Banner Offer Ended...For Now!

The deadline for free banner ads was yesterday! Or was it the day before? I lose track especially when I spend whole days away from my machine. Anyway...

The point is that I've received exactly 4 submissions, which as it happens is exactly the right amount! Here are the 4 banners that will be displayed, starting with The Great White Destroyer which started today:



Looks like the news got round a bit late for more people to send banners in, but don't worry - this probably won't be the last time I offer this (providing it proves of some use) So keep checking back for future stuff like that!

My Time With: Altitude!

Normally I'm just not into flight games, but as this was side on and had a cartoonish style I decided to give it a go. The fact that it was on offer on steam had nothing to do with it!
So after a few false starts (it asks you to register and the like) it starts you off on some training exercises to get used to flying and such. It literally has you flying through hoops! In fact the tutorial is quite nice and doesn't get bogged down, which would probably be quite hard to do with a game like this. After a few training exercises it hit me that this is a multiplayer game rather than a solo experience!

I was a little disapointed, I had a load of ideas for what the missions might have been like. Such as chases through tough terrain or death defying nose dives before dropping bombs. In this style it would have been really good! But I persisted nonetheless.

After completing all of the training missions I dipped my toe into the cool waters of the internet and started playing against real people, which is always worrying. So far I'd enjoyed the training but still got the firing buttons mixed up! But luckily I found that many people were far worse than me! And although I was rarely the best in any game I was often in the honourable mentions (usually given the longest-kill-streak award because I button mash the fire key!)

Even better than that I realised that I could customize my plane with different perks depending on what I'd achieved in the past. This included different unlockable weapon perks such as double fire, or secondary weapon upgrades and even engine upgrades where you can increase the power generated (power is required for shooting and afterburner.) This led to a whole new world of fun!

I also discovered you can play skirmishes offline  with variable bot difficulty which is great for practicing. It's especially useful when you've unlocked a new plane type and need to learn how and when to use it.

I'm really enjoying Altitude and if it had a single player campaign then I would probably have given it a whole 2 page review. As it is I don't want to judge it based on my own online experiences as that's unfair if you guys (who might have decided to buy it) didn't have as much fun as I did! All I will say is that it's great fun, especially the team matches.

You can get altitude from their site where there's a free demo!

Max And The Magic Marker Review!

It's that time of week again - actually it's a day after that time of week so I'm a bit late!

The Max And The Magic Marker review is up (finally) so go take a look!

Click here for the Max And The Magic Marker review!

Oh Flock, it's Wednesday! Time for some mid-week deals!

Mid weekly deals?

Crazy idea I say but why not take advantage of this madness hm?

Direct2Drive are currently offering the Herd-Em-Up game Flock (published by Capcom no less) for only £3/$5 (I'm guessing at the american currency conversion.) While I've not played this I'm extremely tempted by this offer!

Steam are having a Square-Enix week thing where they have a Battlestations and Order Of War Bundle going on. Personally this doesn't appeal much to me but I'm sure plenty of you out there are into these WW2 type games!

It also annoys me a bit how Steam are still saying they have Bioshock 2 on offer (if you check their "all specials" section) at £27 when you can get it from Amazon for £22 (inc postage!)

Anyway, aside from this the first online pre-order of M.U.D. TV is at GamersGate where it's currently on offer at £25. Still not sure about this game yet, need to think about it.

GOG are now selling Aquanox! That's a blast from the past, and it's good to see it on there. It's being sold for $5.99, but I feel it's my duty to say a) It's a fairly short game and b) My old boss picked this up for £1 in Kidderminster once...

My Time With: MUD TV Demo

When I first heard about this I thought: Wow, it's a new simulator game along the lines of Theme-Park/Theme-Hospital, some of the greatest gaming experiences of the late 90's!

It turns out it's not quite as good as those and I'll explain why.

So the premise is that you are trying to build a TV station, attracting viewers of all types and making cash off the advertising. You can buy shows from the "Slave and Film Corp" to schedule on your channel or you can even write and produce your own with the right staff.

Unfortunately the demo features far less building of your studios and managing your staff that it does buying and scheduling programs whilst assigning the right adverts to the demographics that will be watching. This isn't bad in itself but after day 4 or 5 it really starts to drag and feels more like a casual time-management game. A big reason for this is that you control a character (called Matt) who has to travel to each room to perform any kind of buying, selling, scheduling, writing or production tasks that are required. Having a character who is in the game feels out of place and running between the different floors to buy programs and adverts gets dull quite quickly.

The interface really isn't the best and while intuitive some of the time there are too many occurances where I didn't know where to drag and drop items or when I needed to press a particular button to start a task (for example when you want your staff to start writing a script)

But the very worst part is the tutorial text, it's long winded and difficult to read. The UI doesn't get highlighted where you're supposed to click and along with the other issues here makes it one of the worst tutorials ever. As PC Gamers I think we need saving from tutorials like this, I for one haven't got the patience for pages and pages of text based explanation. I'm sure Theme Hostpial wasn't like this!

With all of that said there are some nice touches to MUD TV. Watching the shows get produced is fun, and the staff are all named like celebrities, such as Nuck Chorriss. The room building is standard stuff again but still entertaining to play around with. In fact anything not to do with the film scheduling is fun! Plus the whole thing looks fun which helps. The TV shows being shown are quite soon to repeat but there appears to be quite a few and you generally get different characters in them each time.

Obviously this is only the demo and I don't believe the game has been released yet so who knows what they're going to keep, cut, improve (hopefully not make any worse!) And I'm still keen to play the final product because this kind of game appeals to me on plenty of levels.

I'd highly recommend, as usual, trying the demo out because it's quite a substantial time-drainer in itself and gives you two whole levels of the game which is at least a couple of hours of play time with those tutorials in there!

I'm offering free advertising for independent developers!

It's something I've been thinking about for a while now. I've removed the google ads from the site a few weeks ago and I've felt a lot better about things since then. They're still here on the blog, but I haven’t mustered up the courage to try and alter the xml for that yet!

Anyway, since doing this I've been considering offering some free ad space to independents. Some of the more established people who have achieved fame through word of mouth and being IGF winners and the likes already earn enough to advertise on bigger sites. And I know I help out some independents from the reviews I've done, however a lot of the traffic I receive probably never sees the reviews unless they've specifically searched for them via google, etc...

Doing this might not even help anyone. I reckon a lot of veteran gamers out there have developed abilities in order to ignore adverts without even thinking about it! On the other hand maybe it's worth a shot to see how it does.

So, I'm going to be doing the following for a month to see what the response is and if I'm overwhelmed (or under whelmed!) with questions about it. Here's what I'll be doing for 4 "lucky" developers out there.

• 1 week free banner placement, no strings attached
• Banner will appear on all pages of the site.
• Location, left hand side of site under main menu of site
• Banner size: approx 130 pixels wide by 400-600 pixels tall
• Include the destination URL
• Must be for a game you or your team has written

Now, in the unlikely event that I get more than 4 responses for this (I have a terrible pessimistic attitude sometimes) my tie breaker will be drawing names out of my United Kingdom Tophat but don't worry - it doesn't favour UK people.

So, if you've read all that malarkey and want to sent me your banner (I'll show them all in a special blog post with the links if I get more than 4 anyway!) then please email me here:


Please let others know, I'd hate to no banners to show after this!

Edit: Deadline of the end of the week, 15th March 2010.

The web expands: Avernum VI

Spiderweb software is one of those independents that have been around forever - and when I say that I mean they were around when I was at High School. And that was far further back than I wish to remember.

Thing is, they do what they do really well and have a loyal fan base because of it. They've also released more games than any other independent developer I know of!

Anyway, they've recently released their latest title: Avernum VI - obviously is the 6th game in the Avernum series. Specifically they have this to say for themselves about it:

"Avernum 6 is the final game in the popular and long-running Avernum series. Explore a gigantic world, with a fascinating storyline, hundreds of quests, multitudes of side dungeons, and many hours of adventure. The game features clever enemies and dozens of interesting scripted encounters. Learn over 50 spells and battle disciplines. Hunt for hundreds of magical items or craft your own powerful artifacts."

In a nutshell it's an isometric RPG so if you're into those and haven't tried a Spiderweb game yet it's probably worth you trying this or perhaps the first in this series to get a taste. They have been doing this for a while after all and there are free demos to try.

I wonder if I can get a review copy...

Review and Deal at the same time! AI War: The Zenith Remnant

I've actually had to spend quite a long time with this game. For two reasons, firstly it was one of my big regrets that I didn't write more about it last time. In fact I didn't even bother to read my own past review on this before starting - it would just have confused me. Secondly I really got into it this time compared to last and started to understand how the game works. I literally had to change mind gears.

Well, not literally. I'm not sure how that would work.

Anyway, my much better review of AI War and it's Zenith Remnant add on pack can be found here, just click me.

I've also written a bit of a guide on the game which contains 9 tips that would have helped me when I started. I'm not saying the given help is bad in anyway, there's just a lot to take in so I came up with this guide!

However that's not all! As a strange but pleasant co-incidence AI War and The Zenith Remnant are both available as part of a new Indie Strategy Bundle which is available from the Indie Strategy Game Site. This pack includes both AI War titles, Positech's Gratuitous Space Battles and also Solium Infernum (which I feel bad about never hearing of, must check it out.)

What a happy day for Indpendent Strategy Games!

Totally Annihilated! TA now on Impulse!

Oh Total Annihilation I have such fond memories of thee!

Back in the late 90's when I had a 333mhz machine which is now slower than my gfx card! You came along and introduced me to RTS gaming in 3D! Not the 2D that had been bested by the boys at Blizzard, and not only that but a fantastically dark story based on human consiousness implanted into machines.

With your epic music by Jeremy Soule and innovative Commander based control method you showed us new wasy in which we could obliterate each other and for that we are truly greatful.

Here's a vid of the game in action:


So yeah, it's out now on Impulse! No mention of the add on "The Core Contingency" though, would have been nice to see that in there too.

Click here for the impulse page

Or if you're feeling super nice you could download the impulse client from here first!

Portal Ending Changed?

From all the stuff happening earlier in the week with the new portal update it appears that now the ending of the game has changed!



Thanks to MrSnuggleDuck (what a name!) for uploading this to youtube.

Of course the new bit doesn't happen until the very ending of the video where...