In the microbial stage the game plays a bit like flOw; you’re a tiny organism that gets ever larger the more food items you manage to eat without being eaten yourself.  As you progress you’ll be able to add onto your critter by using the evolution points you accumulate through your feasting.  This aspect strongly reminds me of a perhaps lesser known game E.V.O.: Search for Eden that came out on the SNES in the US in 1993 which also used an evolutionary point buy system for adding on parts to your creation.  After enough growth has been accomplished in the seething pools of early life you crawl out to be a new land creature.

Having now acquired legs (or not, depending on your preference) you now move across the land looking for food and the added goal of finding a mate.  The gameplay is still similar to the whole eat-to-live scenario played out in the cellular stage but moves from the top down, 2D view to a fully 3D environment.  During this phase you put the finishing touches on your abomination before moving on to the tribal stage of the game.

You now control an entire tribe instead of a single entity.  This stage is a bit more RTS-like in that your tribe is attempting to, by use of various means, become the dominant one in the area on its quest for civilization.  The personality of the creatures gets fine tuned here as well since from here on out you don’t get to control them directly.  Warlike actions lead to warlike species and et cetera.  At the completion of this phase the player then moves onto building a city in the civilization phase.

The civilization phase seems to be similar to another game of the same name.  Customization doesn’t stop however as players are now able to design buildings and vehicles (air, sea, or land).  During this stage you can actually zoom all the way out to planet view for the first time as well.  By whatever means suits you best you wrest control of the planet to your side and boldly move on towards the stars.

In the space stage of the game the player gets to move about the universe looking for new planets to conquer or inhabit.. or both.  Through might, terraforming, or just plain ol’ meanness the player gets to flex their stellar muscles (in the star sense, no ego fluffing intended) and spread out as far as they choose.  They receive missions to complete and occasionally have to fend off invaders to their homeworld but in general actually have a large amount of control over how they wish to play the game at this point including being able to go and play any of the previously completed phases.  Or they can just go out and blow up planets.  Really, in the Spore universe there are billions of planets to interact with and the content is constantly evolving itself.

Throughout the entire game it will be able to upload your creations to a central database and download content from the same to populate your world(s) with the machinations and beasts of other Spore players.  There will be some checks in place where you can control who and or what gets sent to your game to avoid the onslaught of genital monstrosities that already populate the database being filled by users of the Creature Creator software that’s currently available.  Perhaps more than any game prior, Spore will offer an infinitely re-playable experience where you actually will never know what sort of things you’ll be able to see and interact with.

This time we’re going to look at a new game I picked up at a recent convention I attended, RoundCon.

I’ve had the Settlers from Catan for years and love the little game.  It’s fast, simple, and a blast to play.  I’ve had my eye on one of it’s successors for a while now, Starfarers from Catan!

In Starfarers the play is very similar to the original Catan with a few interesting changes.  First the basics:  You roll dice to see what generates resources each turn based on numbers on chips on each of the resource generating locations.  You use these resources to build things.  In the original Catan you built cities and roads.  In Starfarers you build expansions to your ships, colonies, spaceports, and trading posts.  The general idea is the same: you want to be the first to garner fifteen victory points in order to win the game.  In Settlers victory points were counted from cities and towns as well as some ‘prize-like’ victory points for having the largest standing army (special cards you could buy) or the longest contiguous road.  Starfarers counts colonies and space ports but also introduces some extra competition in the form of the trading system with the alien races further away from the starting planets.  The player with the most trading posts around a particular trader gets that race’s friendship token.  These tokens are worth two victory points each!  Also you can, using the wonderful event system in the game, gain fame rings on your ship to indicate heroic deeds accomplished.  Every two fame rings grants another victory point.  You gain and lose favor with the traders and gain and lose fame rings leading to an enjoyable dynamic experience.

As a two player game it was fun but by adding more it can only get better.  As just two players the universe became divided rather quickly and after I took three of the four traders through a bit of luck and speed the game was concluded.  With more players the struggle to maintain control of the traders would be more heated and the game would last longer.  Still, that’s just taking a great cake and adding icing.  And who doesn’t like icing?  Someday I might pick up the expansion that adds two more max players (right now it caps at four players) but I hardly ever get a large gaming group together these days with my time constraints.  Those acquainted with my other site, Falling Leaves, are already aware of the little leisure time I can afford between work and school so I won’t dwell on it here.

The summary here is that the game, Starfarers of Catan is well made and dynamic enough for repeated playing.  While the four player base set maximum is somewhat constraining it does not hold back on any of the spacey fun the game presents.  Live long and build ship expansions.

Pathfinder promises to be a magazine touted towards campaigns under the Open Gaming License. While the information in their release is brief; at first glance the publication appears to be a rehashing of Dungeon, most specifically the scenarios, only using a more generic rules set than one of the big DnD ones. However, digging deeper into the dark bowels of their FAQ, it seems that the truth is far worse.

The magazine with be primarily only pieces of an adventure spread out over multiple issues. The first episode of this style will last the first six issues. Now, Dungeon had these in it, too, but it also held far more info and articles. There will be some of this in Pathfinder as well, but that’s not the focus of the magazine. It’s adventure telling, not assisting.

Each issue apparently will run right around fourteen dollars to purchase from the store and most likely a reduced cost to subscribers. So, it’s also more expensive than Dragon. So, by crunching some numbers together, the first campaign will run six issues at fourteen dollars each, so for one complete mini campaign your out of pocket cost from the store will be roughly eighty five dollars. Yes. EIGHTY FIVE. How much do you care for buying the whole core set of three-five DnD books again for the sole purpose of one measly adventure? Those pregenerated campaign books for sale run what, thirty dollars maximum? So you go out to purchase Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and return with Ptolus and all it’s ostentatiously overpriced glory. Ridiculous.

I might pick up the first issue simply to take a more informed stance on the issue; see how it’s laid out, content, how much it weighs my wallet down, etc. I hardly expect to be floored by anything other than Paizo’s vanity. I sincerely believe that the reason Dragon and Dungeon’s licenses have been pulled back by WotC was to rip them back from the gangrenous claws of Paizo’s terror squad.

So the poll:

Will you be making a purchase of Paizo’s new magazine, Pathfinder?

* Sure, how bad could it be?
* Yes, I buy all sorts of these magazines.
* Maybe.
* No, I hate those guys.
* No, I will boycott them for what they have done.

Desktop Tower Defense!

The premise is simple: it’s somewhat based on the defense maps from Starcraft and Warcraft.  You build multiple towers of various kinds and upgrade them with the gold you get from killing creeps (what the coder calls the enemies).  As you progress the creeps get increasingly bigger hitpoint pools and more types begin to appear.

First off there are the normal creeps.  Just a group of ten with no special abilities.  Next is group type spawns.  These little blue guys cluster ever so tightly together; which is great because it actually makes them easier to pop by most means.  Next are the annoying immune spawns.  One of the cannons you have at your disposal, the frost tower, slows creeps down in a splash radius and does some damage.  Immune creeps are unfazed by frost effects though and plow right along.  Next up are fast spawns.  These drop-shaped entities zoom right along at about double the speed of the other spawns.  Luckily the afore mentioned frost towers affect them just fine.  Flying spawns are next.  These yellow triangles are not blocked at all by towers and cannot be hit by some such as the bash and dart towers.  Finally are the accursed spawn creeps.  For the most part they’re only irritating.  That is until the boss shows up.  More on that in a moment.  Spawn creeps only arrive in groups of four but when you kill one it only splits in two.  Great, right?  So bosses are to be discussed.  For the most part they’re just larger versions of their counterparts but with greatly increased hitpoints.  The only difference is spawn boss.  He splits into two when first blasted and then each of those split into two again!  I think there’s one more level of splitting but I am unsure.

The towers at your disposal are varied.  The first one, the pellet tower, is a slow little gun that is the cheapest to build.  In the grand tradition of most games like this they are also some of the most powerful when fully upgraded.  At max level they turn into sniper towers who allow you to click on specific creeps to target as well as immensely increasing range and damage.  Following that we have the squirt tower.  This is much faster but does less damage.  When advanced all the way it becomes the typhoon tower which has slightly increased range and only a little less damage than the sniper towers.  Frost towers are fun.  I described them above and there’s really not much else to say; at top level they’re blizzard towers with slightly increased range and damage and as they increase the slow amount increases (almost imperceptibly).  Dart towers are basically missile launchers.  These cannot hit air but have a decent range and do splash damage around whatever they hit.  At max level as ICBM towers they have range almost as good as the sniper towers but don’t do as much damage.  Also they are mind numbingly slow.  General consensus around the office is that they are not really worth the trouble.  Swarm towers are fully anti-air and can hit nothing else.  They’re kind of like dart towers for flying creeps but do more damage with less range and are far faster.  Maxed out they become storm towers that are not too different from their earlier versions but do more damage and have greater range.  Lastly a new addition to the tower team as of recently are the bash towers.  They have a very small radius but when they ‘fire’ they damage everything in their radius with a chance to stun which increases with levels.  The problem with bash towers is that, even upgraded all the way to quake towers, their range never increases.  And even at max their stun percentage is only twenty percent.  They can be fun to play with but as they are also the most expensive to upgrade in the game they are usually left by the wayside.

So that’s about it.  When you get a chance give it a shot and let me know what you think.  This is everyone’s favorite gaming crab signing off.

Gametap aquired the liscence and now offers the online experience the game was designed for as an exclusive title through their site.  There must be something to this game.  In reading articles about its death and rebirth it seems that it was the community that brought it back from the brink.  The community lived for two plus years without the game ever having the communal aspect installed.  This dedication saved it.  This just goes to show what power gaming communities can have over their favored products.   That can perhaps bring a glimmer of hope to those of us who harbor a flame for less than popular games and wish for them to return from obscurity.  I’m looking at you, Talislanta and Unknown Armies.

“I third it, Floyd said quickly as Madonette tried to speak. This
Was this really the end? I turned the pistol over in my hands, saw
touched a match to it, jumped back as it ignited. A tongue of black
that had carried me away. Steengo had suspected this-but why hadnt he
CHAPTER 7
peeking over the top of another matted beard.
very troubled outside world. The galaxy is at peace-or so you say.
out, wrote his in-then re-recorded the whole thing just as if it were
Likewise. If you have a moment I have a picture here I would like
more appeared, waving cudgels, howling as they ran, bearing down on”

“This required watching recordings of all of the most popular groups,
now.
Tremearne. Tell him to get some radios down here that we can use to
Bottle banks! Isnt that an unfortunate term?
forehead, which felt very nice.
Well then, like to break it to you gently, this stuff really sucks.
that. He pointed the gun between my eyes. Dont move?
Just like you-only with a different name. Hoppe. As soon as it made
what you just said. Kindly clack your jaw-a-phone and get onto
As it was they strained forward, eyes bulging with homicidal rage. I
A big fat red slob! I shouted. A hairy conman!”

“What are banks?
our tracks and stared at the herd passing slowly by.
swimming pool in any case. We just wanted to see how well you did.
I could have finished it then and there and made life easier. But I
steps of a brick building.
on all fours. By this time even the dullest of the audience knew who
sealed in an armored case that would take a diamond drill to open. I
were forcefully relocated to this planet. This inadvertent
and rapped onDIV>nuts in case they want to come back for seconds. Then rest up until
recorded, then rehearsed some m”

“both sides of the wall have had the treatments. This makes for
you are tired of living. After five minutes the outer door closes and
that we had just left.
propaganda for the troops. If we cant believe him about that-how can
Fine. I stopped whispering and called out. Im most cheered to
What kind of anomalies? Metal deposits?
bystanders and occasionally giving a royal flick of the hand at some
rewards, possible remission of sentence, lots of fedha. With great
chamber was empty. I looked at Floyd who seemed just as bewildered as
someone who sort of makes up the tunes, then writes down the stuff”

“I dropped into a chair while I waited for beneficence to take place.
He coughed and groaned when the pressure was released. Demons in the
Bonan tagon-kaj bonvenu al Paradizo.
Captain-thats the one thing we got plenty of! A good six months of
inspiration. Found it.
every word we said, so I chomped my jaw to get Tremearnes attention
His very words, Floyd said. But so what? The artifact is long gone
wall all pointed guns at me.
The trial . . . I said feebly, visions of lawyers, appeals, torts
against eavesdropping.
to be the ones pretty much in charge.”

“help.
from his mother and the other women. In some primitive cultures the
inspiration. Came up with the best I could do at such short notice.
my shaking hand in what might have been a maternal way.
thought I heard a low moan from Floyd, but the baaing and farting of
Did they indeed? I would believe nothing they said.
down with the others.
index finger, left hand. M glued to the pinkie of the same hand.
Not only short on imagination but bereft of manners as well. And when
buckle.
No, no-not that! an ,elderly scientist cackled. Then shut up and”

“academese. Was clear speaking becoming a lost art?
You can take the cuffs off while we are in this room. I am Captain
fists. Very soon we would be away from weary wardens and on our own.
group composed only of security agents. But it will take time to put
Indefatigable did not shake hands but instead hit his closed right
nightmare!
The double image flickered and became one.
which one blows strongly to emit sounds. He comes from a distant
to the journalists. Nor had the map even hinted at the many levels
tools into it. My belt buckle twisted open and I took out the reel and”

Today Elyssa spent some time in Qufim partying it up with some fellow adventurers. Except for a slight mishap involving some mistargetted macros, everything went smoothly. Well, mostly.

The party consisted of Ely, level 20 white mage/10 black mage, a paladin, a black mage, a beastmaster, a ninja, and a thief. So there’s a tank, a healer (Ely), and three damage dealers. Not too shabby, although she might have preferred a red mage on call. A little extra enfeebling and healing could have maybe sped things along a bit faster but the experience came at a good pace. The first camping spot was a small, frozen over lake in the middle of the island. There were plenty of worms and crabs around to pick on for fun and profit, and Ely’s power wasn’t being taxed too hard. She kept up the protectra and shellra, and switched off barstonra and barwatera depending on what the team was up against. When night fell on the island, though, things got a wee bit hairier.

As the sun went down, suddenly Ely and gang were surrounded by undead! Wights and banshees seemed to come from nowhere with malicious intent focused upon her little group. Despite having both a white mage and a paladin on hand, they were not going to be much of a challenge for these spooks. So, they retreated back onto an ice floe in the middle of the lake.. er, more of a pond really. This lasted for a few hours, enticing more crabs out onto the ice to visit violence upon. However, after a while the worms nearby got wise to the game and crowded the not too distant shore and started pummelling the group with nasty earth spells like stonega and rasp.

So there they were, Ely and such, surrounded by mean undead and spiteful caster worms. Suddenly one of the party members decided to make a run for it. Ely, not feeling too keen on the idea stayed behind with another member as the other four took off at a sprint, quickly being harried by a pair of banshees. One dropped and then another until half the group was dead. After waiting for things to settle down a bit, the beastmaster slathered some silent oil on himself and snuck off. Elyssa was not about to be left totally alone, and since the majority of the undead had taken off after the fleeing others she decided to cast a sneak spell on herself and tiptoed out of the narrow ravines that led to the pond and made her way to Delkfutt’s Tower.

As the night wore on Elyssa entertained herself by sitting outside the tower (wisely out of the range of the nasty creatures that were wandering around outside) and listening to the sometimes banter, sometimes arguments, of other nearby adventurers. After a while, only about an hour before dawn, finally the group managed to get back together. Elyssa suggested the ripe hunting grounds they were at earlier; the crabs and worms had been fairly good to their party.. up till the ghosties started to show up. But no, the leader decided that we were going to hunt the somewhat tougher creatures out by the tower. So, after protectra-ing and shellra-ing back up, the thief ran out to bring back a slightly larger crab than the ones they had fought earlier.

As the battle heated up it became clear that something was not right. The black mage had aparently changed his subjob after he died.. for some reason. So there they were, that little group, with a chunk less firepower against something relatively tough for the current setup. And then the mage decides to fix the problem. Great! However, he decided to do it in the middle of combat by warping himself to another continent. Not so great. Regardless, Ely and crew managed to take down the crab, although she was drained of magic power for the first time since she had set out that day and most of the party was fairly beaten up. Also she was a slight bit irritated that the tanks .. damage dealers, whatever the people hitting the crab had decided themselves to be at the moment, kept dropping the ball and letting the critter come and take some swings at her. Still, they managed to take down another one before the black mage got back in another drawn out battle.

Around this time Ely noticed the time and announced that she would have to leave by the end of the day. It turned out that other members also had other engagements that were pulling them away. So, there, on the other side of the island from Jeuno, the party parted ways. Ely put her sneak enchantment back up and hit the road. A couple of hours later and she was winding her way back through the tunnel to Jeuno.

Back in town, Ely decided to check her delivery box only to find that no one in Windurst had apparently wanted to buy her stack of fire crystals and bird eggs despite the, what she considered at least, very reasonable asking price. Not one to be upset with such a thing for long though, she stuffed them in her pockets and turned around to leave her rented room when an idea popped into her head. Doubtingly, she asked her moogle if he could tend to her flower pots back in her house in Windurst Woods. Surprisingly, as soon as she mentioned it, the little bugger warped himself back to Windurst! That certainly caught Elyssa by surprise. Still, she could communicate with him and requested that he plant some grain seeds in both her pots. Completing that he faded back in and with a shrug Ely hit the busy streets of Lower Jeuno to stop by the auction house.

With the sun going down over the ocean, Elyssa put the crystals, eggs, and even a crab shell she garnered from her earlier party up on the auction block. The crystals and eggs actually would sell at a higher price here in Jeuno, it seemed. The crab shell wouldn’t even sell for a full thousand gil, however. “Well, better some gil than no gil, I suppose,” Ely was muttering to herself as she noticed, gee, it sure was getting dark out here. She wandered down the road a bit to visit the local magic shop to pick up a scroll of barblizzara. As she was walking back towards her rented room she noticed that it was even darker than before. There were streetlamp lining the street but no one had lit them yet. So, she went to ask a guard she saw about it.

To Ely’s surprise, the guard asked if she would like to light the lamps! At first she felt a little put out by the question, wasn’t it the guard’s duty after all? But, the idea intrigued her, and it wasn’t a long road anyway, so, smiling, she agreed and accepted a torch from the guard who went back to watching the chaos of the lower auction house. Walking down the street, Ely counted off each of the lamps she lit till she reached the other end of the road, twelve lamps in all. She returned the torch to the guard who mentioned that Jeuno was thankful for any help it could get with even the smaller things and that its citizens would not ignore a good deed. So, with a fulfilled feeling, Ely, who became a level 21 white mage that day (complete with all the new level 21 white mage spells, barblizzara, cure III, and regen), made her way back to her rented room, bid a good night to her moogle, and drifted off to sleepy land.

To be fair, Ice Age was a bit before its time. Since its creation Wizards continued with their tradition of having one shot expansions. Ice Age was meant to be like the later sets, I believe debuing with Tempest, that were in cycles of three; the first set came out with the largest amount of cards and also the run of lands and then the story was advanced through the next two sets. Ice Age had the first and the third (I think) but it was missing one..

Enter Coldsnap, Ice Age’s long lost sibling. Not much is currently known about this new expansion, well, by me at least. It seems that rather than re-release the run of snow-covered lands, we’re going to see snow-covered permanents and a new kind of mana specifically for this set. So now, instead of worrying about all those snow-covered swamps (regarding which the designers brought up a good point about, in a frozen land, isn’t everything snow-covered?) instead you might have some snowy elves or chilly artifacts that you can tap for this new and improved mana cost. It’ll have it’s own symbol, of course, which is nice. However this just kinda seems like another way to handle the same thing we already had with the snow-covered lands.. without having a second grouping of lands. I don’t mind, I suppose.

Regardless, I figure I’ll pick up some packs, I usually do. The pre-release events for this set are this week (7/8-7/9) so I assume that they should hit shelves next week or the one after that.