Xenowar: Minimalist Squad Tactics (Android/Windows)

Xenowar

Xenowar is simple turn-based squad tactics. It had one or two recent releases. Gameplay is not at all as deep as UFO:AI goes but quicker to get started with and fun too.

I tested it on a friend's HTC Wildfire [spec]: it was quite laggy and either the screen is too small or my fingers are too big. :) Or maybe I just lack touch-screen-experience.

Please excuse this laggy and kind-of-broken recording..

Dragonball Raging Blast 2 Review

Time for another review! Sorry for the lack of reviews, been extremely busy. Time to get on track! Anyway this is a review for Dragonball Raging Blast 2. Enjoy!

Gameplay:

Well where to get started. DBRB2 is a very enjoyable game when it comes to fighting games. I personally am a huge DBZ fan so obviously I'm going to love that game, but I will base this review on a non fan perspective. DBRB2 has a wide variety of characters to play, more than the first one. in DBRB2 there is no story mode. The mode is known as "Galaxy Mode" which is really neat in my opinion. Every single character in DBRB2 has their very own galaxy you can play. Each galaxy has about 5+ fights. You can rush through the game is just beat each characters main missions in their galaxy or try for 100% completion of every characters galaxy. If you rush through it, it will still take some time to beat all of them. When you complete certain people's galaxies you unlock other character galaxies as well as hidden roads. What I mean by hidden roads is say you beat the last mission for Goku, you will unlock an alternate mission for gohan, teen gohan, etc... It basically means if a characters galaxy is linked with another characters then you will unlock sub mission known as "hidden roads". Now there are a TON of unlockables in this game. From concept art, to characters, to soundtracks, moves, costumes, accessories, voice clips, etc... There are A LOT! One of the new modes they added is called "Battle Zone". It's basically missions and when you have beaten the battle zones then you unlock ultimate zones which are much harder fights. The online play is better, a lot less lag and a lot of titles to unlock. Yes there are a lot of move spammers online like the other previous games. But what fighting game does not have those type of people? Overall this is a good fighting game to play with your buds or alone beating galaxy mode. The controls are really good and the combos are fun. They also added a raging blast mode, when you fully charge up with your ki press "RB" on the 360 controller and you will enter raging soul. This basically makes you faster, stronger and pull of longer combos. 

Overall: 8/10

Graphics:

The graphics are much better compared to the first one. The auras and detailing on the environment and characters are much better than DBRB1. They are very pretty. The super attacks look much better as well such as the Kamehameha. Overall all of the graphics got a nice upgrade.

Overall: 9/10

Audio:

The music choice is very well done in this game. Many new soundtracks have been added and are all pretty decent. The voice acting is kind of off on some of the characters. The voices for Jeice, Frieza, and kid gohan are all different voice actors and sound terrible. The other characters are great. The combat audio is good as well, when you hit with a big attack or big combo it sounds like it hurts.

Overall: 8/10

Overall Rating: 8.5/10

Open Web Games, GameOn and Construct 2

(edit: Construct 2 is going Closed Source, I'll either edit out this part or keep it for reference, but don't get your hopes up when reading this)

Scirra Construct is one of the few FOSS competitors to the proprietary GameMaker 2D game development suite (Gluon, Enigma and Game-Editor being the others). Unfortunately, the system has been limited to Windows since its inception due to relying on DirectX fiddlies, however, that has all changed...

Construct 0.x Showreel

Yesterday the long awaited Construct 2 project released a public alpha. No longer are Construct games chained to Windows; instead, games can be exported to HTML (5) which is pretty much on the opposite spectrum of platform-lockin.

Construct 0.x Interface

Now, one significant problem is that the editor isn't cross platform, and relies on a Windows GUI lib. However, seeing as the games are now cross platform, maybe the FOSS gaming community can show their appreciation by helping with the porting process? "Game Maker" like software is something that really lowers the bar of entry into game development, and Construct 2 fits that bill.

Jump on their forums if you're interested!

Why HTML (5)?

So, some people might ask why Scirra is targeting this rather new platform. I'm most probably mistaken, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Construct 2 is the first "HTML 5 Game IDE", and definitely the only Open Source one. Among the Free Gamer blog team, we have a couple of writers who don't approve of the web being used as a game platform (you know who you are), personally I find it rather promising. The fact that open web tech is immensely cross platform, and has an ease-of-delivery that is second to none, I can only see benefits to developing and embracing it further.

Mozilla seems to have gone that route; they recently hosted the "Game On" competition where developers entered games that utilize open web tech; and FOSS web games won 2 of the categories ("Best Webbiness" and "Most Fun")!

Don't write HTML 5 games off to 2 dimensions either, someone recently posted a rather simple but fun 3D RPG game utilizing WebGL on OpenGameArt the other day,  it's rather cool :) Also don't forget about the Quake 2 WebGL port! (remember, these require a WebGL enabled browser, such as Chrome/ium and Firefox 4)