Awesomenauts: The console MOBA

On May 1st, a little company called Ronimo Games released a game called Awesomenauts on PSN and Xbox Live. Recently I became a member of PS Plus, which is PSN’s premium service that provides free games and discounts to paying members. I have downloaded quite a few neat games as a result, and Awesomenauts was one of the free games this month. It’s only been a couple of weeks since it’s release but I have had quite a bit of time playing it, and I must say it holds its own compared to other MOBAs I have tried.

When I first downloaded the game I hadn’t read or seen any video of the gameplay, so I really didn’t know the game was an MOBA until I actually started playing it. At first appearance I believed it to be a platformer of sorts, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually an MOBA. When starting up the game it automatically starts up a tutorial, and after playing through that you are presented with the option to play against other players online, or to play practice games on your system against bots. If you need the practice or don’t really understand the genre, I would say it’s ok to start against bots, but they seem to be a little difficult for new players. It’s easier to play against people, as they tend to make more mistakes that the bots do. I remember playing on the first day, and because I already knew the concept of destroy towers, then destroy base (with PvP in between), I was owning people’s faces. I still do most times, although I have met my match a time or two.

The game came with 6 characters and 3 maps to start, although there are already rumors of a couple new DLC characters to play, and I’m hoping new maps will come along with that. The game’s graphics are reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoons, but it suits the game’s sense of humor and game play. It is 2d, and side-scrolling, but the game play is very addictive and fun. Each of the characters have a tree of abilities, some unlocked to begin with, and others that unlock as you play. You have an “account level” for lack of a better term, similar to Call of Duty games. When you play a match you get “solar” (the game’s currency), at the end of any match you end up with a total of the solar earned, plus bonuses for winning a match, playing a random character, or playing split screen. These totals add up and level your account. You then open up new abilities for the characters, along with some other game features. The cap is level 45, at which point you can choose to prestige (just like Call of Duty), up to 5 times. At this point I am at prestige level 3, and I am still enjoying the game.

Out of the characters, there are the main archetypes you would expect. Clunk is a tanky character, Voltar is a healer/support, Leon is a stealthy class, Yuri is support, while Sherrif Lonestar and Froggy G are both DPS. My personal favorite is Leon, because the ability to grab runners with your tongue and go into stealth is just too cool to pass up. But his downside is only having a melee weapon, whereas all of the other characters have some range. There are 3 levels, all of which have different lanes, but as opposed to traditional MOBA’s with a 3/4 view, top is really up and bot is really down. Ribbit IV is a jungle-themed level that has 2 towers on either side on top and bottom, and then the base behind. There is a central area with creeps and a baddy called the “Solar Boss” who is a bitch to kill but worth a trophy or achievement, depending on your system. Sorona is desert-themed, and my personal favorite. There is 1 tower on top and bot, but then the two lanes join to one and there’s a last tower to clear before the base. There are neutral creeps far above the level (reachable by a jump pad) and a trap in the center of the level, where you press a button and a huge creature comes out below you, eating anyone dumb enough to be standing there. Finally, AI Station 404 is a space-themed level, that is laid out opposite of Sorona, where there is 1 tower in one lane, and then it splits to a top and bottom lane with 1 tower each, then on to the base. The center of the map has a weird gravity field, and neutral creeps above. This level has no weird traps or bosses, but each side does have a flying droid generator, in which you have to press a button to get said droids. All in all the levels are varied and fun, but we definitely need some new levels.

Overall it’s a great game and I would recommend it to anyone who has a console and enjoys MOBAs. It’s definitely worth the $10 price.

For Those New to LoL

I have been playing League of Legends since last summer, so close to a year now. Not every single day, but I have managed to get myself to Summoner level 30 and I do play pretty regularly. My humble beginnings and journey to the cap have brought me insight, and I would like to share some tips with you now. These tips are mostly aimed at new players, but veterans alike might pick up a new tidbit that they hadn’t read elsewhere. I am going to assume if you are reading this that you understand what a MOBA is, and you understand how DOTA style games work, so I won’t be discussing anything that basic. So let us begin.

The first thing to remember when playing League of Legends, is that it is a highly skill-based game, but these skills are acquired through practice. When you first start out, you WILL die. Often. If you manage to keep your kill-death ratio positive, you are doing something right, but don’t think that it is the only part of the game that matters. Everyone who plays competitive PvP games knows the desire to have more kills than deaths, and more kills than the rest of your team. In LoL, kills do matter, but so do deaths, and there are different reasons why they matter as opposed to say, a first-person shooter. Kills net you gold and experience, which you then use to gain levels in each individual round, and use to buy items which improve your champion. So yes, getting kills is a priority because it will cause you to become “fed”, and once you are you can shred your opponents. But, getting kills needs to be safe, and not a trade-off. If you get a kill, but also die, then the effect counter-balances itself with the opponent. If you get a kill but you and your team-mate die, the enemy came away with the advantage. The kill-death ratio is less important when playing a tank champion as well, as your focus is to keep your team-mates alive, not get kills. Assists net experience and gold as well, and a tank will often times go negative on the kill count but have numerous assists.

So, practice makes perfect. Learning to zone/lane/jungle/last-hit/team-fight all comes with time. Figuring out your play style and which champion you like best is all up to you, but once you find a champion you like, here are some suggestions, this is what I do. When I want to start playing a new champion because I’m bored with the ones I have been playing, I do some research first. Two websites you should bookmark ASAP are MOBAFire and LeagueCraft. These sites have tons of guides on each champion, that includes rune/mastery builds along with item builds while in-game. If you’re new to the game you won’t have many runes or mastery points, but it will give you an idea what to items to use and what benefits that champ the most. After getting an idea of what your chosen champ can do, the first thing to try in-game is a bot match. Don’t queue up for PvP matches when it’s your first time playing a champion, because that just ruins everyone else’s experience. Play against bots every time you want to try out a new champ, a new build, or just for fun. Once you have a few bot matches under your belt and have figured out a build you like, then feel free to queue up some PvP matches, and do your best. Again, don’t expect to be phenomenal right off the bat, and don’t be worried about getting owned by high level summoners. The matchmaking system works pretty good at keeping you matched up with summoners of your level.

Another awesome tool for learning more about the game is the League Replays program. It’s like Fraps or any other recording software, but it uses less system resources and records the games automatically. The custom format of the files are much smaller than other softwares as well, so you won’t take up a lot of hard drive space. Once you have recorded a game, you can go back and watch how you did, and how your team mates did, which in turn can give you a bunch of valuable data. Watching yourself after the fact can give perspective on mistakes you made and what you can do differently the next time you play. If you do really well, you can even share the replays on the website.

Finally, don’t be a douche. There are so many trolls on the internet it’s ridiculous, and you would have to be living under a rock to have avoided them thus far. Try not to be one of those trolls. Riot came up with an ingenious way to keep trolls in check, and it’s called “The Summoner’s Code”. It’s a basic outline about how to not be a troll while playing the game, sort of like “The Golden Rule”; do unto others and all that. Moreover, it’s not Riot who controls the outcome of violators of the code, it’s other players, which is pretty awesome if I do say so myself. Once you reach summoner level 30, you are allowed to become a member of “The Tribunal”, which is basically a committee that decides the fate of those who have broken the code. There are many different reasons why people get reported, and when they are reported those cases go to the Tribunal. Then a member logs in and decides whether or not the offense was punishable or pardonable. I have been participating in this for about a month now, because I feel that it really does help the overall health of the game, keeping trolls out and the good-natured players in. Now don’t get me wrong, I know that we all have moments where we “rage”, but it’s still best to keep these things to ourselves rather than in the chat logs. Just remember to follow the code as best you can, and follow my suggestions so that you don’t get reported for “intentionally feeding” because you decided to play a champ for the first time in PvP.

Joining the Joneses

I like to think of myself as a tech-oriented guy. I have always kept up with gadgets, consoles and computers. I might not have the newest version of everything, but I do have a laptop, a PS3, an HDTV, an iPod and various other toys. I don’t have a top of the line laptop (it’s two years old now), I have a newer PS3 (160 GB slim), the HDTV is just a regular LCD but it’s only a 32″, and my iPod is an 80 GB classic, so no touch. Still, I am usually content as long as I have a gadget or piece of equipment that serves the purpose, regardless of if it’s brand new or top-of-the-line. The one area where I was lacking was mobile devices, more specifically, my cell phone. I never really saw a need for a smart phone, all I ever used my phone for was calling and texting. My old phone broke a few days ago, and I still wasn’t going to get a smart phone, but I was sort of forced into it. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I love the device.

I go through Boost Mobile because contracts suck. The service isn’t always ideal, especially with the crappy phone I had before, but you do get what you pay for I suppose. When I went looking for a new phone, I was surprised to find that you really can’t buy anything but a smart phone these days, at least through Boost, and the particular location I was at. So I ended up purchasing a Samsung Galaxy Prevail for a fairly good price. They actually had better smart phone options, but I didn’t feel the need to shell out more cash. Now that I know more about Android devices, I sort of wish I would have had more money to spend. I’ve had the phone for about a week, and have done quite a bit of toying with it, along with reading around the net and I have some tips and sources to share for users of this particular phone, but also for Android users in general.

The phone came with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and though this isn’t the most current version of the operating system, it is one of the most popular and seems to be very compatible with everything on the market. On the storage side, it has roughly 160 MB internal, and a 2 GB micro SD card. It came with a handful of apps, most of which I found useless and unable to uninstall. The ability to transfer apps from the internal storage to the SD card is limited, most programs won’t allow this. My first step in customizing my phone was to visit the marketplace and download some apps, the first round were ones I already knew about. Facebook, the University of Phoenix app, Pandora Radio. Upon visiting the marketplace the phone detected updates to existing apps, so I updated those as well. Next, I wanted to set up custom ring tones, so I hooked the phone up to my laptop via USB, and transferred some MP3s over. I found that setting a custom ring tone was no problem, but there was no way to set my mp3 file to a notification tone, so I set about trying to figure out what could be done.

Tip #1: Under the main menu of the phone, you will see a file folder called “My files”. Open the folder, and within it, create a new folder called “Notifications”. Any sound file that  you save within this folder will now be available to set as a notification ring tone, so instead of having to use the default sounds, you can set a music file of your own to go off when you get a text message, voicemail, etc.

After figuring out most of the settings, I decided that I wanted a custom background. This part was frustrating for a couple of days, because I would find a picture I like (either one I took with the phone’s camera, or one that someone else sent to me that I saved), and I would set it as the wallpaper. The phone would prompt me to pick a portion of the picture, which it would then stretch to fit the 5 main screens. This was irritating, because I really just wanted the full size picture as the wallpaper for all of the screens, and would have preferred that the icons just floated over the main picture (a watermark, if you will). So it was time to do some more hunting on the web.

Tip #2: If this issue irritates you as well, I recommend downloading “Multipicture Live Wallpaper” from the marketplace. With this app, you can have 5 separate pictures on each main screen (it supports more than that, but that is my specific number of screens) and they will be full size, rather than just a portion. The settings are tricky and might take a little while to get used to, but it is definitely worth it.

Feeling like my phone was pretty customized, I decided that I wanted to try out some games. This opened up a whole other bag of worms, because once I started noticing the phone’s internal storage running out, I knew I was going to have to figure out a way to get apps moved to my SD card. As I mentioned earlier, there are some apps that will allow you to move them to the external storage. However, most won’t, and this poses a storage issue. It’s pretty silly for the developers to make it this way, because internal storage is far smaller than external, but thankfully there is a work around. My Dad told me about an app called App2SD, and I tried it. I suppose that solution works for some people, but when I opened it up to see what I could move, there was literally nothing. It didn’t help the situation whatsoever. So I started researching. I found that the best way to be able to handle operations like this is to Root your phone. Rooting is to Android as Jailbreaking is to iPhone. Basically, you give yourself administrative powers over the phone, much like you would have over your PC, where you can view more, move more, and do more. It sounded like a pain in the ass according to some websites, and sounded really easy on others. I was convinced though, when I saw this article, because some of those apps looked just plain cool. The same website had an article on rooting your Android phone, but it pointed to a program called “Superoneclick”, and this didn’t work for my phone. I had to do a bunch of searching around the web, and I ended up finding a different program that did the same thing, but I can’t remember the location at the moment. I’m sure if you had a different phone it would work out easier, but I wouldn’t recommend trying it unless you are a bit tech-savvy, it was definitely a pain and took the better part of a night for me to get it done.

After rooting my phone, I started downloading apps that allowed me to do more of the things I wanted to do. I picked up Superuser, Titanium Backup, and Adfree, all of which you can read descriptions of in the article I mentioned above. TB is the program that I was wanting to free up storage space, as it allows you to uninstall apps that came with the phone, and to move apps to your SD card, along with making backups of everything. That alone was enough for me to know that rooting my phone was worth it.

Back to gaming, I ended up trying a few of the games off of the Android market, but I really wanted an RPG to play, and most of the options were Action-RPGs, and with touch screen controls I was more frustrated than anything. So I looked into emulation, and it is actually quite prevalent on Androids. I ended up with Super Gnes and DroidEmu, both of which can be found on the market. The first is an SNES emulator, and the latter is actually an emulator for pretty much every system imaginable. Why have both? Well I preferred the location of the controls on the Super Gnes emulator, so for SNES games I use it. I ended up downloading a bunch of Gameboy Advance RPGs as well, and that is what I use DroidEmu for, as all of the other GBA emulators I tried didn’t work. I also found a great place for ROMs, and you can find that here. All in all, I have about 10 RPGs now that I either played very sparsely or never at all, so I have options for mobile gaming.

I am very pleased having an Android device, and having played with iPhones in the past, I think I prefer Android. If I have any more tips or tricks come up, I’ll make sure to share them here. Until next time.

Re-motivated

Enough time has elapsed where I feel like I have a new direction to go with my blog, which has been too long-standing for me to allow it to slip into nothingness. I recently passed the 7 year mark, and I would kick myself later if I let it all go. Technically speaking, I have been blogging for 15 years, but I only have an archive for 7, so we’ll leave it at that. Regular readers will notice that I changed the layout (not only to reflect on my change in mood, but I figured it was good to start fresh again). If you are new to this site, let me give a brief description of what to expect in the future, and also what to expect if you happen to browse through some of the archives.

This blog started out as a personal one. I have always had a casual tone, and I tend to delve into my personal life from time to time, though don’t worry, I don’t go into excruciating detail. Posts in the 2005-07 range tend to deal with a bunch of stuff most people don’t want to read, but those posts serve as memory lane for me. In 2007 I came here to WordPress, and started focusing my writing on MMOs that I was playing. That trend continued throughout the years, although when I took breaks I spoke of other things. Mainly, this blog has always been in an “everything/nothing” style, and whatever has tickled my fancy tends to take up most of the space. Recently I took a break from the blog altogether, because I didn’t really have much to say, and I also felt like the lack of an MMO to talk about limited my content.

I still intend to share things about my personal life, and I will comment on football, movies, music and other things besides gaming. The focus this time around though, will be on more single player and multiplayer games that aren’t MMOs. If you read Massively, you will probably have heard of their sub-section called “not so massively”, which covers the world of MOBAs. I thought the phrase was catchy, and sort of goes along with my blog title, so there you have it. I’m not focusing solely on MOBAs, but I do have some tips and tricks (and possibly guides) to write up, and I have commentary about some PS3 games that I have been playing as well. Some of the info might be a little dated, mainly because I don’t typically play games the day they come out, but I will try to stay as relevant as possible. In coming days I have some posts planned, so here’s the intro, and I’ll be back soon.

Calling it Done, For Now.

I really haven’t had much to say, or the drive to say it. I don’t feel as if I am really contributing to the web as I once did. I used to post about things that many people read. There were still my day to day “journal” entries, but amongst them I managed to get numerous hits when writing about MMOs or other assorted topics. I don’t play MMOs anymore. I mainly have a normal boring life, and most times I don’t feel like it’s really worth writing about. So for now, I’m going to let this page go dormant. When I re-evaluate things and maybe find a better niche or something I’m more passionate about, I’ll be back. I miss writing on a regular basis, but without the drive and passion to do so, posts become lifeless and bland. I don’t want to let the years of history here go to waste, so I will be back, I’m just not sure when exactly. Until that day comes, I bid you adieu.