It's a world of adventure, where you get deal damage with the words that you spell.

I have a kind of love/hate relationship with the game company Popcap.  I say this because I absolutely love the games they make, but I hate the amount of time that said games steal from my life.  The most recent offering from Popcap, Bookworm Adventures 2 continues this trend.  Plants vs. Zombies set a very high bar for “casual” games. So can a bookworm hope to leap it? In some ways yes.

When I was first explaining the concept of Bookworm Adventures Volume 2 to a coworker, they got a little confused.  Like any adversarial game, there are adversaries to conquer, in Bookworm you do damage with words.  My coworker thought that meant you were supposed to use hurtful words to vanquish the enemy.  While that may be an excellent idea, it’s not exactly on target.  In Bookworm, you deal damage in the same way you score points in Scrabble (sans the double and triple word scores).  Just like in Scrabble, you have a tile set to spell your words from.  In Bookworm, you get 16 letters and the longer the word you spell, the more damage you will do.  For instance, a word like pretentiously, is going to do a lot of damage.  Some letters deal more damage than others, just like some letters score more points in Scrabble.

What's the best word you can spell using those tiles?

So, can spelling be fun? Absolutely.  Some of the fun is from the verbal taunting you take from the opponents you face.  Take Too Hot Porridge to the left there.  He’s like cold porridge, but hot.  When you’re playing in adventure mode, all of the villains have a theme. You’ll run through Cold Porridge, Too Hot Porridge, Baby Bear, Mama Bear and Papa bear in Chapter 5’s GoldieLex and 3 bears.

The opponents that you go up against get progressively harder.  They’ll have more hit points than you and they’ll don armor.  The attacks that they send your way will also get more brutal.  They can change your tiles, set them on fire, lock them down and all sorts of other attacks.  Maybe you thought you had the tiles to spell visualize, but if your v-tile gets changed to a qu-tile then you’re not going to be able to spell what you thought you were.

When you spell using gem letters you deal bonus damage. If you use 3 gems, you get a wild card gem.

While your enemies attacks and defenses get upgraded, yours can too.  For instance, when you spell longer words you get rewarded with tile gem upgrades.  Those gem upgrades may just be a damage increase, but some gems deal lasting damage or even knock out your opponent for a turn.  Additionally, if you spell a word using three different colored gems, then you’ll be rewarded with a special wild card.  It’s essentially the equivalent of your empty tile in Scrabble, giving you the ability to use it as any letter to complete the word you want to spell.  In the example on the right, I used it as the S in “whereabouts.”  In Bookworm you can only have one wild card gem at a time, so there’s no hoarding of them to make a 16-letter killer like semiprofessional.

Now, when you’re playing the adventure mode, it might be tough to not use a solver to help you decimate the competition.  The fascination with using 10 and 12-letter words to obliterate your enemies.  But I urge you to take heart, and resist the temptation.  Oh who am I kidding, go wild, spell words like tonsillectomy and vanquish your foes in a wild display of amazingness (Bookworm does not accept my spelling of amazingness as a valid word).  Throughout the course of the game you’ll also get powerups, in the form of healing potions, damage increases, and purification potions.  The purification potions come in handy because they take care of all of the things your enemy may throw at you.  For instance, if you have a tile that’s being warped every turn, or if it’s locked down and you can’t use it, the purification potion will take care of that.  Health Potions are pretty straight forward, if you’re low on health and don’t want to die, use one.  You can also add some power to your attacks with the damage increase power up.

Destroyed! He didn't see the word coming that killed him.

Now, if a word that you spell is particularly damaging, you can kill your opponent in one-shot.  Later in the game, your words have to become even more deadly than you’d have ever imagined at the start.  Words like Squash will not send your foes packing when they’re armored to the teeth, that’s when you’ve got to break out hyperkinesis (provided you’ve got the proper tiles).

Maybe this wasn’t intended by the developers, but one of my favorite parts of the game, once I gave in to the dark side of using a solver, was to see how large the word I could spell was. Sadly, I never was able to use all 16 tiles, I guess I’ll have to call myself a word apprentice, instead of a wordsmith.

There’s a lot to be done in Bookworm Adventures, outside of the adventure mode.  Once you complete it, you’ll gain access to Arena Modes and Mini-Games.  The Mini-Games consist of Mutant Words, Golden Coins, Word Up!, Link-N-Spell, Letter Rip! and Word Master.

They make it harder to cheat during the minigames by blacking out your tiles.

You get your first taste of the Mini-Games during the campaign from the helpful Moxie. During Adventure Mode, the better you fare in the mini-game, the better your reward.  Outside of the Adventure, you’re just playing to best your previous high score.

In the Arena Mode, every boss that you’ve fought through the campaign comes back to roost in a way that’s much more intense. There are no turns, but rather each boss attacks after a cooldown.  You get bonuses for attacking first, but it’s an intense affair the entire time.

One of the important aspects of the games Popcap makes is the replayability.  I find myself consistently coming back to Plants vs. Zombies because it has that unique quality of destroying zombies with an army of plants.  Only part of that magic is found in Bookworm Adventures.  I thoroughly enjoy the adventure mode, and playing through it to get to see the next boss and the next level ate up time like playing Civilization.  But when the missions were over, and I was sitting on the menu screen, it wasn’t the same going into the arena or playing the minigames.  They’re still fun, and I will certainly play the campaign again, but what it really leaves me wanting is Volume 3.  But maybe that’s the point.  I really have nothing bad to say about the game… except that it ends.  It’s a fantastic adventure, one I certainly enjoyed playing.  You can pick it up directly from Popcap, and it’s also available on Steam and other places.  You can also pick up a demo of the game to get your linguistic feet wet.

(Oh, and yes, that headline is intentionally spelled untie, instead of unite, I thought it’d be funny.)

Any questions about the game or about the blog?  Leave a comment below or shoot me an email at matt(dot)schuler(at)woodtv(dot)com.  For shorter, quicker updates follow me on Twitter.

Quitter.

The boss battles are fearsome.

The level layouts are pretty nice.

I would not listen to that horse.

The easiest is to go here: My Posts (http://blogs.woodtv.com/author/mattschuler). You can also go to the entertainment section of the woodtv.com blogs (http://blogs.woodtv.com/category/entertainment/).  There you’ll find a chronological list of the postings, which you’ll notice Aaron Lafferty frequents more than I.  You can also find the five most recent posts on the homepage, but my posts reside there for only a short time usually.

My most recent reviews were for the BlackBerry Curve 8900 and the Palm Pre (which actually came in one, two, three parts).

I also do peripheral reviews for gaming companies, I really liked the Razer Sphex (a very economical gaming-grade mousing surface that has an adhesive on the bottom of it to stick to your desk), and I found the Logitech G19 gaming keyboard stunning, if impractical. My favorite mouse right now is the Razer Mamba, though I use a Razer Lachesis myself.

I’ve built a PC for the blog and listed out components. I saw the future of the home phone.  My ears have been blasted by a nice set of cans, and I’m working on getting another pair of headphones for review.  I’ve also met an android, even though it was encapsulated within a phone (the T-Mobile G1).  I’ve also been caught in a storm (which would have been a better name for my BlackBerry Storm review in hindsight).  I also told people not to buy a Blu-Ray player, though I am wavering on that declaration (I still need cheaper movies).  I’m in love with DVR’s.

When it comes to games, I’ve been Left 4 Dead, Soiled My Plants and gotten stuck in a World of Goo.  I’ve done battle with Demigod, seen the Fallout and witnessed the Dawn of War, but never delivered the multiplayer review on it (which could change seeing as they just released a rather massive patch for the game adding much depth).

You can also follow me on Twitter, where I post immensely more than I do here (probably because it’s limited to 140 characters).

I’m working on a review right now for Bookworm Adventures Volume 2 (a great game for wordsmiths or their apprentices), and just today opened up a HP Mini (a netbook provided for review by Verizon).  I also recently was able to sign up for a Google Voice account and will be posting my thoughts (so far I love it).

As for my original introduction post, you can find it here. I hope this was helpful.

Even the menu seems epic. (click to enlarge)

I’ve taken my time with the Demigod review.  I wanted to make sure that the game I enjoyed playing, the game underneath all of the issues that plagued its launch, got a fair shake.

The issues were bad enough for the Stardock CEO Brad Wardell to post a blog called “Demigod: So what the hell happened?” a couple of weeks back.

I feel it’s had enough time though, and that playing the game now and offering my review gives an accurate view of what the game is like now that Stardock and Gas Powered Games have had a chance to get things under control.

You're going to want to investigate the many Demigods and settle on the one that's right for you. (click to enlarge)

Demigod is a unique kind of game because it combines various RPG and RTS elements to make something that’s pretty unique in the game space (at this point).  If you’re familiar with WarCraft III’s Defense of the Ancients (or DOTA) then you’re going to be at an advantage in terms of how the game is played.

There can be a multitude of objectives depending on the game-type you choose, but essentially it boils down to your units defeating the enemy.  There are flags on every map that give bonuses to the team that controls them.  If you capture the flag next to the gold mine and portal, that means your team will get more reinforcements and your cash flow will increase allowing you to buy better upgrades.

Other flags will give your team experience boosts or strengthen the hit points and damage of your reinforcements.  There’s also a nice flag that reduces the cooldown time for your Demigod abilities.

Demigod’s strength is in its Demigods

There are eight Demigods to choose from.  The most recognizable would have to be Rook (the huge walking castle which is the game’s essential title character).  One for suggestions, Rook was also the first character I played as when I jumped in the game.

The way I play Rook could be very different from the way other people play it, as there are different ways to level up your character.  (A web-based talent tree can be found here.)

I wanted to slam the Rook’s hammer, so for me I upgraded “Hammer Slam” as often as possible, which was every third level.   It proved to be a pretty potent weapon that did nice area of effect damage.

The Rook can also upgrade its team’s defenses by constructing towers on the map to guard key choke points.  Additionally, you can upgrade Rook to be a walking tower, which puts archers, a tower and a trebuchet in its arsenal.  If that’s not enough, Rook can heal itself by draining surrounding towers of their hit points to give the walking monstrosity some staying power.

Regulus will snipe you down. (click to enlarge)

Regulus is one of my favorite Demigods.  He’s the one I logged the most time on, and played with different styles.  My favorite ability on Regulus is Snipe.  A massive range lets you snipe from quite a distance away, and if you start casting while your target is running or teleporting away your shot will still land. (I kind of thought this was overpowered when post-teleport I found myself dead from someone else’s snipe, but there are similar abilities on other units that act the same way.)

Another favorite ability of Regulus for me was Angelic Fury.  Essentially it adds bonus damage to every shot at the cost of mana, and Regulus sports a cool pair of wings that let him loft above the action.  (Though he cannot truly fly, and thus skip walking around a corner).

Regulus’ arsenal is complimented by a talent that increases range and another that slows his enemies movement speed.  Additionally, you can lay mines as traps that explode for a nice chunk of damage and slow targets movement speed.  You can also rig Regulus’s attack with a tracking bolt, to give you the location of enemy Demigods wherever they are.  There’s also a Mark of the Betrayer attack that will explode for damage when the targeted Demigod performs an ability.

Capturing the flags are important for your team's success. (click to enlarge)

Rook and Regulus are examples of the “Assassin” Demigods, there’s also a set of “Generals.”  In that group, the most eye-catching would probably be the scantily-clad Queen of Thorns.  The Queen’s history says she was one of the fairies of the forest, but she’s no Tinker Bell.  The Queen can summon Shamblers to defend herself, and in turn can also destroy Shamblers to both heal herself and damage enemies.  There are also some more offensive weapons at her disposal which you can check out at the skill list page.

In the same group of generals is Oak.  Oak has a knack for bringing the dead back to life.  Oak can also shield his allies from damage, and a more powerful version of the shield actually heals them.

But don’t worry damage-dealers, Oak’s not all defense.  He can also cast Penitence on enemies, which not only damages them, but also slows them down and makes them susceptible to more damage.

Demigod’s strength is in its Demigods.  The Diversity of Demigods at level 20 (the level cap) can be pretty substantial because of the large number of talents you can spread points out to.  For instance, you could run into an Unclean Beast who is a ferocious melee fighter who has Foul Grasp (a stun that also damages).  But another player who chooses the Unclean Beast may choose to focus on leveling up Unrelenting Wrath (a 10 second buff that increases attack speed by as much as 65%).

The fog of war looks much more amazing when animated than in a screenshot. (click to enlarge)

This Is Your Battleground

The maps in Demigod provide good variety for their limited number.  (There are only 8, but more releases are planned).

Leviathan, the map to the right, is a round map with flags scattered over it.  As said before, controlling flags is important for controlling the battle.  Each map also has a unique defensive layout to start the game.  An equal number of forts, towers, unit spawn points and healing stones will be positioned around the map.

The healing stones are important for your Demigod, because if you’re interested in not dying in the battle it may be of interest to run away to live and fight another time.

The towers’ and forts’ range is limited though, providing ranged units an opportunity to snipe away from a distance, whittling away the hit points.  Regulus, my hero of choice, was particularly adept at this and would be able to take several towers down if I wasn’t rebuffed by an enemy.

The layout of the map you play is very important to the strategy for battle. (click to enlarge)

All of the maps are symmetrical so neither team is put at a disadvantage because of their starting location.  Crucible, the map to the right, takes the player away from the central battle location from the spawn before pushing you right into it.  It’s also one of the more popular maps in the Pantheon.

You can see a full listing of the maps and a tally of the number of games played on Demigod’s site here.

The most popular maps are generally smaller in size.  The larger maps, Mandala and The Brothers have less than 10,000 games played each.  I would presume this is because it’s harder to field a game with 10 players, and there have been connection issues getting people into a game.

Like most every other game I’ve played, I don’t tend to jump around from map to map.  I settle into my favorites and try to become an expert at those.  In the single-player game you can choose the specific number of opponents you want to face, including outnumbering yourself in battle (which if you’re in the mood for a comp stomp isn’t all that bad if you set the difficulty to easy).

If you've found favor, the items you can equip are more potent. (click to enlarge)

Do Me A Favor

Demigod incorporates an MMO-type element to the game play in with “Favor Points.”  You earn favor by being awesome in battle.  The better you do, the more favor you gain.

I actually really like the system because it gives you the option to either save up for some truly spectacular items and forgo weaker items.

I started out with the “Charm of Life” because it was cheap and seemed to offer some nice benefits.   The fact that I didn’t have to re-buy it every time was also a nice factor.  After that though, I didn’t go after other items along the way, but instead saved up honor points for an “Amulet of Transportation” that allowed me to quickly jump to allied buildings (which include captured flags) after a four second cast.

Other players may have preferred to spend as soon as they were able to, and that’s an option but I chose against it.  The persistence of the items is a great feature though, and one that keeps people playing the same way that MMO item-grinding keeps people playing.

The compliment of weapons and armor you can equip is broad and ranging. (click to enlarge)

It’s Dangerous To Go Alone… Take This

In the non-persistent realm are two different types of items.   There are the items that you can purchase from your main base,  the Citadel.  You can also purchase items from an Artifact Shop, which on some maps is capturable and other maps is not.

The Artifact Shop sells much more powerful items, but with that power comes a hefty price tag.  For instance, the first item I buy is usually a +mana helmet that costs in the range of 3,000 gold.  But my favorite item at the Artifact Shop rings in at 25,000 gold.

You get room for 5 items and 3 consumables in your inventory, maybe this is my lack of experience speaking, but I always focused on getting items instead of consumables.

So how do you keep yourself flush?  You earn gold throughout the course of the game.  The amount you earn is based on upgrades to your citadel, the number of gold mines you control (which are capturable with flags) and finally the number of heroes you kill.

This shot will kill that soldier, and then some. (click to enlarge)

Then There’s The Pantheon

The defining aspect of Demigod’s multiplayer action is The Pantheon.

The Pantheon is the grand arena with thousands of players ranked nicely in the ladder system.  On the Demigod site, there is a plethora of information breaking down almost any stat that you want to read about.

You can sort players by rank, experience, favor points, playtime, wins and losses.  Alternatively, you can just search for the player (I’ve managed to get half up the rankings in my limited Pantheon play time).

The Pantheon site also shares stats on Demigods.  As you can see, Regulus isn’t just my favorite, he’s the Demigod of choice for the masses (narrowly edging Unclean Beast for the top spot).

The amount of information on the site is pretty impressive, and in scale is comparable to World of Warcraft’s Armory. Granted the WoW Armory tracks millions more users with even greater detail.

When you kill opposing Demigods, you get gold. And the longer the kill-streak, the more you are praised. (click to enlarge)

But There Are Some Issues

Connectivity issues were bad enough with Demigod at one point for Stardock’s CEO Brad Wardell to come out with a public statement.

He provided this analogy to kind of explain what was happening with the online gameplay.

“So in Demigod, on launch day, Alice would host a game. Tom would be connected to Alice by the network library and then that socket would be handed to Demigod.  Then, Alice and Tom would open a new socket to listen for more players to join in.  As a result, a user might end up using a half dozen ports and sockets which some routers didn’t like and it just made things incredibly complex to connect people and put a lot of strain on the servers to manage all those connections.”

That’s one positive thing I can say about the problems that plagued the Demigod launch.  The company actively works to fix what’s broken.  In their defense, the testing of games was probably done on a LAN, and thus they would not have been able to foresee the connection issues that players faced online.   In his post, Wardell talks about delays of information being sent between players that would kill any game.

Here it says I'm rampaging, I guess I was killing a lot of opposing Demigods. (click to enlarge)

In my experience, I did have some connectivity issues.  Running the game in a window afforded me the opportunity to start the search for a game and do something else.  At least three times while searching/connecting to the game it crashed.  This was after the first patch Wardell talked about in his post on May 18th.  There was a subsequent patch though and things seem to be getting better.

In a game like Demigod though, this is a make or break issue for a lot of players.  If you’re going to have a matchmaking system it has to be sound.  Connectivity aside, I did not find I was outmatched by other players, as say the matchmaking in the older Warcraft 3 so often displayed (link has some salty Penny-Arcade language & euphemisms).

More Regulus killing. What can I say? He really was my favorite. (click to enlarge)

The Michigan Connection

Demigod also has a Michigan connection.  Stardock is located in Plymouth, Michigan.  (Which is actually just in my backyard, hailing from Canton).

Stardock is also doing a pretty awesome thing.  All of its games are released 100% completely free of any DRM (digital rights management) system.  DRM creates nothing but headaches for paying consumers, and often times can devalue a game if its frustrating enough.  I have to commend Stardock for putting the consumer ahead of the pirate.  It may make games easier to steal on torrent networks, but even games laden with restrictive DRM will still be there.

Additionally, Stardock is also embracing the future of digital distribution.  You can actually save some money by purchasing Demigod on its Impulse service.  And just like Valve, the company I’ve heaped praise on for Steam, you can download the games you own to any computer you own.  This kind of consumer-first thinking is really encouraging to see.

A Game Has To Be Fun

Overall, a game’s value really comes down to whether or not its fun.  In that respect, Demigod delivers.  The units, the maps, the persistent elements all come together to form some very nice gameplay.  It’s a game I’d recommend because I see that they’re working to address any problems that crop up.

Questions, comments? Hit the section below, and follow me on Twitter because I update that more often than the blog.

The only thing between your brains and zombies are the plants on your lawn.

The tagline for Popcap’s latest offering is ‘Get Ready to Soil Your Plants.”  Plants vs. Zombies as a concept is something I’ve never seen before.  Sure, I’ve fought off zombies, in fact I’ve had a number of posts recently fawning over Left 4 Dead.  I’ve played Tower Defense games (careful with that link, hours will be gone before you know it).  I’ve even planted flowers, but to combine the concept in a game I’d be okay with my daughter playing?  Amazing!

Maybe you’ve seen the music video with its catchy phrases (’There’s a zombie on your lawn,’ ‘I know your type: Tall, dark and dead, you want to bite the petals off of my head.’), and if you haven’t you should really take the time to watch it because it’s hilarious.  I know when I first saw the trailer that I had to play the game.

Things are pretty simple at the start. Defend one row from zombies, because they don't walk on the dirt it's too rough on their undead feet.

A different kind of tower defense

If you’ve ever played a tower defense game, the gameplay of Plants vs. Zombies will come pretty easily too you.  Build up your defenses, in this case plants, to ward off invaders, in this case zombies.

The game really eases you into the concept, starting off with only one path to defend and giving you gentle tips to collect the sunshine (because the only way you can build plants is with sunshine).  Sunshine is the only ‘resource’ in the game and you will live or die based on how much of it you gather.  It falls from the sky and can also be produced from sunflowers.  There’s a good chance you’ll be overrun by the zombie hordes if you don’t stock up on sunflowers.  A good strategy on most levels is actually pumping out massive numbers of sunflowers in an effort to boost the amount of sunshine coming in.  That way, you can build more unwieldly plants to truly devastate the zombies.

There are plenty of plants in the game to help you fight away the zombie hordes.  It starts off pretty simple, but as you get plants that are more fierce, the zombies you fight get stronger.  The strategies for fighting also change.  It’s not enough to just put out plants that shoot more, because some zombies have shields and will be able to chew through a couple plants devastating your defense.

Arm Yourself With These Plants… and More!

The Sunflower doesn't kill anything, but provides sunshine to build.

The Cherry Bomb is effective at leveling large groups of zombies.

A lawn mine will destroy any zombie that walks on it, but arming takes time.

Zombies coming at you too fast? Snow Peas slow zombies down.

There’s a Plant For That

Diversity in plant life will keep you alive.

For times where you feel like you’re being overrun, there’s a plant for that.  Throw out a Cherry Bomb, a plant that explodes and destroys all enemies in the vicinity.  Facing a zombie that tunnels under your front line and starts attacking from behind? There’s a plant for that.  It shoots forward and backwards.  Fighting on water?  There are aquatic plants, or you can toss out a lily pad and build any plant you’d like.  Fighting at night? You can equip yourself with mushrooms that further change your leafy defense.  Fighting in fog? Well… there’s no plant for that, but you can build a lamp post to light your way.  If you run into a zombie holding a screen door as a shield, it might be best to break out a mushroom that shoots gas through the screen.  If your plants are getting roughed up and eaten too quickly, you can give it a hard outer shell.

I’m actually pretty amazed at the variety and depth that presents itself in a game with such a simple concept.

Zombie! A Zombie with a shield! Oh, that's just a screen door? Then gas him!

Garden Variety

There are 50 levels in the adventure mode broken up into five sections.  You fight in your front yard, your back yard (which introduces the pool and thus the need for aquatic plants), at night and in the fog.  The battle even heads to the roof, where there’s no soil.  Without soil, your army is dependent on pots.  Without a pot, you can’t plant your army.  Luckily, someone has left pots on the roof for you to start with.

There are 26 types of zombies and 49 ‘powerful perennials’.  All are detailed in the almanac after you encounter them.  The almanac is filled with flavor text that adds a bit of comedic touch.  Comedy is rampant throughout, as if you couldn’t tell from a name like Plants vs Zombies.

Killing Zombies For Fun & Profit

There’s more to killing zombies than just keeping them from eating your brains.  It pays.  In fact, there’s a store in the game that allows you to get plant upgrades, expand the number of plants you can equip and get random miscellaneous goods like garden rakes, pool and roof cleaners.  The plant upgrades are extremely useful.  One mutates your sunflowers and turns them in dual-headed sun-producers while another turns your plant into mini-gun like devastator.  While you’re killing, money will churn out allowing you to purchase the upgrades.

There also plenty of modes apart from the adventure mode.  Mini-games, puzzle, survival and a Zen Garden are some of the unlockable modes.  You can earn additional money through those.

At battles end, collect your loot. In this case, it's a three-headed plant that shoots in three lanes at once.

The game is full of depth for being something so cheap ($19.99 direct from PopCap or $9.99 on Steam).  If you’re interested in checking it out, but don’t want to shell out the cash for the game there is a demo available. The demo lasts just 30 minutes, or about enough time for you to get hooked and download the full game.

Plants vs. Zombies truly impresses.  I was addicted from the start.  I played it for hours and didn’t realize where the time had gone.  While being the kind of game you can play for long periods of time, it’s also the kind of game you can pick up and play for a short time and then set it back down.

The only gripe I have with the game is that it’s dependent entirely on the mouse.  I’d love to be able to hotkey my different plants for faster building, but that’s not an option right now.  It could be attributed to balancing, but I’m thinking it would be better with hotkeys.

Questions, comments? Hit up the section below.  Follow me on Twitter for smaller, quicker updates that sometimes don’t make a full post.  Most recently, I let people know that the StarCraft 2 Beta was coming this summer.

Go sign up for the beta!

The StarCraft 2 Beta Opt-In is now available!

From the Battle.net forums “The StarCraft 2 beta-test period is coming in the months ahead! If you’d like a chance to participate, now’s the time to let us know. Simply log in to your Battle.net account, and click “Beta Profile Settings” to go through the new beta opt-in process and upload a snapshot of your system specs. During this process, you’ll also have the opportunity to opt in to future betas for other Blizzard Entertainment games. Please note that even if you’ve opted in to our betas previously, you’ll need to complete this new process and upload your current system specs to have a chance to be invited.”

There’s an FAQ on the Battle.net forum, but read that after you sign up for the beta! Hurry! Go!

Kill or be killed. Rather, kill for as long as you can, but you're going to die eventually.

Valve continues to impress me.  The company delivers updates to games its released for free.   For Team Fortress 2, those updates come in the form of class changes, new game modes, new maps and other various goodies.  For its Left 4 Dead players, Valve’s done it again.

The Survival mode was released this past Tuesday to the PC and Xbox 360 as a free update.  What’s amazing to me, is that almost any other company would have charged for an update of this quality.  In fact, most do.  I look to Fallout 3 as a great example of a game that’s charged for updates, but Valve goes the other route.  It adds a new game mode and releases new maps for free.

The patch actually has more to offer than just a new game mode too.

It doesn't take long for things to get out of hand on a Survival map.

First, the patch notes then more analysis.

Survival Mode

• New gameplay Mode
• 16 maps including Last Stand
• Leaderboards
• 7 new achievements

Versus Changes

• 2 new versus campaigns
• Fixed a case where versus team score would continue to be recalculated after the score panel was displayed
• Fixed an issue with recalculating the versus score health
  

  Eventually the special zombies, tanks and hordes will overtake you. It's inevitable.

  bonus for a player when they are rescued from being incapacitated

• Fixed being able to start a swing as an infected, then teleport to the survivors and have the claw swing hit a survivor
• Fixed a case where teleporting to the survivors would not reset the ability timer
• Fixed an exploit where you could load the chamber of a weapon with bullets by holding down the melee key
• Fixed a case where it was not possible to join a game while it was in a finale
• Fixed a rare case where listen servers would speed up the game over time
• Removed convars related to melee fatigue
• 

  If you're keeping good pace in your killing, there are points throughout the round where you'll have a lull and no zombies are assaulting you.

  Fixed a case where infected players would get a respawn time on their initial spawn into a map

Server Changes

• Made ms_force_dedicated_server not require cheats
• Add a message when queuing a heartbeat
• Simplified setting of game mode
• Removed convars director no human zombies and director holdout mode
• Added mp_gamemode [coop,versus,survival]

General

• Added lobby join and leave messages

Youll need to kill hordes efficiently, or the zombie hordes will overtake you.

It’s truly a fantastic experience. Survival mode brings with it a certain level of intensity.  You will be killing zombies until they kill you.  There are lulls where your group can scamper to the ammo pile from your entrenched position, but you’d better be quick about it.

Before the patch was released,  I wrote about an interview that some of the designers had given.  From that, Kerry Davis and Scott Dalton said Survival mode will be more than just trapping players in a small part of a map, unleashing the hordes and recording the longest time.  Davis and Dalton did write about the rate at which the difficulty curve increases.

You'll keep killing until you can't kill anymore.

“If the curve ramps up too sharply, we find that teams of all skill levels tend to hit a wall at the same time,” they wrote.  “There isn’t enough variation in the times to separate great teams from average ones. If the curve is too flat, then average teams will have a good experience, but really good teams can grind on long enough to cross the line from having fun to just getting worn out.”

After having played through a number of the included maps, they’ve done a good job with the pacing.  Managing to kill off the last of a horde of zombies before getting saved by an ally from an incoming boomer before the tank barges through a wall into your room to destroy you is a common experience.

No matter what, everyone dies...

Some maps are definitely easier than others, but that’s not through the fault of the designers.  The Survival is a refreshing change of pace in Left 4 Dead.  It fits with the campaign co-op and versus modes.

There are also some cool features of the Survival mode, like a leaderboard that shows you who’s lasted the longest on each map.  I dare say my 33:54.87 on drains will not be bested, but that’s probably because they released a patch yesterday that fixed a problem with tanks not spawning.  If you’ll notice on the final picture, we killed 2000+ zombies, but only a few tanks.

I’ve attached thost patch notes below.  If you’ve got any questions or comments, feel free to hit up the section below or check out my twitter page.

While you’re here, you should know that there’s a sale going on for the weekend that makes Valve’s Orange Box a mere $10.  That averages out to less than $2 a title, and is better money spent than any other form of entertainment.  The box includes one of the most original titles I’ve ever played, Portal, and a fantastic game in Team Fortress 2. (I’ve written about it before.)

Other Survival Mode Changes

• Darkened the Lighthouse background movie and increased the contrast with the user interface elements
• Chapter selection is now available when creating a Survival lobby
• Single player coop now works correctly after playing Survival online
• The correct game mode will be set when playing back a demo
• Changed holdout server spew to be development only
• Stats are no longer updated while viewing a demo
• Correctly update the leaderboard based on the player’s personal time, not the team best time
• Show the player’s best time in the scoreboard
• Removed Survival exploits from The Terminal, Last Stand, The Crane, The Boathouse and The Warehouse
• Fixed tanks sometimes not spawning after 15-20 minutes (Yeah, that one helped us out for a while.)
  

The single-player campaign is truly something epic, with multiple mission options that keep you coming back.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2  takes what I thought of the real-time strategy genre and transforms it.  This is definitely the good kind of transformation, it’s the Optimus Prime kind of transformation.  Dawn of War 2 is a lot of fun, and when I turned the game off I wanted to come back.

I’m breaking the review up into two parts, the single-player game and the multiplayer game.  The reason is fairly simple, the two modes are fairly different.  The multiplayer mode is more of your traditional fare for RTS’s while the single-player mixes in some roleplaying and tactical elements.

The other reason is fairly obvious, I just spent a good amount of time beating the single-player game and it was so engrossing I wanted to write about it right away.  It combines great story-telling elements with great gameplay elements and you can’t go wrong with that.Dawn of War 2 (DOW2) introduces you to the game in a way that’s fairly intuitive and weaves the entrance of characters into the introduction of gameplay.  You start out with the Force commander along with Tarkus and his squad of Blood Angels. The game mixes tutorial with action and allows you to click on bubbles to better inform yourself.  (This can definitely be good when learning about making sure your units have cover, because it allows them to deal damage while deftly protected.)

It transforms the traditional RTS mode, because you’re not going to build a base and manage resources in the single-player game.  Dawn of War 2 subtracts the town-building elements of the RTS genre and ramps up the warfare.

For the purposes of the campaign mode, you are the Force Commander.  He’s a hero unit akin to the kind you’d see in Warcraft 3, but with an added layer of depth because you choose the attributes you level up.  Each squad you have the option of deploying has a squad leader that you level up along with the Force Commander.  With the rare exception, you can only deploy 4 squads at a time from an eventual total of six squads.  You have to take your Force Commander, so it essentially leaves you with 3 spots for 5 groups.

You've got the option to choose which groups deploy and certain missions are definitely easier when you make the right choice.

The way you choose to equip your Force Commander should be balanced with how you choose to arm your group.  I chose to focus on the melee aspects, as you can see to the right, pouring points into my strength option.  There are four options that put simply determine your hit points, ranged damage, melee damage and energy (for using special abilities).  Because of my focus on melee, I was giving the Force Commander the very best melee weapon drops I was picking up.  Along with the swords, axes and rippers equipped, if it’s a one-handed weapon you can also equip a sidearm.  Generally, it’s not that used because the Force Commander gets sent into the midst of the action and is swinging with fury.

The first squad that’s paired with the Force Commander is led by Tarkus.  He leads a group of space marines that are definitely more than your standard grunt units. You can outfit them with almost any weapon (depending on which stats you build up).  I chose to go the traditional route and equipped them with ranged weapons and built up their ranged stats accordingly.  Tarkus, with points in the stamina tree, has the ability to taunt units into attacking him.  This is particularly useful in combination with another ability called Tactical Advance.  Tactical Advance reduces the ranged damage Tarkus and his space marines take.  Those two abilities combined can give your army the time it needs to reduce the enemy to ashes.

You also eventually get paired with a group of scouts led by Cyrus.  The scouts were probably my least utilized unit, but I could see them being particularly useful if I had cranked up the difficulty.  Cyrus and his scouts can utilize the infiltrate ability that allows them to slip behind enemy lines (cloaked) to plant a bomb and destroy a building.  With enough points in the energy tree, Cyrus can actually use abilities while cloaked and out of sight.  The kind of weapon the group equips actually determines a type of special attack Cyrus gets to use.  If armed with a sniper rifle, Cyrus can take a high-powered shot that devastates infantry units.

One of my favorites groups to deploy were the heavy weapons marines led by Avitus.  Big guns dealing big damage is how they live, but there are some strings attached.  Avitus and his marines wield heavy weapons that require setup time.  Once they get setup though, watch out.  With enough points in the ranged tree, the setup time is eliminated and Avitus can start firing immediately.

You can also call on Thaddeus to join your missions.  Thaddeus leads a group of assault marines who can jump into the action from quite a distance away, disrupting entrenched units.  Combined with a decent melee load-out, Thaddeus and his marines can do a good amount of damage while also allowing your ranged units to get into place so that they can start dishing out the damage.

The fifth and final member of the squad is pretty amazing.  It’s also a vital part of the story line of the game, so I won’t give away who it is.  The unit is the only vehicle that you will deploy during the campaign.  He’s placed inside of a Dreadnought (scroll down to see the description) and with the right equipment will become a key part of your deployments.

It seems wasteful to send down a droppod everytime you deploy on a mission, but these are Blood Marines and I don't really see them as being the environmentalist type.

As mentioned, you only get to take four groups down to the surface for most missions.  It’s important to equip your marines with the right kind of weapons for the enemies you’re going up against.  The mission description will let you know if the enemy has vehicles in the area, which would be a good indicator to toss Avitus a plasma cannon (effective against vehicles) and to bring along some explosives.  My favorite grouping wasn’t available until later in the game, when groups combined with weapon and armor drops created a tour de force.  Missions often could be completed in various ways, but I found the “guns-a-blazing” route was my favorite option.  Cyrus sat on the bench a lot.  The game warns you against leaving out one unit all the time though, because there will be a mission where the stealth options Cyrus offers are of greater benefit than the massive guns brought by Avitus.

You will get more weapon drops through the campaign than you will ever be able to equip.  It seems like the designers knew that was going to happen though, and you’re given the option of trading in items for experience.  I actually got myself in trouble a couple of times using it though, keeping only one key group of armaments and armor and trading away everything else.  There’s also the option of sharing load-outs between different groups, depending on the units that you send into battle.

Your army will always be outnumbered by the opposing force. It doesn't matter, the Blood Marines are dominant.

In battles, there will be times when your seemingly invincible Space Marines will get into a situation where they need to regroup (I’d say retreat, but it just doesn’t seem right).  This could be for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the death of some of your squad members.  Each squad has a certain number of units, but a shared number of hit points on the display.  Your squad leader is always the last one to die.  There are bonuses at mission’s end for keeping your squad leaders alive, so it is advantageous to turn and run if the battle isn’t looking good.  You can fallback to respawn points on the map.  The single-player part of the Dawn of War 2 doesn’t have the traditional base-building, resource-gathering type of home base.  Instead, there are various relay points around the map that you capture in order to call in reinforcements.  These points are usually defended, but any casualties of the fight are replenished when you capture the relay.  I don’t know if there’s a limit on the number of reinforcements you can get as I never ran into it, but your mileage may vary.

There are no medics in Dawn of War 2.  Your army, when not in battle, regenerates its health and energy.  You’ll usually have time in between fights to heal up.

If your squad leader, or Force Commander, falls they have to be revived by a fellow squad or restored using an equipped item.  Equipped accessories come in a variety of types.  There are pure stat boosters, limited-use items and replenishable items.  Stat-boosters are pretty self-explanatory, you get a better character by equipping them.  Limited-use items are things like turret drops and aerial strikes, the number of which are determined by points of interest you’ve captured on the planet.  Grenades and healing packs are examples of replenishable items.

There are three planets to deploy for missions: Calderis, Meridian and Typhon Primaris.  The environments are varied, from desert to jungle to cityscapes.  The environments are certainly pretty thanks to an impressive graphics engine.  And they are destructible, which means that building housing a force of Orks can be toppled with a well placed detonator.

The missions you’re given don’t have to be completed in a particular order.  You’ll have multiple mission options available and you can choose to do them in the order you wish.  There are missions which have a deadline.  They’ll give you three days to complete the mission, and you usually only have one deployment per day.  However, depending on your performance on some missions, you can actually earn more deployments on the same day, allowing you to get more done.  The determining factors are speed (did you finish fast), durability (did your men survive) and devastation (did you kill them all).  There is good variety to the mission types as well, and each mission you complete comes with a reward on top the items you pick up during the fighting.  Because you choose your missions, you have the option to defend a control point, assault a boss, or capture a certain strategic objective.

There are three strategic objectives: foundries, shrines and communications arrays.  Each has a different impact on your deployment.  The number of secured foundries on the planet determine the number of sentries you can drop on defense missions.  Similarly, the number of communication arrays determine the number of orbital strikes you’re given.  The maps are constant.  You will see the same strategic objects again, so if you chose to capture a shrine on one mission, on the next you can capture the foundry left behind.  There’s also a level of infestation on each planet that has an effect on each mission.  You’ll see more enemies if the infestation is higher.

Dawn of War 2’s single-player campaign is epic.  There’s so much to write about, I had to make three additions to the original post I forgot. The storyline draws you in, unit development adds diversity and choice, and there’s a heaping helping of action to keep you coming back.  As epic as the campaign is, it won’t fully prepare you for the multiplayer experience, which is another reason I broke up the review into two parts.

Everything you do in the campaign can also be done with a friend.  I didn’t have a chance to try out the co-op mode as my Steam friends were all busy, but it’s there should you want that single-player experience to be a little bit more friendly.

The single-player campaign introduces you to each race (the Orks, Space Marines, Eldar and Tyranid) but not all of the units you’ll encounter in multiplayer.  I’m looking forward to diving into the game even more.

One thing before the end, Dawn of War 2 is utilizes both Games for Windows Live and Steam.  When you install the game, it adds it to your Steam games list, meaning you can install it again as many times as you like.  I’ve an expanded friends list on Steam, which is nice but haven’t used a Games for Windows account much at all.  It’s what’s used for multiplayer matchmaking though, so I’m sure to get acquainted with it soon.

There’s a demo available if you’d like to give it a try.  You can find it here.

Questions, comments? Hit the section below.  Shoot me a note on Twitter or send me an email at matt(dot)schuler(at)woodtv(dot)com.

When the hunter pounces your friend, you should shoot it. (click to enlarge)

A big content patch is coming next week to Valve’s Left 4 Dead.  The patch will add a new game mode, dubbed ‘Survival’ and official versions of Versus maps ‘Dead Air’ and ‘Death Toll.’

On the Left 4 Dead Blog, a post from Kerry Davis and Scott Dalton said Survival mode will be more than just trapping players in a small part of a map, unleashing the hordes and recording the longest time.

Valve wants Survival games to last less than ten minutes.  It will be a mode of play “distinct from Campaign or Versus.”

Davis and Dalton wrote about the pacing offered in a Survival map, saying they needed “to define as precisely as possible how the difficulty ramps up during the course of a round.”

The designers have a number of different variables to work with including spawn times for mobs, special infected and tanks; the number of each type of infected that spawn; the time in between each spawn.

“All of these variables to work together to create a fairly smooth difficulty curve,” Davis and Dalton wrote.

You’re not going to last forever when playing a Survival match, which might be a bummer for the folks surviving the World At War zombie level. Davis and Dalton did write about the rate at which the difficulty curve increases.

You'll need to kill hordes efficiently, or the zombie hordes will overtake you. (click to enlarge)

“If the curve ramps up too sharply, we find that teams of all skill levels tend to hit a wall at the same time,” they wrote.  “There isn’t enough variation in the times to separate great teams from average ones. If the curve is too flat, then average teams will have a good experience, but really good teams can grind on long enough to cross the line from having fun to just getting worn out.”

Obviously, a tank will be much harder to take down if you’re still battling the zombies that have spawned before it.   Davis and Dalton also wrote about a break period in between respawns and how it will increase as the round goes on, they call it a “lull.”

“Each lull gets slightly longer as the round progresses, but that’s no guarantee the team will actually see the lull – it just prevents new infected from spawning,” they wrote.  “It doesn’t help with infected that are already in the arena. Killing mobs and tanks as quickly as possible is the best way to ensure that a team can take advantage of a lull to heal, resupply ammo, or just move to a better location with more supplies.”

I really can’t wait for this mode to hit.  It’s going to be pretty intense.  The number of zombies killed in a single Survival round will often be more than an entire campaign, according to the blog.  Conserving ammunition, timing reloads and aiming for the head will all be key come next week.

Will you be battling the zombie hordes when the patch hits?  Leave a comment below.  Feel free to check out my Steam Community Page and friend me so that we can kill the hordes together.

Questions? Shoot me a note on Twitter, or send an email to matt(dot)schuler(at)woodtv(dot)com.

Terran vs. Zerg

StarCraft 2’s original Battle Report was an epic battle between Terran and Protoss armies.   Now Blizzard has released a second Battle Report with a battle between the Terran and Zerg.

This time around the battle takes place on the map Blistering Sands.  Two of StarCraft 2’s game balance designers are pitted against one another.

There’s commentary from Dustin Browder and Robert Simpson.

Check out the video on Blizzard’s site for 22 minutes of gameplay footage.

StarCraft 2 is currently in alpha, hopefully it’s soon headed to the beta.

Recently, there was a Q&A session on BlizzCast 8 that had multiple questions that were StarCraft 2 related.   Check out my post on Gaining Aerial Superiority in StarCraft 2 for my writeup.

Questions?  Hit up the comments section below, shoot me a note on Twitter, or send an email to matt(dot)schuler(at)woodtv(dot)com.

A Zerg army tries to break through a well-fortified Terran base. (Image Courtesy: Starcraft2.com)

There is one game I’m looking forward to, more than any other.  That game is StarCraft 2.  The sequel to the best selling real-time strategy ever, and a game that has changed at least one world culture. (It’s also my favorite game of all time.)

I’ve been looking for an excuse to write about it, and tucked away in BlizzCast 8 is some Q&A with the game’s Lead Designer, Dustin Browder.

Browder was asked to give some insight into game mechanics, especially the current setup for air units and their role in the game.

“Well obviously each of the races behaves differently with how they use their air units,” said Browder.  “The Zerg, obviously the mutalisk is still a powerful part of the Zerg air force and still used for a lot of fast raiding, a lot of sudden attacks from different directions to keep the enemy off balance and of course in mass in the end game you can obviously use mutalisks for mass air assaults.”

It’s good to see that the designers are keeping some of the traditional strategies alive, but it’ll be interesting to see how the new units counter.  For instance, Browder talked about how a new Terran air unit differs from the Wraith in the original series.

A Terran army assaults a Protoss base with plenty of Thor units. (Image Courtesy: Starcraft2.com)

“The Terrans with their Banshee, is very very powerful anti-ground unit,” said Browder.  [The Banshee] can even sometimes just power right through base defenses which really the Wraith couldn’t have handled in the original game.  So you see a lot of need for all the races to have some very powerful anti-air weapons to deal with these kinds of threats.”

But what kind of offensive weapons will the Protoss be able to employ when it comes to base destruction?

“A similar threat on the Protoss side is the [Warp] Ray,” said Browder.  “It is a very powerful bream that can really do a lot of damage to enemy buildings.  So you’ll see there are some very heavy hitters in the air in Starcraft 2 that really require you to get out there and use some of these more dedicated anti-air units.”

Those units include the Corrupter and the Phoenix. Browder says players will see some similarities with the original game, but “these really powerful hitters really do make a pretty big difference. ”

A Zerg army assaults a Protoss base defended by several Carriers. (Image courtesy: Starcraft2.com)

Browder also said there will be some authority given to the bigger units in the game.

“Certainly the Carriers have a much longer range than they’ve ever had before,” Browder said.  “It makes them a very powerful threat from the air in the end game.  We should probably see more carriers used in higher level games but obviously will see how that goes in the beta.”

The traditional Terran end game air unit was and still is  the Battlecruiser.  This time around though, the Battlecruiser will have three options for improvements.  The Yamato Cannon is back, but players will also be able to buy a shield instead.  Plus different Battlecruisers can have different upgrades.  Stick the shielded force in front with the cannons in back and it will make for a fairly formidable battle.  The goal, according to Browder, is to make them a little more practical in different matchups.

“Where previously you would only see Battlecruisers in certain match-ups in Starcraft, now in Starcraft 2 you’ll probably see them in more matchups sort of across the board,” he said.

Browder also talks about the art direction of the game, addressing the ‘warp in’ process for the Protoss.  There are two videos comparing the animations in the original to the modeling in the sequel.  Check out the videos at the bottom of the BlizzCast.

Questions?  Hit up the comments section below, shoot me a note on Twitter, or send an email to matt(dot)schuler(at)woodtv(dot)com.