As your cash is limited to start with, so are the choices but as you improve and earn cash you can buy better parts and fight tougher bots.

The right picture is the arena where you fight other bots. As you can see, my bot got beat up by Bonnie and Clyde. I’m constantly amazed by the sophistication of some of these games. Speaking from experience, no one ever appreciates how much programming effort goes into game programming.

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This is quite a fun diversion. In the centre is a rotating arm with various coloured balls attached. You have a ball shooting gun that revolves around the perimeter. You have to shoot the ball to hit other balls of the same colour so they fall off the centre.

It’s all about the timing and the first few levels are pretty easy. After that…

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There a number of Flash games where you have to place the States in the correct location in the USA. This one was covered not so long ago on portent.

Something a bit different is combining the idea of locating things (in this case countries) with Tetris to make it more interesting. Countries or small states (Andorra, Lichtenstein etc) fall slowly from the top. Use the cursor keys to rotate and place them correctly. Three levels of difficulty make it more or less challenging.

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A couple of years ago I started playing Travian, a free browser game of expanding your village and attacking other players set in the time of Rome with you being one of three tribes (Romans, Gauls or Teutons). I got knocked out but eventually realised, I’d been playing blindfold with one arm tied behind my back.

So I’ve rejoined and things are progressing slightly better. One thing I’d missed out on were the quests. Click the Soldier on the right to get these as you can earn grain, iron etc and speed up your growth.

Anyway, more as I progress. I’m only at position 5622 in the table so room to improve. I’m playing on server 6 under the name Portent.org.

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This games takes the defence scenario but extends it by giving you the ability to build armies (using mana which is obtained by killing the baddies) and then you can go on the offensive. It’s a simple 2d left right scrolling and can be played with keyboard or mouse.

You have artillery in the shape of a bow and as well as earning mana during the battle, you also gain experience that can be used to upgrade your weapons, give you new types of troops. Great graphics, an ok sound track and just fun. Excellent.

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Hexxagon from Neave games is a very easy to play but not so easy to win flash strategy game on a hexagon grid. As my “about to lose” position demonstrates! Starting with three pieces each, one in each of the six corners you have to capture territory. You can either

1. Clone a piece into an adjacent empty location
2. Jump a piece two locations aware.

The possible moves are highlighted when you click one of your pieces, green is clone, yellow is jump. If your piece is cloned or moved next to the computer pieces then each one adjacent to yours becomes yours. That’s it. So easy to play!

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This is a bigger review than usual, complete with animated gif which I’ve put together from screen dumps. I’ve been playing LootWars for a week or two now on my iPhone so feel qualified to give an in-depth review.

Its a Multi-player Mobile Game (MMG or MMO?) which is significant itself and not that expensive at just over £1. the object is to get to the top of the leader-boards by picking up scrap and bashing othr people to steal theirs. But you are limited to holding just 6 pieces of scrap.

Gameplay: After you run the App you get the first screen with rusty logo. Top right is your three important stats: A for attack total, D for defence and E for energy. the latter is important as it maxes out at 20, is used when you scavenge or fight and only recharges at the rate of 1 per 20 minutes of realtime. The game is server based but plays over 3G, Edge or Wifi.

At the start you loot (2nd icon) and when players trash your items after they beat you in a fight. The 2nd screen shows my player (portent by the way!) not looking too healthy because I’d just scavenged two low power items. the attack is the sum of the 6 items attack, defence is the total of the items defence. Scavenging gives you the odd good item but mostly crap so you have to beat people and swap your inferior items stuff for their better ones.

Fighting takes place in the arena. You can search for players matching a name (or part name so a matches a number) but you only so 24 or 25 maximum. It would be better if you could see more or there was a next button. If you put in a and search you get the first 24 that match a every time. Press refresh and you get a random selection. Once you pick someone- I picked ordieth who was a lot stronger than me (the colour codes show green weaker, yellow about the same and red stronger) a fight takes place which I won. Items always seem sorted by total value with weakest at the top. Ordieth had what I call a 80-93 spread. His weakest item was 80, strongest 93.

After I defeated him, I swapped my weak Sheriff badge (26) for his strong DVR box (93!) that must have pissed him! (There are over a 1,000 items with levels and other factors that are hinted at in the help. You can trash someones items rather than swap yours with theirs.

So it’s a simple albeit repetitive game that is quickly played. I tend to leave it for a few hours, do a few fights to recover what I’ve lost and hopefully get stronger. I get the feeling that the creators are tinkering with the game. Some people were dropping crappy items so they couldn’t be attacked. If you have 5 or 6 items you are vulnerable. 4 or less and you can’t be attacked. But they have stopped players dropping items temporarily.

I think that with a few minor tweaks they will have a better game; its not bad now but could be improved. I could think of a few different ways to improve it but they can’t make big changes suddenly. for instance you can visit the town to mingle and swap items but I’ve never seen that work. Some more info on the item colours would be good.

So my experience has been scavenge to get initial and replacement (for trashed ) items then fight to improve items. I’ll keep you updated on how this progresses. Currently I’m starting to find it a bit stale. But I think it will improve so I’m hanging in there. They do encourage feedback but haven’t responded or acknowledged mine. You can also visit the their website.

Graphics are very nice though are just window dressing. It works well even over edge and they’ve just changed servers which suggests they’ve got overwhelmed with players. It’s significant as one of the first wave of multi-player games for the iPhone. So if you like games and have an iPhone, give it a try! Rating 7 out of 10.

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I started playing this a few months ago and have played it for free (resisting the temptation to speed up building etc) and managed to get up to 13 cities before dropping because I lost interest.

Part of the problem is the alliance I am in, where my number of cities is about the same as the other 6 people added up together. But I still find it just too slow a pace. I’d log in and spend 15 minutes giving build and recruitment orders and ship resources so i could afford to get more Moonstones and thus more Barons and thus build more cities. But after a while that sort of gets very samey.

I think Travian had a better over all pace plus combat played a bigger part in that game. EA have done a very good job, it’s very well implemented but it needs a bit more balancing to give it pace. If that’s done (and an iPad/iPhone app that interfaced to it would be excellent!) I’d rejoin.

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Though the title is from Star Wars, the game design is the old Defender game where aliens are capturing humans and taking them into space.

This would be well done in Flash but for JavaScript it’s excellent with what looks like 50 or 60 moving objects on screen (explosions bullets etc) and a parallax scrolling mountains. I’d also suggest you try it in the chrome browser because that has a very fast JavaScript engine. i have only one minor criticism and that is you can easily miss the ship at the start (it’s in the bottom left corner- blends in well with the mountains!). If you really need it, read the game overview on his blog.

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The BSA (Business Software Alliance, not the Boy Scouts of America, Botanical Society of America or the Brazilian Space Agency!) is a real organisation that hunts down people using unlicenced software in companies.

They have produced a simple Flash game- can you find who is using unlicensed software in the company?

I notice they call this “Software Cluedo”. I do hope they’ve licensed the use of the word Cluedo from Hasbro (in which case shouldn’t it have a trademark symbol?). Wouldn’t it be ironic if they hadn’t licensed it…?

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This is a good time waster. You have a gun that you can change the angle with the cursor keys. You get a number of shots though you can restart any level. The playing area has stars which exert a gravitation pull on your shots. You have to figure out (by trial and error) the correct angle so that your shots hit the target and not the stars or exit the screen.

Easy to play- it just needs space bar and cursor keys input but some of the levels can be quite tricky and they get trickier as you progress. I’ve got to level 11 so far.

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