Roleplaying games

While is not strictly a RPG, Kongregate’s collectible card game called Kongai is quite interesting. Lots of moves, skills, and cards. I’ve played it without much luck though. It has one major design flaw: requires multiplayer.

Why is a flaw? because of the timer, and the unreliability of people. There’s a 1 minute timer to make your move, and while it might seem fast, in real if you have to wait every time 1 minute, the gameplay become tedious. REALLY TEDIOUS.

Result? if you can’t win a match, simply delay every move at maximum! There are very good chances that the opponent, frustrated, will quit the game, giving you the victory.

A pity they didn’t make a proper computer AI, it would be a good single player game.

Just got a news about a game I reviewed some time ago, “Magic Stones“. The authors have released an interesting add-on called “The Magic Shop”. What is it? in practice it allows you to spend XP and PP (prestige points) in a sort of shop to buy avatars upgrades or, more interestingly, “perks”.

The word “Perks” instantly reminds me of the great Fallout game. Indeed, perks are some “special skills” that you can unlock only in the shop, and that will give your druid extra powers like faster mana regeneration, some elements bane (for example “air bane” will decrease the stats of all opponent avatars that are air-based).

The add-on can be obtained for $4,99 which seems reasonable. I had followed the author’s thoughts about charging for each new quest, because of the amount of work involved, but I see in the end he opted for giving away yet another free quest, but charging only for this add-on.

So personally I’ve decided to buy it, also because reading his blog, he has already started working in another rpg very similar to the old classics like “Dungeon Master” or “Eye of the Beholder”… this guy needs some encouraging!

Today got an email of a friend of mine, that was all pissed because couldn’t find the quest mode in the card/rpg game I reviewed some months ago, “Magic Stones”. After a brief discussion with him in chat, I found out the problem: he didn’t buy from the original author, but from another site!!!

Often portals or other online resellers have old/outdated versions on their sites, so if you find a demo on a portal that interests you, is always better to try to buy it directly from the author to avoid surprises. It isn’t developers fault, since mostly are forced to accept such deals to earn more money to support themselves. And portals don’t update their games, so if the author 2-3 months later adds new feature/updates, the portals version is always outdated.

You must be careful about search engine ranking problems though, because often you would just do a search for the “gamename”, and not always the first result is the original developer. So in this case if you do a search on Google for the word “Magic Stones” you could find yet another portal reselling the old version. Unfortunately Google just places the result based on the “link” power, so a portal could easily get on 1st places.

What is the solution then? easy! – just google for the developer name! in this case, search “Winter Wolves”, or for other good roleplay games like Avernum, etc, always google for the author/developer name, like “Spiderweb”.

That way, you’ll buy directly from author supporting himself and his hard work, and also you won’t have unpleasant surprises!

Hope this tip will be useful to someone.