Yearly Archives: 2014

WWE Supercard

WWE SuperCard puts the power of WWE Superstars, Legends, and Divas in your hands by bringing the hard-hitting, larger-than-life action of WWE to mobile in a brand new card battle game!

Features:

Massive WWE Roster: Collect your favorite WWE Superstars, Divas, Legends and Managers to build your roster and compete online against other players in multiple game modes! With more than 400 collectible cards, the action never stops!

Fast-Paced Player vs. Player Action: Take your five-man team online against other players to test your skills. Win your matches and earn new cards to add to your roster!

Customize Your Team: Discover cards of different rarities to assemble the ultimate WWE team. Train or combine your cards to upgrade their levels and unlock their full potential.

King Of The Ring: Put your deck to the ultimate test by playing in the King Of The Ring tournament. Manage your deck wisely in this 16 person multi-day tournament because the higher you rank, the bigger the reward!

Expanding Universe: The WWE SuperCard Universe will regularly expand with roster updates, so you’ll always find yourself discovering new cards!

WWE Supercard Review: A Glorified Top Trumps CG

By Ojogo

 

 WWE Supercards Mobile Review 1

I grew up loving the WWE franchise. I was already a fan of the then still young Undertaker when he was rising up the WWE (then known as WWF) ladder going toe-to-toe with the likes of Lex Luger and Yokozuna. I was a fan of the Heart Break Kid Shawn Michaels way before his return to the WWE in the early 2000s.
And then I moved on.
Now I’m going back to that world I was once highly into with WWE Supercard, a mobile card game for the iOS and Android.

 

 

Gameplay

WWE Supercard is developed by Visual Concepts and Cat Daddy Games, where you have your own team of WWE superstars (and diva) facing against other teams in asynchronous battles that try to emulate what happens in the ring.

 WWE Supercards Mobile Review 2

The game follows the typical mobile card game formula. You get cards of various wrestlers, divas or boosts. Every wrestler/diva card you get has a certain numerical value placed on four attributes which are namely: Power, Toughness, Speed and Charisma.

 

Winning matches in-game requires you to beat your opponent by besting their stats on the attribute that is randomly generated at the start of every match.

 

 

Matches

WWE Supercard has two game modes where you can participate on. They are the exhibition matches and the King of the Ring.

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Exhibition matches puts you against other player teams of your choosing. The game gives you four opponents to choose from. No special rules are enforced in this game mode. So the game adheres to the normal win condition in every match you join in. Matches in exhibition mode are tracked however.

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King of the Ring matches however is where the game puts your team to the test. You will be facing a group of players in KotR just like in actual wrestling matches and the higher in the KotR ladder you reach, the better the rewards you’ll be getting.

 

Furthermore, KotR matches use more than the usual setup you have. KotR matches allow you to switch your teams up in-between matches to allow your team to recuperate lost stats as you continue on fighting in the King of the Ring. This feature stretches your prescribed team setup so that you need to also take into consideration your benched wrestlers and have a great reserve team aside from just your main team.

 

 

PvP

If it hasn’t really sunk in yet, WWE Supercard is a PvP centric mobile title. Though in typical mobile PvP games, the matches will be fought asynchronously. KotR matches on the other hand require you to go against a series of players. The game matching makes you wait a while but once you’ve been matched, you’ll immediately be fighting against another foe.

 

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Cards

WWE Supercard follows the typical eCCG formula where each card you acquire has varying forms of rarity. The natural stats of each card are primarily based on their rarity. With this setup, you’ll eventually get cards that have the same character but different natural stats because of its rarity.

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Also, cards in Supercard have a max level of 15. You can increase their levels by “training” them. This means that you’ll use your inactive cards as ingredients to increase the levels of your card “in training”.

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Another way to increase your card’s stats is to make them “pro.” Similar to training, getting your cards to “pro” level requires you to merge two similar cards. The higher the card level merged, the higher the stats earned.

 

Aside from the natural stat boost through training or making your cards pro, you can also increase or decrease you or your opponent’s stats in matches with boost cards. Boost cards take the visual form of various objects wrestlers use legally (or illegally) during matches. The expected assortment of steel chairs, ladders, stop signs and the like are all present.

 

 

Critique

As much as I like the nostalgia offered playing WWE Supercard, I still can’t shake the goose bumps I felt seeing the game in action. The gameplay is really solid and easy to get into. But they could have done better with the interface. The interface design felt like the game isn’t a licensed title. In fact, there are tons of unlicensed titled games out there better designed than WWE Supercard.

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Another thing of note in WWE Supercard is how they did the wrestling matches once you start fighting against other people. Instead of going with a text based style of combat, or with the pixelated character in actual ring-side brawls, you’ll be seeing your cards actually making an entrance, hoping down the ramp before jumping into the ring. Then they actually fight it out ringside. Yes, you read it right, THE CARDS actually fight. So just imagine, your cards are like costumed mascots beating each other in a ring, and that’s how matches in WWE Supercard look.

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I can also say that they could’ve chosen better portrait shots of the wrestlers. Their shots could’ve been more flattering, but I guess they chose the natural look for their roster.

 

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Conclusion: Good

Personally, I have no problems with the gameplay. However, WWE Supercard feels pretty cheap as a game. As a guy who’s already stopped watching WWE for years, I look at WWE Supercard as a cheap representation of the sport saved only by its IP and decent gameplay. However, if you’re the die-hard WWE fan who’s looking for a game that can appeal to both your wrestling fanboy without giving into the campy overdone mobile wrestling game theme, WWE Supercard is the game just for you.

The MMORPG Disillusionment – Changing Business Models

By Blair Nishkian (Tagspeech)

 

The MMORPG maelstrom has been in full swing for over ten years, now.  Honestly, the gaming world, and the world of entertainment in general, will never be the same again due to its impact.  Not since the first major casinos have profiteers seen a better vehicle for transporting easy money into their pockets – without having to produce much of anything at all.  The method by which players pay for these experiences began simply, and has become more and more complex over time.  Microtransactions and MMORPGs now seem to go hand-in-hand, as even World of Warcraft is no longer above gouging players for premium items and services.

WorthWhatyouPay

There’s an old economic adage I’m fond of: “Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.”  Do you REALLY want that cosmetic item?  Like, super bad?  Would it just complete your character entirely?  Well, it’s bundled in with twelve others and will run you about fifteen bucks.  Take it or leave it.  Most of the time, people will take it.  Gouging for cosmetics and style in these games is popular, because nothing gets to players more than personal expression and their sense of identity.  It’s the fashion industry paradigm writ small, in a digital realm, for articles of clothing and body parts that don’t necessarily exist.

GuildWars2Hairstyles

Services are even better.  Name changes, server transfers, account mergers, recustomizations, etc.  Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have a subscription fee.  But how do they stay afloat?  A skeleton crew for a development team, utterly gutted from the development process (farewell, hard workers), and a premium item store so lovingly crafted and beautifully designed it no doubt nets them a tidy sum every month, equal to, or possibly even exceeding what they would make if every active player paid for a subscription.  I certainly know I’ve taken the bait and bought some things in that particular store that I shouldn’t have.  It’s just too easy to do.

 SMITE Ultimate God Pack

But not every free-to-play, freemium, or whatever else model works.  Many games, despite their most earnest efforts to find the right method of siphoning money out of player pockets, don’t do so great.  They fall by the wayside.  They sink, when they’re desperately trying to swim.  Some of these developers have decided that, in order to get players to actually purchase enough from their premium shop to stay afloat, they can resort to a brilliant plan: let players pay a flat fee and unlock access to every bit of content that you would otherwise pay a fortune getting piecemeal.

 BlackGoldBoxSet

Wait, hold on.  A flat fee for all the content?  Well, haven’t we just come full-circle, then?  That’s called a box fee.  We used to buy video games in boxes, you know in the days before the Internet sucked so many console gamers onto personal computers.  You’d buy the box and own the game.  It wasn’t complicated.  So now that these producers are increasingly desperate for profits, they’re going completely back to the beginning, in the hopes that things will somehow change?  Will they really, though?  It didn’t work for the dead games of the past, and I highly doubt it will work now.  The charred remains of so many flat-rate, subscription-based MMORPGs lie strewn across the annals of MMORPG history; Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa, any number of now defunct WoW clones, etc.

 Tabula_Rasa

There’s just so much waffling and frantic scurrying about, one has to wonder if there isn’t a deeper problem here.  Could it be that the problem isn’t your payment model?  Could it be that your game just isn’t that great, and simply falls short of being good enough to compete in the savage jungle of the MMORPG genre?  The list of online games continues to grow every month.  It gets bigger and bigger, to the point that I wonder if it will ever end.  Why are these games that no one asked for continually released?  The simple fact of the matter is, and I’m sure the average player would agree with me, there are just far too many online games and not enough interested players with disposable income.

 

That’s the cold, hard truth of the situation.  That’s the way the cards have fallen.  The marketplace is bloated with titles; a total buyer’s market.  I can’t know the exact financial details of many of these games, but I’d wager that more than a few of the bigger MMORPGs are being propped up by their publishers, while a vast number of small-budget, sideline games are either barely ekeing out a miserable existence, or well on their way into the boneyard.  I’ve asked it before, and I’ll ask it again:  When is it going to stop?  Is this mad gold rush going to quit anytime soon?  Never before have I felt like there’s just too many games asking, begging, pleading for money and support from players – from Kickstarter, to early access titles, to free-to-play games, to subscription-based MMORPGs with cash shops, to everything inbetween.

ESO Deluxe Editions

All I hear, everywhere I go, is “please, PLEASE, give us money!  Please!  For the love of god, we need your money!”  And they’ll do anything to get it from you.  The marketing machine, even for these humble indie kickstarter grassroots mom and pop fanfest love nuggets, they will happily stoke the fires of the press and any positive rumors they can to build a cult of mystique around their titles.

 

A lot of Kickstarter games have been HUGE disappointments to the fans that supported them.  Shadowrun Returns, for example, was a massive letdown.  Wasteland 2 has been generating serious controversy on Steam over accusations of false advertising: every major publication and reviewer has been comparing the game to the original Fallouts 1 & 2, while a great many agree the game could not be further from them.  What did the developers do to quell those comparisons, so as not to invite the possibility of dissatisfied customers looking for a Fallout experience?  Nothing much.  Why rock the boat, when you can ride the coattails of a household franchise?

Wasteland2

There are a finite number of gamers, each with a finite amount of disposable income.  There just isn’t enough to go around, developers and publishers.  High turnover and serious disillusionment seem to be the order of the day when it comes to working in the games industry as a developer.  I do not envy them one bit.

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