Notebook Wars 2

Remember when you would draw out epic dogfights on your notepad in school, in between pulling the ponytail of the girl in front of you and feigning interest in the teacher, who was explaining the water cycle for the third time this year? No? Well, maybe it was just me, and of course the DreamForge Studios devs, who bring us this piece of notepad paper known as Notebook Wars 2.

For once, I can not say that I've played the game's prequel, so I can't make any comparisons to improvements from the original, or unneeded flaws. However, judging the game on it's own merits, its a pretty fun game, with some pretty major flaws in design.

In notebook wars 2, you play as a pilot who is tasked to shoot down an armada of enemy planes and occasionally a bunker, tank, or gigantic robotic monstrosity the likes of which could have only come from the mind of Micheal Bay. It is never made clear why you are destroying all of these ships, but one must assume that zombie Nazis have taken over the world. This would also explain the flight skill of the pilots, because apparently having a half decayed brain limits zombie pilots to military parade and delta formations.

The game's upgrade system is standard shooter fare, though very well polished. You have ten ship and ammo types, and while they may have their strengths and weaknesses at the lower tiers, the upper tiers are your standard 'one bullet/plane to rule them all'. The pricing is really well done is most aspects, you really seem to get what you pay for, but a notable exception is in upgrade slots for planes. Some planes only have one upgrade slot, some have up to four. The problem is that the slots have to be unlocked on every plane you buy, and slot prices are both based on the ship's initial price, and grow exponentially each slot. So while that $100,000 might look like a pretty cool goal to go after, its pointless to buy unless you want to spend a half an hour grinding in the game, because getting four slots on it costs $200,000 altogether, twice the price of the most expensive thing in the game. Using the three slot helicopter on the other hand means spending $30,000 total, and is really a better option due to the way the system works.

The combat is pretty fun, but the enemies lack unique qualities by and large, and the rounds go on for way too long and don't do enough to overwhelm you. About 80% of the enemies fly together in lines and fire straight ahead, making it easy to edge kill the entire line, or swoop out of its way. Some of the more interesting AI in the units, these large green planes, were discarded after three levels, even though the different movement style changed up the game and made it more dynamic, and it would've been really nice to see more of that. The game is also very slowly paced. Its certainly not your average shooter, rather than short, frantic rounds with lots of impulse thinking and playing going on, the game sends an ungodly armada of planes at you each round, but at a leisurely pace. It may also be worth mentioning that the final health bar of each boss took far too long to deplete. At the point that the boss has lost all his extra guns, he has no hope of winning, the final health bar just delays the progression of the game by about 50 seconds.

As far the art style, I really do dig it. The crayon art is consistent, and and the animations of things like helicopter blades spinning don't distort at all. I could realistically look at a picture of this game with all the HUD removed and say that someone took crayons, colored pencils, and line paper and drew this out.

Notebook Wars 2 is a pretty good top down shooter, albeit not one that has you working much. It's a really good game to play while doing something else audio-wise, such as listening to music or a podcast, because with no story to speak of, the entire game is very light on requiring player comprehension. Definitely a game I would recommend for someone who has an hour or so to burn.

Gunball Arena

Do you like guns? How about balls? Do you get a thrill from arenas? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then have I got a game for you! Gunball Arena is a new game from Armor Games that pits you and your little ball, and his gun or sword against huge waves of enemies. The game is by no means hard, and has some rather annoying bits to it, but it is definitely worth playing.

The basic game play is simple, you have two type of weapons, melee and ranged. Melee weapons are short range, high damage, and lack recoil. Guns are longer range, but the damage is much worse, and though the more powerful guns can nuke half the playing field, they also send you flying back from recoil. In addition, you have three special powers the can be used infinitely, sans the individual cool downs. Unfortunately, two of the three abilities are neigh useless, berserk increases damage, but spins you around in an uncontrollable circle, and teleport teleports you about 5 feet away and seems to hit everything in between you and the teleport location. Slowdown on the other hand, functions like a bullet time mode where everyone but you slows down, and is incredibly useful.

On the weapons front, the game has quite a few, and there are no down sides to buying a weapon since they sell for exactly what you pay for them. The fact that your weapons are specifically glued to the front, back, left and right of you is rather annoying though, as it means you can't focus fire on where you put your mouse, and instead have to aim sideways to use side guns, or slot up your sides with shields/mine layers instead of actual guns.

While playing I did encounter a pretty game breaking bug after I'd bought all the upgrades. As soon as I sold my sword, my money displayed as NaN(not a number) and I wasn't able to buy anything. Nothing I could do fixed the problem, so I was essentially stuck with no weapons at all.

Another disappointing facet of the game was a lack of a final boss. The beginning plot has you set up to enter a tournament to fight the king, but even after beating every level and fighting all five bosses, you never have a final boss to fight. It wouldn't be that much a problem, but your character accepting the king's challenge to a fight to the death was the entire premise of the plot, and it just seems really weird that it never played out in the game.

Overall, Gunball arena is a damn good game to play if you want an easy, fun game, but be weary of that bug, because not being able to change your weapons is no fun at all.

Bubble Tanks 3

Bubble Tanks 3 is another bubble tank game by hero interactive, of armor games. If you've either of the prequels, the gameplay should be familiar, as should the sandbox environment with little to no objective. In the first game, you played as a tank that slowly grew in size as you collected bubbles from fallen enemies. The second game included a branching tree of tanks that emphasized either speed, rate of fire, or damage per second. The third features an even more robust system in which you unlock ship classes with the bubble collects, and allows you to build your own ship, which is limited only by the amount of gun points and ship class.

At class one, the speed are incredibly fast, but lack the firepower and special abilities that a higher class would have. At class six, you inch along at 30% of the speed that the class one moves at, turn at a snails pace, and have little in the way of dodging abilities, but in turn can have a massive amount of firepower, shields, radar, and anything else you might want to outfit yourself with.

The enemies in this game seem more annoying than in previous bubble tank games, particularly single bubbles on non hostile levels, which are nearly impossible to hit, and the various enemies that shoot out both purple and green bubbles. When hit by a purple bubble, your speed slows to a crawl, making dodging hard as hell, and when hit by a green bubble, you cannot shoot. Combine these two against a high class ship and you've pretty much created an infinite stun lock combo that can only be rid of by leaving the area you are in. There also seems to be a distinct lack of boss type enemies like those introduced in the second game in the series, which is a disappointment.

On a technical front, the game seems to be slowing down or locking up completely for many people. While I haven't had this problem to nearly the extent of others, I do get lag that oftentimes persists until I kill everything in the room I'm in, which is quite frankly ridiculous with 4gb of ram and a quad 2.12ghz of processing power. There are also bugs with certain abilities, most notably the apocalypse gun, which obliterates the entire room you are in, and occasionally freezes you inside a feedback loop, forcing you to restart the game.

My favorite part of the game had to be the tank creation mode, I probably spent more time designing a tank than actually playing the game. Every ship has a class, and in order to move up a class your ship needs to take up more and more of the total area of the playing field. Personally, my favorite class is class 3, 80% move speed isn't horrible and at class four the guns function as rotating turrets rather than mounted weapons, but to each his own.

All in all bubble tanks 3 is a fun creation game with a few bugs, major lag problems, and an interesting sandbox type game at its core. I'd recommend you play the second one instead of this one if the creation aspects don't interest you, as the gameplay is far smoother.

Cat Astro Phi

Cat Astro Phi is a retro top down adventure game and asteroid shooter. The game emulates the style of the classic Game Boy games, from the four colors, to the classic midi music, to the outer GUI shell of a pixelated game boy mock-up. The story is ever-present, and some of the dialogue presents itself as both a satire and an homage to the games it emulates.

The game consists of two game types, a sidescrolling asteroid shooting game and an top down game not unlike the original legend of Zelda. I honestly didn't care much for the asteroids mode, but its thankfully short and you can purposely fail it if you wish. The main game involves finding your lost cat, and collecting 10 power cells to repair your ship. Each of the three levels includes simple puzzles involving bombs, boxes, keys and three types of guns. Its simple, but its fun as hell, and the game only gets better as it goes on.

The graphic art is nicely done, the animations are simple, but they work. Like the old gameboy, it only uses 4 colors, but nothing is muddled or hard to make out. The explosion sprites are a bit of an exception, as they seem to blend horribly with all the other ground textures.

I went into this game expecting a mediocre and tedious little town down shooter, and was pleasantly surprised. The writing is well done, the art design is iconic, and the game is a tad short of the perfect length. The only real problem with the game is the poorly done asteroids mode, but even that is more bland than it is bad.