COSMOS is now level 50! Wohooo!

I became level 50 Knight today! Finally! This is a big milestone so party-time in Wartune!!!
And I got a lot stronger too! From something around 22k battle rating I am now at 25k.

What's new at 50?

• 1 extra slot for Astral - awesome!
• The level 50 jewels and rings in the catacomb shop!
• Talents - great but really expensive!

Here is my level up!

Here are my Angels level 43 now:

And here are my skills. With level 50 I added the point to get level 2 Whirlwind.

And here is my Equipment and Stats (without any pots or other buffs):

And my Astrals which need a lot of work still - my weak spot.

Paper Mario Sticker Star (3DS)

Console: Nintendo 3DS

Genre: Adventure RPG

Release Date: November 11, 2012

Date Reviewed: January 30, 2013

Gameplay:

Paper Mario Sticker Star is for the 3DS system. Paper Mario Sticker Star is not like the original Paper Mario for the N64 or the Wii versions. This version of Paper Mario is a new and fresh approach to the series. I personally loved the original for the N64 because of the RPG style. With Sticker Star there is still the RPG battle system but it's not nearly the same. With Sticker Star you actually go around peeling, buying, and finding stickers, You use these stickers as your battle commands. You have your basic stickers like the shoe (jump), and your hammer. But there are also a lot of different variations of these stickers like the fire hammer which does damage to all enemies. These stickers can also be powered up or you can even find them. These are known as shiny stickers or even flashy stickers which are much more powerful version of other stickers. There are a total of six worlds and each world has it's own different theme and style like with most mario games. Sticker Star does stay to it's routes by adding a lot of humour within the game. There were several times in the game where I had a good laugh.

So of coarse your roll is to save Princess Peach from Bowser once again. Basically what happens (without giving away spoilers) is everyone is at the sticker festival. While everyone is paying attention to Mario and Peach talking about the royal stickers Bowser sneaks in and steals one of the royal stickers. These royal stickers have great power within them and Bowser uses it to capture Peach and wipe the floor with Mario. Of coarse it is up to you to recover the seven missing royal stickers and rescue Peach.

The Battle System

With Sticker Star I found there was a lot more puzzle work to do than any other Paper Mario. What I mean by that is you have to do a lot of back tracking to other levels to progress. I did enjoy this aspect of the game but some of the times you have no clue where to go or what to do next. There were to much hidden paths to find to advance to the next level. I did enjoy that there was lots to do. If not rushed it is a 12 hour+ game. No replay value but it is longer than most recent Mario games out currently. The exploration is a huge part of the game which makes it even more enjoyable. Most of the bosses are challenging but have the option to make it easier if you know what stickers to use. I do wished they kept how the original one was. You get into a battle, earn XP, gain levels, etc... I am very happy that they added something new to the series but I missed the original game play style.

Sticker Star does stay true to the series of being a fun 2D style game with 3D environments and objects. These objects can be turned into super stickers which can deal a lot of damage or be a good support tool. Some of these include a fan or a vacuum or even a baseball bat. Each has it's own unique purpose. Overall the game play is as fun as it's always been and if your a Paper Mario fan I would check this game out you will have some fun. It is probably the worst one out of the three but still a lot of fun.

Graphics:

Paper Mario Sticker Star has your same 2D graphics as any other Paper Mario game in the past. You play as Mario who is made of paper and talk with NPC's who are also made of paper. Almost everything in the game is made of paper. You play as 2D but the environments are 3D. The game is very colourful and has a lot of variety. Each world you enter is a completely different environment. A little feature that I found really neat was whenever you got a shiny or flashy sticker and moved your 3DS around the stickers will shine as you move it around.

Water coming out of a cardboard bowser mouth?

Paper Mario Sticker Star also has a lot of great battle animations. The animations on the enemies and environment are very well done. They really did stay to the name of “Paper” Mario.

Audio:

The sound track for the game is what you would expect from any Mario game in the series. So catchy and soothing for the most part. When you go underground they did re use the classic soundtrack from Super Mario Bros. The audio is what you would expect from any Mario game. Never bad, always good, and always catchy. It seems to relate to the game very well.

Conclusion:

Overall Paper Mario Sticker Star is a very fun and enjoyable game. There are some things that do affect the overall score. Some of the younger audiences may find this game confusing at some parts and well get lost and will not be able to figure out where to go next. Most of the time they do not tell you where you need to go, it's basically go and figure it out for yourself. There were a couple of times I needed a small walk through to figure out where I needed to go next. I also believe they really didn't need to add the RPG battle system in this version of the game. Yes, battling with the stickers is a cool and new concept but when you win a battle it doesn't really feel like you've accomplished anything from doing it. Yes, you may earn coins or health when you defeat them but I missed when you gained experience, levelled up Mario, use badges, etc... That was very fun to me. Overall Sticker Star is a fun and enjoyable game but if your looking for the “old” Paper Mario this is not it. But try it anyways, you may have a good time as I did with it.

Various voxel engine ramblings

I have outed myself previously as not a big Minecraft fan, so take everything in this post with a grain of salt (as I obviously don't really understand that genre).

Anyways... recently this sub-reddit for open-source games was pointed out in our forums, and while it isn't really as lively as others (for example the Linux gaming one) it pointed out an new project called Iceball:

Pre-alpha Iceball screenshot

Seemingly made by people not happy with the recent commercialization of Ace of Spades, it's an all FOSS remake, those early development you can follow here (or on their Github page).

Now maybe the graphics are lacking on purpose (see disclaimer above), but I couldn't help to think: why for f***'s sake did they have to reinvent the wheel with their own engine instead of using for example Terasology:



Or Minetest, or the Ardorcraft API for that matter???

Ahh well, at least it made me aware that Terasology is still very much under development, and with its focus on DungeonKeeper & Dwarf-Fortress elements, it might actually become a game I would play (and doesn't make my eyes bleed :p ).

Speaking of which... the guy behind AgentKeeper released yet another nice video and graphics are constantly further improved as seen here.

Fire Emblem Awakening early!

So I got my copy of Fire Emblem Awakening this morning for my 3DS. A whole week early. The game is wonderful so far. As for Paper Mario, that will be up at some point today as promised. Stay tuned!

Selendriel Knight Level 63 US West

Well, as they say one must learn from the best so I was checking out the top Knight on the US West server - a knight called Selendriel with a crazy 44k battle rating.

Note the level 14 soul engraving and the astrals which I wrote myself what they do. I would say he or she is a very SOLID knight. No fancy or lucky astrals or greediness with even higher critical damage, etc. Just very solid attack and defense and near 45,000 life also.

#28 in World Boss Event Knight Level 48

It was pretty great to achieve to be #28 in the whole server on a World Boss event especially given that I am a non-cash player, well, at least so far.

Here I am level 48 and you can also see a bunch of my World Boss fighting videos on YouTube on my Wartune Playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWe0jGwNlMkhpXfWKME2S1dOqwqQdYE6B&feature=view_all

In the meantime I took a screenshot because I earned roughly 250,000 gold and daru, which also means that the top spots are probably making something in the area of 1,000,000 gold and daru.

DevCorner: Blender Game Engine

While Blender3D is one of the premier FOSS projects out there, its integral part the Blender Game Engine (BGE) is often belittled as not a serious game engine.

While the criticism is certainly not completely unfounded  and the integration of limited "non-programming" game code creation (via logic bricks) gives it a bit of a "RPG maker" image, it really is a quite interesting platform to work on it seems.
Ok, probably as of now the BGE is really more of a rapid game prototyping engine, but previous experience during the Yo, Frankie! project has actually shown that at least compared to some other well known FOSS engines, it is a serious contender (that Blender Foundation project originally started on Crystal Space, and after many problems was implemented in the BGE in a few weeks only).



So what makes it so interesting? Well for one there is the full integration with a creation tool (obviously Blender3D) so that getting your content into the game is only a matter of making it. No exporters or anything needed... it just works. Then of course there is the fully scriptability via Python, also integrated tightly. Basically you never have to exit Blender, and testing your game can be done right in the editor with one click (no compiling etc. necessary). Oh and did I mention the great physics capabilities via Bullet, also build right in?

In addition your created game will be immediately available on any platform the Blender Game player has been ported (all major desktop operating systems, with an Android port under development and a browser plugin, too). In addition you can choose to publish your game as a single .blend file, giving the users a direct access to all the source files of the game; a wet dream of any true FOSS game developer!
The tight integration with the GPLed Blender Player, has been a major source of discontent with the predominately propitiatory game developing users of the BGE however. Thus there now exists also a few options to encrypt your game and/or run it on an external engine that can be kept close source (but I will not go further into that here). 

You can find a lot of (sometimes really awesome looking: 1, 2, 3) game projects on the Blenderartists.org forum. Now as I said, most of it is sadly closed source with propitiatory artworks, but I also have the feeling that some simply don't know or care about the legal implications of their "freeware" game (which sadly shows that even many people who use a great FOSS tool, mostly care about the "free as in beer" aspect of it). 

One of the more interesting projects right now (which might or might not become a full FOSS game) can be seen in this video:



It shows the most recent work by Martinesh, who is basically BGE's resident game art guru. Two years ago we already featured previous awesome work by him, but sadly that Air Race project is by now canceled.
What he is now working on is however rather a show-case for the really nice new graphical features in the BGE which he and others are developing in the so called "candy" development branch (on his blog there are also more details and nice videos from some time ago).

Another cool recent project it the rewrite of the the logic bricks visual programming idea via nodal logic blocks called Hive.

While not completely integrated into Blender yet, you can already try it via an external editor (the created python code works fine inside Blender). There are also some tutorials and a documentation for it.
Since my programming skills also lack somewhat, I find that an interesting tool... however most likely it is rather a nice way to do some level scripting, than actually programming the real guts of a game with it.

So where can you get started with developing your own game using the BGE? Well, the blenderartists.org sub-forums are always helpful, with some nice beginners video tutorials linked here, here, here and here ;)
There are even some books available (this one in particular is quite recent, which is a plus given the fast development of Blender3D) and there is of course the official Blender documentation.
Oh and a good source of content is (besides our friends opengameart.org of course) Blender Swap (nice interview with one of the creators here).

If you have further questions please comment below or ask over at blenderartists.org!

Updates from AgentKeeper

I mentioned this nice new project that appeared on our forums some time ago already, and while the promised source-code isn't available as of yet, a new and quite good looking video was recently posted:



Now as you can see, it shares quite a lot of graphics with OpenDungeons, which is not completely dead either, but there is at least some discussion to "jump ship" as AgentKeeper is progressing much quicker (with it being a University supported project).
You can follow AgentKeepers progress here if you fancy some nice dungeon management simulator ;)

P.S.: Stay tuned for an new version of Red Eclipse early next week.

Upcoming Reviews! (Currently working on)

Hey everyone. Normally I would only use this blog to post reviews and not updates but this is a big one. I recently had some time off so I have had the opportunity to play some new games. I am currently writing the reviews for each of them now. Down below is a list of reviews I will be posting shortly.

Reviews to come:
- Paper Mario Sticker Star - Jan 30th
- New Super Mario Bros. 2 - Feb 1st
- Tales of the Abyss (3DS) - Feb 8th
- Halo 4 - Feb 11th
- Borderlands 2 - Feb 14th
- Call of Duty Black Ops 2 - Feb 17th
- Diablo 3 - Feb 20th
- Smite - Feb 23rd
- Fire Emblem Awakening - Feb 25th
- World of Warcraft Mists of Pandaria - Feb 27th
- Minecraft (XBLA) - Feb 28th
- Awesomenauts (XBLA) - Feb 28th
- Trials Revolution (XBLA) - Feb 28th

Yes this is a lot. These are not in order but I will be releasing all of these as soon as possible. I am planning to have all of them uploaded no later than Feb. 28th, 2013. All the dates attached to the reviews are not final and may be adjusted or pushed back. I will do my best. Also the Arcade titles are much smaller so I will do all three on the same day. If you want to see any other reviews please feel free to comment, post on the facebook page, message me on twitter, or send me an email at codysreviews@gmail.com.

I also wanted to say I have reached a new milestone and I am doing all of these reviews to see if I can double what it is now. I am getting about 700 views a month now and am at 11k viewers.

Thanks everyone!

Some nice screenshots...

So it seems like it is up to me again to keep this blog alive ;)

Not too much to report though... therefore I present you Red Vs Blue Unvanquished edition:

Well at least that could be fun... anyways, as they explain in their last two weekly updates (1,2), their Demon Engine has seen quite a few graphical updated an bug fixes lately. Furthermore they highlighted an upcoming major change in game-play compared to Tremulous, as Unvanquished will be using a real resource gathering system.

Also a cool new screen comes from the "Modern Warfare" mod for 0 A.D.:

Tanks in 0 A.D.

In their WIP thread on the 0 A.D. forums they have also confirmed that the mod will be "open source" however did not specify this further. It also seems like they have plenty of good artists, but are lacking a bit on the coding side. So if you know your way around Javascript and XML hacking, give them a hand (and secretly lobby for a full FOSS release ;) ).

Group Arena Screenshot

I thought to take this screenshot in the group arena because it looks good 2 warriors or knights protecting the lady mage :)

The levels are 45/46. I also have the fights recorded on YouTube so check out my channel there is you want to check it out.

Click the picture to enlarge.

Wartune Introduces Talent System

Recently there was an introduction of the Talent System in Wartune (applicable as of level 50). Basically from what I understood all talents are passive except 1 which is active and it goes in the "6th slot" of the skill buttons - you know where you click to activate skills - in between of skills and runes.

The one my guild mate uses stuns enemy players (only works on players) and its pretty cool.

Here is a screenshot of how the talent tree (or more accurately circle) looks like:

Becoming level 45 with arena shop set

One grand milestone in Wartune is becoming level 45 and wearing the arena shop set. The next milestone is at level 55 which is far ahead in the future and many people don't even reach it.

Open Source Handheld Console GCW-Zero: OpenDingux, Kickstarter

GCW Zero Kicksterter is a project to create a spiritual successor to the low-cost Dingoo A320 handheld gaming console.

Thanks to SiENcE for pointing this out!

Fresh versions of Stunt Rally and Warzone2100

Just released today, there is a new version (1.9) for Stunt Rally:

Stunt Rally 1.9

It has a few nice new features, but probably the greatest update is a major change in the car handling physics, including an "easy" mode for those of us not wishing to practice for a career as a professional rally driver ;) and the guys would like feedback in the SR forum so let them know what you think.

A big collection of (partially quite crazy) screens can be found here.

Another great release that surfaced just today is Warzone2100 version 3.1.0. It cumulates all the changes made during the last 2.5 years, however if you tested the RCs already then there isn't too much new. Most notably they mention the new and fully fixed netcode, so that "out of sync" is a thing of the past (unless you have a crappy net connection like me :( ).

Have fun playing!

My Knight Skills Level 44

For those who wish to see my skill allocation here is the screenshot of my level 44 Knight's Skills:

The shadow slasher unfortunately is a mistake so that 1 point I could have used elsewhere now either in slashers or making Delphic or Whirlwind level 3.

There is no justice in guild wars

Here is a nice screenshot from a guild mate of mine taken during the guild war where he was fighting with 4 weaker players and killed them all and I want to show that in saying that in guild war there is no question of fairness - the strongest wins - it's the rule of the jungle. And so please do not get angry or shouting that the game is unfair when you go fighting in the guild war in Wartune. I myself have been killed millions of times by powerful players and that's the game, don't get upset, get stronger :) and by the way the same applies in life! don't get upset! get stronger! :)

We had a really great guild battle Sanctum vs. Russians on the 11st of Jan on the European server of Armor Games and I was lucky enough to be there on time and participating so I could record it. You can see the videos below.

The Russians guild has grown a lot and has become much stronger compared to the wars we had in the past. So good job to them. And also good job to our guild for keeping up the good work and maintain the solid #1 position.

Enjoj the videos!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Red Eclipse, STK feature in Microsoft Promo

Hat tip to forum member TheLastProject who posted about a promotional video for a proof of concept research project called 'IllumiRoom'.  The main game shown is Red Eclipse, but SuperTuxKart also briefly appears (implicitly as the game played by a girl!) around the 0:48-50 mark.

I doubt they were actually showing an Xbox as I'm unaware of either Red Eclipse or SuperTuxKart being able to run on one.

I find it fascinating that 2 FOSS games would appear this way.  Either this is an indication of red tape avoidance (no permission required for GPL games) or a cultural shift within Microsoft - or perhaps I'm just reading too much into it.

It certainly adds some validation to the games themselves, indicating they are impressive enough to feature as part of a video by one of the world's foremost technology companies.  So hats off to the developers of both projects and also the projects that enabled them (CubeSauerbraten, TuxKart) - I like it that both games are good examples of open source in action.

GarageGames raising money to port MIT-licensed Torque3D to Linux.

Just a quick heads up.  GarageGames is currently raising money to port their recently open sourced Torque3D engine to Linux, including editing tools.  Here's a link to their IndieGogo page.  They're using a fixed funding campaign, so you don't have to worry about losing your money if they don't reach their goal.

We could use a capable 3D engine with mature, commercial quality editing tools on Linux (yes, there are other FOSS engines that run on Linux, but what we don't have is something that comes close to Unity at the moment in terms of ease of use) -- not to mention the fact that this would open the door for people to port a lot of existing games.

If you'd like to see this happen, stop by their IndieGogo page and help them out.

Gathering for the Guild Tree

One of the cool parts of Wartune is the massive gathering of friends in the guild to rip the benefits of the Guild Tree, which come in form of fruits (free contribution to the guild every 3 minutes) and very nice experience I think it was every 15 seconds and you get more the more people energize the tree.

So here are 2 screenshots from US West and Europe servers showing 2 different guilds gathering at the Guild Tree to chat, have fun and get the benefits for 15 minutes.

(sorry my recording software toolbar is covering the server name, but my level 46 mage is in US west and level 42 warrior in Europe)

Gathering for the Guild Tree US West - Russians

Gathering for the Guild Tree US West - Sanctum

and also here is a movie about it Wartune Guild Tree Event and Explanations

Final Guild Battle Sanctum #1 vs. Mummies #2 (5 Jan 2013)

Another win vs. Mummies :)
Go go Sanctum!! :)

Check out the 2 parts video I put on YouTube showing the guild war on the 5th of Jan.

Part 1

and Part 2

Cube2: Sauerbraten Collect edition released

After more than two years, there is a new Cube2: Sauerbraten release, called "Collect edition":



Full change-log can be found here, and the downloads are linked here.

Also keep an eye out for a new Octaforge (also Cube2 based) release, as announced here.

A word of warning about not nice people

So I wanted to make a normal Void run after failing nightmare and I couldn't find anyone in the guild at the time I was playing, so I joined a random one. There, 2 friends joined in who I later found out were not the most nice people and then another person joined in.

Well, these 2 started behaving in not such a nice way, not moving together, not responding / talking, doing things out of rhythm so to speak. We got to the goblins and guess what? They charged in no pulling no nothing.

Both myself and the 4th person were frustrated by them, but I was keeping my cool while he was not and started swearing.

So the way I see it there are 2 ways to go from such a situation. Or you suck it up and be nice anyways and get the dungeon finished. Or you stand on your ego, start exchanging words and ruin the dungeon run by someone quitting. I suggest the first. And then of course try to remember and don't join into a party with these guys again! (if you remember them :))

Duel Rank 33 - Woot!

I just beat Taurus in Duel and reached rank 33! 220,000 gold and daru - I am now starting to understand how much ahead all the high rank people are if they get such rewards regularly! Wow!

I reached rank 39 in Europe! What a reward!

Wow I could not believe my eyes neither about reaching rank 39 nor about the reward being 190,000 gold and also another 190,000 daru! That's huge!

Unfortunately I do not think I will manage to maintain this rank for 24 hours before they pay out the rewards, but I will try.

My Wartune Blog - My Wartune Playlist

So I decided to open up a nice little blog for my Wartune guides, videos, pictures and ideas and since I can't re-post everything I already did, well, then I am just going to put the link to my YouTube Wartune's playlist below which you can visit and see all my Wartune videos!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWe0jGwNlMkhpXfWKME2S1dOqwqQdYE6B&feature=view_all

And here is one of the many nice videos:

ASTRO Guide of 3 Stages of Astro Making

Ur-Quan Masters HD released

Happy new year everyone!

So today I found out about this really cool project to improve the graphics of the open-source (with freeware media) classic Ur-Quan Masters (aka Star Control 2):



Having played the SD version back in the day on my GP2X handheld (and it seems to be available for Android nowadays too ;) ), I can assure you that the game holds up very well to today's standards, with a really cool and funny story and awesome voice acting. Higher resolution graphics thus can only make it better ;)

So, NO excuses now... give it a try!