Star Wars: Battlefront beta

I'm not going to go into any details because I want to respect the non-disclosure agreement.

All I'll say is I've played a little this morning and some more this afternoon and I might play it again later...

In fact, the only thing keeping me from playing it all day is some necessary chores, and toilet breaks (cursed bladder!).

Skyshine's Bedlam

I've been thinking about this game a lot over the last couple of weeks. At first I gave it the benefit of the doubt and persisted, but it just doesn't have the replay appeal it was hoping to have.

The last time I played it was just after an update, which had changed how battles worked. It made it so each side was always far enough way to prevent annoying, first turn losses. This was something I thought would be a good idea, but I soon  realised that it made the game much easier and I found myself thinking that the previous iteration was far more compelling to play. I ended up winning for the first time, on my first attempt after the update and haven't played it since.

Bedlam feels like a game which has all the first ingredients for a great game, but they've not put it together quite right.

The game it still be tweaked and changed, so I'll keep an eye on it. Just wanted to post here as this was something I had been looking forward to and it just hasn't quite hit the mark.

I won a game by crashing a moon into a planet

There's an indi-humble bundle at the moment with some great titles, which can pretty much all by bought for £6. The one that really caught my eye though was Planetary Annihilation.

I have heard about it in the past, but for some reason it past me by. I think it may have been before I had a PC and I accepted I'd never play it. Also, if I remember correctly, the reviewer liked the game, but had various reservations, which sounded plausible at the time.

Anyway, I've now played this game for a couple of hours and it's wooing me with it's insane scale, wonderfully simple graphical elegance and the fact I strapped 3 massive rockets onto a moon and flew it into another planet!

I must admit for the first hour or so I was in old skool RTS (real time strategy) mode, building individual factories and power stations, doing everything one at a time and trying to maximise my resources. I soon released that I'd need to be a lot faster and more efficient with my time, rather than my resources, and within a couple of hours of playing I was building lines of factories, selecting the whole lot and building 100s of tanks, which I'd then casually command to attack another faction on the other side of the planet. It's such a fantastic feeling!

I should briefly explain at this point that Planetary Annihilation is an RTS that allows you to fight across a system of planets. A game may revolve around a single planet, but usually there'll be several with a few moons or asteroid belts thrown in. All these astral bodies are orbiting a star, so there is a day-night cycle, although it's not very perceptible, unless you're admiring the nice graphical details, like lights on the front of units. The game camera takes a little getting used to, but when you zoom out the units and buildings become easily identifiable symbols, which helps greatly for strategic movements.

I think I've played 3 hours in total now. I'm very excited to play more. It's simple, nice to look at and completely bonkers as far as RTSs go. I love it!