Demo Showcase Euploria

It has been a while since I tested a demo randomly from the Playstation Network. With so many games that are waiting to be played, the last thing I need is to find ANOTHER game to add to the backlog. Playing demos is a good way to test the waters to see what is fun among the 5 A+ titles we get a year. I'm sure everyone has the friend that is still playing 2 year old games and doesn't even know of the existence of others. As fun as it is to only play the same game all the time or to only buy heavily advertised titles, it is important to take advantage of demos.

Last week, the demo for the PSN version of Euploria was released. Euphloria is a PC game that was released in 2009 and is now available for the PS3, App stores, and a few other places. Like many "indie" games of late, Eufloria has a relaxing tone with smooth visuals and lax music. If you stay awake for long enough after experiencing the atmosphere, you are presented with an RTS game. Like other RTS, the goal of Eufloria is a expand your territory throughout the surrounding area. This is done with Seedlings that grow from flowers planted on your asteroid(your home base). When you get a certain amount of seedlings, you can float to other asteroids(neighboring bases) and attempt to plant more Flowers onto them. If you are successful in implanting your seedlings into the asteroid, it will become part of your territory and produce more seedlings. This continues until you clear the objective; usually to take complete control of a certain area.

Our favorite real-time strategy games have obstacles to overcome. Euphloria is no different. You will encounter enemy seeds that must be eradicated. If you allow them to flourish, they may invade your territory and eliminate your forces. The only way to prevent this is by invading them too! When 2 forces are growing at the same rate, there is no real way for either side to create an advantage. In this sense, you cannot simply grow a force of 10 seedlings and fight the opposing 10(plus whichever ones are born during the skirmish). To get ahead in Euphloria, the player has to take over unoccupied asteroids quickly to generate more seedlings. Each asteroid has a stat value for speed and strength, so there is some strategy in deciding the path your army should extend. Like other RTS games, the best players are those who can micro-manage their forces into smaller groups. It is easy to grow 10 seedlings on 2 asteroids and send them all away to fight an enemy. But what if they flank your team during the attack? This is where RTS games, and Eufloria actually becomes fun.

Perhaps the best part about Eufloria is the Fast-forward feature. Without this, Eufloria would be far too boring to actually call relaxing. There are times you will turn it off, such as to counter an invasion. For many players, FF will be the default playing speed and turning it off could be called a "slow-down" option. Other features of Eufloria include the ability to zoom in and see intricate details in the level. Is this necessary for combat or strategy? No; actually it is more difficult to navigate between asteroids when the camera is zoomed in. You do get some visuals on how seedlings actually kill a flower, but nothing much besides that. In later levels, your seedling arsenal will actually change. Based on the flowers you plant, you can develop seedlings with additional speed, power, health and other goodies. The flowers you plant may also have their own abilities, like defensive plants the will fight back against the seedlings. Unfortunately, the Demo will only give you a small taste of how intricate the game will be in the later levels.



Patience is the key to liking Eufloria. It will be slow to start, and the visuals probably won't help those with short attention spans. It does have very entertaining moments though, so let's not dismiss it entirely. On our home consoles, we do not get many games like Eufloria to play. For those who like to dip their gamer thumbs into different experiences, Eufloria may actually be a lot of fun for you. Above all else, it costs you nothing but time(and some harddrive space to try the demo for yourself.

Dragon Age 2!? Oh Em Gee.

For those who don't know, I am not a fan of the Dragon Age series. In fact, I bought DA:Origins and quickly returned it the next day.

I'll let that sink in for a little bit.

Dragon Age was one of the few games I have bought without reading ANYTHING about it. My basis on the type of game it was and the quality was from the commercials and the hype of friends talking about it. So when I bought it, I expected Demon's Souls-like combat with awesome spells and abilities. Instead, I was given this:

Video Author: XISIL3NTIX

Now don't get me wrong, some people LOVE this kind of gameplay. In fact, I used to be a big fan of this style of combat on PC games. Which brings me to what I always say about Dragon Age, that it is a PC game, ported to consoles. What does that mean? Well, think about console games and PC games. On the console side you have a game like God of War, on the PC side you have a game like Baldur's Gate. That is not to say that all console games are beat-em ups and all PC games a dungeon crawling mini-games(incoming hate emails). Computer games are known for micro-management, and the combat fits that style. Meaning physics and reactions are kept to a minimal while paying attention to numbers are the fun of the game(aka micro-management.) Console games are all about physics. Since most of the time you are controlling 1 character, and games want you to feel like you're part of what is going on. With PC games, you are instead the "master" of your "game"(emails!) and instead of you being on the front line, you are just a presence that orchestrates how the battle unfolds. This is exactly how Dragon Age plays (in my opnion.)

Tomorrow, Dragon Age 2 will be released. They did fiddle with the combat in the game to encourages console players like myself to give it another try. But is it enough to make me want to get into it?

The character models have always looked great. Unfortunately, in the demo, you aren't allowed to make any changes to your character. But just going from the default character, it already looks better than Dragon Age: Origins(DA:O).

The combat has taken a turn for the better though. I find it funny because when I read the Playstation Blog Interview with Bioware all of their thoughts are my same thoughts when I tried the demo. The physics are still designed for micro-management, but the feel of the game is much more reactive and impressive. You put in a command and you can see the results. Shield Bashes aren't just little taps with your shield, the character does a full lunge and bashes heads with his(or her) shield. You do still have a menu you can select actions from, but the time you spend outside of the menu in combat is much more fluid(and satisfying).

So will I pick up the game? Probably not. But this time, it isn't because it is bad. There are many games out there I would love to have, but since I'm playing so many already, they are pushed to my wishlist. Dragon Age 2 has the privilege of being on my game wish list! Congratulations. The changes to the combat, and visually quality are leaps and bounds better than DA:O, it feels like a console game and not a terrible port. Kudos to EA and Bioware. It is only March and this year's game lineup is looking to be incredible.

Demo - Move Heroes

It has taken me almost a full day and a half to finally make this post. First, my video editting software crashed, so I had to re-download that. Then youtube wouldn't upload my gameplay video. Left it on overnight and woke up today to it still uploading. But now I can finally talk about what I have been playing. But first, is a Demo Showcase! Today is Playstation Move Heroes.

Surprisingly, Move Heroes is only half of what I thought it was going to be. Going by the trailers I saw, I expected Move Heroes to be a beat-em up style game, just like the games its Cast came from. But instead of it being a straight-up action adventure game, Move Heroes is more of an...Action...Arcade...Party..Game? You do have points of action, smashing, exploding, and stuff like that, but the way the "game" is set up, it is not an adventure at all. Much like a party game, you go through a series of "stunts" with the characters. That may be destroying waves of enemies sure, but it also includes things like throwing a disc for high scores, finding hidden objects, etc.

The game is still a lot of fun. The story is something along the lines that a Villian brought the different Playstation Heroes to a planet, and is making them do things for his amusement. So the whole point of the game is to get massive scores in these different events. The events offered in the Demo are:

Survive a Deadly Deathbot Uprising - A melee smash-em-up survival.
Could you be so Bowled - A bowling-esque event(the Jak portion of the video.) You roll a ball and guide it to the targets. Theres speed boosters and obstacles along the way.
Whibble Trouble - Search and rescue with beat-em-up gameplay. You find little baby aliens while smashing enemies and have to deliver them.
Industrial Revolutions - Disc Tossing that is guided by the move controller. The objective is to hit targets, of course with Speed Boosters, Power ups, and High Score multipliers.
A Mine of Their Own - Search and rescue, this time, with Blasters (The Clank portion of the video.) For some reason, I found this one the most fun lol.

I'm sure when the retail version of the game comes out, there will be more events. The game looks like it could be a lot of fun, but if these are the only events, spanned across different levels, I could see it getting old very easily. I'm not worrying about it though, as Nihilistic has been working on this game for 2 years now. I'm sure there will be enough content to back it up.

Killzone 3 + Move = Tired arms

I had originally planned to have 2 games on display today, Killzone and the PSN title Stacking. Unfortunately, every time I went to upload Killzone to youtube, it would take hours for it to finish, which is pretty discouraging. I finally managed to finish the upload last night for Killzone, so that is what's on the blog today!



Killzone is one of those new shooters, hyped up for play with Playstation Move. So my initial plays were with the Move and Navigation Control. As a warning, I'm no expert at Killzone, and I'm also no expert at the Playstation Move. But with practice, it seems to work really really well. The video is my 3rd playthrough with the Move. The default settings, which you saw for me change in the first bit of the video are terribad, and should be changed immediately.



The Deadzone is how much freedom you have on your Controller before it moves the camera around. Some people like the controller to instantly move their screen along with it, some people prefer to have a "point and click" ability, similar to a mouse and keyboard. So my deadzone is set for the almost the entire range of vertical movement(it sucks to look up and have the camera spin on you!) and most of the horizontal range.
The next important change was obviously the pointer speed. For me, I wanted it as close to my hand's moving speed without throwing the cursor too easily. 50%~ is the way to go (unless you're one of those people ho can keep a super steady hand).
Lastly, the Aiming mode defaults on something called Lock Assist. Lock Assist is designed for more casual players, for the campaign. Whenever you press the zoom button on the Nav controller, you are instead automatically zoomed in on the enemy that you are looking at. If you aren't looking at anything, it won't zoom. Then, it gives you a convenient Window around the enemy that you try not to(if the game allows you) to move out of, and it gives you a new, slower moving targeting reticule, ideal for hitting the enemy consistently.

Of course, you can't get "good" playing like that, so I turned the Lock Assist Off, and made it the old-fashioned hold-to-zoom. I actually find the game much easier to play this way. Not only can you zoom on anytime, anywhere, but you can play a lot more aggressively if you zoom in on exactly what you want.

The game is a lot of fun though. I didn't play Killzone 1 at all and I played about 1 hour of Killzone 2 and never put it back in(game was pretty difficult to me). Killzone 3 is still fairly unforgiving, but with practice, you'll be mowing down Helghast in no time.

Demo Showcase

This was another thing I wanted to do. A lot of people want to pick up games but not without seeing a little gameplay about them. The PSN store has lots of demos available to test games out before you buy them. Unfortunately, not everyone has time to download and try every demo, or may not even have the space on their harddrive! So I will make Initial Gameplay videos for any. By initial, I mean that it will (usually) be my very first boot of the game file, so I will be playing it as any new player. I have 2 prepared for today. The first is a real initial play of the game "Faery", released on the PSN on Tuesday. The other is a game I have had for a couple of months called Dead Nation, which a few people have asked about.

Okay, Faery is....interesting. First off, it's important to say that it is 14.99 off the PSN. That's not all that hot of a price for the type of game it is. For the content? Yeah, I'd admit that it has 15 bucks worth of content in it, but it's definitely not for everyone. The dialogue was kinda entertaining. It seems to give you enough choices to make it seem like your choices are meaningful. Character customization is an RP'ers dream. Every couple of levels you get skill points that go towards customizing your little pixie into the perfect reflection of your inner Fairy. That's actually kind of fun too! But the combat, ohmygosh is it vintage. This is where the 15 dollars comes in - if the game had a different combat scheme, then it would be worth the 15 for sure. Unfortunately, the combat is pretty bland and takes away from the fun of everything ELSE in the game(Pixiing!!).

Dead Nation is a LOT of fun in its initial playthrough. If you love upping the difficulty for points and trophies, then it has okay replay value. Not great, but okay. The problem is that(as of right now) "Mission Select", as seen in the video, is your choosing of the actual stages in the campaign. This to me is not a "mission" select, but a chapter select; and I don't know about you guys, but with a game like Dead Nation, I don't want to play campaign 8 times. I did buy the game and played co-op locally, and it is great for that.