If you check the podcast feed on the right side of this page, you'll notice that Episode 5 - The Dark Knight Rises Review is out now! You can find it here or through the iTunes store.
This week features the hosts of Post-Credit Podcast as cohorts in a lengthy discussion and review of The Dark Knight Rises. Other topics this week include a Bane poster stuck in a trash can, turning our world into Skyrim, and more!
If you didn't notice the updated RSS
feed linked on the right side of our page, The Bard Next Door Episode 4 - Faith in Secular Media is now up. You can find it here or on the iTunes store.
In this week's episode, Randy, Dan, and guest Jesse Doland discuss non-religious films that still affect their own faiths. Other topics include Tiny Wings 2, Michelle Rodriguez being awesome at Comic-Con, Oz the Great and Powerful, a balding man that might be Jeff Daniels, and more!
One Man Left gained quite the reputation from its iOS release of Tilt to Live, which exemplified the principle of being easy to learn but difficult to master with incredibly simple tilt controls and addictive action gameplay. Despite having almost no barrier to entry for even the most casual of gamers, Tilt to Live develops into a complex and strategic experience rather quickly even as it maintains its fast pace.
Outwitters is an entirely different genre and pace of game. It's an asynchronous multiplayer turn-based strategy game accompanied by charming cartoon visuals on iOS. And it once again exemplifies that crucial element of being simple on the surface but opening into wide possibilities.
Check out the trailer right here or in the inexplicably small viewing window below (I really do need to work on figuring out how to make videos appear larger on Blogger).
Before I go any further, know this: you need to try this game out if you enjoy turn-based strategy at all. It's free, and the good kind of free, too. Download it here.
What's so great about this, then? To start, many games that are advertised as free are heavily restricted until you pay money, but Outwitters is free in the best sense. You pay nothing, download the game, and are presented with no advertisements. You get one of the game's factions, the Scallywags, to play for free against any and all opponents. The Scallywags are at least on par with the two factions that you can unlock for money. Each faction is only differentiated by its own visual style and a unique special unit. The free Scallywags, for instance, can build the Bombshell, a slow-moving artillery critter.
And you can enjoy the game with the Scallywags entirely for free. It's awesome and there's not really any need to put any money into this game if you don't want to. If you find yourself enjoying it enough that you want to expand your strategic options just a tad and play with a different set of visuals, then you can unlock either the Adorables (think cute stuffed animals) or the Feedback (robots) for $1.99 each. Alternatively, you can purchase the Uber Pack for $2.99, which includes both the Adorables and the Feedback AND any other future teams that One Man Left releases for the game. A bit of a steal, that one, though these are limited-time release sale prices, so I'm not sure what they'll be once the sale is over.
The game is either local pass-n-play or online asynchronous multiplayer-only, which might be a turn-off for some, but there are a wide range of players diving in right now so even complete strategy newbs should settle into a competitive niche. You'll win some, you'll lose some, and that's just the nature of the beast when you're dealing with a large multiplayer pool. The asynchronous multiplayer works well for the most part, but it does have some inherent problems which I'll dive into later on.
Outwitters' central mechanic is Wit. Wit is your resource for everything in the game. If you want to build a unit, you need to spend Wit. If you want to move, you need to spend Wit. If you want to attack, you need to spend Wit. Special abilities? Yup, spend Wit. However, you only get so many Wit points per turn. Even when you increase your Wit generation by capturing neutral spots on the game board, you're only gaining a few Wit points of advantage over your opponent.
Wit can be saved for future use in between turns, but that's easier than it sounds most of the time. You will NEVER have enough Wit to do everything that you need to do, which means that you're going to have to prioritize very carefully. Wit adds just enough to the standard turn-based strategy game to freshen the genre up perfectly.
Your goal is to destroy your opponents' headquarters, and to do this you'll generally employ five different units shared between all factions (though each faction's version looks unique). There's the Runner, a frail but fast unit best employed for recon and precision strikes on weak targets. Vision and tactical precision are both incredibly important aspects of Outwitters, so don't underestimate the cheap scout. The Soldier is a balanced option with a bit of everything at an effective price, sturdier and packing more of a punch than the Runner but slower and pricier. Medics are fragile but can heal and boost your other units to greater feats. Snipers are pricy, fragile, and terribly slow, but are also capable of dealing quite a bit of damage from long range. The last core unit, the Heavy, is a pricy, slow, very healthy beefstick that dishes out as much damage as the Sniper but at close range.
Those core units present a very delicate game. Your most powerful options are also usually your most vulnerable ones. That holds true with the special unit for each faction as well. Every one of them is relatively fragile, but is also capable of entirely changing the course of a game on its own.
It's turn-based strategy beauty incarnate, and the game's cartoon aesthetic presents a charming counterbalance to the intense thought that will go into every move you make in an effort to utterly annihilate, say, an army of teddy bears and pink elephants (if you're fighting the Adorables). The music is also wonderful, with an entirely whacky and upbeat vibe that helps pull the entire strange experience together into undeniable awesomeness.
There are some problems with the game, and some of them are significant. It's had some problems with notifying you when it's your turn with push notifications, so it's not a bad idea to load Outwitters up to check your games list just in case somebody is waiting on you to submit your turn. Considering that the very idea of using push notifications for asynchronous multiplayer is to eliminate that guess work, that the system is currently experiencing difficulties is a shame. The developers have already put a good deal of work into fixing the push notifications issues and hopefully they'll keep going until there are none.
The game also crashes sometimes on my iPhone when I load it up or load up one of my games in progress, though it has never crashed for me in the middle of actually playing. This is definitely frustrating but happens infrequently.
The last problem is one that is inherent to asynchronous multiplayer: you have to wait for your turn. So the game plays out at a slow pace even when you're involved in multiple sessions. And losing players frequently won't bother to surrender or finish the losing game out, so you'll be stuck waiting seven days four days for an auto-victory to flag and clear that game from your list. It's a minor problem considering that you can have many games going at once, but some may find it an annoyance nonetheless.
EDIT: While I was typing this review up, One Man Left patched the 'auto-forfeit due to inaction' time down to 4 days, which should help alleviate the above problem with Outwitters. Yay!
Hopefully these problems will be worked out rather quickly. Given One Man Left's track record with Tilt to Live and their consistent communication through Outwitters' news system, I don't doubt that any issues will be alleviated swiftly.
And again, the game is largely fantastic. It is the most fun I have had with a multiplayer game in a long time, and it is the good kind of free to play. Download it now.
Last week on my own personal blog, Geek Media Musings, I reviewed Telltale's The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day and found the game to be refreshingly good after the release of their incredibly disappointing Jurassic Park game. The Walking Dead was more of a talky decisions game than a zombie action one, but I appreciated that considering the gravity surrounding those decisions. Life and death were in your hands, and your choices were usually sacrificing one person or resource to save another.
While Episode 1 was about surviving the initial impact of a zombie event, Episode 2 picks up three months after the first and your group seems to have settled into some sort of relatively-safe life in a barricaded motel. Except that you're running out of food. The gang has been on strict rations, and everybody is hungry. In fact, today it's your job to distribute the last few pieces of food to the group, but you don't have nearly enough to feed everybody.
So who do you feed? Perhaps more important, through your decisions, who don't you feed?
These are the moments where Telltale's game shines. There are no obvious answers, no real sense of right or wrong. Every last person in your camp is starving and each deserves food. The old man, the hunting buddy, the children, the markswoman, the guy who always has your back, and all the others. Who you feed now may have consequences later today. I applied a simple moral code that I carry in the real world: children first, elderly second, women, and then men. So some of the women and all of the fit men in my group went hungry that day, despite the fact that said fit men were pulling the most weight by way of their bodies being the most useful tools.
Others might approach that situation entirely different, and while I might believe them morally wrong in some way if they starved the children or something, the game isn't going to say that they've made the wrong decision, and indeed, their groups may fare better than mine did in a practical sense.
While zombies are present in Episode 2: Starved for Help, the meat of this particular episode is the question of how you treat your fellow human beings during dire situations. This question is implied in almost every decision you make this time around, and they are some heavy decisions.
As I said in my review of Episode 1, my hope was that Telltale would continue to provide the player with interesting and heavy decisions, and instead Starved for Help considerably improves that aspect of the game with consistent tension and weight. On the technical side of things, the game's audio sounded better than Episode I and its visuals looked just as good.
My one quibble comes with some of the action events that pop up from time to time. They're carried out through simple QTE and are not hard to achieve, but they can jump up on you when you settle into the slow and talky pace of the game. In particular, one of them took me completely by surprise this round and I was faced with an instant reload. While these can be fun and their presence keeps tension together, they are often inconsistent with the pace of the rest of the game. Luckily, failing them never punishes you too badly as the game will simply reload you to just before the action event that lead to your death in the first place. But then, that itself can also break atmosphere and tone.
Still, that's a small problem in light of everything that The Walking Dead Game does right. If you're looking for a game set in the post-apoc setting that hinges upon big decisions with no shoe-horned correct answer, I really can't recommend this enough. I already regret some of the decisions that I made, and these are decisions that I made in a video game. That said video game can move me so speaks volumes to its quality.
The Walking Dead Telltale Game Series is available for purchase as the entire season on Steam and through Telltale's site for PC, but keep in mind that you're buying the whole season without immediate access to the last three episodes of said season, each of which will release individually over the next few months. If you'd like to purchase the game on an episode-by-episode basis, I believe that those are available for console on the Xbox Live Marketplace and the PSN Store.
If you didn't notice the updated RSS feed linked on the right side of our page, The Bard Next Door Episode 2 - Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut Part 2 is now up. You can find it here or on the iTunes store.
Topics covered this week include The Newsroom, The Walking Dead The Game, Valve's reputation for awesomeness, and more! Listen in and let us know what you think!
