Monthly Archives: February 2011

Lucent Heart Star Contest Winner Announced

Lucent Heart Star Contest Winner Announced

Gamania Digital Entertainment announced that players can now sign up for Lucent Heart‘s upcoming “Prepare for Love!” sneak peek beta. Beginning just in time for Valentine’s Day, on February 10th-14th players are invited to find their Valentine in Lucent Heart and partake in special date dungeons, fun relationship building activities, or just some good old fashioned questing throughout Acadia. And as a special gift for a special occasion, Gamania will be turning on in-game weddings for serious couples.

Lucent Heart is a highly social Anime MMORPG that’s filled to the brim with unique content. Players will meet new friends and go on fun, lighthearted dates after being paired up by its matchmaking system. They will experience the powers of the Zodiac with special armor, abilities, and daily horoscope enhancements tied to their birthday. Not to mention 20 huge zones with unique monsters and bosses, hundreds of quests, numerous classes and skills, crafting, pets, mounts, and so much more.

Gamania would also like to introduce its new “Lucent Heart Star”, Vanessa Liang. Vanessa beat out some incredible competition in the “Lucent Heart Star” contest and will be the official representative for Lucent Heart’s North American launch.

“I’m beyond thrilled just thinking about my new role!” said Vanessa. “Being the Lucent Heart Star combines all of my favorite interests – gaming, anime, fashion, and cosplaying. I’m so thankful and excited to play with everyone that supported me, and to meet new people in the upcoming beta release.”

“We are very excited to have Vanessa on-board as Lucent Heart’s official spokesperson,” said David Wong, COO of Gamania. “We wanted to be sure we chose someone that represented Lucent Heart’s enthusiastic community and Vanessa is a perfect fit.”

Beta keys are available now for Lucent Heart’s “Prepare for Love!” beta. The keys are going fast so players will need to be quick to insure they get a spot. Sign up options can be found here.

For more information and to check out the interactive Zodiac wheel describing all 12 in-game Zodiac signs, visit the official Lucent Heart website.

Dust 514

DUST 514, featuring first-person shooter and RTS-style gameplay, will interact directly with EVE Online. This interplay between the two games opens the EVE universe to console gamers and gives them a chance to become part of one of the most massive cooperative play and social experiences ever.

 

 

The primary gameplay of DUST 514 features brutal ground combat that takes place on the surface of planets from EVE, delivering the visceral, adrenaline-fueled experience of futuristic firefights. Developed for the current generation of consoles, DUST 514 combines equal parts battlefield reflexes and strategic planning, giving commanders and ground infantry real-time configurable weapons and modular vehicles to manage dynamic battlefield conditions.

World of Tanks Review: Tank You Very Much

World of Tanks Review: Tank You Very Much

By Iain Compton

 

World of Tanks Urban Combat

 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ve probably heard of World of Tanks; a third-person tank combat game that’s become a breakaway hit for the Russian developers. I’ve been playing the game on and off for the past few months and so the good folks at OnRPG asked me to write a review.

 

At first glance the game looks very solid, the graphics are realistic and the tank models appear very authentic. You can choose from three nationalities – the US, Germany or Russia – but these are not factions or sides. Rather, they are three different tech trees to explore with strengths and weaknesses at different points. Battles are 15v15 affairs with each team balanced by the server to distribute the more powerful tanks as evenly as possible. This generally results in each team having a mixture of each nationality as well as a spread of vehicles from mighty heavy tanks to nimble scout tanks, stealthy tank destroyers and fragile but powerful artillery. In game you command your tank with some very basic controls as you and your teammates do battle across one of half a dozen or so nicely designed maps. The winner is either the last team to have any tanks alive or the first team to capture the enemy flag.

 

The game is set during the Second World War and the period is well realised. The tanks depicted are actual, historical tanks that fought in that conflict, the equipment you can buy for them is authentic and the maps are very atmospheric – most depict central or eastern European towns and villages of the period. If you are a hard-core military history buff you might complain that some of the tanks didn’t see service at the same time but if you did, we would be justified in ignoring you. This is an arcade style game not a simulator and the emphasis is on fun and accessible game play rather than strict accuracy. You can have the camera outside the tank for better visibility or you can zoom in for a gunner’s eye view down the barrel of the main gun for greater accuracy.

 

So you drive your tank around, you shoot the gun at other tanks and after the match you are awarded credits and XP. You can spend the XP on unlocking new upgrades or vehicles while the credits go on repairs and replenishing your ammo as well as buying new and shinier stuff. The game is free to play and so the developers hope to pay their bills through micro-transactions. You purchase Gold that can be converted into credits to spend, it can be used to buy certain premium tanks directly or it can be used to upgrade your account to Premium status. Premium accounts earn 50% more cash and XP, which means you’ll be driving the bigger and more powerful tanks much sooner. Some of those big and powerful tanks fire very expensive shells and cost a fortune to repair so, if you are unlucky enough to have your ride wrecked and to lose the match, it’s possible to earn less money than it costs to fix the tank up again meaning that Premiums become very useful indeed at higher tiers.

 

World of Tanks Upgrades

 

Each tank has a bunch of upgrades that you can research using XP. These range from bigger guns or engines to better suspension, more powerful radio equipment and more heavily armoured turrets. Additionally you must research the next tank in the tech tree before you can purchase it so you have to work your way methodically through the various tiers. The team balance is based on tiers more than anything else so the game will try and put tanks of roughly equivalent level into a match. This means that your little Leichttraktor starting tank won’t have to run up against anything more dangerous than other light tanks and perhaps some of the less powerful medium vehicles.

 

World of Tanks Skill Tree

 

There are, generally speaking, three kinds of vehicle in the game and each is a separate branch of its country’s tech tree. You have tanks, which are pretty straightforward: armour, turret, gun. These are the most versatile vehicles in the game and they come in light, medium and heavy flavours. Light tanks are fast and so are useful for scouting, heavy tanks are lumbering behemoths that can take huge amounts of punishment and medium tanks fit somewhere in between. Then there are tank destroyers, stealthy snipers that mount very powerful guns but have limited mobility. They don’t have turrets and can only fire directly forwards, they are also generally less armoured than regular tanks but they make up for this by being harder to spot. Finally there are self-propelled guns, more commonly referred to as artillery. These are very slow and lightly armoured but are capable of lobbing shells practically anywhere on the map. They have a special top-down map mode where they can select targets that are out of their direct line of sight and zero in on them. If any enemy tanks find your artillery then they are in trouble but if you keep them alive then they will rain down death from afar.

 

A nice touch is that there is a place in the battle for smaller and less powerful vehicles; bigger isn’t necessarily better. You can always see your teammates on the map but you can only see enemies that have been spotted by someone on your side. Spotting means that the enemy tank is within range of a friendly vehicle and that the friendly vehicle has a powerful enough radio to transmit the information to the rest of you. Until your scouts bump into the enemy then you won’t know if they are rushing your flag in force or dug in and waiting for you to come to them. Artillery in particular is very dependent on brave souls burning forwards in fast but lightly armoured vehicles to report on enemy positions. If you are in a light tank then your engine and your radio are more important than your gun. Scouting is worth XP and credits after the match just as kills or damaging hits are so you are helping yourself as well as the team by doing it too.

 

World of Tanks Free MMORPG Long Shot

 

At the moment, the game is in open beta outside of Russia and so many things are still unfinished. A clan system and territorial control campaign has been added recently that allows players to fight each other over a strategic map rather than just randomly skirmishing. More tech trees are promised with French tanks apparently almost ready for release and British and Japanese vehicles planned further down the line. Wargaming.net have set a February or March 2011 timescale for release but no firm date has been announced yet.

 

Overall the game succeeds. There will be enough to keep a hardcore player occupied in unlocking all the new vehicles and upgrades but there’s also a lot of fun to be had in the lower tiers so the more casual players aren’t going to feel left out. The controls are easy to learn, the driving physics work the way you expect them to and matches are fast-paced, rapid-fire affairs. If you have a bad match and die early on, you can leave, join a new game with a different tank and you’ll still get your rewards from the earlier game. A few things niggle a little but they are details really rather than solid criticisms – why do all the tank crews have American accents for example? My Heroes of the Proletariat in the screenshot above apparently come from somewhere outside of New York City rather than the banks of the Volga. The game is easy to pick up, lends itself just as well to a quick session at lunchtime as to a long evening of gaming and the different maps throw up different tactical challenges.

Marvel Heroes Omega

Marvel Heroes is a free to play MMO Action RPG in the style of Diablo. Play from a large selection of unique superheroes from the Marvel universe, across a classic comic book storyline.

Features:

Your Favorite Heroes: Choose to play as Thor, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, Deadpool, Emma Frost, and many more, each with their own set of abilities.

Earn Heroes For Free: Earn currency to purchase heroes just by playing the game.

Battle With Friends: Join in groups or Supergroups and battle alongside other players in co-op action.

Endless Fun: Over nine game modes offer constant challenges and content for you to play.

Battlestar Galactica Open Beta On Feb 8th

Battlestar Galactica Open Beta On Feb 8th

 

Players eagerly awaiting Battlestar Galactica Online, the highly anticipated space combat MMOG from Bigpoint, can get a ‘jump’ on the competition and be the first to launch a Colonial Viper or Cylon Raider by visiting Syfy.com and Syfy.co.uk where the open beta for the new game will be available exclusively for one week only beginning Tuesday, February 8th. Also available to players only at Syfy.com – and international Syfy Universal websites – are a frakkin’ awesome set of Syfy-inspired Viper and Raider designs, which players can choose to represent them in the on-going battle between the Colonial and Cylon fleets.

 

Battlestar Galactica Online is a free-to-play, browser-based space combat MMOG that combines high-quality, 3D graphics with intense gameplay. Bigpoint – the global market leader in browser-based massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) – designed and produced the game, which is based on Syfy’s award-winning, internationally popular television series Battlestar Galactica, produced by Universal Cable Productions.

 

battlestar online starbuck on your wing

In Battlestar Galactica Online, both the Colonial and Cylon fleets find themselves stranded in an unexplored area of space at the very edge of one of the galactic arms. Heavily damaged and critically low on resources, both fleets race against time to repair and rearm, struggling for control of systems rich in Tylium, metals and water. The Colonial fleet desperately searches for a way to escape and continue the search for Earth before the Cylons gain enough strength to destroy them once and for all.

Mine Things

Mine Things is a Browser Based PvP, crafting and trading game.

The first humans are back on Earth, having lived on Mars for 2000 years after escaping the most catastrophic volcano eruption in recorded history: Yellowstone.

You are one of these survivors and have been given your own plot of land to mine.  You will mine this land night and day, uncovering what ancient civilization has left behind.

Trade with others locally or in foreign cities.  Pillage other traders PvP en route or hunt thieves for bounty.  Free to play forever and 100% accessible to non-payers.

Dungeon Keeper World

Dungeon Keeper World is a 3D massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG) based on Electronic Arts’ “Dungeon Keeper” line of game.

Players will take control of an evil lord to build their own underground dungeon empire. On the surface players can continue playing the game just like any other 3D MMO.

Players will be able to enter instances, level up, obtain equipment and summon minions to do their bidding.