Sunday, June 29, 2014

Ingress and Summoners War + Ascent the space game

So, these past few days I've been playing very little Dragon's Prophet. I haven't played much Chivalry, either. This is because I found a couple of mobile games that were interesting enough to pull me away from them and I've begun working on another project.




I downloaded Summoners War a few days ago and it's been quite fun. I love monster-capture type games, and this definitely fits that. I am a bit sad that the method of getting new monsters is based on RNG. I mean, I'm a faithful follower of RNGesus, but it's still kind of annoying getting crap after crap. Although, the crap makes for great fodder in leveling up my main summons.

The combat system in the game is also pretty fun. Generally, I don't like turn-based combat, but Summoners War has kept it simple, yet strategic. Really great for a mobile game, especially when a majority of the time you're just logging on to play for 5-10 minutes at a time. The progression, at least for the summons themselves, is also massively skewed thanks to RNGesus, but it does give you something to keep playing for. I'm just afraid I'll end up getting bored/frustrated with it and quit.







The other game I've been playing a lot of the past few days is Ingress. I got a new phone with a new provider and decided to give it a try. My last phone/service was a bit iffy when it came to GPS lock/Data in my area. But the one I'm with now is pretty stable, even in the middle of no where. The only issue is that my new phones resolution is a bit smaller than the suggested resolution for Ingress. I read into a lot of ways to fix this, and I may still decide to go with them, but I found a work-around that lets me get past the few issues I was having. After getting past those issues, I can easily play the game with my phone, although there is a bit of text overlapping on some tabs - nothing serious though.

I was worried about playing in a rural area, but was surprised to find that my small town of about 900 has a number of portals. I also have several towns that aren't to far away, including some cities and one being Wichita which has something like 400k people - and seems to be fairly active going by the intel map. Here's a screenshot of my town (and yes, that is exactly how big it is - for about 10-20 minutes in any direction it's nothing but farms, too.


I suppose now I should say I decided to join the Enlightened. I enjoy being the underdog, and it seems like almost everyone plays Resistance - the numbers support that.  From the above, you can see that there is one Enlightened(Green) portal, and a lot more Resistance. This is because someone from one of the nearby bigger towns came through a few months ago and submitted a ton of portals. They're all level 1 with one level 7 and one level 8 resonator each. So they're not very strong and great for a low level like me to learn the game with.

The single Enlightened portal is one I grabbed earlier today. I took out the first resonator earlier that day and came back later after re-filling my weapons reserves to finish it off. Once I took over the portal, I put a four level 1 and four level 2 resonators on it, plus a very rare and a rare shield mod to help protect it from anyone that happens by - though I doubt that'll happen... or that the shields will stop anyone. 

My next goal is to capture the four portals in the middle and make a very small field with them, just to get familiar with it. Then I guess I'll farm a lot to get higher level so I can upgrade the portals enough so that I can make a bigger field to surround the town. Still learning, though, so that strategy may change. Or someone from Resistance will make an outing and come re-take everything and screw up my progress. 

For those that familiar with Ingress, it's the Augmented-reality mobile game that Google's "Niantic Labs" created. It has some pretty rich lore, combines geocaching, Alternate Reality Game techniques, and (of course) Augmented Reality. If you didn't notice, I included links to several wiki-pages in the last couple of sentences. In short, the game is incredibly fun - even while playing by yourself, but it is meant to be played with several people (even if you're just coordinating over the comms and not actually meeting in person). I do have two invites for the game, though I'm honestly not sure if you need to be invited anymore since the game is out of the beta - however, if you want one, just let me know in the comments and we'll figure it out.


Other than that, I've been playing a game called "Ascent" or "Ascent the Space Game" with the URL of "thespacegame.com." It's an interesting game, but very hard to get into, though from what I understand the developers has been working on improving that tutorial and new player experience. I haven't played it enough to write much on it. But so far it seems like a mix of elements from Shores of Hazeron (one of my all-time favorite games) and EVE Online (another game I enjoy), so it should be fun once I get more into it.

Anyways, that's it for now. Thanks for reading.



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