The Download Munkey : Download This, Download That :)

Read about Meritous over at the excellent PlayThisThing blog quite a while back. Unfortunately, I’m not sure whether the guys at PlayThisThing actually recommend it since some of the stuff written there seems pretty ambiguous at times. Maybe my impressions below will help you decide

In Meritous, you are psionic user MERIT adventuring into the Orctus Dome to set things right. You’s armed with only an area attack which conveniently fries the brains of any creature within a certain radius, the lethality and range of the attack being directly proportional to the length of time spent charging your PSI circuit by holding down the Space. Your psionic attack is also a defensive skill as it can also clear most enemy projectiles within the same radius when discharged (after releasing the Space).

Initially you will encounter weak and underpowered beetle-like things but as you progress, more formidable foes start to appear like laser-firing spiders which require quite a significant PSI charge to kill as well as spiky creatures which quickly release a hail of projectiles not alike bullet hell shoot-em ups .

While attacking single enemies is simply a charge-and-release affair, you can choose to tackle groups of monsters in multiple ways such as aggressively zigzagging closer towards the enemies and release a series of short-ranged psionic blasts or evade enemy projectiles or even backing out into a previously cleared room while charging up to the maximum amount required to kill every single moving creature with a single shot

To aid you in your quest, MERIT has three upgradable skills, Reflect Shield which conjures a shield to absorb a certain number of hits before your vitality is affected, Circuit Charge which increases the damage of your attacks and Circuit Refill which reduces the cooldown period after each attack during which you’re dependent on only your shield and reflexes to defend against counterattacks from the remaining enemies. All skills are upgradable with crystals that you collect from fallen foes.

Your playing style therefore depends on your skill levels, the type and number of monsters you’re facing and even the size of the current room since smaller rooms allow for less room to maneuver. The visual cues in this game are fantastic and allow you to quickly access the tactical situation at hand and react accordingly.

• When you charge your PSI bar, monsters are in range are marked with a circle around them and those which will be wounded/killed by that particular amount of charge are marked with an additional cross.
• Rooms are colour coded by their threat level - empty rooms in serene dark or light blue and heavily defended rooms in progresively warmer colours like magenta or in the cases of treasure rooms, ruby red.

The play experience is wonderfully simple to pick up thanks to cues and features like the essential map and an ingenious Crystal Magnet Device which teleports all uncollected crystals directly into the current room. Frees up the time trying to pick up every crystal to explore more rooms

If you’re stuck, there’s always the Online Help which can be accessed by pressing H in-game. Right now, I haven’t even exactly figured out the exact objectives in Meritous since I’m having lots of fun just by exploring the 3000 rooms (currently explored 822 - 27.4%) and killing monsters (current tally - 4143 out of 10723 - 38.6%)

Download and play Meritous.

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Titans of Steel : Warring Suns, the commercial sequel to the previously freeware Titans of Steel by the same developer Vicious Bytes has been released as freeware by its publisher Matrix Games since February 2008.

Being a fan of the original game, I must say Titans of Steel : Warring Suns’ definitely a much improved game although the notoriously unintuitive management interface has been carried over from its precedessor - newcomers will surely be confused by the usage of the next and back arrows to navigate through the management portion of the game

Beneath that interface lies a relatively deep and complex turn-based mecha (“Titans”) wargame where you can nurture a team of rookie pilots (“Jocks”) as they are sent into missions or campaigns against AI opponents.

Skill points can be distributed between the piloting, combat and miscellaneous skills (333 points each) and attributes can be improved by using the same number of skill points from all three categories per point. While improving attributes help increase base skill levels and maximum skill levels, a jock with high attributes but low skill levels is not likely to be of any assistance to his comrades on the battlefield.

Your jocks can only improve with combat experience by participating in any of the included campaigns and missions via Solitary Game > Start New Game > Load Team from File > Select Map > Load Mission / Load Campaign. I recommend the first campaign as a good introduction and target practice for your inexperienced jocks. Press F10 for mission objectives and optionally E for exit zone.

After a few missions, you can assign them to battle AI opponents in random maps to further boost their experience, attributes and skills. Credits earned after completion of each missions can be used for purchasing, repairing or customizing your titans with a selection of weapon, armour and equipment upgrades as well as for recruiting additional jocks to your team to a maximum of 8.

The in-game tutorial is very much recommended to grasp the finer points of titan piloting and combat before you even start creating your own team of jocks. Reading the included PDF manual is also a must if you intend to fully understand the significance of each stat and skill for your jocks as well the critical differences between the myriad of weapon and armour choices when buying or upgrading your titans. It’s only 48 pages long so it won’t take too long to read or at least glance through the contents.

A word of advice though, the rookie jocks and recon titans that you can recruit while assembling your team are at most one third as skilled as Tiger I and his Cobra light titan that you control the tutorial so be prepared to adjust your expectations or you might be severely discouraged when you see the dismal hit percentages when the actual slugfest begins

Thankfully the combat module of Titans of Steel : Warring Suns is a blast to play with the difficulty much toned down from the previous game - I still remember my team of jocks who would consistently fail at least one third of the movement skill checks and bruising their titans before even entering firing range of the enemy. The helpful auto-move feature also alleviates the tedious micro-management of the previous game while you’re advancing under relative safety (Alt + Right Click).

The event-based turns get a bit confusing at first as turns are assigned to jocks when certain events occur, e.g when any weapon on his titan are recharged and ready to fire (press x) or when his movement order is complete or even when encountering a new enemy titan (press (w,u,e), etc. After playing a while, it really becomes a very efficient and powerful way to manage the titans in your team. Pressing F3 can interrupt the jock’s current order for reassignment of new orders but may require a skill check while aborting the current order.

The clean functional graphics and sounds are nothing much to crow about since the main draw of this game is the RPG aspects of progressively upgrading your team of jocks and titans. The ungainly interface and relatively long battles (at the beginning when you have a team of rookies with equally crappy titans) mean that it’s not for everyone but for those with more than a passing interest in turn-based mecha combat, Titans of Steel : Warring Suns is a definite must-try.

Download Titans of Steel : Warring Suns 1.2.1 from Matrix Games.

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OpenGlad is an open source version of one of my favourite DOS games, Gladiator, orginally a shareware action-RPG game by Forgotten Sages. I had great fun playing the unregistered shareware version of Gladiator 3.7D some ten(!) years back. Something about the charming little old school pixellated sprites and RPG-like team and character management keeps compelling me to play this game.

While this game supports multiplayer (up to 4) via hotseat, I’ve only been playing the singleplayer campaign recently, so the main focus will be on the singleplayer aspects today. There are supposedly 40+ missions in the campaign but I haven’t completed it yet since some of the missions are incredibly tough

In OpenGlad, you command and manage a team of characters in search of adventure and loot. There are 15 playable character classes to hire for your team, ranging to conventional soldiers, mages and clerics to rarely seen non-human classes like fire elementals or even gooey self-reproducing slimes.

Once you hired your team of adventurers, you can train them to increase their stats for them to better survive on the battlefields. The stats are broken down as follows (summarized from the README file):

• Strength: Strength affects melee (hand-to-hand) combat, as well as things like your weapon range.
• Constitution: Higher constitution increases hitpoints and rate of healing.
• Dexterity: Increasing dexterity improves ability to dodge, weapon’s accuracy and speed.
• Intelligence: Controls amount of ‘magic’ power, how fast this power regenerates, and the success of special abilities.
• Armor: Reduces the damage taken from enemy attacks.
• Level: Acts as a multipler for other stats and allows usage of special abilities. Every three levels of experience (1,4,7,10) provide certain character classes an additional special ability which can often turn the tide of a battle in your favour. Read more about the special abilities in this classes.txt included with the orginal DOS version.

After training your team, you’re ready for your first mission. Initially, you’re accompanied by powerful NPCs, but you’re better off controlling your own characters since NPCs do not belong to your team and thus are not trainable.

To control your character, use the * key on the numpad to access the Options menu (2,8 or 4 for the Options menu of the second, third and fourth player) and change your key preferences.

• Fire: Attack with ranged weapon or hand-to-hand combat if enemy is next to your character
• Yell: Calls for help. Press together with the Shifter key to summon other characters to fight with or defend you.
• Switching: Switch between characters. Pressing Shifter in conjunction with the Switch key will switch to the first characters of another character class.
• Special: Use special ability. Hold Shifter key to use associated special ability (e.g Teleport Marker is used when Shifter key is held down, otherwise Teleport is cast)
• Special Switch: Switch between special abilities for characters with more than one special ability.

Before … and After …

After killing every enemy on the map (basically any moving character on the map not wearing red), the FOES counter on the top right corner should then read 0 and move your character onto the Exit arrows (shown on radar as flashing blue dots) and press Y to advance to the next mission. The first ten missions are linearly arranged with the ones after the tenth grouped into mini-campaigns whereby you can decide the order to tackle them.

Exit in sight

If any friendly character on your team dies during battle, he/she leaves behind a heart gem which returns a portion of his/her training costs back to your treasury if collected by another member of your team. As an alternative, you can press Esc to abort the mission and replay again (perhaps at a lower difficulty level) or even retreat to a previously played map and play another mission. You can save between battles but not when in the battle itself.

Of course after each mission, you get a certain amount of gold based on your performance to train existing troops or hire new ones to bolster your little army.

Some tips to get you started:

• Remember to hire clerics, preferably more than one since clerics cannot heal themselves. When low on health, give the nearest Cleric a bump to heal your character.
• Remember to save game under Save Team in the Continue Game screen. I learnt this the hard way when I clicked Begin New Game instead of Continue Game while advancing to the next mission. Oops!
• I noticed in this game is that it’s cheaper to purchase a Level 4 character under Hire Troops than to upgrade a Level 1 character to level 4 under Train Team.
• Windows version unable to be run in full screen mode is a known issue.
• If you prefer to play at Skirmish (easy) difficulty, remember to set the difficulty (default : Battle (normal) when you start the game as the difficulty isn’t saved after you exit OpenGlad. The difficulty really ramps up after scenario 10 - Defending the Keep so that you might wish to keep the difficulty at Battle in the earlier missions as higher difficulty levels offer more XP for your characters.

Download OpenGlad 0.98 from the Snowstorm Entertainment site or visit the archived Forgotten Sages website (link courtesy of the Gladiator Yahoo! Games group).

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I have always enjoyed watching lone warriors of exceptional martial prowess clearing a bloody swathe through the ranks of the enmemy in CG trailers for games like the Korean MMORPG Soul of the Ultimate Nation (top) and the X06 trailer for Lost Odyssey (bottom).

© Webzen

© Mistwalker

While action-oriented RPGs like Diablo allow your hero to re-enact similar scenes and hack down enemies in droves, combat in these games is still essentially an abstract game of numbers for to-hit percentage, damage, armor effectiveness, etc.

Not in Kaos Kontrol’s Legion of Man You control a nameless fighter and hack through anyone foolish enough to stand in your way until the blood of every single enemy on the battlefield paints the ground red (or if you succumb to overwhelming numbers, of course).

By left-clicking, you swing your sword and slash any unfortunate soul within reach. Although combat sounds simplistic, timing your attacks becomes critical when you’re faced with multiple enemies as you’re vulnerable to attacks from certain sectors when your sword is currently slicing through the foe in front

Most of the enemy minions will fall to a single sweep of your sword but they’re numerous and can easily take you down in due time when you’re surrounded on all sides. Fortunately, you have a shield (right mouse button) to fend off frontal attacks and a spin attack (hold and release left mouse button) to slaughter all within a specific radius. It would be great if the shield could be used offensively to batter the enemies to your side or a running or charging attack was included to extricate yourself from sticky situations.

© Kaos Kontrol

In terms of aesthetics, Legion of Man is definitely influenced by the movie 300 from the loading screen to the character design of the forces arrayed against you especially the ungainly axe-wielding giant in Mission 3. Duel. Thankfully, your character doesn’t wear leather underpants like the Spartans in 300

The gameplay is very much similar to 10 Tons Entertainment’s sci-fi survival game Crimsonland, particularly the Modifiers system (Perks in Crimsonland) and the gameplay modes).

I prefer the gory melee combat with swords and axes in Legion of Man over the long-range high-tech firepower in Crimsonland as there’s nothing like evading a charging standard bearer and then plunging your sword into his back There’s some medieval ranged weaponry e.g crossbows available as power-ups to pick off advancing foes but you’ll be relying on your trusty sword and shield most of the time.

There’s plenty of graphical violence in Legion of Man e.g cleaving bodies into halves and loping off the heads of opponents so it’s definitely not for young and/or impressionable players.

BTW, if you get a black screen after the loading screen when you start the demo from the Windows Start Menu, press Alt+F4 to close the game and run the Legion.exe in the game folder instead - usually C:\Program Files\Legion of Man\.

Also if the game controls feel sluggish, turn down the resolution or as a last resort, disable shadows by editing Pcini.txt in the game folder and set shadowenabled to “0″.

Download the 45 MB demo over at GamersHell or visit the official site of Legion of Man to buy the game online @ $14.95 USD. (Haven’t seen it on retail shelves here in Singapore)

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After playing (and mismanaging the civil administration) in Rome : Total War for the past month or so, I find myself increasingly drawn towards the smaller scale and shorter battles in Slitherine Software’s Legion Arena instead.

Like Rome : Total War, you engage in tactical combat as the Romans against their enemies such as the Samnites, Gauls and Carthaginians. There’s also a shorter Celt campaign which is only unlocked after the main Roman campaign is completed. The Celt campaign requires slightly different tactics and strategies with their more offensively-oriented troop choices like the Celt naked fanatics as opposed to the more disciplined and tactically-flexible Roman legionnaires. For a preview of some of the historically-based battles you’ll fight in the two campaigns, check out the official Legion Arena site.

Early missions involve less than ten units on both sides on tiny battlefields (above). Before long, you’re tasked to take on the Gauls and Carthaginians in massive battles (below)

Each campaign is simply a string of set-piece battles lasting not more than five to ten minutes each, after which denarii (Roman currency) is rewarded to you to upgrade the weapons and equipment for existing units as well as to recruit new units to your army. Requistioning of replacements for casualties in your existing units is done by way of fame points which are generously allocated under the easier difficulty settings. Units with sufficient combat experience can be promoted which grants them statistics and skill increases as well as specialist combat skills like anti-cavalry bonuses or additional formations (below).

Unlike in Rome : Total War, you not only deploy your units before the battle proper, but also issue them default movement orders like advance to contact, charge or outflank the enemy. You’ll still be able to command them once the battle starts, but each command you give expends order points (slowly regenerates during battle) with better trained veteran units requiring less points to command, which I think simulates the nature of ancient warfare very nicely. The tactical engine is no slouch too and mistakes are severely punished in the later missions, like this massacre of cavalry (below) which futilely attempted to attack infantry in the close confines of a dense forest. Morale is also modelled in this game quite convincingly which is essential in ancient wars where enemies were more often defeated by routing them off the field rather than killing them to a man.

While Rome : Total War definitely has better graphics and a wider variety of units, gamers on a limited playtime may find the shorter missions and RPG aspects in Legion Arena more feasible. It also helps that Legion Arena is currently published as a Replaygem title in SG retailing at the very affordable price of $9.95

There’s the prerequisite war elephants in this game of course, but fans of siege warfare may be disappointed as Legion Arena only features field battles.

Download the 233MB demo or the 1.010 patch if you already have the game.

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