OK, starting today I have added two new authors to the blog! Please welcome Nick Lee and Travis Bowling. Let me introduce the two of them.
Nick Lee is a highly skilled game artist, currently located in London, working on titles such as Lego Knight’s Kingdom, Star Wars: Jedi Knights, Harry Potter, Sims Bustin Out, Jurassic Park, 1945, Rainbow Islands, Sims2, JLH: The Flash, Fast&Furious, Metal Slug, Age of Empires 3, Transformers:G1 Awakening, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and Rockmania.
Travis Bowling, from Ohio, is a game enthusiast, mission and map designer and long-term player of Age of Conquest. He is the current administrator for Age of Conquest as well as the official game forums. He has created some of the maps for Age of Conquest as well as all the missions for Tropical Stormfront.
The three of us are working on the next installment of Tropical Stormfront, i.e. Desert Stormfront. We will definitely talk about Desert Stormfront, of course Age of Conquest, plus anything else related to games.
In case you are curious on what my dad is up to. No, he is not a game developer. He is creating computer hardware. He is currently working on a next generation Atari computer. As Atari the company is pretty much “dead”, Medusa Computer System is the one company left still producing Atari hardware.
The project is called the Atari Coldfire Project (ACP). Atari experts from hardware and software are putting together the next Atari computer called FireBee running on the ColdFire processor. The hardware is finished. The operating system and software is currently still being worked on. Visit the links below for imagery & video:
Age of Conquest ONLINE v3 now features game signatures! The signature shows the avatar, clan, clan logo, the overall rating and season ratings (RS). The signature URL is given as follows:
Replace <username> with your Age of Conquest username. For integration into a forum, you could use the following BB Code. The code links to the homepage of Age of Conquest:
If Japanese is your first language, Android Walker has a review of Age of Conquest LITE for Android on their site. Review and video are in Japanese for obvious reasons. There is both a game description plus a YouTube video:
I wouldn’t mind getting my hand on that little precious. The price tag of the Concord C1 Quantum Gravity watch is still at $320′000, so I’m going to wait for the moment. I just need a few more customers for Age of Conquest…
I am lately addicted to Hydorah. Hydorah is a free side-scrolling shooter. The game features great graphics and music and is quite a challenge to play.
If you fought the Bydo and shooted the Bacterians in the core, you are ready for the war against the evil god Hydorah. Choose the path to follow and fight planet by planet against hordes of meroptians.
Every couple month someone emails me to port Oregon Trail to Android. It’s a different person every time. It’s just a short message such as:
“I challenge you to port Oregon Trail!”
“Oregon Trail!!!!”
“Hey, you should port Oregon Trail to Android!”
It’s puzzling? Why me, I don’t own the rights to Oregon Trail? I wouldn’t mind doing it, but I am pretty sure Gameloft has their own developers to pull it off. Also, there are other games out there that I could port; how about those?
Out of curiosity, I went to check; the founder of Microsoft has left the company rudderless and is doing full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation doesn’t offer anything new from other non-profit organizations with the exception of $30 billion in funding.
The world needs the leader of the biggest enterprise back in his office. Return to Microsoft and unite the industry…
We are proud to announce the integration of Noble Avatar into eCribbage (this actually happened a while ago). eCribbage is the largest, most comprehensive collection of free online cribbage games on the web. See below for a depiction of the winners podium after a game has ended.
If you like cribbage, definitely give the game a try. For the guys out there: the game also seems to be quite popular amongst the ladies!
Age of Conquest is doing pretty well in the Android Market. The Lite version has been downloaded over 200′000 times. That is actual very close to Noble Fart downloads with a little over 350′000. Conversion rate from Lite downloads to sales is a little under 10%.
I spent some time playing Crusader Kings Deus Vult by Paradox Entertainment for the sake of fun as well as spying on the competition. I was close to putting the game away after spending half an hour trying to “play” it. There is no tutorial or anything to help explain things. The tooltips were helpful, but didn’t explain how all the variables influenced all the other things in the game. I finally looked at some YouTube video footage that detailed some of the basic game play.
The Good:
Captivating! A must for strategy game enthusiasts.
The game allows managing everything from members of your court, diplomacy, military, economy, provinces to the empire as a whole.
Sophisticated diplomacy management make it both challenging and interesting to play.
Endless hours of entertainment, once you get the hang of it. It’s a bargain for $25.
The Bad:
The graphics look good enough, but the user interface is simply a pain to navigate. Clicking on provinces, military units and factions is difficult.
There should only be one zoom level for the map. You are either too close or too far away from the map. The overview map should have the various provinces colored.
Micromanagent: there should be an option set some of the features to auto. There is no fun in managing every single member of your court. Also, there isn’t much fun in managing your ruler’s character traits. There are too many lengthy messages boxes that force you to make a choice: “choose this button if you want to do A. Please note there is a 25% chance that your ruler receives the trait Illness and a 10% chance your Piety changes by -1.0 or a 50% that your mother leaves you and your father looses -20 prestige or…” (and that’s just the first button)
Accidentally clicking a message box. Every so often just the instant before you select a province, a message pops up and you select one of the buttons by accident. Especially annoying if you just declared war against a big empire.
Unclear relations between the various variables. It is difficult to manage your empire if you don’t know what all the various options do. Although the rollover texts provide some guidance many things are left unexplained.
Bugs and crashes…
The game is definitely worth playing. A streamlined version of it could make it an exceptional game. You can download the Crusader Kings through GamesGate. Get the Deus Vult edition for $25.
So, I finally received my Nexus One in the mail. Google is giving away a free phone to every finalist (N. American Conquest) in the Android Developer Challenge. In other news, Google is also giving away a free phone for developers that have an application with rating 3.5 or higher in the Android Market. So, I am expecting to receive another phone in the mail anytime soon. It’s either going to be the Nexus One or the Droid by Motorola.
Anyhow, the Nexus One works great! The speed is amazing. It replaces the free HTC Tattoo that I received a while ago to port Age of Conquest to the smaller screen size. The Tattoo was quite a disappointment. It “runs” very slow. The touch screen isn’t working very well; to get things moving, you had to press down really hard.
If I indeed get another free Nexus One, what should I do with the 2nd phone?
