Falllout Shelter: Why you should be running away from this app

Fallout is huge. Fans from all over the world waited eagerly for the GamesCon releases and for that, they have the Pip boy and some mobile app that debut on the iOS platform and later Android. 

At first, you might think that you could have played this game as a teaser to its bigger release but it wasn't. It is a standalone freemium game for mobile. 

Freemium. This ugly term is the buzzword of the mobile gaming industry. Free to play but pay to play. 

There has been heaps of success factors for this type of gaming. It is social and friends can help you. Unfortunately Fallout Shelter isn't the case. It is, a freemium game that has no social element and this is why it is going to burn and crash. 

I played this religiously for 10 days, and boy did I waste my time.

First, the game isn't as exciting as it should be. For one you have to play the part of Immortan Joe, where you decide who to keep and who to send out into the vast wasteland while protecting your valuable food and water resources. You need Cap credits to build underground shelters to house your minions and each room or shelter has a function. 

Energy generation is one, the other is food. The last one is food, which is kinda stupid because you operate a diner instead of an underground farm house. You can only have two dwellers in a room and for procreation, you need a living quarters too. The living quarters will also determine how many residents you may have in the shelter. 

Now putting a man and woman together in the living quarters will beget you a kid, who in the radiation age, takes 6 hours to grow from a child to an adult. As a child, you cannot assign any duties to it, that means you have a parasite at best. When it grows up, you could sire another child with it depending on who is expendable. This sort of makes you understand why Immortan Joe of Mad Max always kept a harem of women to sire genetically capable children. Unfortunately, any kid born in the shelter is a dufus and has to be upgraded in terms of experience points. Who they fuck matters too as the kid will exhibit qualities of the parents. Not everything will be passed down to the kid. 

To make things exciting, you have raiders who break into your shelter to steal stuff and when you send your guys to defend it, they have to be armed. Now how to get weapons? Only by picking them up from the wasteland, and that means sending out your best dwellers to get them. Each dweller has a complicated talent tree. You have strength, charisma, etc, etc and the clothes you wear will give you an additional advantage of each task you assign to them. 

Oh, your dwellers can die in the wasteland and there is no action which takes place which you are a party of, you get a status report on how they died and it is up to you to revive them with those Cap credits, which you earn while increasing the experience points of your fellow dwellers. Each time they get an upgrade in experience points, you get rewarded with Cap points as well. So the more people you have at any time, the more Cap points you get to earn and keep. Those points can later go into upgrading the shelter or for reviving dead dwellers from your shelter. Each dweller has a health bar and a radiation bar to watch out for. If the two are weak, any simple disaster can kill them.

I know it sounds boring and it is. I cannot for the life of me understand why they created this game as it just doesn't work. So to summarise the experience.....

#1 Social Element is Lacking

There is no buddy who plays along with you, sends you credits or exchange weapons. You are there with just your dwellers and there will be outsiders who will from time to time come to join you from the wasteland but that is hardly an inducement from a social perspective. The game is solitary, just you and the computer which spits out random problems for you to solve. To keep everything running smoothly, some have said that you need to have 52 dwellers. Then everyone will be happy. It would be more exciting if you could send out your dwellers to raider another's dweller's patch, perhaps steal from them. That would be more fun but nada....it is boring. 

#2 Raiders will find a way in regardless of upgrading your Entrance 

Raiders will break through your front door no matter how hard you try to fortify it. 
There are two fighting scenarios, that is to fight the incoming marauders, and to fight the mutants that come to infest your shelter. Think of it as the only interactive experience which doesn't happen often. Most of the time you end up fighting mutant rats and roaches that infest your cookie trail. Is this exciting? Only if you like watching grass grow.

#3 Shelter disasters are Boring

Fire, fire and more fire. Each time you overwork a room shelter, there will be fire. And the fire can kill the residents if their health points are weak. The only way to avoid the fire is to place your resident in the entrance area which never catches fire. And for that, you are only allowed two to a room. Fires do not harm your resources, machine or for that matter, the store room where you stash all your ill gotten goodies.

#4 Weapons are all bullshit when fighting Mutants

Weapons can only be obtained from the wasteland. There is no other way. You can't buy weapons because if you did, the mutant roaches and marauders won't stand a chance against you. So that is why the fighting is all BS. You can have, for the sake of getting you to buy more cap points, mutant roaches that will kill perfectly healthy residents armed to the teeth. Picking up a good weapon is a lottery. It depends on your dweller's luck. 

What would Immorten Joe say about the Game?

Get out into the wasteland.... and bring me back some grub! And stop wasting time on that Fallout Shelter game!!

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Categories: Android, fallout, Freemium, ios, mobile

Star Wars Commander: May you be Forced into a Rip Off

I have a deep fondness for Star Wars. As a kid, I loved it and even if Lucas was a dufus when it comes to making engaging games, I felt that he could have at least played some before licensing his name and universe to the highest bidder. Now that he's out of the business, makes you wonder what will Disney do to it.

Playdom, a mobile game developer, launched this game app to tap into the deep pockets of iOS users before it heads out to the Android platform but is it worth your time playing it?

It really depends on how you mean by playing. If you enjoy being ripped off by a Clash of the Clans clone then by all means, yes!

Let me digress. Many moons ago, a company named SuperCell thought of this medieval strategy game where people can battle one another all over the world. It was a freemium hit by some measure and loads of would be clones grew out of it. Playdom licensed the creative concept behind Star Wars and copied virtually everything about it in a aptly called strategy game called...you guesses it...Star Wars Commander.

In the game you get to play the rebel side or the Imperial side. No diff really except that you won't have any access to the heroes of the game which by far reside on the rebel side. If you side with the rebellion, you get Luke and Han Solo, Chewbacca and maybe even Obiwan. But the heroes from the dark side are some bold mechs, which are designed from the the Star Wars Imperial lore.

The game itself is based on the first installment of the series, which is on Tatooine. In it, you get to kick Tusken Raider ass and lay waste to anything remotely Imperial or Rebel.

Why Freemium is a Rip Off

There are three resources you need to complete the game...crystals, alloy metal and credits. Sounds like a plan but wait till you hit the paywall. Alloy and Credits can be easily harvested but not crystals. These you can only gain from the side missions. Crystals are useful for extending the length of protection on your ranch out in the desert and speed up deliveries of buildings and ordnance. The protection period is basically for you to ante up on should you fear some attack from a paying fool. To attack someone, you need to ante up with a payment of crystals so this in itself isn't free.

If you do get attacked, you will sustain minimum damage. However if you chose to revenge attack, then your protection is withdrawn and you can get hammered in the process. You could face a string of attacks, wave by wave but players so far are wary about paying those hard earned crystals for less than two minutes of mayhem.

There is also another caveat. If you attack someone to rob them, well they have a right to revenge attacks.

The crystals are costly to purchase. You can spend 100 bucks on it and that's way more I would pay for a game on a console. Worst of all, there is no completion level. The game soldiers on even if you stop paying to play. So your outpost in the desert will be a stark reminder of what sort of rancher you have been. To avoid being attacked, you can also choose to stay online busy building or doing something in the game screen. This will ward off any attacks. Such tricks mean that the attacker can never be revenge attacked.

There are periodic campaigns which offers you a chance to earn a different currency to redeem a different line of robots and troopers with a bazooka for the imperial army (god knows what you get on ther rebellion side, mini Yodas?). There are even more stuff along the way during the campaign, like the use of Hero characters to complete your campaign. This in itself becomes very murky because of a bug.

You can't select a hero for your squad all the time, and this hero is virtually useless in some of the side missions. The Hero can be used during attacks on another player but beyond that, it's uses are limited. Selecting a Hero character is a miss affair generally. If you have two Heroes on standby, the latest one made is offered up for battle without a choice.

What I don't like about the Game

You can't use the full resource of your army to attack. That's basically the one thing that disturbs me. I have a slew of forces but you don't get to choose the fighters you can use for an attack. Instead you have to 'manufacture' them for the mission and you need to plan ahead instead of just hitting the buy button.

The one thing that really stuck out was that when you get attacked, your own troops are busy wanking in the barracks and refuses to come out to fight. WTF? Instead you are encouraged to join a group of similar minded players. These players will donate troops to your outpost and you don't get to choose which troops either. Once you get attacked, these donated troops will do the defending. If they are 'pussy' ranked, they will get whipped. So you have been warned.

In any strategy game, you leave you worst troops behind and take the best one out to fight for you. Your poor quality troops are cannon fodder, with the outpost defences kicking in to destroy the enemy. This element is missing. So does it make sense to play a strategy game with your feet and hands tied behind your back?


What's more, your troop's AI are at the level of 'retard'. Instead of attacking buildings, they can be often seen shooting at barriers and taking a scenic route to their next target. You don't get to instruct them to attack which target at all. This makes for a difficult gameplay as the retards within your rank will rush out to get destroyed by cannon fire. The same goes for tanks and AT walkers, even though they are by AI program more attracted to certain types of buildings within an outpost and will not go after more valuable targets because that to them...does not 'compute'.

Lastly the game itself is riddled with bugs. There has been times when the revenge button doesn't even work, as it gives you Yoda like answers like....'Player cannot be found' alerts.

This is not a stable game to play with and you should not invest in anything more than your time on it. The bugs have caused Playdom to reset its servers and deliver a new update, which at this time is still bug ridden. I have had my own troops destroy my own tanks in a wonton act of rebellion...thanks to a bug in my system.

It might sound funny but I never thought a Star Wars remake of any kind would turn out to be a comedy. Make of that what you will.

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Categories: Android, ios, mobile, star wars, strategy

Google Console On The Horizon

A recent report in the Wall Street Journal claims that Google will be entering the console gaming market featuring its Android OS. They will also be making a wristwatch for some odd reason as well. This is probably a response to the Apple TV/Steam 'rumors' which cropped up not too long ago.

Read more at Wall Street Journal

Categories: Android, Console, Google, Wristwatch

Wikipad Gaming Tablet Out Worldwide This Summer

Wikipad shrunken Android based handheld is scheduled for a worldwide launch this summer, which will first be released on the 11th June, 2013.

The 7-inch device offers a 1280x800 IPS display, a 1.4 GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of on-board flash memory. It will run Android Jellybean 4.1 and hopefully include a side order of potato chips which goes well together.

Gamers will be able to download games from Tegrazone, Playstation Mobile and Google Play.

Categories: Android, Nvidia Tegra, Wikipad