The holiday season is approaching so everyone knows what that means: hoards of enemies that never seem to stop coming, training new troops, adding new turrets to your base, cannons with legs, stealing crops from your local agriculture community, and messing with the forces of gravity... All the usual stuffo. Oops. Did I say the holiday season? I meant LINK DUMP FRIDAY! Wooty-tooty!
Age of War - draws elements from a complex strategy game and puts puts it into a much simpler format for the casual gamer. With only one base to defend on a 2D plane, it's very simple to keep track of everything that's going on. And with the ability to advance through different time periods the game utilizes 16 different units and 15 different towers very effectively. Did I mention you get special powers? Because you do.
Twilight Heroes (previously reviewed) - is a rather old-school browser RPG where you make choices, explore, find items and gain abilities by clicking links, sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure story, but much more interactive. By day you're an under appreciated worker in a droll job, but when the sun sets you put on that crime fighting mask and patrol the streets. You develop super powers as you play, such as telekinesis or super strength, all depending on the class you chose when creating a character. Build your crime hideout when it's dark, but don't forget you have work the next day.
Cannon Runner - is actually TWO games for the click of one. One is a simple but entertaining shooting game where you move your line... thingy... around and shoot stuff such as targets and cannons firing at you. Over time your weapon levels-up and becomes more powerful. The second is a more complex game that puts you in the place of a cannon that has legs. Your goal is to simply reach the end of each level. However, your cannon can't jump, so you must use your attack to propel yourself in the air as well as shoot enemies that are trying to stop you.
The Guarded Garden - is similar in concept to Pac-Man where you must run around eating as many carrots as you can while avoiding the dogs that chase you. You lose health over time and when you get attacked. You can run by holding space but this will deplete your health reserves. How many carrots can you has? Om nom nom nom.
Sola Rola - the Gravity Maze - is a unique puzzle game in which you need to get two blobs — Wiz and Waz — to their respective buttons. Their space ship is off-course and they're bored, so they decided to play with their ships gravity maze. Use the left and right arrow keys to rotate the stage and the blobs will roll around as blobs tend to do. The puzzles start out fairly simple but do get progressively more difficult.
Well this about wraps up this week's Link Dump Friday I hope these games can tide you over until JIG Poker Night, tomorrow at 3:00 PM (GMT -5:00).
Rotating clockwise and widdershins in Sola Rola. A Discworld reference in this day and age makes me a happy man.
Actually, widdershins isn't entirely a Discworld reference. It was the term used to describe a counterclockwise rotation before the the advent of clocks. Its opposite (i.e. clockwise) is deiseil or sunwise.
Sola Rola is long-winded at the beginning and the skip button wouldn't work. But the game is really good--it should have it's own entry.
Age of War was fun, but probably only once.
Both cannon runner games are great... except, how do I get through the wall in the first one?
Twilight Heroes recently moved to a new server, so now everybody interested is welcome to join without fearing excessive lag. Yay!
Don't try to go over the wall. Fall in the hole.
Keith, the playing field is wrap around :) so go past the bottom :D
I'd been messing around with Age of War for awhile. I have a ton of little gripes with the game (the third level's special ability is absolutely terrible, it's mostly a race to better defensive tech) they come from spending a lot of time playing it so I think I have to approve.
It's got the polish of something that was thrown together without much concern for quality, which is a shame, since this is a concept that could be built into something worth a lot longer look.
If you pause the game, the cooldown on your special ability still continues.
Sola Rola is totally fantastic. I second the motion to give it its own review. The great thing about the tutorial messages in the first few levels is that they don't pause the game. You can just play right through the level with the characters chattering helpfully in the background.
Glitch on level 35 of Sola Rola had me stumped for ages, the blobs we're connected by the tether and I couldn't reach anything. went out and back in and was pleasantly surprised that it had disappeared.
Wasted a lot of time on Age of War! Could use some tweaking, but it kept me interested until I beat it on hard.
Why is Twilight Heroes reviewed again? Especially because it's been downgraded from standalone review to a Link Dump Friday feature. Weird...
i found a glitch in the 2nd cannon runner game....
when you encounter the jetpack/fire power for the second time (the part where you have to burn the string...anyway there is a gap you have to jump, its like the part where you start and you have to jump onto the other end but the other end has a ceiling go on top of the ceiling and just go stright upward, you should be going so fast that you go through the top barrier and you will be on a long block with like 2 inches of the background left if you go up just a little bit you will be on a blank screen, if you want to continue the game just keep goin right and fall you should land on a platform at the gap you were going to jump...thats the glith
baba - it was included here by mistake before we caught it, but with the recent server trouble they had when we first posted the review, I felt that another mention couldn't hurt and left it. :)
Does the second game in Cannon Rum (the one where the cannon has legs) freeze between levels 2 and 3 for anyone else?
Sola Rola - I just can't get level 46. Just 3 levels to go and I just want to finish it off, but I just don't see it.
age of war is a really unfair game. your enemy get like 10 time the amount of money you do. here what happened....i had like 3 cannoneers on the field and i killed everyone of their guys and all of a sudden the comp buys and explosive cannon ($6000) and 4 cannoneers ($1000 ea.) the computer pulled $10000 out of its ass. i cant win!!!! its nearly impossible everytime i get an advantage the computer magicly gets money out of nowhere. dont play this game its not worth your time
My ploy worked, right after I posted, I figured it out.
Yep, Sola Rola is a good puzzle game -- to bad you have to sit through that beginning to get to the game.
Yuyuke, many players have complained about the Skip button not working, over at Kongregate. The author's reply to all these messages have been to upgrade your Flash player, as you need Flash 9 for it to work properly, it seems. So try doing that, and see if it helps.
How do you pause age of war?
I've also noticed an annoying bug on the third age of age of war. For some reason the colonial soldiers just march through my defenses. My soldiers go against their soldiers but they go do quickly while enemies soldiers mow through them. But they are supposed to be at the same level!
I don't know if it is a glitch, but it is annoying. The game has so much potential.
you sure took long enough to discover grabbit rabbit XD I played it about half a year ago
Sola Rola is really glitchy, just got the ending animation and I haven't done the level I was stuck on yesterday, looking back over the levels and it seems I've missed 3/4 while playing through (even though I was just clicking next level) so if you're stuck I suggest exiting and going back in in case there's a glitch.
Age of War is somewhat reminiscent of the 2001 free game Siege, by Fallen Angel Industries. I wonder if there are other games with the same basic idea.
Scott: the space bar pauses age of war....when you pause the special meter keeps going... by taking advantage of this it make the game a little more fair...i also found that its EXTREMLY hard to win until you get to the last stage of evolution...as i posted somewhere above i said it was impossible to win but you just have to hold the enemy until you get to the last stage of evolution... here is how to win...
when you get to the last stage of evolution keep saving until you get enough money to buy an ionray turret gun (the best turret you can get)buy one and keep using the special attack to kill your enemies. when you get the money buy another ionray turret gun and just sit and watch...as the turrets rip through your enemies soon there will be no enemies on the field and the comp will send out one enemy at a time, the turrets will fire on it even though its all the way on your enemies side of the field. The turrets will be shooting so fast that when the enemy die they will still be shooting and those bullets will hit your enemies fortress. Eventualy you will destroy their fort and...Congrats You WIN!!!
I made Cannon Runner =O
Holy crap how is it here?
Age of War is trivial on "normal" difficulty, and I beat it after one loss on "harder" difficulty, but "impossible" difficulty is tough. Haven't beaten it yet, but it seems doable. This is without using Todd's glitch, of course.
Unfortunately, on impossible difficulty, there seems to be a lot of randomness with regards to how your special attacks work out, and, to a lesser extent, how your enemy clumps his units, which I think takes away a lot of the enjoyment.
Epoch: i have to give you credit for trying to beat the impossible level on age of war because i gave up after about 5 minutes of playing because it took like 5 of my guys to kill 1 of the comps and they quickly overwhelmed me and easily destroyed my fort. I did try using the glitch i found to help me but i got impatient of waiting for the special to refill and really... cheating is no fun. good luck and congratz if you do beat it.
I agree with the above on Age of War. I was a great fan of Steam Brigade, and the notion of a Civilization-esque "tug of war" game is irresistible. Yet at the end of the day, AoW is fun for about three or four run throughs, and then discarded.
The primary trouble is that once you figure out a good sequence of units to send out, the only other tactical decision is whether or not to build defense or offense. Steam Brigade (for example) offers a variety of terrain and attacks, which demanded a bit of thinking beyond "two non-shooters, backed up by shooters". So, some obstacles and terrain would help.
There are a few other small nits, such as the facts that the final "charge up" screen for the special attack is illegible, and (a personal comment) all the blood is a bit, well, ick. But really, it feels like a dry run for a much more interesting game, if the designers would only spend a few more months creating varied terrain and perhaps a few more units. I would be willing to pay $5 for a game like this with more replay value.
In my opinion, with the exception of Sola Rola, which is pretty darn excellent, and Twilight Heroes (which has already been reviewed) this is the weakest Link Dump Friday in a very long time.
The Gravity Maze starts out as a real hit slowly turning into one of the most annoying games after like 20 levels. Even beats pixel hunting games in its potential for annoyance...
The trick with Age of War is that it's an economic game, not a tactical game. The fact that it's literally one-dimensional is a clue to that - the playfield is largely irrelevant, being merely a buffer. Buying offensive units is always a losing game, because either side receives more money for destroying a unit than the other side paid to make it. Buying too many offensive units also tends to put them in range of the other side's turrets, which pays their stored value more quickly to the other side (at least until the end, when turrets range over the whole playfield and everything dies fast). Turrets, OTOH, are costly but never pay money to the other side, never run out of ammo, and can even be traded in.
The instructions suggest an offensive-defensive balance, but that balance doesn't exist in practice - play mainly for turrets, keep a minimal number of units in the buffer, and you will starve the other side of capital (though it apparently cheats and constantly earns enough to keep *you* fed, else there'd be a stalemate). This makes the game fairly trivial.
Given that, I had hoped that there was some sort of sly satiric commentary embedded in the game (both sides evolve through the ages, yet it's called "age of war", and the gameplay is basically a testament to the futility of war). Unfortunately it seems instead to be yet another game made by and appropriate for a teenage male, which is admittedly very much the norm in this arena.
Basically a poor game because the interactivity is severely limited to a few decision points (when to evolve, what rate to set production at), but interesting for a short while.
As a side note, the tune is painfully catchy and hard to rid oneself of after playing the game.
dr troy d. you are the best ever
I like Sola Rola, but it makes my firefox really slow... the windows task manager shows up to 100% cpu-usage for this.
re: borednow
Actually, I'm not convinced your assessment is right on Age of War. You're right about gaining the financial advantage to playing defensively, but when I played that way, I noticed the computer was evolving to the next state before I even had the experience to do so.
The instructions page mentions that you gain experience when your own troops are killed, so it looks like what you really need is a balance between financial growth (which happens when you fight defensively or are outnumbered) and experience points (which come faster as you are more aggressive). I think the game really is about getting to the final stage before the computer, while still maintaining enough income to do so.
Although I'm sure nobody will see this comment, I just thought I'd say a couple things about Age of War if anyone's interested. This strategy will make "hard" level easy and "impossible" level very do-able with a little practice. These tips are for impossible level.
It is not necessary or advantageous to evolve at the same pace as the enemy. Stay at the lowest level of evolution until you have 45000 experience points. Use club men exclusively, and mete them out only as absolutely necessary, and only when the enemy's troops are in range of your egg-o-matic.
Concerning turrets, obtain three egg-o-matics before evolving. You will obtain your first one immediately: as soon as the game starts and there are five enemy troops on the field, activate the special ability and quickly buy an egg-o-matic. You will need the special ability to successfully hit 2 enemies for this to happen. If it doesn't, start over--you can't win.
After you get the first turret, keep the enemy close and issue only as many club men as you need to. ALL enemies will succumb to the club men and the egg-o-matics until the knife-wielding modern soldier. At the point that the knife guy shows up, you should be at 200000 experience points and should be able to evolve to the last stage and get a red ion turret. This is the only sketchy point in the game after the initial egg turret scramble.
Use the special abilities on things like dinosaurs and horses to accumulate money for turrets; otherwise, you can get by with club men on slingshot dudes, riflemen, even canoneers.
For the finale, you should have obtained at least three blue ion turrets. Go make a sandwich until you have enough dough for about 4 super soldiers. Then send 'em out. Victory!
[Edit: Spoiler tags added. -Pam]
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