Monthly Archives: July 2015

Beasts vs Bots

Beasts vs Bots is a RTS game developed by Shiver Entertainment and published by Nexon N. Designed specifically for mobile devices, Beasts vs. Bots features fast-paced synchronous PVP, the ability to directly command units during combat, and battle that takes place in a classic fog of war map, providing a classic RTS experience.

Features:

A Thrill a Minute : Enjoy real-time PvP that is fast, thrilling, and always changing.

Faction Warfare: Choose between the cold and calculated bots or the adrenaline-fueled beasts.

Deep Controls: Enjoy gameplay that is fine-tuned for touch without sacrificing the direct control of units during battle that RTS players expect.

Co-op action: Connect with other players during base-mode through messaging and chat features

ARK: Survival Evolved Available Now for Mac and Linux

ARK: Survival Evolved Available Now for Mac and Linux news header

 

Studio Wildcard announced today that the open-world survival game ARK: Survival Evolved is available now for Mac and Linux on Steam Early Access, and is among the first large-scale Unreal Engine 4 games released for these new platforms. The Mac and Linux versions share all of the features and content of the PC game and include seamless cross-play no matter which platform survivors choose. ARK players can dive into the dynamic island ecosystem where they craft weapons and tools, build multi-story houses, commune with other tribes, as well as tame, train, and ride dinosaurs from the vicious T-Rex to the monstrous Spinosaurus and soaring Pterodactyls.

In celebration of the new launch, ARK is on sale at the discounted price of $24.89, from the regular retail price of $29.99, on all platforms: store.steampowered.com/app/346110/.

Today two new oceanic dinosaurs have also been released on ARK – Plesiosaurus and Ichthysaurus join the 70-plus dinosaurs available at launch. Much like the Brontosaurus on land, Plesiosaurus is an excellent beast used to transport large quantities of goods across water. These powerful creatures are so large that they can be used as mobile water bases. Ambitious tribes can build bunkers right onto the backs of Plesiosaurus instead of building cargo ships. Ichthy is a speedy ocean-mount for rapidly exploring the seas and waterways around the island.It is a comparatively fast, agile swimmer with a friendly curiosity much like a modern-day dolphin.

Elsword Launches New Dual Character Luciel

Elsword Launches New Dual Character Luciel news header

KOG Games, a leading developer and publisher of popular free-to-play action MMORPGs, today announces the launch of Elsword‘s newest character, Luciel.  Lu, the demon monarch and Ciel the mob hit-man, come together as one dangerous dual character in pursuit of each and every demon that plagues the land!

Lu emerges in Elrios as a small child, having exhausted all of her mana in order to escape captivity from the realm of demons. She has lost all of her power and possessions due to being betrayed by her own her subjects. Ciel finds Lu in her weakened state and takes her in, and before long, assassins from the demon world come for Lu.  Ciel gives his life to protect her and in that moment Lu remembers everything. A supernatural contract allows her to revive Ciel as a half-demon, and he is bound to serve her in return. This demonic spiritual bond brings the two together mind, body and soul as Luciel. Hell-bent for retribution, they will take everything back!

As a dual character, Lu and Ciel introduce a whole new style of combat to Elsword.  Despite being two characters, they share one skill tree yet how each unique skill functions depends on which character is in combat.  Certain skills can be used to switch between characters to increase their Combination Gauge, but it’s up to players to keep tabs on skill interactions.

Luciel is designed to work as one by accommodating for each of their weaknesses; with Lu focused on reeking havoc when up-close and personal and Ciel focused on tactical approaches and keeping the enemy at bay. It’s all about setting up for the Queen of Demons with the hit-man of the underworld. Ciel can utilize his advantage to fight enemies that claws can’t reach and disadvantage to bait enemies to get in close only to awaken a sleeping giant. Lu sets while Ciel spikes!

Drift Girls Mobile Review: Fanservice in the Fastlane

By Jason Parker (Ragachak)

 

Drift Girls Mobile Review

Recently, NHN released a standout mobile game to the market, Drift Girls. It’s free to play, and combines drifting (taking a turn where the wheels are opposite of the direction your car is facing) with a Dating Game (. . . that one’s pretty self-explanatory). I have been stuck on what I could possibly say about this, but I have to say, for the most part, it’s really quite fun. It’s ridiculous, the women that your character dates meet virtually every trope or stereotype I could think of. The South African vegan, a British military agent (Redhead, so as to not be Cammy from Street Fighter), a shy martial-arts girl, a ditzy blonde seeking direction in life, and many more. They make it a point to let you know that these girls do not get jealous (at least initially), and so you can date as many of them at once as you’d care to; this is definitely a fantasy, and not to be taken seriously.

Drift Girls Nerd

If not at the release of this article, very soon, expect a Bottom Tier video of my/Colton’s racing shenanigans! The game is a little challenging to get used to (The drifting portion, at least), and the dating is really quite simple. Each girl likes a particular thing or doesn’t and each girl provides benefits to your racing depending on her affection level. The timing takes a long while to get used to, far more so than nearly any other timing or rhythm based game I’ve played. Factor in ever changing track types, turn angles, and the speed of your car, and addition boosts you get from the girl you’re riding with, and a simplistic mechanic turns into a mechanical nightmare to get right. Which ironically adds a lot to the replayability of the game, as you’ll be frustrated into playing until you can get it right! The dialogue is pretty entertaining and the localization team offers up some pretty fantastic scenes between your character and their opponents (“My car was kid-tested, mother-approved!” had me laughing way harder than I should have been).

 

Drift Girls Mobile Review

Waifu Simulator: Generic City Drift

In this particular town, racing and drifting seems to not be against the law at all. It solves many problems, and commands an incredible female following. It in a way reminds me of Yu-Gi-Oh, the Anime more than the card game, where peoples’ problems are solved by a ‘Children’s Card Game.’ Though, this game will try to get you to spend just as much money as you might on a card game, I’m afraid. No matter how much I enjoyed the ridiculous dating, and fast-paced action sequences, the difficulty in the story mode ramps up very steadily, to the point where proceeding is almost impossible without spending real money on a car, or spending even longer farming in-game currencies to try and do the same. Most of the early chapters, you are on par or above the opponents, and that makes it easy to get into, but around Chapter 6 and 7 the difficulty spikes incredibly. No matter how finely tuned you are on your drifts, your skill only factors in to reduce your typical race time by a second maximum. The consistent AI with superior wheels will trump your inferior ride every time.

Drift Girls Mobile Review

That said, car upgrades aren’t as brainless as you may initially believe. Parts, Cars, Mastery Levels, Car Ratings (1-6 stars), there are a lot of things to keep track of, lots of numbers, lots of grinding cars and parts up to upgrade, repeatedly doing the same races over and over to get new cars and parts to use as fodder. All this adds to your maximum straightway speed, straightway acceleration, maximum drift speed, and drift acceleration stats. I believe the ultimate goal is building a car capable of handling drift heavy tracks, and one made to zoom down straightways. In practice the limitations on resources mean you’ll likely have to settle for one car that’s hopefully balanced enough to handle whatever gets thrown at you.

Drift Girls Mobile Review 09

The controls are pretty simple, but can feel downright unfair; there are lined spots in the road where the drifts take place, and the better you do on it (from Miss, Bad, Good, Great, Crazy) gives you Nitro, which you can use to boost through (Thanks, Starfox). Each chapter has a series of races, where success fills up a bar at the top of the screen, and at the end you have a Boss Race. These races all tend to revolve around at “least” one girl. Sometimes several, including unlockable girls depending on certain racing criteria (such as ranking 30% or higher in the online races in X league of the week, the first form of PvP offered).

Drift Girls Mobile Review Race

I found myself doing races over and over and over again, just to get the next race to even pop up. Races are ranked, D-S, only rank you if you win, and the first time you score a B, A, or S on a track will grant you bonus rewards. So you can go back and do a race again if you have a low rank, do a little better, and get cool rewards. Namely getting an S rank on a track will score you 3 dollars, the cash shop currency, as well as the opportunity to get a bonus dollar once a day for racing the track again, no matter your score. Considering just how heavily the game is based around the cash shop, this reliable way of netting free currency daily is a must. Though the frustration of getting S rank (perfect start + Great on EVERY drift, or scoring a Crazy drift (+ or – 0.07s from a perfect drift) can be maddening!

Drift Girls Mobile Review

While story missions and the follow-up grinding of them costs you fuel, Drift Girl’s standard mobile game stamina system, there are optional side races that use a ticket system instead to keep the entertainment flowing. This includes the League of the Week mentioned above, as well as the World Race. League of the Week races are segmented into tiers based on your car’s total stat, including your girl, such as the novice race not letting any stat above 1,000 participate. League of the Week tracks are considerably harder than the regular drift races you do in the storyline. On top of that, your reward is based on your performance versus the rest of the server, with your best time of the week submitted to ranking.

Drift Girls Mobile Review 12

The downside is you only get 10 tickets every 12 hours, and to maximize your results, you should race every tier, even ones you are far below the qualifications for. This leaves you less chances to repeat races, especially for casual players, meaning you likely won’t be scoring in the top percentiles often if ever. Some of the drift girls can only be unlocked by scoring in the top percentile, so casual players will have to dawn their hardcore helmets at some point to grind out the best score to get these girls. Of course even if you get into the needed percentile, each day your rating can and likely will decay more and more as other players play and race, passing you by. So you have no choice but to keep up with it, similar to Vanilla WoW PVP. You’re going to have to invest time in this mobile game in order to keep that weekly ranking. It is at this point that the gameplay becomes monotonous at best.

Drift Girls Mobile Review 05

Thankfully there is World Race, an elo based system that pits you against other online racers, or replicas of their car/girl stats and average performance, to see how you really stack up. World Race always puts you on the same track that is rather well balanced in the middle to reward cars on both straightways and drifts. The downside here is you’ll quickly discover how much gear overrides skill in this game. But World Race is still a fantastic way to make in-game coins and cash currency, while hyper leveling a car’s mastery points to give you a better fighting chance in story mode.

Drift Girls Mobile Review 04

Another side venture to distract you from the painful repeated defeats in story mode is the Event Races, the quintessential filler arcs any anime harem worth its salt offers. These have limiting features such as restricting you to only using German cars, and seem to follow the progressively darker side of story mode, involving organized crime and mafia investigation.

 

Drift Girls Mobile Review

Let’s Play The Dating Game

There are many, many, many women in Drift Girls. For whatever taste the player may have, Drift Girls may have exactly that. They use various anime/television tropes to create “interesting” girls, but it is pretty perverted when you get right down to it (not that that is necessarily a bad thing!). You can buy your date jewelry, and a swimsuit, and dress them up. Whomever you are seeing is also on your main screen, and in one of the tutorials it tells you that “you can touch her,” but it’s nothing really gross or disgusting. You can make her change her facial expressions at best while making sounds that might get you some stares in public places; you can also reposition her so you can see “more” of her, instead of just her face and shoulders. As you do things with these girls, both positive and negative, it creates Memories, and the more of these memories you unlock, the more rewards you get, from money, parts, cash (which can be used on more stuff, consider it the purchasable currency). There’s one other bit having high memory score nets you, but I’ll save that for last.

Drift Girls Mobile Review

Each girl has her own hobbies, likes, dislikes, and on a scale of 1-5 gems, each date will be rated; If only girls were so quantifiable in real life. There are a few factors that go into the amount of points your date is worth from how much she likes your car, what she thinks of the date location, and how you answer questions she poses to you while you are out. If you score low, you can always go back later and score higher, but don’t take someone to the same spot twice in a row! That will seriously harm your relationship score. That’s bad, because unlike a full fledged pimp, your girls only shower you with coins every twelve or so hours if they’re in a good mood! Which makes you wonder, why does your harem pay you every time you log in if you aren’t their pimp?

Drift Girls Mobile Review 16

The relationship scale goes to four hearts, but you can “Unlock/Exceed” that by fulfilling some pretty ludicrous conditions. Generally it’s Race X times with her as your partner, Go on X amount of dates, and collect 10 phone numbers. So, you’re telling me I have to bandy about with more women to get her to like me more? That’s kind of absurd. The farther you go in the game, the more locations are opened, and there are gifts you can give them only when you exceed the normal relationship scale.

Drift Girls Mobile Review

But back to that bit on the memory score. Your total memory score seems to be a percentage chance for getting a girl to stay with you overnight, offering some rather… unique… dialogue, along with fanservice and a 24 hour boost of 100+ to your currently selected vehicles performance. Nothing sexual happens that you can see, but the dialogue tells you more than you need to know. As the difficulty curve continues its mountainous rise, you’ll find yourself fishing for girls to stay the night with you each day to maintain your fighting chance.

Drift Girls Mobile Review Date Locations

As you level up in the game and meet more girls, your dating location choices grow as well. There are also date locations that require items, such as tickets (say, the Sports Event), and not all girls will want to go, so be wise about where you take people. I personally think the game telling you that you can date as many girls as you want, and rewarding you for it is kind of silly. It’s fiction, and should be treated as such; but the girls are all really very attractive for what this is; I cannot tell if they are a parody of dating games, or if it is an attempt to take itself seriously. With the dialogue as absurd as it is, I certainly hope this is some kind of comedy or parody.

 

Drift Girls Mobile Review

A Tale of Two Titties: 3/5

As far as mobile games go, there are certainly far worse and far better. It is entertaining and funny, even if you inevitably get bogged down by the difficulty and the need to farm pretty constantly just to keep up with the competition. As you progress, the game gets harder in other ways too, you no longer get to see the “safe zone” for a perfect start at the beginning of the race, and they take away the turn warnings on the side of the road, so while some roads might look like you take a left turn, they don’t and you ruin your entire race. And losing a race by .005 seconds is probably the most infuriating thing that I can imagine. Though the game really pushes the cash shop the longer you play, making it all but impossible to win without spending money. That’s really a black mark against the game, but despite that, I had fun, even if it became awkward to play around others due to the ridiculous squealing of the girls while drifting.

 

Graphics: 3/5

The graphics are pretty simple, but not ugly. The women all look really quite pretty with plenty of expressions to make them feel less 2D, though it steadily becomes a game about fanservice right from the first selection in the game. The game is all about showing pretty anime girls in bikinis, and it does that quite well, even if the variety in girls almost feels forced, drawing from all over the world. All in all, pretty, but not groundbreaking.

 

Controls: 2/5

The controls really bothered me; it was incredibly difficult to get a “Crazy,” or perfect drift. If your finger slips even a little, it can ruin a drift and the entire race to boot, and that’s not good. Navigating the UI is fine, but the location of the nitro button is just awful. Cars that excel in drifting feel a bit handicapped as you have to pull some finger ninjutsu to enter a left leaning turn while activating your nitro without flat out fumbling your phone to the floor, or more often than not botching your drift quality.

 

Features/Gameplay: 4/5

The gameplay and features are really all pretty simple: You have dates, racing, online racing, and a shop. There’s not a lot to the game, but the countless ways they rewrap the same package is quite astounding. Given its simplistic controls, I doubt there is much further they could have pushed things. Though a clan system pitting drifting teams against each other would do wonders.

 

Sound/Music: 3/5

The sounds in this game were cute at first, but very… very quickly became infuriating. When a girl rides with you, she squeals and yells while you are drifting, depending on how good or bad you did it varies. A good race sounds purely orgasmic, and will turn heads (they even have a help tip warning you about it if you’re socially dense). Surprisingly if you do poorly some of the girls belittle you harshly, which can be a sudden jarring realization in this otherwise perfect fantasy. Add to it that the voices can be incredibly annoying, and definitely are reminiscent of various anime features. I found myself turning the volume down quite a bit, but for some reason found my performance faltered when sounds were entirely off. In the end my only option was headphones to maintain my competitive advantage from subliminal anime fanservice approval.

Drift Girls Mobile Review 10

 

Want me Drift Girls? Catch Ragachak and Colton on our MMOHuts’ Bottom Tier Let’s Play video giving their uncensored commentary on the game! (mature content warning!)

Drift Girls Bottom Tier MMOHuts

Otherland Introduces ClanLand and More

Otherland Introduces ClanLand and More news header

 

Dedicated worlds for Clans, significant performance optimization on low-end hardware and a major overhaul of skills and abilities are the latest improvements developer DRAGO Entertainment has implemented in the Unreal-based MMORPG OTHERLAND.

Much more than just “guild housing” – the new ClanLand

With U|Space, Otherland already boasts a fresh approach to the classic player housing feature in MMOs. The ClanLand feature takes this principle even further – each clan will get their own instanced and expandable outdoor area that provides PvP and many new functionalities.

“The cool thing about ClanLand is that you can expand it and gain access to new resources and content.” Lucjan Mikociak, Studio Head

Apart from access to standard Clan management features like Clan controls and Clan bank, Clans will also be able to gather crafting resources like SOMA, solve special quest chains and even battle their own bosses within their ClanLand.

The core of ClanLand is PVP: When they reach a certain level, Clans can declare war on each other and attack certain areas of their opponents’ ClanLand. Successfully attacking a territory provides the winner with additional content that will add up to their previous possessions. The Otherland-style twist: Similar to U|Space, players can set up guard NPCs within the ClanLand if they previously collected their “eDNA”.

Skills & Abilities overhaul
Now that the first major skill overhaul has been done, players can look forward to many changes which provide more variety and fun to the combat. Heavy and special attacks have been changed: simple damage-dealing abilities have been replaced by unique skills with more efficient crowd control effects that improve overall class balance. For example, Marksman heavy and special attacks will mostly deal zone damage, to balance the class’s many single-target abilities.

Other changes involve class skills and skill slots. To provide more variety in playstyles and give classes a clearer identity, class abilities will involve a system of buffs and debuffs.
When applied by more than one player, those effects will not simply stack; instead, parameters like power and duration will change, making players focus more on the effectiveness of the group as a whole.

Having less skill slots will make class skills even more important and players will have to choose their skills carefully. To ensure variety and avoid “cookie cutter builds”, a new stat called “Telemorphic Capacity” (TC) will be added to every skill. Selecting skills will stack up TC, and characters will not be able to go past a certain limit inherent to their character.

Game client performance improvement
While already performing quite well on modern hardware, the game experience in Otherland had been less satisfying on low-end graphic cards, especially on laptops. This issue has been addressed by DRAGO, resulting in drastic performance improvement. PCs that could barely keep up 25 FPS in the game’s main hub Lambda Mall now easily run at 60 FPS. Modern gaming PCs are now also capable of running Otherland at 4K resolution well beyond 40 fps (in Lambda Mall) and even reach 60+ FPS in less populated areas. The developers will keep working on client optimization for notebooks using the Intel Integrated HD3000 and HD4000 GPUs that can be found in a lot of notebooks across the player base during the Closed Beta Test.