A while back I gave my first timer total newbie impressions of trying to pick up Yomi Online. It was definitely a struggle but I did manage to successfully self-teach myself the game, just by reading the rules and playing the tutorial and bots lots of times. This meant I was able to pick it up using just the main in-game resources available to me, with a bit of help from forum posts and guides once I felt I could [...Full Story...]
Title: Bomb The Zombies Format: Android Reviewer: Remy77077 Approximate Time Spent playing at time of writing: <1 hour Modes of play: Single Player Bomb The Zombies does actually offer a genuine challenge to the player, which is sadly quite unusual for a mobile game. Each level is essentially a basic puzzle of how to use your limited bombs or abilities to wipe out every zombie on the screen. Where this game falls down is that there are [...Full Story...]
We did not really consider gambling ‘fruit machines‘ (aka slot machines or just slots) when it came to defining the Agoners review criteria. They clearly aren’t designed to be any kind of challenge or competitive game at all. The best fit they would have to our criteria would be under the “Toy / Experience” category – for those that enjoy the thrill of betting against the odds to try to win money, or of calculating the odds correctly. Of course [...Full Story...]
Title: Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Format: XBox Live Arcade Reviewer: Remy77077 Approximate Time Spent playing at time of writing: 800+ hours (My raptr stats show over 400 hours playing it, but I’d been playing this for 9 months for a huge amount before I even created my raptr account, plus lots of offline play, so I think this is a pretty good estimate, given I know from my save file that I’ve [...Full Story...]
Asynchronous competitive multiplayer games are something I’m very interested in as they are potentially a very good fit for both my gaming tastes and lifestyle. That’s why I picked out a couple at the start of last year as titles I was keeping an eye on. Skulls of the Shogun has recently been released, but I haven’t yet tried it out, but for Hero Academy, the time is now, as you can see from my raptr stats I’ve played it [...Full Story...]
Lum is a very attractive character for a lot of new players at Yomi. It’s also been said this is a bit of a shame though, because he’s one of the most complex characters in the game to play with, and so not exactly ideal for a new player. Yomi is a competitive game that supremely tests your valuation and reading (yomi) skills. As it’s a turn-based card game, there’s no real ‘execution’ to speak of (apart from rare cases [...Full Story...]
When I last wrote about Yomi, I was still very new to the game, but I’d decided to buy a single online character to get me started and to help me learn to play the game. I do think this is definitely the best way to get started at online Yomi, because I feel there’s just too much going on and too much to learn if you are playing with different characters every week on the free rotation; unless of [...Full Story...]
Title: Outland Format: XBox Live Arcade Reviewer: Remy77077 Approximate Time Spent playing at time of writing: 16 hours estimated (I have 34 hours on raptr, but that was massively higher than play time, caused by frequently leaving this game on while away from my Xbox, often paused… to understand why, read on). Modes of play: Single Player, Online Two Player Co-Op, Online Leaderboards It’s been a long time since I posted a full review and I’ve probably played more of [...Full Story...]
…Continued directly from Competitive Gaming 123… A quick review of what that our 1,2,3 was: 1. A level playing field. 2. Effective skill-based matchmaking. 3. Accurate and fair skill & result-based ranking. What’s always amazed me is that there’s so few competitive games that currently or have ever managed all three of these basic core criteria very well, or even at all in most cases. One caveat is that, generally, super-hardcore-tournament & clan competition stuff succeeds in adding some or [...Full Story...]
While I was writing my follow-up to my previous article about competitive gaming design using case examples, I got sidetracked into a very interesting debate on David Sirlin’s Fantasy Strike forums. I’ve linked it here, in case you want to read it all, but I will attempt to summarise the major points of it here. David Sirlin (and one other poster on the site) were insistent that all Xbox 360 fighting games have functioning true-skill based matchmaking. Here’s a quote [...Full Story...]
Well Halo 4 has gone one worse than Halo Reach even, and launched without any kind of skill-based ranking system, and now has a gameplay affecting grind exploitationware system too rather than a purely cosmetic one. These are absolutely horrible decisions for competitive gamers everywhere and make me wish I could go back in time to Halo 2′s release again! Reach eventually got some semblance of a working ranking system, but it was too little too late, confined to one [...Full Story...]
We’ve written so much here on Agoners about competitive gaming, as per our definitions, that I thought it might be useful to re-state a few things in a single article. A bit of a re-statement of our beliefs; a competitive gaming manifesto if you like. Gaming design for competitive gaming should always mean these three things: 1. As level a playing field as possible. This means that as much as possible everyone is playing the same game with potential access [...Full Story...]