Recently I’ve been playing a lot the game Westward, that could be shortly defined as “Virtual Villager clone with Wild West settings”. It is a nice game, with all the “required” features. This kind of games even if are defined “casual”, have some appeal also to a “old hardcore” player like me. I mean, they surely have some limitations and too much “tutorial”, but they’re definitely miles away from the classical match3! 🙂
…unfortunately YES! The CPU still cheats in PES6. Not in such bad manner as in the previous title, but still…! once you score a goal or two and are winning, your players will start to be affected from “total incapacity mode” disease.
It means that will miss the most basic passes, goalscoring chances (in one match I had Ronaldinho miss 2 penalties… can this be possible?!) and so on. Your defenders also will instantly become slower and weaker than opponent. That is, a player of the height of Maradona could jump and win the ball with heading versus a tall defender like Stam… 😐
Ok ok, some might say “if you always win, where’s the fun??”. Sure that’s true – still when you draw a match where you had 60% ball possession, were leading 2-0 after 1st half, and had 2 penalties (both missed by Ronaldinho as I said above), versus a much weaker team (was playing Brazil – Peru !!!) I don’t know if is still so… fun! 😀
I’ve been playing (in my very little spare time while working on USM2!) the last game from Sid Meier’s, Railroads. At first my impression was very positive (well is still quite positive). But lately I found that the AI, which is in charge of moving the trains from one city to another, using the binaries you’ve placed, has some troubles 😀
I bet that from the programming point of view that part of the game must have been a real nightmare… figuring out what is the best path to take with algorithms must have been really hard to program for the (poor) coders of the game!
Apart for that the game rulez, as if Sid was a “quality guarantee”. Indeed of their latest games I’ve played (Pirates, Civilization IV) all of them are very good. Maybe a bit too much geared towards the “casual” market (like the annoying cutscenes of Pirates that I was skipping everytime after I saw them once!). Still, he is a real master of gameplay!
Yeah I know… I should work on USM2 😀
And indeed I’m working on it, I swear! yesterday night finally passed another great milestone – played a complete match, everything went fine, player ratings, realistic results and events, etc.
But the “problem” is that today got my copy of PES6 fresh from the oven ! So I MUST play it for a while. I just played for a few hours and those are my first impressions:
In one word: this new version rulez, way better than the previous one that was a little disappointing!
USM2 programming is running at full speed. Yesterday I spent 10h on it! also I just finished a temporary website, you can check it here. The initial release will be in english only, but I put all the texts in an external file so will be (hopefully!) easy to localize it.
Also I’m already planning some updates… I mean I already wrote down some notes on possible new additions. For now main goal is to finish a release candidate 1.0. In games so complex like a soccer management one, you never run out of ideas! but is important to try to release a first version to gather users feedback (most important thing for a developer).
Meanwhile I found very fun the game Fizzball released by the friends developers Grubbygames. Is a very clever and well designed variant of the classic game “arkanoid” or if you prefet “breakout”. Cool comic-style art too. Was a fun diversive for a few hours, then I had to go back working on USM2…! 😉