Networking 2 - Age of Booty

Slight cheat as this is one I picked up ages ago - might even have been my first PSN purchase or certainly amongst them - but I think this is the first time I've really sat down and played it for any length of time. Made by Certain Infinity and published by Capcom it is the premiere pirate based Real Time Strategy game available on PSN. Incidentally it's quite likely to be the only one but that's neither here nor there.

Age of Booty is also probably the easiest strategy game I've ever played and while incredibly simple I can see some complexities there which would make online fiendishly complex to master. The formula of the game is straight forward, conquer a set amount of towns within either a set time limit or as long as it takes against either human or AI teams of pirates, it's kept simple by allowing you to only control one ship as opposed to the whole fleet but can lead to conflict between human players with regards to upgrading ships and towns, especially on maps where certain resources are scarce!

Upgrades are simple using a combination of the three primary resources of gold, wood and rum you can upgrade either your towns (using 4 units of gold, 2 of wood) which boosts the defenses of the town meaning it can hit back harder when enemies try to take it as well as more health to make it harder. Frustratingly you lose the upgrades if they're broken so don't leave a town for long under enemy attack as a well tooled ship will still pound it to submission and your hard won resources are lost. Your ship has a bit more choice when (for 4 rum, 2 wood) you can choose to upgrade the speed, armour (represented by health) and cannon (how hard you hit, represented by pips above the health bar). Choose wisely though as most maps won't allow you to fully upgrade and though you can specialise in hitting hard and taking a pounding it's irrelevant if you can't chase off unruly buccaneers.

The gathering of resources can lead to a little frustration, with towns it is done automatically and dependent on the towns you own you'll receive two units of a combination based on resources, I think to some extents it's simple but if a town has tiles with more than two resource tiles around it it might not pick the one you want as the third. For those simple complexities this leads to one, make sure to explore the whole map at the start of a game and plan for there. It's simple to pick the first town you see to conquer but if the resources don't complement too well (rum and gold for example) and it's all you've got you could be left behind by the more astute opponent technologically. As well as the gathering from towns you can acquire further goods by picking up salvage on the high seas (also dropped when sinking enemy ships) and raiding enemy towns. On an unfortunate map you could be searching for ages for the salvage you desperately need for upgrades.

To give you an edge you've got the option to do what pirates did best, harass and sink humble traders. While sinking enemy ships gives you a resource, sinking traders will provide you with one of four bonuses. The bomb, is placed on a tile and causes damage to anything within a one hex radius - this makes it useful for saving towns you're too far away to help, or even taking out opposing defenses while being a little further out of range of their cannons. The Whirlpool is placed on a tile and whisks anything sailing into the hex to a random spot on the map - a last line of defense essentially but on most maps the enemy will simply sail on to the next tile and resume as normal, whirlpools seem to take to long to start to be a real quick response. The Ghost Ship turns you invisible until you next attack an enemy, downside of that is that if you sail into a tile too close to something you can fire on you will do as fire is automatic. Finally you have the Pilfer Monkey, very useful on those occasions when you make bad choices in resource gathering as you swipe two random resources from the opponents but as it's random it's pot luck what you gain.

Gameplay is simple, movement is carried out by moving a cursor ahead of your ship and pressing x to make your ship sail to the requested tile. On the route the aforementioned overzealous crew will fire automatically at anything that happens to be in the tile next to it which makes controlling it much simpler. Once your cannons have broken the defenses of a town just remaining in a tile next to it will hoist your flag to claim it (and the resources will begin automatically replenishing at a speed dependent on town rating) though if a rival is also adjacent to the town it will remain contested. If you're taking damage - and you will be hit a lot as everything fights back - you automatically heal by remaining in a tile adjacent to your home cave (where you buy ship upgrades) or a town owned by your team while towns will automatically repair their health bar. To deploy your special bonuses just press triangle, bombs and whirlpools will be placed on the tile of your cursor so make sure it's placed right, don't want to bomb your own defenses....

The game has received some negative feedback on account of the single player game being deemed "frustrating and poorly balanced" and in some cases it is, the thing is, it's a strategy game. I think the poor balance is essentially down to bad planning, some maps are much harder to capture the key resources and sometimes enemy ships will start stronger than your own but with a strategy game isn't it good to have some form of tactical challenges and decisions to make? Next up "why Civilization games suck because enemies send stacks of strong troops to attack my least defended cities!" so though the frustration IS there, I feel it's a part of any decent strategy game. Not played a lot online yet but it seems to be fairly tough to find a full game (could be bad timing on my part) but when you do it's good fun. Would be worth trying to get together a bunch of friends and shiver their timbers it does however have 4 players local split screen play too which is a nice touch. Especially after some rum and fine wenches leavin' ye to sail to blighty. Yaaar!

It's a decent enough strategy title and it's killed a good few hours while I revisited it having not given it a lot of time after purchase. Personally do think it gets a tad repetitive though due to the one game mode - even online variants are the same capture the towns principle - but that's the only real dampener in my opinion. 7/10

Childhood Revisited - Transformers (G1)

I feel harsh appraising this one after all this time. I can't really compare a cartoon designed to advertise toy ranges to a film but as a kid this was essential viewing so it warrants a rewatch. Though incidentally with the exception of the Optimus Prime Toy below I didn't actually have any of the toys of the key characters, I recall a micro machines version of the "Aerialbots" and I think one of the "Combaticons" but generally it was about enjoying the stories for what they were. Incidentally due to a kerfuffle with Play.com (why do they hate me) I'm going to stop just before the movie and stick with the more Earth focussed series'.

Okay so Season one started off with a three episode special detailing the basics of the plot which were a civil war between Autobots and Decepticons on a dying planet, the Autobots fleeing to another world and crashing eons ago on Earth, finding Earth based vehicles to disguise themselves as and the Decepticons trying to steal resources to fly home. In this case it introduces us to the core 6/7 on each side and builds up the story. One of the key elements of the first series is with the exception of the episodes with multiple parts it's typically cartoon. Bad guys scheme, good guys foil scheme, bad guys go back to plot revenge and repeat ad-nauseum. As the series seems to be touching the waters I don't think there's that much there which doesn't overtly reek of salesmenship such as the random decision to build robot dinosaurs. As the hapless Michael Bay says "what use is disguising yourself as a robot dinosaur". That said everyone loves Grimlock. Probable highlight is War of the dinobots which shows Grimlock as slightly more than just a dumb brute, far more like he is in the comic books. Sadly in later years he reverts to little more than a comic figure.

Season two starts off in much the same way as the first with using that same core (primarily) and a couple of the later additions like the Constructicons (without wrecking ball testicles thank you Mr Bay...) but after the first dozen or so it begins to branch. What it does is start to expand the universe, alongside the typical salesman spiel we're now introduced to concepts like the super computer Vector Sigma which gave the transformers life and personalities and going back to when the war began and basically creating a more "real" universe. A lot of the new characters were introduced because of toys but some (Alpha Trion being the most important possibly) were also there to develop a real world. I do think a large part of it was down to the fact the movie was going to be worked so it makes more sense to try and develop a better plot. Especially when they made some of the decisions regarding key elements of the movie, got to admit, little Lanky was traumatised... Of course it wasn't all relevant plot building. Vector Sigma knows what they were thinking with the episode "Kremzeek".

As a product though how does it really hold up? In some cases it does look incredibly 80's and the number of animation and sound errors is shockingly high which shows how rushed some of it would be put together. Overall though it's not that bad to watch, 'er indoors actually watched this all for the first time as I was putting this all together for the sake of the blog and she was giggling sometimes at it and enjoyed watching through generally although I doubt she got why I dragged her to the cinema for the first Bay film like a giggling fanboy.

If you didn't enjoy it as a kid I don't think going back now is really going to change anything. I'm sure Hannah enjoyed the odd episode but I don't think she'd have sat through the lot if it hadn't been for the fact we were spending our evenings with nothing on television. For a nostalgic look it can be worth it but I think it is entirely down to getting it for a cheap price that you're happy with. It doesn't hold up great but I still think it looks and sounds a lot better then cartoons I'd caught since, not sure what that says about kids telly these days...