1601

He got confused and thought that TWEotW was TWEWY?

1602

I played through the game to get a ticket one day. I think it must have been bundled with some indie package I bought before. At any rate, all you do is wander around, collecting poorly modeled objects by walking over them. Physics are unreliable at best. The people in the game aren’t even animated, they just slide around. I don’t expect AAA quality from indie games, but the fact that this game costs money is ridiculous.

1603

On the other hand, Atom Zombie Smasher is da bomb! Just played my first bit of it. Too fun.

BTW, in Beat Hazard (another of my excellent purchases this sale) what’s the trick to beating those huge boss ships?

1604

Is ME2 DLC available for the PC? I don’t see it anywhere on Steam (It’s entirely possible I’m just blind). Played it on the 360 so the only reason I’d be picking it up now would be to play through all the DLC.

1605

According to a post a ways back, ME 2 DLC is only available via the social bioware site thingy.

1606

WEotW has two interesting levels. The videogames themed one and a black and white letters one.

1607

Ah, thanks.

1608

The huge ones? I tend to focus on one wing at a time to try and knock out the weapons. They take a real beating though.

1609

This got a little wall-of-textish, but if anything here isn’t clear just let me know.

Eliminate everything on-screen that isn’t the boss so you can focus all of your attention on it.

Now your plan of attack depends on the type of boss. For the twin smaller ships and the one large ship with multiple turrets, try this. Focus all of your firepower on one half of the ship (targeting the guns on the right or left side of the ship, but not both). The weapon arrangements are always symmetrical (the left and right sides of a ship will have the same weapons in the same spots) and a boss will always run through its weapons in the same order when firing (for example, missiles, lasers, plasma, missiles, laser, plasma, etc.) If you destroy both of the weapons of a given type, such as both missile launchers, then the other weapons will simply fire more frequently as there are now just two weapons to cycle through. However, if you destroy one missile launcher, one laser cannon and one plasma cannon, you now have cut the boss’s firepower in half and can dismantle the rest of the weapons with far less risk than if you just sprayed weapon fire at the thing and accidentally left the boss with lasers that fire constantly (which can be a death sentence if you’re not accustomed to handling them).

For the centipede, all you need to do is keep yourself from getting surrounded. Get out ahead of the boss as it moves toward you, then fake it out by moving in one direction until it starts to turn to chase you, and then switch directions once it’s too late for him to turn back. Micro missiles are fantastic against these bastards. If you get surrounded, you’ll want to trigger a bomb or reflect shield to get out before you get wiped out.

The giant octopus is just a matter of keeping your distance and hammering away at it. If you get too close, it curls up and becomes immune to damage. Once you destroy all of the arm segments, this one will fall apart, but I’d recommend just using normal weapons fire on it because the special weapons aren’t overly effective.

I’d highly recommend snagging the reflect shield as early as you can, since it is outrageously powerful. If you ever find an enemy that is firing missiles at you then you can just turn them all around and get a ton of easy damage (especially effective against centipedes and bosses).

1610

Regarding Steam in general… am I misunderstanding something, or is Steam really pausing all game downloads while I’m playing a Steam game? Seems whenever I exit a Civ5 session when some games had been downloading as I started the session, the download shows up paused and then restarts. How can I prevent that?

1611

No, you’re right. Dunno.

1612

Once you start a game, you can alt-tab out to the Steam window and then manually tell your downloads to pause and then resume.

1613

Alt-Tab out, tell it to resume the download, then Alt-Tab back in.

It is an annoying “feature” of steam which I detest.

1614

Good idea, I’ll try that.

1615

There’s a hidden flag in Steam that’s set on a per-game basis that tells it whether to pause downloading while that game is playing, and unfortunately there’s no way to universally override it. But yeah, if you tab out, pause, then resume, it will keep going.

1616

Another forum member already gifted it to me, so I’m set. Thanks for the suggestion, though, I hadn’t actually considered ebay. :)

1617

Yeah, have to agree. I’ve seen that before but thought I was doing something wrong on my end. It should really only do that if you try to play online. Single player? Who cares?

1618

It’s basically a Katamari Damacy clone. It’s not got that ineffable Katamari charm, but the things you mention are pretty much true of Katamari also, and I wouldn’t complain about them in that game.

1619

Otagan’s excellent post covers the mechanics. I’ll try to cover the intangibles.

You aren’t dodging the bosses bullets and missiles. You are dancing with them.

1620

Just a quick shout out to a fun little game that’s $2.50 for the duration of the Summer Sale. Hinterland, by Tilted Mill, is a game I bought when it was on sale for the same price during the Winter Sale last year. I hadn’t had time to get around to it until now, but I’ve put around 6 hours into it and am really enjoying it.

It’s totally a light beer and pretzels game which combines a little Dungeon Siege-like RPGing with some town building strategy to create a unique niche game. Essentially you start out choosing one of 15 or so “classes” which determine your starting attack/defense/resources/equipment levels. Then your hero is tasked with adventuring into the countryside to clear the map while also building up his town. The map consists of segments that might contain a monster lair, a bandit hideout, a base from which raiders attack your town, a portal you can use for quick travel or one of many different resource nodes used to improve your town. Clear out and capture a territory and it’s yours to keep, along with any benefits it might bring to your town. Capture all the territories to win the game.

Meanwhile, back in town, “visitors” come to the town and can be settled in town by building them a home or workshop. This costs gold, and more valuable settlers also require that you have captured certain resources or discovered certain objects (as loot) that they will require. Once settled, nearly all the professions can have their buildings upgraded which will result in better production levels. Once you get rolling you will have a number of townspeople producing food and gold, crafting weapons and armor, creating potions and researching spells. It’s very satisfying to come back to town from an adventure and discover a stack of healing potions and some new weapons and armor crafted by your townspeople waiting for you.

You can also “draft” townspeople to join you as fellow adventurers. Obviously combat and magic oriented townsfolk (guards, priests, etc.) make far better companions than the local farmer or innkeeper. You’ll need these extra hands to take down the tougher areas far from town where larger and more powerful monsters reside (with better and more powerful loot of course!). You’ll also need to occasionally defend your town from raiders sent from the bases the monsters and bandits control. For this reason it’s prudent to hire some guards and leave them in town with a built up guardhouse or two.

In the end the mix of actiony RPG and strategic town building is very captivating. An hour easily slips by as you seesaw between adventuring in the wilds and standing in town settling new townsfolk, upgrading their buildings, equiping everyone (lots of misc. items can be found that increase townsfolk production levels when you equip them on the correct townsperson) and genreally managing your town. Every so often the King sends you a request, usually for food, gold or to capture a territory, and completing these grants you large bonuses to your Fame score and sometimes a nice item as well. When you finally complete the game your score is determined by many factors, including the class you chose at the start, the time it took you to complete the game and the amount of fame you have at the end. Games can be short, medium or long (each map larger than the last) and several levels of difficulty and score changing options are available. Maps are randomly generated, so between that and the character class differences there is good replayibility to the game.

At $2.50, even if you only spend a few hours playing a couple of short games you’ll get your money’s worth. It’s not epic in any sense of the word, but it’s light enough and different enough that I can see myself replaying it a few times and perhaps coming back to it again in the future when I need a quick fix of something different. I’ll easily put 10 hours into the game, which breaks down to all of $0.25 an hour. It’s too bad Tilted Mill closed up shop, as this would be a good game to get a sequal with a little more depth and a few extra options. If any of the above sounds interesting to you, I highly suggest grabbing this little gem before it goes back to being $10.