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The final wing of Naxxramas opened on Wednesday and many eager players jumped straight in, hoping to complete the final stretch of Hearthstone’s first expansion. I was among them, taking on the two final bosses live on the station’s Twitch channel.
As if to make up for last week’s four bosses, the Frostwyrm Lair has only two bosses in it; Sapphiron and Kel’thuzad himself. And both of them can be fairly challenging, even if Kel’Thuzad is the more challenging battle of the two as the final boss of the entire thing.
Sapphiron’s Hero Power is a 0 mana cost ability called Frost Breath, which destroys all minions who aren’t Frozen on your side of the field and he will use at the start of every turn. Sounds bad, but you do have a lifeline. A 2/10 minion who you start with on your side of the field called Frozen Champion. As his name suggests, he is forever Frozen but also shelters minions placed on either side of him from Frost Breath’s power. So this is a battle of consideration and careful placement and perfectly doable in a few battles if you play your cards right.
Kel’Thuzad though… well, Kel’Thuzad cheats and I’m not just saying that because he’s difficult: he literally does cheat. He starts off with 30 HP, 10 armour and has another 0-cost ability that causes your Hero 2 damage and freezes it. He’s also programmed with different responses to each Hero’s entering phrase as well as all 6 of the emotes, which can be quite amusing if you’re bored. When you’ve removed all his armour as well, that is when he will cheat. He will end your turn automatically and then summon two 3/3 Guardian of Icecrowns with Taunt and change his ability to Chains, an 8-cost ability that allows him to take control of one of your minions for the turn. He will also do this if you let him carry on too long beating you down without removing all his armour. My advice is to smack down his armour quickly, being aware of the auto turn-end when it’s all gone (try to do more than 10 damage during the ‘armour’ phase to give you a little headstart on his health), then just play cards and deal with him. Eventually you will win.
The final Class challenge is that of the Paladin against Kel’Thuzad with all his tricks. Use the Echoing Oozes in a similar way to how Grobbulus did last week – they help enormously.
Also, I discovered an Easter Egg. Play a Hunter deck, and use Animal Companion against Kel’Thuzad – see who you summon. 😀
As an ending the Frostwyrm Lair was certainly good enough, but maybe lacked some little touch that made it perfect. Not that I cared when I finally beat Kel’Thuzad (that NPC misplay! He had fatal on me and missed it!) and then saw the rundown of all the boss coins being counted to confirm that yes – I had entered Naxxramas and made it out the other side the victor, many cards richer and with new skills and experiences.
I entered Curse of Naxx excited but doubting whether I’d be able to actually beat it. I am a skilled Hunter player, but not so much the other classes. But the expansion made me sit down, play with the mechanics of cards both old and new, learn new tricks, made me stop to consider the best ways to exploit a weakness in my computer opponent or how to best to use their abilities to my own advantage. I’ve also been frustrated to great heights and shouted “That was bullshit!” once or twice during livestreams when usually I just stew. The class challenges have let me learn a little of how to play other classes, even if only in certain circumstances and I’ve learned that if you know a deck well enough and have a great amount of drive and determination, eventually you can win. I entered a decent, if slightly doubting card player and left knowing that Hearthstone is a game that I can play well, that has earned its place high up on my mental top games list.
Oh no! You came to work 0.03 seconds late. Now all the good, safe jobs are taken. Now you, a lowly cleaning robot, is tasked to collect precious materials from various worlds in a sector that is about to go Kaboom! And if that isn’t enough, these planets are crawling with dangerous rogue robots that are out to destroy everything in their path. But not all is bad, you happen to convince some fleshy meatbags to do a lot of the hard labor for you. Just be careful not to let any harm come to them. The Boss’ wife thinks they are cute.
Freaking Meatbags is a real-time strategy game that combines base building, tower defense, work management, and some shooter-like action. Most levels in the game start out with you landing on a planet with a select few meatbags you chose to take with you from previous worlds. Given limited space on your ship you are only allowed to take a small number, the rest you just leave on a planet when you are done with it. Now it is your job to manage where the meatbags go and what they do. Most of the time you will have them just collecting materials, sometimes you have them explore secrets to find useful items, and other times you may just have them put into a machine which mixes their DNA to form another meatbag with their combined stats.
As they continue to work and work they gain experiences and increase stats which make them work harder and faster. Of course you can also alter them a bit to make them better if you think they are too lazy. One of the first things you can do is implant a brain slug to make them less likely to slack off and more likely to work harder. Another thing you can do is as you travel from planet to planet you sometimes come across other aliens. Some of them have laser eyes, some of them explode on contact, and some even have rocket launchers. Somehow you convince these aliens to help you and if you combine their DNA with your meatbags, you can create more useful meatbags that can work harder as well as protect the base and themselves. But remember you can only take a few of the meatbags with you to the next planet so choose wisely.
Now, while your meatbags get to work, you have to build up your base and your defenses. As the game progresses and you collect money you will be able to unlock some useful structures that you can build as you collect the resources for them. Some of these items are not available in the game as of yet but will be put in soon. These items include items that help your base run better like: jump pads to help the meatbags move faster, a mining drill, and barracks to hold more meatbags. There are also items which can be used to defend your base from the rogue robots like: turrets, rocket launchers, and metal barricades which all can be upgraded as you progress. You will need to be careful with how you use your resources, for when night comes, the waves of enemies come as well. You don’t want to be caught without some sort of defense or your base, you, or even your meatbags can be in trouble.
This is where the real time strategy comes into play. Sometimes there can be multiple places the rogue robots can come from. Once they show you where, you need to block off the area and place weapons to try to keep them back and destroy them before they reach your base. On some planets it is straight forward, but others give you limited space to build. Most structures cannot be built on water or certain terrains. Luckily as you progress you would hopefully create some meatbags that can help defend your base.
In between some of these normal levels of base defense and material collecting are levels where you are beamed down to a planet where there is no place to build a base. In these cases you are tasked with finding stray materials on your own as well as destroy all the rogue robots that seem to plague these planets. Luckily you are able to find some turret guns which follow you around that you can use to defend yourself. These guns are powerful but can’t fully protect you for if a robot comes to close to you it explodes and damages you a lot.
So far this game has been quite fun. It is a nice twist on the tower defense genre that also throws in some action in there as well. This game is still in Early Access Beta, so some features are not yet implemented. They seem to be thinking of adding another mode or two as well as new items and DNA mixes. All in all I can’t wait to see where this game goes in the near future and can’t wait to play more of it.
A few days ago creator of twin-stick shooter Zenzizenzic announced that his game was now to be published by Adult Swim Games, a name that comes with quite the positive reputation.
Zenzizenzic is the latest game from Dutch developer Ruud Koorevaar, following on from Super House of Dead Ninjas and Jazzpunk. The game recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise the rest of the funds needed to finish the game’s development and get it onto Steam. There will also be a new gamemode called ‘Macro’ added to the finished game now, despite that stretch goal not having originally been reached.
We’ve been watching this game and it does look like it’s bound to be a good one. Are you looking forward to being able to play it?
Minecraft was announced to be coming to the Playstation 4 months ago, finally bringing a little bit of the sandbox action to fans of Sony. Unfortunately it seems like they might need to wait a little bit longer: Sony have failed it for certification.
4J Studios, who are responsible for the console ports of the game passed on the game to Sony for review on August 12th and have since tweeted out that Sony have found problems in the game that need fixing before it gets cleared for release on either the Playstation 4. They are also fixing bugs in the Xbox One and Vita versions currently.
Sony found some issues we have to fix in their final test of #MinecraftPS4 🙁 We’re fixing, but we need to go through the process again.
This makes it seem likely that Minecraft PS4 Version will likely miss its original August release window. As of writing we don’t know when the new release date will be.
It’s time for us to pre-release the next major Minecraft update, the Bountiful Update! This will bring Minecraft to version 1.8, and should be officially be published in the launcher on Tuesday, September 2. This is the update that to date has taken the longest time to create (over 300 days), and is the result of many, many changes.
These changes consist of both new features, and large game structure changes such as replacing the hard-coded “block renderer” with a system that is able to read block shapes from data files, or performance enhancements such as multi-threading the client-side chunk rendering. We hope you will enjoy it!
Here’s a list of the major changes in the game:
-Added Granite, Andesite, and Diorite stone blocks, with smooth versions
-Added Slime Block
-Added Iron Trapdoor
-Added Prismarine and Sea Lantern blocks
-Added the Ocean Monument
-Added Red Sandstone
-Added Banners
-Added Armor Stands
-Added Coarse Dirt (dirt where grass won’t grow)
-Added Guardian mobs, with item drops
-Added Endermite mob
-Added Rabbits, with item drops
-Added Mutton and Cooked Mutton
-Villagers will harvest crops and plant new ones
-Mossy Cobblestone and Mossy Stone Bricks are now craftable
-Chiseled Stone Bricks are now craftable
-Doors and fences now come in all wood type variants
-Sponge block has regained its water-absorbing ability and becomes wet
-Added a spectator game mode (game mode 3)
-Added one new achievement
-Added “Customized” world type
-Added hidden “Debug Mode” world type
-Worlds can now have a world barrier
-Added @e target selector for Command Blocks
-Added /blockdata command
-Added /clone command
-Added /execute command
-Added /fill command
-Added /particle command
-Added /testforblocks command
-Added /title command
-Added /trigger command
-Added /worldborder command
-Added /stats command
-Containers can be locked in custom maps by using the “Lock” data tag
-Added logAdminCommands, showDeathMessages, reducedDebugInfo, sendCommandFeedback, and randomTickSpeed game rules
-Added three new statistics
-Player skins can now have double layers across the whole model, and left/right arms/legs can be edited independently
-Added a new player model with smaller arms, and a new player skin called Alex?
-Added options for configuring what pieces of the skin that are visible
-Blocks can now have custom visual variations in the resource packs
-Minecraft Realms now has an activity chart, so you can see who has been online
-Minecraft Realms now lets you upload your maps
-Difficulty setting is saved per world, and can be locked if wanted
-Enchanting has been redone, now costs lapis lazuli in addition to enchantment levels
-Villager trading has been rebalanced
-Anvil repairing has been rebalanced
-Considerable faster client-side performance
-Max render distance has been increased to 32 chunks (512 blocks)
-Adventure mode now prevents you from destroying blocks, unless your items have the CanDestroy data tag
-Resource packs can now also define the shape of blocks and items, and not just their textures
-Scoreboards have been given a lot of new features
-Tweaked the F3 debug screen
-Block ID numbers (such as 1 for stone), are being replaced by ID names (such as minecraft:stone)
-Server list has been improved
-A few minor changes to village and temple generation
-Mob heads for players now show both skin layers
-Buttons can now be placed on the ceiling
-Lots and lots of other changes
-LOTS AND LOTS of other changes
-Removed Herobrine
The pre-release is available if you have activated development versions in the launcher.
Sincerely, the Minecraft and Minecraft Realms teams
So yeah, there’s the prerelease, but we have two weeks until the full release of it apparently
