Portent

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.

Link

Popularity: 2% [?]

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!

Link

Popularity: 14% [?]