The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac is an independent game developed by Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsll. I try to support game development companies when their content is good, especially when the content is from an indie company.

Gameplay:
The game play is a mix of several different genres such as rogue, action and  dungeon crawling. You start off on one floor viewing yourself from a birds eye perspective and using your tears as your projectiles (yes, tears) to kill off steadily more difficult enemies. The combat style is called 'Twin Joystick Shooter" where you can move up/down/left/right (with the WASD) and shoot in the same directions (with the arrow keys). You have several areas to navigate through until you find the boss. Once defeated, you go to the next floor down until you have completed the game. Each stage is randomly generated so it doesn't really get repetitive.
One of the features I really enjoy that make this game tough as nails is that when you die, you have to start over. This is common in most rogue-likes and although you may think of of this as a drawback, it's definitely not.

Art:
The same art designer who helped on Super Meatboy worked on The Binding of Isaac. Both cartoony and dark the animation is very impressive indeed and is probably one of the better features.

Sound:
The sound is pretty good but the music is great. It's haunting and chilling

Overall I would really recommend this game, it's well worth the purchase.

You can purchase it here

Microsoft's New Flight Simulator Title

Microsoft Flight

I have been looking forward to this release for a while but I hadn't really been following the new on it. So when I saw this title released on the steam store page for free I was very excited. Although I haven't been able to spare the bandwidth to download this yet I will hopefully do that soon.

I have been a big fan of the Microsoft Flight Simulator series and hopfully this will maintain the game-play of a simulator. I am going to go ahead and say that this game looks very pretty graphics wise, but of course that comes with a downside of higher system specifications:


CPU: Dual Core 3.0 GHz
GPU: 1024 MB ATI Radeon HD 5670 or 1024 MB NVIDIA GEFORCE 9800 GT or equivalent
HD: 30 GB hard drive space
OS : Win7 SP1 64-bit operating system
RAM: 6.0GB


These are the recommended specifications to run well so it looks like and to be honest they are pretty high, but hopefully the graphics make up for it.



If you want to check this game out you can get it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/games/flight/
Or if you have a steam account:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/203850/


Any questions or comments don't be afraid to leave them.

All information Sourced from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight

Image Sourced from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/96/Msflight_maule_m7_vc.jpg

TF2 Trading

Time for another post about Team Fortress 2.

This blog post will be some simple tips and tricks on trading.

 

Scrap Banking:

Buying whilst prices are low and selling while they are high isn't the only way to make money in Team Fortress 2. A good way people make money that is low risk is scrap banking. What you need to do is first buy any two random weapons for a scrap until you a a fair amount. Then you advertise that you're selling weapons for a scrap each. Rinse and repeat. Although you can do this on a regular server it's probably better to go on to a trade server.

Advertising:

When you're on a trade server, copy the trade message (that can look something like this "-Trading Lots of Weapons -- Trade Me-") and paste it in the chat.
A lot of servers offer a back pack feature. This is when you can type in "!bp theirnamehere" and it will show what items that they have in their inventory. This is a good way of advertising a large amount of items is by sorting all the items you're selling onto one page and advertise in a trade server as "**Selling all my items on page 5 of my backpack - BP Me**".

Team Fortress 2

This game has to be one of my favorites, so I am going to give a quick rundown on what it's about.

Primarily this game is a team based shooter based around nine different classes. The Scout, the Soldier, the Pyro, the Demoman, the Heavy, the Sniper, the Medic, the Engineer and the Spy. Each of these classes are unique and fun to play. You have to work together to complete the main objective, whilst stopping the other team completing theirs. Objectives include capturing points&flags, pushing a cart and defending areas.

There is also another aspect to this game that a lot of people enjoy: Trading. Buying and Selling to make a profit. The economy in TF2 is constantly changing and fluctuating so some people make Metal (the currency used) by buying items when they're cheap, and selling when they're not. I found trading is very satisfying and rewarding but something that I have learned is to keep the gaming and trading separate. When ever I play on trade servers too often I get bored very quickly.

Probably the best feature about this amazing game is that it is free. All you need is a steam account which you can get here. The biggest downside of this is the large download, for me it took around 10 gigabytes but it was well worth it.

In summery I would really recommend trying out this game and see if you like it.

Any questions or comments, don't be afraid to leave them.

                                                                                              





Origonal Image Sourced from: http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/File:1280x1024_logo.jpg

N0tch's New Project

 

0x10c

 

So N0tch has announced his new project titled "0x10c". It has only been in development for literally two days but N0tch plans to do as he did with Minecraft and release its early early stages and let the community have a heavy influence on its progression. Something I don't really agree upon is that for online play you would have to play monthly which seems to be a bit greedy and hopefully by the end of development it will be a one off payment (although I doubt it).

The premise of the story is that during the space race there was an error in the computers that controlled how long they were induced in to sleep for. They eventually woke up after trillions (yes, trillions) of years. I am going to guess this will be a procedurally generated universe complete with planets, black-holes, etc. Personally I am liking this idea, it has lots of potential.

Judging by the brief description N0tch has given, I would say a key feature in the space exploration game would be a 1980's style computer that is fully functional where you can use it as if it was a real computer. With Minecraft, you could have two values with redstone, on and off, and people have made some absolutely amazing creations. But if we start with a fully functioning computer the creations could be extraordinary.

So I am looking forward to see how this game will turn out.

All information was sourced from http://0x10c.com/

As always if you have any questions/comments, don't be afraid to leave them

Minecraft With a Twist

Superflat Survival

Recently I have been a little bored of the ol' Minecraft so I asked my friends for any suggestions on what to do. One of them suggest quite an interesting idea of playing survival on flatland. At first I didn't think you would be able to play properly, but as a group we eventually figured out how to make ourselves sustainable.


Step 1:

First, under 'More World Options' change world type to 'Superflat' and make sure Generate Structures is on. 

Runescape

My Opinion:

I don't know about you guys but I have always had a negative stigma towards this game, and until recently I actually played it and now I have some more valid opinions.

My friend has an addiction to Runescape and for the last year has been talking about it almost non-stop and I just rolled my eyes. That was until last week, I decided to play it, even just to take the piss. But I noted that most of my assumptions of the game were wrong.

An Average Gamers Perspective on Runescape:

- The community isn't that bad, although there are a lot of younglin's "hu sp33k lik3 dis" you can have intelligent conversation with some.

- This game does involve grinding, and LOTS of it at that. So obviously this is the main drawback for most people. The grinding does result in leveling up, which is very satisfying.

- It's not optimized very well as it runs in Java, so despite it's sub-par graphics compared to todays standards lag is to be expected.



So in my opinion, lots of ups and downs but all it amounts to is your opinion of the game. What is true is that it's not as bad as a lot of people say it is. I would recommend it to at least try it out. Just remember, don't critique this game if you are having fun. Because that's all that games amount to really, but if you're not having fun, don't bother.

http://runescape.com/

If you have any comments, don't be afraid to leave them.