Monthly Archives: April 2014

Reviews

City builders and you: Anno 2070.

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City builders and you: Anno 2070.

Ahh, the Anno XX70 series, a fine piece of german videogame engineering, made by the masters of the Settlers, Blue Byte, and published by the slightly deranged Ubisoft, a house build on the slow realization that always-on DRM probably isn’t the best idea, log on every time you want to play? Much better idea, put in a social interaction system into your own smaller version of Steam and Windows Live? Superior idea.

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The basic gist of Anno 2070, and the whole series in general, is that you built a city on an island, you then supply said city with the crap its inhabitants demand. Food, entertainment, community and that kinda stuff.

In an new twist, Anno 2070 has three different kinds of citizens, the capitalist Tycoons, the hippie Ecos and the supplementary Techs.
The Tycoons, who demand stuff like spirits, casinos and hamburgers, can handle much more pollution than the other two, and have more efficient supply chains, their coal power plants produce a lot of power compared to, say, windmills.

The Ecos, who want tea, concerts and health food, can’t handle pollution at all, and have lots of cool ways to improve the environment, their windmills produces no pollution, and not a lot of power. Their entire supply infrastructure isn’t quite as efficient as the Tycoons, but do produce shiny cities.

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The Tech’s, similar to the [Look up the Orientals from anno 1770], aren’t really supposed to be a standalone element, they are supplementary to either the tycoons or the ecos, providing crucial research, and an efficient offshore oil production. They demand simple algae based food, energy drinks and a lab nearby, to conduct dreadful experiments.

In the campaign, you end up playing with all three factions, starting with the Tycoons, then Ecos and finally getting the techs into the great bit blender. As you play through a fairly lackluster campaign of “AI goes rogue, save the world, pretend you are a hero”. It’s all good fun though, you even get to build warships and an small air force, and then go blow shit the hell up.

The game is wonderful fun, with plenty of contents to keep any decent fan busy for ages. 90/100, game of the age, all ages, all the time.

Electronic Entertainment

The Ouya: Still fucking stupid!

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So, the Ouya, is it still a useless pile of engored over-marketed shit? Of course it is, the core concept is broken as all fucking hell, a useless consoles to play mobile games, games that are almost universally unplayable and shouldn’t exist outside of Newgrounds.

Another sad tendency, is the fact that flash games, previously something you’d play on Newgrounds when you where bored, are now sold as actual games, genuinly expensive games, a staggering concept to me, games like these aren’t worth anyones time, least of all me.

Now, the Ouya does live on, of a short, it runs on the nightmares of deranged marketing people, the dreams of redditors who flock to anything vaguely rebelious and the money, the money, the fucking money of Venture capitalists, who happily hurl cash at anything that have even the slightest chances, of making them fortunes.

To bad nothing good will ever come from the Ouya, other than more than a few laughs and giggles.

And behold, Amazon’s getting into this too, or are they? Nope, it’s just another little happy TV thing, with the whole console thing added as a little bonus.

TOUCH IT
TOUCH IT

There is no real demand for the Ouya, everything it can do, can be done better or easier with something else, like say, a laptop and a HDMI cable.

But alas, it was marketed as some liberating concept, handed down to us, humble plebs, by the Great and Glorious gods from upon high. Free the games, indeed. I don’t want the games free, Quality control is awesome.

But that’s not to be. But enough of all this, we all know the Ouya’s a stupid pile of crap.

Yves Behar’s design is still fucking stupid, and sweet lady, have you seen the design he made for the One Laptop per Child idea? Why the hell?

Why wouldn’t they just ask Lenovo if they could use the ThinkPad instead, cheap and durable beats overdesign crap anyday.

HATE
Hate.
Electronic Entertainment, Reviews

Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls, in-depth Finacial Audit.

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So, Diable 3‘s latest, and probably only, expansion has just been released recently. At a price of 39.99 € for the standard edition. 40 € for an expansion, expensive? Hell yes.

So, let’s split the cost into tiny bits, and laugh at the end result. For your hard-earned fourty Euros worth of game, you get the following: Adventure mode, Act 5 and the Crusader. And that’s it, nothing else, there is no extra content beyond those three elements, everything else is included in the base game.

Let’s start with the biggest sinner, the adventure mode, and just before I start my blitzkrieg attack on this useless waste of time, let’s just cover what I thought it was: Randomly made maps, where you could just murder shit, with random missions.

What it actual is: The storyline maps, with two kinds of missions: Kill guys and kill guy. Same maps, same bosses, same mobs, same everything, nothing new at all, using the same art assets and content.

Total cost: 14€ for something that took about half and hour worth of coding, what it should have cost? Nothing, this shouldn’t have cost anything, anything at all, it’s just watered down story mode crap, using the same assets and a bit of extra voice work.

It should have been included with a patch at some point, for free.

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Next on the itinerary, the Crusader, an extra character is kinda nice, plenty of extra voicework, lots of crap to do, but otherwise, nothing special. I’d pay 14€ for an extra character to have fun with.

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And for the final nail in the proverbial coffin, Act V. Now, this one’s a real pile of crap, it’s basically just around four to six hours of preditable content and story, and if any of you fuckers bitch about bloody spoilers? I’ll laugh from now ’till the heat death of the goddam universe.

And why? Because the story is stupid and preditable, another BIG BAD guy appears, you kill him, that’s it, that’s all there is to it, no big surprise, no big thing, just you walking through a city, then a few shitholes, then hell, then murder end-boss.

Absolutely no surprises at all, which is a welcome addition to the base game storyline, where the little innocent girl character, turns out to be the daughter of EVIL and get’s possed by Diablo, something even the meanest intelligence, could tell, around Act I, part four, the chase for the magical murder thing.

So yeah, worth 14€? Fuck no, not for that little content.

So in conclusion, Reaper of Souls does fuck all for Diablo 3, the giant patch does EVERYTHING for Diablo 3, the 40€? Is just Activision rearing it’s grotesque head again. Did I buy it? Yes, I have friends, it’s the price you pay, for friendship, which isn’t magical, just expensive.