Tankblitz Part 1 on its way!

You may have noticed some bits and pieces changing in our website. Well, we've been working on it, tweaking fonts, adding categories, and so on.

But now that all that is out of the way, we can focus on getting Tank Blitz Part 1 out!

You can expect to see many new enemies (choppers, rpg troopers come to mind), new upgrades, a new machineshop, and a lot more customization options. Oh and there will be more than one new level. :-)

Stay tuned for more updates!

RPG's of today...

Played a bit of Kingdoms of Amalur recently. Meh... The combat system looks good on paper, but all you end up doing is spamming autoattack. At least the skill trees are mediocre. Probably the only recent RPG out there that actually gives you a bit of a choice, lets you plan things out a bit.

Diablo 3 will be coming out soon. I am not at all excited. Funny, a few years ago, me and a few friends had it planned out. We'd all quit work for a year and devote our entire lives to it (kinda like how we played Diablo 2 back in college :P). But by now, after seeing that they removed the stat system, skill system, well, everything, and they replaced it with an extremely dumbed-down primate-friendly system, I have very little faith left. Sure, I'll play it for a month or two. Then it'll get shelved and forgotten.

World of Warcraft's newest expansion is also set to completely remove the talent trees and replace it with something that looks more like an april's fools joke than a new talent system. As if that game needs any more dumbing down.

Meanwhile, wizards of the coast have announced that they're working on 5th edition now (I know I know, old news). I am under the impression that they're scrapping the horrible 4th edition era, and going back to the 3rd ed roots. At least partially. Perhaps there's still hope for future RPG's yet.

Oh well, I'll end this post with an image that pretty much sums up everything I said.

Isoball X-1 is out. What's new?

Our latest game, Isoball X-1 has come out today. Hooray!

Now you'd probably prefer to spend your time playing the game instead of reading about it here, so here's the link: http://www.candyflame.com/isoballx1/

Still here? Okay then. You probably want to learn more. Well, a little history first.

Isoball was our first game. It took us 3 months to make. We weren't sure where we are going with it. But once it came out, it was a big success! Over 10 million people played it, and we were quite happy.

So we decided to make Isoball 2. And after a few games in between, we made Isoball 3. By the time we decided to make another sequel, more than 60 million people had played an Isoball game. I was personally very happy that we made a game series that could reach such a global market and entertain so many people.

So after a bit of a break we finally got around to releasing a sequel: Isoball X-1. I can hear you asking "What's up with the name?". Well, we wanted this to be more of a level pack, as there are no new pieces. And we didn't plan it to have any new features. But hey, guess what, we were wrong! By the time we were done with it, we had several new features:

- Achievements! And 18 of them too! Some of them are boring and straightforward, like completing 12 levels, or viewing all the tutorials. Some of them are quite unique, and well, I don't want to spoil what they are. Good luck finding them. :-)

- Cutscenes! X-1 is the first Isoball game to have a story. Well, sort of. There are these cute cutscenes that "chronicle" the adventures of brock the brick-man. Ok I just made that name up! Perhaps we'll have a little contest to pick a name for him later. At this time he's nameless. (But seriously, why does he need a name? He's a brick! Does your table or your pillow have a name?)

- Level selection freedom. We figured that getting stuck at a level and not being able to see the rest of the game sucks. So we just made it possible to play any level you want, skipping the harder ones and coming back to them later.

- We also removed the score system, as we felt it didn't really help anything. Not being able to get a perfect score kinda ruins it for me personally. And rushing against time wasn't all that fun. I think achievements are more fun to work for than high scores anyway.

Well, that's all I have for now. Enjoy the game, and please leave feedback!

Monkeys & Dragons

Holy cow! Toki is being remade! It's coming out on Steam soon, and XBLA / PSN later to boot.

http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/18689

Ahh Toki, who can ever forget that classic game about the monkey trying to save his girlfriend. Uh, or whatever the game was about. Who cares. All I remember is that it was excruciatingly hard even with infinite lives on Amiga, and it was addictive as hell! God... The crystal mammoth boss. The final level with the train tracks. Jump a split second late and you have to start from the beginning. Argh!

Good old times where games weren't designed in a way that guarantees you will win.

In other news, my Skyrim character has now mastered every skill in the game. Capped out at level 81.5. It's still surprisingly a lot of fun to mess about in this godlike state. I normally sprint around with a sword & dagger, just 2-shotting everything in melee. Sometimes I switch to my bow and challenge myself, trying to sneak around oneshotting everyone without being detected throughout the entire dungeon. And sometimes I switch to my magic armor (enchanted to make destruction magic cost 0 mana). And electrocute stuff. But that's pretty lackluster now.

Yeah, destruction magic is pretty useless. I got the damage increasing perks, I drink the damage increasing potion, and I dualcast thunderbolts, and it's still doing a fraction of the damage my bow would do without potions. Not even comparing it to melee damage. Magic was useful on dragons at one point as they're hard to hit with bows when flying around...

But at this point I see a dragon, sneak up to it, the first arrow backstabs it down to 45%, then 2 more arrows and it's dead before it can even land. Actually there was this one time I snuck up to a dragon from the mountains above it, jumped on its back in sneak mode, and backtabbed it to death with a single blow with my sword! That was pretty ridiculous! It actually "awakened" with a 0% health bar, flew up in the air, turned around, started flying towards me, then suddenly realized it's dead and started falling down and crashed downwards towards the base of the mountain. Couldn't even reach the perch I was on. Pfft. Not like I was going to bother looting it anyway.

Then I loaded the game and did some experiments, and figured out that I actually did over twice its life in damage with a single hit. 12x backstabs for the win! 8)

Daggers do 30x backstabs but they don't benefit from onehanded damage buffs, so they end up quite a bit behind swords lategame. But yeah, I tried it and the dagger was enough to oneshot it too.

Well that was fun.

Thumbs up Bethesda!

I must say I did not have high expectations for Skyrim. But I figured I should give it a try anyway, and boy do I regret making that decision... I am hooked!

After the utter garbage that is Oblivion I figured the Skyrim apple wouldn't fall far from the tree. Oh yeah, sure, lots of people actually loved Oblivion... Well the broken leveling system was a major source of frustration for me, and the artstyle was a big step backward from Morrowind. All in all I can't really think of anything positive to say about Oblivion.

But Skyrim is a different story! Now I don't generally judge games by graphics, but Skyrim's environments just look amazing! And I'm not talking about the cell shading, number of vertices, or whatever other tech jargon people use to compare graphics nowadays...

The environments look very colorful, stylish. I enter a cave and see a river, water splashing on the rocks. I *want* to see where it goes. The armor art for each material is all distinguishable and awe inspiring. Every city seems to have its own unique architecture. It's a very likable fantasy rpg setting overall. Unlike the blood & gore, doom & gloom alternatives that have come out earlier this year *cough*.

Anyway, enough about graphics. The new skill system works very well too. Many of the perks are interesting and fun. Like slipping poison into someone's pocket, or investing in a shop to make them buy stolen goods. You actually look forward to leveling up, getting a new perk. As opposed to the joke of a leveling system Oblivion had, where you were just doing everything in your power to *not* level up as there was zero benefit attached to it, and it just meant everything else became stronger.

Well, I would get into my character's adventures, but this post is becoming rather long, so I should probably cut off here. In my next post I will be writing about the adventures of Rukh, the Khajiit burglar.

Here we go!

Welcome to my blog!

I'm not really into all this blogging nonsense, so I don't even know why I'm doing this. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Oh well, here goes nothing.

I'm probably mostly going to talk about my favourite retro games from amiga and arcade days. Maybe say a few things about some webcomics and tv shows I follow. Oh, and I'll probably constantly rant about how awful today's games are.

So stay tuned!