2020-03-18 14:21:15 (edited by pitermach 2020-03-18 14:22:59)

Have you suddenly found yourself with more free time then usual? Well, not to worry! You can do a number of interesting, gaming related things! Find a few suggestions below, but first...

Stay at home! Seriously!

There are some serious things going on in the world right now, with the coronavirus having visited practically every corner of the world. The best thing we can do to prevent it from spreading faster is not going out unless you have to. This especially goes for those who may be more susceptible to falling ill, like our parents/grandparents, and anyone whose immune system is weakened for any reason. Also, wash your hands often and slowly, especially if you just returned from somewhere and came in contact with something that has been touched by a lot of other people. Listen to any instructions given to you by your local authorities, and most important of all... Stay safe! Now, on to some things you can do to pass the time!

Remember Undead Assault? The game in which you and your friends can take on massive zombie hoards? The game went down some time ago. But, thanks to a fellow Russian community chipping in, it's back and it's bigger than ever, and it's only going to get bigger!
Its return was announced a few days ago. The game was due to have an international release this Friday, but the developer has decided to put it out early!

If you don't know what this is all about, have a look at its database entry linked to above, where you can find more information and download links. Happy shooting!

If fast-paced shooting is too much for you, then perhaps you'd like to go on a quest? Well, the developers of Twilio Quest have began to add additional accessibility to their game, which you can read about in the forum thread linked above. What is Twilio Quest? Think traditional JRPG, but instead of battles you get to learn how to code. So who knows, you might learn something while playing this one!

If the idea of coding makes your mind shrink away, but you'd still like to go on a quest, then how about a Blind Quest instead? From the developers that brought us the inquisitor series among others, take control of Nathan the mercenary, whose just trying to make a living by taking extremely dangerous jobs involving a lot of fighting, exploration and side questing. The game is fully voice acted, has some graphics for those who can enjoy them, is available on Windows, Mac and iOS and costs only 5.90 euros.

While we're on the topic of quests, Planet Life, probably one of the more unique combination idle clicker+RPG games has recently received its third chapter, giving us even more to do. If you beat the first 2 and were disappointed and how it ended, now may be a good time to beat up some more jerks and look at the game again. If you have never played Planet Life, Dark has written an excellent description linked above, though if you want to be even more amazed I would suggest just grabbing it from either the iOS app store or Google Play, or playing on the web version (links in the database entry) and experiencing it for yourself. I don't think you'll be disappointed!

And that's not all! We also had a new Pong game come out, featuring some rich, binaural audio from the developers of the epic upcoming Pitch Black, as well as a number of new discoveries of awesome idle games. You can read about all of these and more in the new releases room of our forum as well as looking through the site update news entries, which you can see below this post. With more regular updates, you can expect more awesome content to play through in the near future!

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

2020-03-18 15:11:43

Well written and much needed news article.  I particularly agreed with and truly did like the intro.

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2020-03-18 16:40:20

Very well written, great job. So many surprise releases this year. Manamon 2 which noone expected, and now undead assault, both of which are great surprises.

2020-03-18 18:32:29

Thanks for the news article Pitermach.

2020-03-19 04:46:39

Why can I not get to the db entry for UA?

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2020-03-19 11:32:57

I'm not sure. I can access it both on my computer and phone. Maybe something didn't refresh correctly somewhere - the site is running through cloudflare which is supposed to cache some content.

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

2020-03-19 17:13:22

Honestly blindquest is more like fully narated to be exact.

2020-03-19 20:19:38

With post 1 you've given me enough content to fully and completely rot my board teenage braind, distracting me from my coding quest. I hope you're happy, pitermach, I hope you are.


Now, Wasn't m2 released last year?

You ain't done nothin' if you ain't been cancelled
_____
I'm working on a playthrough series of the space 4X game Aurora4x. Find it here

2020-03-20 08:01:16 (edited by Dark 2020-03-20 09:07:55)

@Pitermach, thanks for putting up the news and doing a nice job on the new UNDEAD assault page for the db, thumbs up.

I only have one small question.

On the db entry you describe the game as "top down first person." perspective, which I find a wee bit confusing.

I always assumed myself that first person perspective means that the directions are relative to the characters' point of view, EG if you're facing north and want to walk to the east, you need to turn the character ninety degrees to the right, using either mouse or arrows, then walk forward, as in swamp, HEARtREAD, blind legend and a hole bunch of other games going right back to shades of doom.

Whereas top down I always assumed means the characters' movement is absolute, with no direction facing, so if you want to move to the east, you just hit the right arrow, as in games like treasure hunt, Shadow rine, Manamonn, great toy robbery, most of the none side scrolling levels of crazy party etc.

You describe the controls as letting your character walk in the four compass directions and firing the way you're facing. In which case, Undead assault technically isn't a first person shooter, it's a top down shooter, though whether the game genre category should be changed to something else, or whether you just explain in the entry that though the perspective is top down the game plays like a first person shooter I don't know.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2020-03-20 12:40:46 (edited by pitermach 2020-03-20 12:41:18)

@Dark right. The game controls pretty much exactly like treasure hunt or operation black square. You hear all sounds from the perspective of your character, but don't have free turning. The first time you press a direction your character faces it which lets you shoot in that direction and if you continue holding it down you start walking.

Genre wise, I see that you classified black square for example as an action game, which makes sense considering you not only shoot things but have objectives to complete. With Undead Assault, I felt that even though your turning is locked to the 4 cardinal directions, the game has more in common with an FPS objective wise, because all you're mostly doing is shooting everything that moves, to get the highest spot on the global ranking.

If anyone thinks the game genre should be changed, I'm open to your thoughts smile

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

2020-03-20 20:27:17 (edited by Dark 2020-03-20 20:30:03)

I'll admit as far as the DB is concerned, the terms "action game" and "adventure game" tend to be sort of catch all categories for stuff that doesn't fit easily elsewhere, EG black square, Hunter, sequence storm, treasure hunt etc, so if we stuck undead asault in there, it would be less informative over all.

However, it's sort of basic to the point of first person shooters that they are, well first person, after all the category also covers offline games like terraformers and technoshock too.

As far as I can see there are three alternatives.

Either 1: put an explanation on the undead assault description that undead assault has the online co op aspects of an fps but not the first person bit.

2: change the genre to action games.

3: Create a new top down shooters category and include those games which involve top down perspective and some form of shooting like treasure hunt, (though obviously not those which are arcade games or rpgs).
4:Create a general top down perspective and include all top down titles that aren't either rpgs or arcade games, though then we'd have the problem of games as different as inquisitor's heartbeat and undead assault falling into the same genre category.

Btw the genres page can be Found here, which hopefully explains what all of the genres are about currently.
Generally I don't like creating new genre categories unless there are at least four games of the same genre which belong together, hence why I don't suggest just making a "topdown online shooters" category, since otherwise you'd end up with lots of genres with just one entry which wouldn't really help anyone find games easily.

Personally, I'd be in favour of the topdown shooters option, since odds are someone who played undead assault probably would enjoy games like treasure hunt, whilst they're less likely to be interested in something like inquisitor's heartbeat, , but I'd like to hear other opinions on this.

Ideally of course, it would be nice to have a "mode" or "perspective" category aside from the game genres one, but we must make use of what we have.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2020-03-20 22:10:11

Dark, i'd compare it to something like Manamon. Because, even though you don't actually have to turn with a compass, you still have to move your char in the direction where you want to shoot.

You ain't done nothin' if you ain't been cancelled
_____
I'm working on a playthrough series of the space 4X game Aurora4x. Find it here

2020-03-30 11:48:06

Hi all. i really want to play undead assault. However there's no documentation available for how the game exactly works. If anyone has some older documentation which could give a general idea it would be greatly appreciated. kind regards

2020-03-30 13:52:51

Hi Nightrider,

Download Undead Assault again. It got an update 2 days ago with a few small enhancements as well as a new, completely rewritten documentation.

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

2020-03-30 17:03:03

Thanks a lot for the info. Appreciate it. kind regards