It’s been about two weeks now since we’ve installed and been playing Popcap’s newest hit – Plants vs Zombies! and over those weeks, many hours have been spent vigilantly growing a monster garden to defend my house (and brain) from a never ending zombie onslaught. As with their previous hits, most recently, Peggle, Popcap has pulled through again delivering a great game that can be played in short bursts and is full of humor, clever graphics and classic Popcap-style music.
I’m calling this a quick review because I haven’t put very much time into the game, but I feel it warrants some discussion and there isn’t a WHOLE lot to it. In fact, there might not be enough to it.. I’ll get into that later.
Demigod is the new PC game released by Gas Powered Games (demigodthegame.com)which has a playstyle that anyone who played custom games in Warcraft 3 should be familiar with. Demigod is basically a full game based around the classic Defense of the Ancients. Two teams of up to five players push through lanes and attempt to take over the other teams base by capturing strategic points including defensive towers, spawn points and walls while playing as one of eight Demigods (heroes) and being assisted by an autonomous army of smaller scale units.
Any gamer knows that the biggest fear in an MMO is having your account hacked and all of your gear, gold and potentially characters stolen or removed. On a daily basis we hear stories from our fellow gamers about having their accounts hacked and gear sharded and sold off. Blizzard has made a solid effort with their authenticators that definitely do add a great second factor of authentication, but there are other (free) games that are seemingly ahead of the game with their methods of authentication, and they don’t require you to carry around a big blue key chain (or pay an additional $7).
Okay, let’s just get it out of the way. This game is a straight up “Gears of War” clone in every way. But I found that’s not such a bad thing during my play through of Mr. Cent’s second foray into the world of video games.
I’m not the biggest Gears fan, but I had a fun time playing it. So I didn’t mind playing the same game again for a few hours. That’s what was key for me, this is a short game. I beat it in about 5 hours give or take and then played it through again in co-op mode for another two. Right when I started thinking “man this is starting to get old” I was put up against the final boss.
I used co-op as a means to get achievements, but this game is built for co-op. If you have someone to play with or get lucky with a public match the game starts to really shine. Although I found the difficultly to be non-existent, especially in co-op . I sense this was a choice of the developer for the more casual 50 fans. The story is forgettable at best. All you need to know is that everyone’s out to steal 50’s diamond encrusted skull and he’ll stop at nothing to get it back.
In all, if I had paid full price for this game I’d feel ripped off. This game is complete weekend rental territory.
Check out what a group of German students has come up with, the WiiSpray. This custom controller (possibly the cleanest looking I’ve seen) works with a homebrew app that allows couch artists to do their thing without worrying about getting paint on their fingers.
Created by Martin Lihs, and first detailed in his thesis at Bauhaus University, the inital concept was released back in 2007. Since then, it has been refined to include a wider variety of backdrops to spray on and the new controller which maintains the look and feel of an actual spray can. It even changes colors so you always know what should be coming out.
Check out the video of it in action (the stenciling is particularly awesome):
MuchCast is our weekly delve into the the world of technology covering (generally) the latest trends and hot topics in video games, movies, music, the web, gadgets, tech and whatever else comes to mind. Typically hosted by Kevin, Dan and Chris, each week usually brings a new guest or two in to join our discussion.
Check out the MuchCast Archive where you can find every episode of MuchCast along with a short rundown of what we were talking about.
