Link Dump Friday
October 16, 2009
Welcome to your Friday, dearly beloved readers! How was your week? How's great aunt Marge doing? Did you ever figure out how to get those ketchup stains out of your new jeans? (Sorry about that, by the way.) Somewhere, birds are singing, bees are buzzing, and children are laughing. But here it's time for strategy, super bosses, and birdies, oh my! That must mean it's time for Link Dump Friday!
Atomic Super Boss - Despite sounding like somebody's garage-bound indie band, Atomic Super Boss is actually an itty-bitty pixel battle with lasers, ships, and high-octane ACTION. Stay shooting, stay alive, stay on the top of the high score list for approximately twenty seconds before three other people beat you so soundly just looking at the game's title brings tears to your eyes. No, I'm not bitter.
Must Eat Birds - Must... eat... BIRDS. No, don't try to resist. You really must. The Nomster won't rest until he's nomed them all! The Flash version of the weird iPhone app has arrived for your hot little fingers. Note: may not be for fans of cartoonish birds, or people who really, really hate LOLcats. You can has noms, k? Hey, look ma! We're in a clique on the internets!
Eridani - Space! Strategy! Mining! Explosions! Woo! Eridani has it all, baby. Build your colonies, not for the purpose of research and settlement, but for amassing an army to demolish anyone else foolish enough to think there's enough room in the universe for the two of you. I guess you couldn't just BUY the planet. After all, why obtain peaceably what you can steal in a malestrom of fire and bloodshed that the universe will remember in horror for centuries to come?
Banana Dash World 4 - Who likes monkeys? Not me. Insufferable, grinning little poo-flingers, always after my bananas, no matter how carefully I hide them in the ocean, only accessible by Dolphin Olympics-style gameplay. How does a monkey get a submarine anyway? Maybe... maybe it's best not to ask.
Maus Trap - While for some of us this title may briefly conjure up fond memories of exceedingly expensive board games we begged our parents for endlessly and then promptly abandoned after playing half a game, this particular title is actually a game of skill and avoidance. If only it were a board game. Then you wouldn't feel bad about hurling it against the wall when you lose.
Come on, don't be so cynical..
Mousetrap got played at least two times in my house... :p
The links for Atomic Super Boss and Must Eat Birds both link back to Jay Is Games for me. Hmm.
I think you forgot to put the link of the first 2 games in. What I want to say is, they're linking to the JIG main page.
The link to must eat birds is broken!
Games are odd things, or at least one's reactions to the are....while I found the buckets of gore in "Vox populi" hilarious, I find the smudgy bloodstains in Maus Trap totally repellent.
The text links are broken, but the icons still take you to the games.
Links fixed.
I love Dora's reviews. I don't actually enjoy playing most of the games she writes about, but I read the reviews just because they are juicy and so fun. So there. :-)
Just. Eat. Birds. made me laugh out loud. I had no idea what I was meant to be doing, but that didn't really matter. I had so much fun, and isn't that what a game is meant to be in the end? I showed it to my boyfriend too, now we both randomly shout MAXIMUM BAKE at each other. It's sad really. But the game is awesome! Vibrant and fun!!
Yeah!
Atomic Super Boss is amazing!
#42 on normal, and #36 on hard!
Looking at it, though, it's crazy to think that only 80 people in the world have unlocked Hard Mode. :/
Atomic Super Boss! Yeah, #21 on hard!
Also, in order to open the Secret that's in the Options screen, you need to be hit by every attack. Generally you'll be hit by pretty much everything after just playing through twenty to fifty times (you can check in Stats to see what you haven't been killed by). Getting hit by the "Mover" is difficult (the Mover is when he swaps sides of the screen; you have to be hit while he's moving between them, not once he's swapped).
What the secret does:
Inverts the screen!
Eridani is fun for a while, but on the later levels I found that the controls seem to get in the way of implementing an effective strategy.
This sonnet is for Dora. The greatest JIG reviewer there ever was.
Elegance she bears, yet she knows her part
Such colloquiality, such style!
She amazed me and she has won my heart
Words come with no effort, like the Nile
Or so it seems, that this angelic thing
Can come up with the greatest game review
Her reviews to my very soul they sing
People who can compare to her are few
What she will say next not one could tell
Jay is Games is so blesséd to have her
Often she will cause me to LOL
Her articles are more precious than myrrh
.........But hark! She will never know who I be
.........I can always know her but her never me
thanks dora! must eat birds: the fact that this avian feast takes place in such an idyllic picnic setting would be incongruous enough but it is made all the more mind-blowingly mental by the fact that there are lashings of BATTENBERG cake on offer!
MAXIMUM BAKE, GARARARRR!
Eridani has lots of good things going for it, but falls flat on some aspects, most notably in the AI department, both tactical and strategic, as well as game balance.
Ships sometimes choose the long route around a planet to attack a building that was right next to them, just because another ship was in between. More irritatingly, the player's ships don't show much initiative and can stand peacefully in place while their comrades are shot to pieces a few meters away. The torpedo turrets, on the other hand, have a tendency to keep shooting at the first ship that came into range, and if that ship is fast enough to outrun the torpedoes for an extended amount of time, the turrets will be useless against anything else.
Finally,
turtling behind planetary defenses is immensely powerful against any fleet. As I write, I have over 30000 resources and little use for them. A combined attack fleet and two IP missiles were enough to take out the enemy's Battle Centre, and the poor fellow is now mindlessly spinning the blueprints of a new one around the planet, unable to build it until I make enough room for it - apparently the AI won't go so far as to ponder whether the extra power station that it had buffered really is more important than a Battle Centre.
Nevertheless, neither of us can proceed from here: he doesn't have the fleet but he does have his planet riddled with defenses I can't well remove without making space for that Battle Centre, and his important buildings are behind the planet, impossible to hit with IP missiles(!). And since he also has tens of thousands of resources, he can always amass enough battle drones to scrap even a full fleet of my battleships with the help of his turrets.
The fact that the game slows to an incredible crawl when there are enough buildings doesn't help much. Building a reasonable fleet is a matter of clicking a few times and going to lunch in the meanwhile.
@Spoon:
You said it way better than I could have. The defenses break the game. Probably not the hair-pullingly frustrating way that most strategy games get broken, but broken nonetheless.
Just like your description, I get to a point where I CAN kill the enemy... but I just don't feel like building the 15 or 16 consecutive fleets it's going to take to wipe him out with attrition...
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