Networking 3 - Flight Control HD

I've been away from a while, hectic schedule with the launch for the local radio station and too little time on my hands to sit here and prepare this one so after your eager anticipation *ahem* this issue of Networking comes out on a little ditty called Flight Control HD. The screen above is actually from the Ipad version but it works in exactly the same way so there's my little disclaimer out the way.

Flight Control is one of those simple short burst puzzle/strategy titles that before you know it you've been playing for hours and missed that meeting you had to attend. There's no way to particularly win it's just a score attack game, "land as many vehicles as you can". You simply guide colour coded planes and helicopters (slow and darn irritating...) to the alloted landing zones using the PSThreemote (C)lankygitwords 2011 or control pad and have to guide as many as you can without them crashing into each other. It's fiendishly simple but the random entry points and semi-random speeds they fly in can make it frustrating. Nothing like getting close to your record on a certain landing field and having a jumbo jet flying in just behind that helicopter that slowly crawls on.

Graphically the HD doesn't really improve matters from a non-HD tv, but I guess it's one of those things that people will expect of games now. In general though there's not much to complain about the planes are a basic block of the colour you need to land them on and slightly different sizes (generally seperated so red = commercial/military jets, yellow = small private craft) until you've routed them into their landing strip when they're white and you see the guide line based on your landing route. On some of the maps closer to the ground you do see the vapour trials behind planes which is a nice little touch.

The sound files add very little to the game, you've got a cheerful little airport muzak tune that plays when you start a new game and on the menu screens. If you last longer than the music file though you're left with very little except for warning beeps as planes begin to get close to each other and a fairly stock crash sound effect. If it weren't for the fact that the sound effect is the only real cue you may have a crash (there's a red circle that goes round each craft but I find myself missing this scanning a busy airspace) I'd probably just mute it as it's far from the finest composition even allowing for the straight forward programming.

I think ultimately this games got a fairly short shelf life. For those into that sort of thing I'd got all the trophies bar one (play 200 games) after booting it up for the first time for a tinker so Trophy Hunters might pick it up for the easy scores but ultimately despite the differing screens (aircraft carrier, cityscape, Aussie outback - complete with emergency flying doctors) and slightly different mechanisms on a few of them it's not something that can keep me hooked. Perhaps on the Ipad version things are different but I'd rather boot up something else if playing for a long time and a good run can take ages so not really that useful for a quick play to kill five minutes.

It's not bad and was quite enjoyable at first but it's running a little thin after a relatively short while. In the last week I've barely looked at it aside from to rush off the desktop before the damned muzak starts!

5/10

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

Networking 1 - Eat Them!

Another semi-regular feature where I look on Playstation Network and pick up a random game to look at. I'm sure I'm going to be beaten for some of the crap I pick up but hopefully I'll find gems. It also means my praise to Nuffle will have to wait until it's untopical but so bloody what? First episode is Eat Them!

As the screenshot above may suggest you're represented by a whacking great big monster and smash the bejesus out of anything you can get hold of. Essentially it's Rampage 2010 on the surface but it is a little deeper than that. Although you don't need to you can engineer your own evil monster of choice from various body parts you can unlock as you carry out challenges and follow the story through. The default monsters are pretty effective to begin with but it's not the same as creating your own beast. Granted that's the RPG Lanky coming out, I used to spend way too long creating band members on Rock Band 2 (before they made it harder to create an authentic band, well researched twunts) so maybe people will settle for the various different default creatures.

Visually the cell shading looks nice and in simplistic terms it's actually quite effective allowing you to tell the difference between police forces, convicts, the army and civilians just by colour of clothing. Kind of like an 8 bit game while looking obviously better and running smoother with more "boom" factor. Incidentally to fit in with the cell shaded look the story is actually built around comic issues which was a nice little touch. The sound is fairly basic in comparison but I guess that's to be expected with it, there's a distinctly chiptune style there and in keeping with the 8 bit style I get the impression Eat Them tries to convey. Of course like the old games there's also the fact it gets repetitive fast audibly. Think back to the same bar from Ghostbusters over, and over again and you get the point but if you're focussed on playing the game you can phase it out, or at least I do.

I've seen some people actually downgrade it for the missions, put simply to advancement in the game to the next issue in the series you need to medal in a series of challenges of increasingly difficulty in each story area to advance to the next section. The better the medal the more you unlock as well for body parts if you're interested in that (a few trophies rely on top medals as you'd exepect if you're into trophy hunting, also a trophy for viewing every part in creation mode). It doesn't seem to prevent story advancement so to skim through it doesn't matter much at all. The offending mission is "race" which entails running around a map to checkpoints within a certain time and doing as little damage as possible.

That seems to fly in the face of the idea of the game wherein people assume to just "smash things" is all you need. Personally it's why I've not played a lot of Rampage over the years, every now and then I play it for a while but never come back. Race helps to move you away from that, sadly that's the only difference from various methods of destruction. The story issues are well thought out with tasks like smashing prisoners out to work for you, bank robberies and helping the getaway cars get out and other nefarious deeds but to get to these you'll need to break things as quickly/effectively as possible.

It's not a bad game to play, the controls are fairly simple though in it's simplicity you're not really told how to do everything, I found out how to roar and intimidate by accident (L2) for example, which was useful as it stopped everyone armed or not from attacking me while I feasted on them to replenish my health (thus the name "Eat Them"), the more intimidating a monster the higher radius.

Essentially, it's an okay game. It's nothing special but it doesn't make me apprehensive of 'er indoors using the words "let's try that one" like some of the titles I've seen while skimming through. The destruction missions are fun to play, at first but I can't see me having the drive to replay them again and again for gold medals later on. Not a bad game and at £6.29 it's a bit of a better price than you would otherwise have for some titles but could be a gamble. I'd give it a stable 6/10