New Game On the Block #3: Ultimate Chicken Horse

Ultimate Chicken Horse is a multiplayer platforming game that is unique in several aspects.  The main unique thing about this game is the level creation aspect of it. 

• How to Play the Game

 

Before anyone can place any items on the level, each player gets a chance to choose an the item that they would like to place on the level. There are a couple of game modes that switch up how this is done but here are the two main ways.  One way is that the game gives a random assortment of items that are limited to a certain number and each player is allowed to choose which item that they would like to place in the environment.  There's a catch though, you have to choose your item in real time with the other players and if a player chooses an item before you can then you cannot use the same item.  Another way the game does this is by allowing the player to choose any item that is within the game for the players to use but they are only allowed to use one item per turn.

Now that each player has chosen their item, they are allowed to place their item anywhere they'd like on the level.  Once each player has placed their item, the game starts the first round.  The goal of the game is to reach the end of the level by touching a red flag. However there are several interesting aspects to this.  If you end up reaching the flag, you are given points based on the seeming difficulty of the level.  For instance if you were the only one to make it during that round you get extra "solo" points.  If you made it with other people and you were first, you don't get extra "solo" points but you do get extra "first place" points.  The game ends when a player has reached the allotted amount of points that they need in order to win the game. 

One more interesting aspect of this is that if no one makes it to the red flag, then no one gets any points.  However if everyone makes it to the red flag then no one also gets any points as the level was too easy.  This means that you have to make the level difficult enough to complete but hard enough to kill of your opponents.

Pros and Cons for the Game

The Pros

The good thing about this game is that it is tons of fun to play with friends and family.  I have never had so much competitive fun playing a game.  Not only that but it's not an aggressive competition where you are directly competing with every other player, it's an indirect competition almost like track and field or bowling would be like.  You're playing against yourself, constantly trying to make the level easy enough for yourself to beat yet challenging for your competition to beat.  It's a ton of fun and for that aspect I would highly recommend that you play it because the potential for this game to become great later on during it's lifetime is very likely.

The Cons

Playing online with friends can sometimes be a little frustrating as the game seems to drop connection a lot of the time without seemingly any reason at all.  Sometimes there are glitches with items and synchronization between players games when it comes to projectiles as you may see someone get hit with an arrow on your screen but on the other player's screen they dodged the arrow.  There are other minimal errors within the game that need to be worked on but granted the game is in early access and mistakes should be expected within an early access game. 

My Recommendation

I highly recommend that you give this game a go with your friends an family, it's tons of fun to play just make sure to try and play the game locally as you may lose connection when using an internet connection. Anyways let me know what you guys think of Ultimate Chicken Horse and I'll talk to you guys next time!

New Game on the Block #2: Slither.io

Slither.io is a new browser game similar to that of Agar.io.  It is a game where you try to become the largest snake on the server and continue to grow as large as possible.  However, this can become difficult because other individuals will be trying to kill you in order to steal you life force and grow larger themselves.  It's an extremely enticing and addictive game for a free browser game and I highly recommend that you try it.  That being said, let's go over the specifics of Slither.io!

Your lowly beginnings

 

When you get to the start screen of Slither.io you will see that you may pick a nickname and then start the game.  There are also several share buttons on the bottom right corner for twitter and facebook as well as a youtube subscribe button on the top left of the page.  Once you type in your nickname hitting the play button will throw you into a game server and you can begin playing.  Once you begin you will see your snake slithering off in some random direction and lots of little orbs of light that are around your character.  You control your snake with the mouse and the best way to begin is to start collecting the small little orbs that you see around yourself.  You can "dart" by clicking the left mouse button but be careful as you will lose size based on how long you hold the button for.  You will see the size that you are in the bottom left corner, the minimap in the bottom right corner and a leaderboard in the top left corner of the screen.  A key thing to remember when you begin and you are around the size of 100 - 1000 it's always easier to die and rebuild to these points so you can play A TON more aggressively than you would if you were at more of a size like 20,000.

Low Score Strategies

The main strategies that are used when you first begin is to either kill , scavenge or a combination of the two.

The Killing Strategy

 

The killing strategy involves finding anyone and killing them for their life force.  This involves darting in front of their head and making them run into your side.  If it works you'll be able to grow tremendously faster than you normally would if you just picked up the naturally spawning orbs in the game.  However their is a strong likelihood that the person you are trying to kill will kill you instead or you'll just miss entirely and move on with your slithering life.

The Scavenging Strategy

 The Scavenging strategy involves going around the map and collecting the sustenance of other people's kills.  This is a very good strategy if you want to survive for the long term.  The best way to implement this strategy is to head to the middle of the map where there is the largest amount of people and wait for someone to die.  Once that happens steal the sustenance from other players before they can get there and make sure that you don't get killed in the feeding frenzy as many other people will be trying to do the same thing.  In fact, this is a good way to get even more glowing orbs.

The Scavenge-Kill Strategy

This strategy combines the scavenging tactic with the killing tactic in order to gain leaps and bounds into the game.  This strategy entails waiting for someone to die and stealing the orbs from other people.  However if there is a large amount of orbs in the vicinity from the death of a large snake, you can use this to your advantage.  Most likely what will happen is a feeding frenzy will occur and this is where you will strike.  Be very cautious when taking the orbs and DO NOT DART to get as much as possible, this is very key in baiting people in and keeping yourself from getting killed too.  If you miss some orbs just move on and forget about it you don't want to get greedy and get yourself killed.  When you see someone darting in being greedy and trying to steal the orbs that you are getting wait until they get close to you and then dart right in front of their head and kill them.  Once you have done that repeat the process until someone else does the same thing.  The great thing about this strategy is that it is a cyclical strategy.  You take orbs, wait for someone to be greedy, kill them, take the orbs, wait for another person, kill them and on and on until you are too large to conduct this strategy any longer.  You can do this all the way up until you start hitting the 10,000 mark and then different strategies start coming into play.

The Mid Score and Large Score Strategies

  These strategies will mainly be for when you reach a score that is between 5,000 and above.

The Wrapping Strategy

This strategy involves using your length to your advantage.  In order to keep growing adequately enough, you have to keep gaining orbs that are gotten from killing other players in the game.  This strategy involves finding someone that is smaller than you and wrapping them up to make it inescapable for them.  You do this by circling them until you overlap yourself and once you do it will essentially be a guaranteed kill for yourself.  However there are several things that every player should keep in mind and that is that it is possible to escape from this trap.  One way to escape is if the player who has done the wrapping is not following their tail well enough and is cutting the circle to kill you faster, this is an opening for the trapped player to kill the trapper instead.  A different defensive strategy that the trapped person should conduct is to get as close to the trapper as much as possible and circle with them.  This way the person will have a hard time closing the circle more quickly and if they make a mistake (or get hit by some lag) then they will kill themselves.  Another thing to keep in mind too is that when you wrap a player you do not have to cut the circle more in order to kill the player faster.  The snake naturally closes the circle so you just have to keep yourself from being killed in order to attain a guaranteed kill.  The last thing that I want to say about this strategy is that it's great for the trapper when they trap someone but watch out for other people that will be using the same strategy and don't be afraid to let go of your target if you think you're being wrapped too.  I have seen several times how someone will have wrapped an individual and not be paying enough attention to realize that by doing so, they got themselves wrapped to by an even larger player than themselves.

Conclusion

These are many of the main strategies that can be found when you begin playing slither.io and there are tons more that I was not able to talk about in this post.  If you found this helpful please let me know and if you want more strategies like this don't be shy, let me know about this too!

New Game on The Block #1: Crossout

      Many PC gamers will know that when it comes to free to play games there's not many that can surpass World of Tanks.  WoT is known for it's large player base and tank battles where players play as the tanks and fight against other opponents within an arena.  What's interesting about world of tanks is that it is entirely free to play, this means that anyone and everyone can start playing the game with no entrance fee.  However, this does not mean that the whole game is free, there are some micro-transactions within the game that but that is all the income that they make on WoT.  Crossout is going to be the same thing, except that there are a multitude of differences between WoT and Crossout.  For starters, Crossout gives the player the ability to customize their vehicle anyway that they want to make it.  Once they have smashed some parts together into an assemblage that looks like a vehicle, they then take it out into the battlefield and test it against other opponents.  World of Tanks on the other hand does not allow for this customization and instead prebuilds the tanks for the player, this works for WoT though because it is mainly a tank battle simulation game.  Even though there are many other differences between the two games than just that, there really isn't much else that differentiates the two games from one another.  Granted this mechanic adds such a large difference between the two games that it makes a clear stance on the difference between the two, but other than that they are very similar.

The funnest thing about Crossout so far is the range of vehicles that you can build.  You can build a melee class that is good at conducting ambush attacks as well as ramming people.  There are missile vehicles which act as the snipers within the game and do a ton of damage but have a limited number of shots.  Then there's the mid-range vehicle type where the vehicle has machine guns to give a constant amount of damage to an enemy.  The list can go longer but these are the main kind of builds that people make within the game.  Although this is a creation game, there are several limiting factors on what and how you can build something.

List of Build Limitations:

1.  Power Score
2. Item Limit
3. Weight Limit

These three things are the main limitations on what and individual can build within Crossout.

Power Score Limitation:
   This limitation is used to "rank" how powerful certain items or weapons are.  This score determines the kind of people that you are matched with.  The higher your power score, the more difficult your opponents become.

Item Limit:
    You are only allowed however many items on your vehicle at one time.  For example, if you have a limitation of 40 items you can only attach a maximum of 40 items to your vehicle in order to make it bigger, better, faster, stronger.

Weight Limit:
    The weight limit is used to limit the amount mass of your vehicle.  There are some items within the game that are extremely heavy and provide a ton of armor, this limit makes the player carefully decide which items they are going to use depending on the weight of the item.

The Gameplay:
    Most of the gameplay revolves around competitive competition between you and other players but there is also a PvE element as well.  Within Crossout these PvE events are mostly known as raids and can involve races, defense and attack goals where the player has to defeat AI in some kind of system.  The player's reward for completing these tasks mainly come in the form of materials that they can use to gain more parts within the game.  There are certain limitations to a player's progression within Crossout too which are materials.  These materials are used to build parts in order to make your vehicle bigger, better, faster, and stronger.  You can also sell these materials or your parts onto the market and make a profit if you feel it is more beneficial for you as a player.

Conclusion:
     I would like to leave you guys on the note that Crossout is an extremely fun game and has a tremendous amount of replayability within it and is only in closed BETA at this point in time of writing the article.  I can only assume that this game is going to become extremely popular in the near future on the date of it's full release and can't wait for it to happen. I highly recommend that you go and check it out, you can either pay $20 to get an access key or signup on the waitlist, either way I believe it's worth experiencing at least once.  Here's a link to the website and good luck in Crossout guys!

How to Troll in Dark Souls 3

Introduction to the World of Trolling:

       As everyone probably already knows, if you're familiar with the Dark Souls series it's one of the hardest mainstream games out on the market.  Although this is a difficult game there are plenty of people that love making the game even harder for other people.  Within the video game realm this technique is called trolling and for some reason this fits perfectly with the dark souls motto of "you think this is ridiculous? Wait til' you see what comes next".  Trolling is the technique of messing with other individuals by manipulating the rules in order to either trick the individual or mess with them in some sort of way.   Although this may seem cruel to plenty of other people around the web and the world, some of the ideas that these people come up with are just ingenious which is why I want to show people how awesome these trolling techniques are.

Several Ways of Trolling in Dark Souls 3:

    Although this may seem like a simple concept to understand, there are several ways to troll individuals within Dark Souls 3.  They mainly revolve around the different ways of interacting with other people's worlds but most of the time there is a little ruse involved with the events.

    There are several ways of trolling invaders, but the main way to troll a person that invades your world would be to trick that player some way into not being able to find you, using a strange weapon type or by getting a group of your friends together to commit some atrocious group trolls.

    Some of the best trolling I have seen so far has been by Iron Pineapple and Achievement Hunter both found on Youtube.  I'll show both of the scenarios below here.

• The Iron Pineapple Trolls: #1 Longfinger Kirk Fan Club

    There are a few ways that Iron Pineapple was able to troll invaders that came into his world and one of the funniest trolls that he has done he dubbed the Kirk Fan Club.  This is where you and several of your buddies all retrieve the NPC's Kirk Armor which damages people when you roll into them.  Once you and your friends all have the armor, you can accomplish some pretty amazing things with it just by swarming the enemy with a confusing flurry of rolls towards them.  It flusters the enemy and confuses them long enough that you should be able to get off the kill fairly easily.   Here is a link to the video below here if you would like to see it in action for yourself.

If you and your friends would like to try doing this yourselves, here is another video tutorial that shows you where to get Longfinger Kirks armor.

• The Iron Pineapple Trolls: #2 The Shrek Roleplay

    This isn't necessarily a troll all it's own, it's mainly just a fun little thing that you and your friends can do if you all have done everything in the game by now.  The trick is that you need to get at least two of your friends and have each of you develop a character that that has either the names donkey, shrek, or puss n' boots.  Once you have had all of these characters reach the swamp in dark souls 3, you will be able to troll invaders by having you and your friends defend your swamp from the invaders that try to eradicate you and your fairy tale friends from your swamp.  Here is a link to the main video if you'd like to see it in action, it's pretty hilarious on it's own.

• The Achievement Hunter Troll:  Camouflage Troll

    This troll involves retrieving the armor of AI enemies within the game and camouflaging yourself as one of the enemies within the game.  This way when a person invades your game you can hide from your invaders in plain sight.  This may be a simple way to mess with people and it's more of a time waster than anything but still this is still the nature of trolling, messing with people in any way possible.  Here is the video if you'd like to see it in action, I recommend that you do because it's pretty hilarious if I do say so myself.

    This is all that I have for now, let me know of anymore awesome trolls that you can do within dark souls and I will add it to the list here so that all of us can become the ultimate trolls within dark souls 3. Praise the sun everyone and peace out!