Monthly Game Smackdown: January 2010 – Round 3
Welcome back to the Monthly Game Smackdown! As a reminder, the MGS is where 4 games are picked at the beginning of the month and every week each game is played for an hour.
Another Monday is here and so are the results of the hour spent with each game last week
Game #1
- HISTORY Great Empires: Rome (DS)
- Current Rating: Sorta Fun
What was played
Continuing the campaign
Thoughts so far
Have I mentioned that this is a long game? In the hour spent, I have manged to capture a few towns and recruit, and lose, a few armies.
I finally understand the relationship between resources, towns, buildings, and military units! All of your towns with a farm, mine, or lumber mill produce some amount of the 3 resources that go into the empire’s pool to be spent on buildings and military units. It’s up to you to pick what buildings get built where, with the strategy of being able to recruit the type of force you want where you want them. Since it takes several rounds to move unites any real distance, let alone getting them to meet up and group into a larger force, having a town that can recruit strong military units at the front of your controlled area is pretty important for being able to keep your sanity for how long it takes to get anywhere.
In short, having a better time with this game but think it’s unlikely to keep my interest beyond one campaign.
Game #2
- Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters (PSP)
- Current Rating: Sorta Fun
What was played
Still jumping and shooting my third-person view through the story.
Thoughts so far
Enjoyability is staying steady. I’m still not getting the hang of the camera controls especially when there’s a lot of enemies coming at me.
For some reason they decided to throw a race (or 4) in the middle of your hurried pursuit of the kidnapped girl, i.e. the plot. In some ways I understand the need to mix it up, but the only point of the races is to collect new items, not actually get you any further along the in recovering the girl. It’s like reading a sci-fi novel and having the entirety of chapter four be devoted to crossword puzzles or sodoku (maybe this game and Game #1 have more in common than I thought?)
Game #3
- Age of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Ships (PC)
- Current Rating: Sorta Fun
What was played
We pick up with our hero where we left him; running about the island doing chores in hopes of getting enough cash to hire a crew.
Thoughts so far
Slog slog slog. It must be some form of insanity that makes me want to keep playing this if nothing else to understand how it all works. It hasn’t slipped in the ratings enough to take it down another notch, but it’s getting close. The first task that seems simple enough, going to get a diamond the banker dropped in the jungle, but after running about the jungle for most of the previous session in hopes of finding it, I had to turn to the web to find someone that had recorded where it was. The solution: turn off the foliage graphics because the diamond is too small to be seen with them on. That should pretty much describe the level of difficulty this game is throwing at you. On easy.
Like Game #1, this game requires a significant time investment to actually experience the entire game (notice how I haven’t sailed anywhere yet). The investment is increased when you get too used to the modern marvel of autosave and swagger into a fight after 45 minutes of game time that you did not save.
Game #4
- Command & Conquer Red Alert 3: Uprising (PC)
- Current Rating: Fun
What was played
Tried a couple of maps in the Challenge mode
Thoughts so far
The challenge mode is both fun and lives up to its name, especially for those like me that beat RTS AI by attrition. The various factions in this mode start with a limit on available units. As you progress through the challenges you get some starting credits depending on how well you do and unlock more advanced units. But, to me, the best thing about this mode is the time limit which is how long it should take “the best” players to beat the map. This gives me something to aim for so that I can actually get better at RTS’s like this and Starcraft.
So with the combination of the challenge mode and the Yoriko campaign, Red Alert 3 has finally broken the 4 way tie. Let’s see if the final hour with each game has anything to say about that.