There are 3 levels of play and within each of those levels are 14 of game types, each is unique and has it’s own benefits and pitfalls. Despite playing the same style of track then difference between the game types is one of the reasons the game remains exciting and enjoyable.

As well as playing DRM-free music on your machine you can play songs from AudioSurf radio or you can opt to play a track from the Orange Box soundtrack which covers the music from the Value games Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2.

A sequel called AudioSurf Air was announce earlier this year, the visuals look good but may indicate the game is moving to an even more Wipeout style track. I hope that the core game elements remain the same otherwise I’ll just have to keep booting up the older version forever more.

If you haven’t played it you can find in on Steam for £5.99 at the moment, but it does normally make an appearing in the Steam sales.

However I was discussing with my wife the recent announcement by King’s Isle about their new MMO in development. Pirate 101 looks to be using the same model but with a pirate theme, what with it being all the rage at the moment. Of course it comes with the high number of safety features that if you have played Wizard 101 you will be familiar with.

I do hope that games like Wizard & Pirate 101 are still going strong and hopefully joined by a wider collection of titles as our child gets to the age where online gaming is something he wants to participate in.

I just hope they get Brian Blessed to voice one of the pirates

GameSpace – It wasn’t long ago that I was having a conversation with Dok about the poor use of game worlds in terms of quests,traveling and how phasing could make better use of the game environments avoiding the “Quest giver hub” and the “quest target areas”. I use rift as an example as the starting areas are huge yet you perform a handful of quests in an area never to return.
The non-standard quest givers and tiered quest system in The Secret World means you are frequently heading to new parts of the map, as well as looking at new areas in a new light.

Investigations – The game has quests that need you to use your head a little, logical clues makes for some good entertainment that not just your normal mmo gaming event, they may need you to break the clue down into more basic elements or Google a name to get help (sporting an in-game browser for that very reason). A good example was this evening when Dok and I tackled one of the main investigations in Kingsmouth, each step was tough but great fun. Lore-whoring FTW!

Quest Cool downs – Missions have 24 hour cool down that means if you group up with someone else who is working on a mission you have already completed, you can either grab it again or ask someone to share. This allows you to help them out but still get yourself a reward for doing so. This makes grouping so much easier for everyone.

Seven/Seven – The skills method have been already detailed before, and in the beta the upper levels were locked so I didn’t really get too much feeling for how these are going to work. That said Guild Wars player will already have the swapping build system in mind and focusing your powers into powerful combination is an art in itself.
I do expect Flavour of the Month builds to be common place, but with wider variations as players customise more to their play-style and grouping needs.

Highlight 1

TSW has been promoting their no-level progression system and to be fair I always took this with a pinch of salt as this often translates into “we refuse to call them levels but the mechanics are the same”. However TSW have managed to pull it off in a rather successful way.

To sum up my play-style, I’m a lore whore, hovering up any story lines and quest arcs whenever possible but as I reminded during my recent playing of Swtor, this often results in you over-levelling can the foes you encounter are weaker and present no challenge.

With TSW I played my normal path and picked up quests as frequently as possible (there is a low capacity for quests) and it felt very natural that the location/game content still matched. Enemies were still hitting me just as hard, despite me having some new skills to use against them.

Hightlight 2

Quests give a quick indicator that tell you how many parts it comprises of, this feature is good for juggling long and short term missions, plus in the one area in use this weekend, quests originate from investigations and not just contacts, which at first I thought was gimmicky but it’s not over used (yet) and the quests are very varied.

Highlight 3

The game uses much phasing to delivery a good experience for the player, despite there being a high volume of players in the area I didn’t feel that my quests were impacted by this. Only once did I have to wait for a clicky to respawn and it was only between 5 and 10 seconds.

We’ll that’s my first post complete, nothing magic but certainly a good start to the game.

The game has recently started it’s 3rd week with the battle currently raging over all of Africa, while the factions attempt to retain control of their base countries and states. The previous week was all about taking and holding the opposing factions territories, which saw the map a patchwork of red, green and blue.

I believe that I’ve only got one more rank to achieve in the War which is Secret Agent, I’m not sure how long the war is actually running but once I’ve achieved the top rung I think that’s in for me unless there is a hidden bonus levels or content I’m unaware of.

Those playing need to remember to link their Secret War account to their Funcom Secret World account otherwise how are you going to claim all those goodies. You can find the link to do this your original sign up email but Funcom also email you at certain milestones, with a helpful reminder included.

Once you have done that you can quickly view the items you have earnt from participating in the war, it looks as if you have been raiding the cash shop early.

Like many players I was over the moon about the news that Guild War 2 was a going to be a reality, I signed up to follow the updates and read up on the lore, backstory, enjoyed the Eye of the North content, that encouraging players to earn content for their Hall of Monuments.

I think my enthusiasm started to wane when they linked the Hall of Monuments to the GW2 reward calculator. Sadly I never got back that drive to for the game, which is a shame as many sources indicate that GW2 is a great experience. For now it will go into the “Pick it up later” pile.

So my money was given to FunCom for their new MMO The Secret World which is scheduled for launch on the 19th June. One of the biggest selling points for me was that it’s not a fantasy themed game and at this juncture in my gaming experience I seem to be shying away from that genre. I’ve been playing SW:ToR (post to follow) which has really handled the gun-play in a great way.

A nice move has been that if you pre-order TSW, play the beta weekend and then think you really wanted one of the pre-order “booster packs”, you can just upgrade your account with those packs rather that feeling that you missed out.

So aside from Pre-ordering TSW I have been also playing FunComs facebook driven Flash game called The Secret War, this allows players to earn small game unlocks such as clothing, xp boosters and other trinkets. Nothing game changing but certainly nice to show-offs at launch with the other people running around with the same items.

However this all changed when Raptr recently got a huge make-over. Now for each of your games, play-time and achievements are ranked against the statistics of other players. The more people that are playing a game, the higher the thresholds of each ranking. The ranks are:

• Newbie
• Amateur
• Experienced
• Dedicated
• Hardcore
• Elite

Ranks, A brief overview

Raptr informs you of your ranking for a game and also tells you what is needed to reach the next rank. As an example I have 20 games where I am ranked as “Hardcore”, but I’m told that I need to invest another X hours gameplay or earning achievements to earn the rank “Elite”.

That’s all well and good but once you have put in the hours and become an “Elite” player of a title, what then? How does Raptr encourage you to put more time into a game?

Well it cleverly doesn’t tell you your exact rank, but it offer you the useful information on what step are needed for you to become the number #1 player of a game. The wonderfully designed message politely tells me that I need to invest another 58 hours in Sanctum to earn the elustrious title of the number #1 player.

The bonus is that you spend more time playing games that may have lost their enjoyment, but the grind doesn’t end there. As more players invest more time you will slowly lose position and maybe rank, another factor to push you into picking up older titles to in order to compete against other gamers and maintain your standing.

 Standings

After the recent changes I was thrilled to discover that I am (at time of writing) the top ranked gamer for both Atomic City Adventures and Atom Zombie Smasher. On viewing my progress on the latter game it was apparent that I needed to put in a few more hours to try and earn more achievements to cement my place as top dog.

As I was typing this post I received an email from Audio Surf informing me that I had been dethroned as the top scorer on Transvision Vamps – Tell that girl to shut up.

C’est la vie d’une compétitif gamer.

*Should you want to add me as a friend on Raptr my username is welshtroll.

The Basic game purchase is a usual £39.99 which has the normal 30 days playtime included, this is the option I shall be ordering this when pay-day rolls around. Pre-ordering grants the player the basic level of rewards

• Access to Beta Weekends
• Early Access (between 1 & 4 days headstart)
• Allows one name to be reserved effective now
• Experience buff ring (early levels)
• Unique T-shirt
• Pet that buffs combat (early levels)

Not a back mixture and will hopefully get peopling ordering the game  super early to obtain some rewards.

But there are some other things can be also be purchased for an additional cost:

• The Initiate Pack (£12.49)
  • Social Flying Pet
  • Higher quality starter weapons
  • Faction leather Jackets
• The Master Pack (£49.99)
  • 30 days extra game time
  • 1 extra character slot
  • one additional name reservation
  • 10% Lifetime discount on full-price store clothing items
  • 10 Experience Buff potions (limited to account)
  • 7 High end enhancements, to max out your toon early on
• The Grand Master Flash Pack (£159.99)
  • All of the content of the Master Pack
  • Life-Time Subscription
  • Snake Skin jacket
• Additional Character Slots (£8.49)
• Additional Name Reservations (£8.49)

In all honesty I wasn’t expecting to see the Lifetime subscription make an appearance for TSW, after many of the games who have opted such a feature have moved to a F2P/PaYG model.  Despite having looked forward to this game for some time. I have reservations about purchasing a lifetime subscription in the pre-order.

I think the biggest problem for me is that investing that amount of money (almost £200) is hard to justify, when I could pick-up the £40 and between 12 and 13 months for the same price.

I think the biggest sticking point for me is that it requires a lot of blind faith that what you are purchasing will be enjoyable and keep my interest. Plus I’d hate to loose those 60 days free gaming time by getting the lifetime sub.

I think I shall have to wait and see if the game is my cup of tea, and if I really want and they still offer it purchase it after launch.

* Open plan style, where your towers also act as walls to block the flow of enemy “traffic”
* Lane style, where attackers stick to one of many lanes and defenses likewise
* Map with predetermined paths, may also have predefined locations for towers

Positech Games latest offering Gratuitous Tank Battles (GTB) falls into the later bracket but it also offers a unique blend of extras that certainly bring something new to the genre.

First up is the unit customisation, a central and popular feature in the previous title Gratuitous Space Battles. This has been enhanced by the addition of augmentation modules that bolster one of the attributes of the unit you are building.  I think it’s worth mentioning the rather impressive comparision pane that allows you to check that your picking the right module for your build. I think this certainly going to be hit with the Min-Max players that want to tweak their units to perfection.
A further enchancement to this system is that the individual layers of a unit you are creating are colour tintable. This is rather good when you need to quickly identify what units you already have on the battlefield.

Of course the best feature I saved until last, it’s the one that makes this more than just another tower defense game is that you get to be the attacker. Nothing is more fun than stomping all over the computers defensive set-up to a galorious victory, then defending the same region as the AI struggles to defeat your perfect deployment.

Additional features
The game has speed settings like GSB but with a new introduction of a frame by frame key, that allows you to watch your tanks being shot to bits in glorious slow-motion.

The game is in beta at the moment so anything may change before release, that said, it’s a highly polished game already and the small tweaks being made to the game at this stage would been seen as day one patches on other most others games.

If Tower Defense is a genre you enjoy, I would certainly put this forward as one for your wishlist.

The superhero game lends itself so well to the idea of the cash-shop and the foundations of this were established by the booster packs that Paragon Studios had introduced over the past few years. If you want a new costume part then just purchase that one part or the whole outfit if you prefer, or perhaps you’ve seen a new cape someone is wearing and decide your character would benefit from owning it.

Despite being a paying member (VIP) the shift move to the freemium model truely sank in with the release of the “Street Justice” powerset, which requires a cash shop purchase. Of course the cost was more than the 400 points that are given for being a VIP player. So you either have to wait 2 months or stump up the extra cash for points.

That said the cash shop items are nearly all cosmetic and thus don’t impact your gameplay if you don’t acquire them.
But to make the perfect costume you may have to buy some extra parts rather than using just the vanilla sets.

The general thoughts people have about the shop are very positive, even when compared to existing games that sport cash shop models.
Have you tried it out yet? What are your thoughts?