In the wake of Gratuitous Space Battles, an epic title that highlights players’ creative abilities to relish in design and strategy as opposed to outright micromanagement comes the highly anticipated spiritual successor Gratuitous Tank Battles. Gone is the cold, dark void of space instead giving way to gritty battlefields wrought by endless World War I warfare that has traversed into a future full of hulking tanks, artillery and mechs. Where Space Battles faced players with simply letting their creations loose on the enemy following the formulation of a rudimentary strategy, Tank Battles expands on this in a way that appreciably layers on top of what veteran GSB players will have come to know and love.
Not completely redone from the top down, GTB has come into life as a tower attack/defense title that encapsulates on the subject matter well while taking cues from its predecessor. Whether choosing to traverse the trenches as the attacker or attempting to break the enemy rush into the breach as a defender, players will find themselves wrestling with which way to play first as both have proven equally entertaining thus far.
Selecting the Campaign will lead players to an overlaid battle map allowing a choice of missions to be played that become progressively unlocked as missions are accomplished. Prior to each of the eight engagements, there is a choice to select difficulty of Captain, Major and Colonel (Easy, Medium and Hard, respectively), but what’s even more interesting is the choice of being able to choose whether or not to play offense or defense. Certainly enough, it’s possible to play the tower defense attacker in hits like Anomaly Warzone Earth and defend in Defense Grid: The Awakening, but Gratuitous Tank Battles not only ties both of those gameplay options together with relative ease, it does it innately well.
Regardless of which option you choose, assaulting or guarding, players will be able to allow whether the computer is able to use a pre-determined set of units, select from a pool of allotted units available for that particular mission or use any unit in the game, even those designed by the player, against them. While it may not seem like a big deal at first, knowing that the AI is capable of adaptive play is interesting as it constantly challenges the player to acclimate to a battle as well. Despite the fact that weapons fall into three relative categories, those faring well against shield, armor or infantry, it still opens up a slew of gameplay opportunities.
Having a distinct love for tower defense games, I opted to give defense a go first. After playing through the comprehensive tutorial, which may seem a bit longwinded to new recruits but is nonetheless exceptionally rewarding down the line, I was given my first command on the front lines and things escalated quickly.
Prior to the start of a battle, I was tasked with placing a variety of turrets, dependent on my available supplies, along designated points in the terrain along with infantry in the appropriate trenches and bunkers to defend the pathways leading towards the other end of the map. Despite not knowing what’s beyond the end of said path, I can only assume it was incredibly important as I was destroying every last target that entered the respective kill zones. On the other hand, had the enemy managed to shuffle 4,000 victory points worth of vehicles through my lines, I would have lost.
Simple enough, but the tanks, troops and mechs don’t just lazily move along their paths. These enemies have their own sets of teeth and aren’t bashful about using them. It seemed like each time I was able to secure a particular section of the map with enough armaments to destroy whatever shielded or armored vehicles sent my way in addition to the troops that accompanied them, the game would adapt just as fast – the digital equivalent of fighting a Hydra. Locking down an area with one particular type of weapon doesn’t work either and the game is quick to point this out.
Too much anti-shield cannons in one location will net a slew of anti-armor vehicles and infantry. Likewise, a stockpile of machine guns and troops to stay an army of foot soldiers will undoubtedly see the treads of tanks and footfalls of mechs on the horizon. The game is clever and no matter what difficulty is played, GTB does a lot to keep a player on their toes. Thankfully, the difficulty curve is enticingly forgiving early on, never throwing more at the player than they can handle – yet this increases comparably with the setting that’s chosen.
As the battle progresses, supplies will continue to replenish at a constant rate, allowing for the purchase of troops and armor, for both attacker and defender until a timer reaches zero. After that, players have to do with what they have. Often times, at least in my case, this has been a do or die scenario where a single cannon has the potential to halt that one final vehicle, rescuing victory from the jaws of defeat. Yet, this is an intuitive design choice that feels apropos overall and one I’ve really enjoyed thus far.
Flipping things around, I decided to attempt the same mission as the attacker. Dropping vehicles from the left side of the screen, my troopers, mechs and tanks made their way through the pc-controller gauntlet. As my recon mechs made first contact, I was able to get a lay of the land and saw that a lower path on the map wasn’t as well defended as the upper one I had initially chosen. Thinking I could fake out the AI, I placed a gratuitous amount of my forces on the upper path for a few moments. Then, waiting as a small stockpile of supplies built, which cost me a small chunk of my allotted time, I placed a massive force on the lower path.
Having garnered a handful of valuable supply trucks, each worth 1,000 victory points but lightly armored and devoid of weapons, I placed them sandwiched between a combined arms group of tanks, mechs and soldiers as they began their long, hazardous walk to the other side of the map. Zooming in from the sky view, the gunfire, shells and explosions became louder as I watched the damage wreaking havoc on both sides.
For a moment, I felt a tingling up my spine when a recon mech leading the column burst in a shower of fire and debris following a head-on hit from a cannon shell. I could only watch as the rest of the vehicles made their way towards the other side while placing forces equally along both paths to keep the computer off balance. Wiping my sweaty palms on my jeans, I couldn’t suppress a grin one of my trucks crossed the finish, despite being pockmarked and burning with heavy damage. Despite still being in beta, this is the kind of gameplay I can only look forward to with enthusiasm for the final product.
Outside of battle, players are able to customize any of the vehicles, turrets or troops they deploy on the battlefield similarly to Gratuitous Space Battles. Complete with unlocked equipment and attributes that will keep those looking to unlock everything enticed, no expense seems to have been spared when it came to the details of adaptation. Armor, shell type, reloading mechanism and just about everything else right down to the color and shape it will be on the battlefield is open to be changed. It really is a creative playground that gives those who want to experiment with their design in collusion with various strategies a chance to do just that and do it very well.
In one instance, I was under the impression that my 88mm Cannon, the most armed and armored turret in the game thus far, wasn’t quite up to snuff. Taking a few minutes, I modified the internal components, altering the attributes. Upping the armor significantly and swapping out the semi-automatic reloading mechanism to make the Cannon fully automatic saw a rise in cost, but I couldn’t argue with the results. Despite looking the same on the outside, it was an entirely new machine on the inside, firing at a faster rate and dishing out far more damage while being able to take some pretty harsh punishment before faltering.
Yet, for all the good things I have to say about GTB, there is at least one firm reminder that this is still a beta. At least on a Windows 7 machine, I’ve seen the game crash at multiple times for a variety of reasons that I’m yet to pin down so I can prevent those from occurring and being forced to reboot my machine. That being said though, despite having to reboot, I’ve consistently caught myself logging back into my machine and immediately restarting the game for no other reason than I want to play it some more. Of course, the technical issue may very well be unique to my machine, but bears mentioning. As always, your mileage may vary.
Overall though, Gratuitous Tank Battles is shaping up to be everything I’ve honestly hoped it would be as a spiritual successor to GSB. And for a relatively low barrier of admission, ordering the game nets access to the beta, which in turn will update as fixes and improvements are rolled out. The game looks and feels great thus far, allowing for a laudable amount of options and gameplay opportunities that serve to make it a solid contender for your time.
Collecting is one of the few acts that separate the average from the connoisseur. At least, that’s what I believed growing up. Collecting, the solitary act of gathering something in a particular series or pertaining to a certain topic seemed to be something I naturally attuned to because it allowed me to amass a ton of stuff. Certainly enough, such a myopic term as “stuff” doesn’t nearly carry true the appropriate tone for what exactly I happen to be getting at, but with any luck, it will.
I collected almost the entirety of the Star Wars Action Fleet as a kid. Saving allowance, doing extra chores around the house or just outright begging when the mood and opportunity struck saw me garner a cornucopia of toys that I’d proudly display atop my dresser – it soon expanded to anything related to Star Wars. Period.
My room became entangled and choked by vast reminders and homages to the original saga and if I had the extra money, extra being anything that hadn’t already been mentally earmarked to be spent on candy or comic books, it went right out of my pocket and into George Lucas’. As I grew into my teenage years, I never quite made the mental separation that there was probably a reason maybe one or two girls talked to me in a given year and even less swung by my house. But then again, the collection always seemed to generate a mixed series of responses.
Fellow boys who would come over at the time would see the collection and be impressed, not just by the sheer volume of iconica, but the fact that it was quickly apparent that I really liked Star Wars. It struck me as odd that other kids my age didn’t have a fascination with something along similar lines. Why not find something you love and obtain as much of it as possible? That was my initial thought process growing up, but as I began to put two and two together (and if I ever hoped to lose my virginity sometime in my young life), it was time to put the toys away and focus on collecting something else.
So, I focused on video games in addition to the relatively usual books and movies. I lined my shelves, desk, dresser and really any flat surface capable of accommodating the slews of media as the ranks of content swelled. As I grew into my late teens, my plethora of dreaded Stuff had reached near critical mass and if it hadn’t been for two simple acts, it all may have imploded in on top of me.
The first was leaving for my junior year of high school at military school. You tend to realize what’s most important to you when you can only carry so much. With the rest staying at home, I more or less forgot what I had stockpiled collectively and focused on what happened to be most important to me. It was a rude awakening, but helped narrow my field of view in regards to acquiring masses of junk I wouldn’t, realistically, end up needing.
The second was a grand act of theft on the part of a child belonging to a woman my dad was seeing at the time. While I was away, he ventured a peek into my room and cleaned out a majority of my collection. Video games, DVDs and books were taken and he was subsequently robbed as well in a cruel twist of irony. I try not to hold grudges, but that is one of them.
Then again, possessions are fleeting. It’s perhaps the hardest lesson anyone learns because it revolves around the fact that nothing we own lasts or remains with us forever. It lends to the simple belief that no matter how hard we try, there is little uncertainty to the fact that everything ultimately ends.
Point being, I’ve long since moved on from collecting Star Wars toys, which have long since been sold to the ravenous hordes of fellow geeks amidst dark, Blade Runner-esque marketplaces such as Craigslist and eBay. My books, thanks in large part to my iPad, have been whittled down to a smattering of a dozen or so physical copies. And the last holdouts of my film collection have all but been made obsolete by the ready access to content Netflix, Hulu Plus and ripped content to my computer.
The narrowing of Stuff has since soothed a good portion of mental encumbrance I feel – keeping things around I invariably don’t need. Besides my video game collection, which seems to be up and coming on the list of things to be culled, I’ve found myself focusing on experiences as opposed to hoarding.
Much to the chagrin of my fiancé, I still have an incredibly large amount of video games. Not because it’s a holdover from my childhood or having matured into some ridiculous man-child. But because it’s one of the few forms of medium content I still catch myself gravitating towards after all these years. Everything from the Nintendo Entertainment System Era going forward has its place in my gallery of games.
Granted, I’ve long since parted with the Atari Stuff out of the simple fact that a majority of it can be emulated on the PC now to a degree. And keeping hardware in the small home we share that outdates me by roughly a decade was starting to weigh on the otherwise diplomatic relationship I share with the woman I’m set to marry. So, without a real adieu, I parted with them - sold to the hordes on eBay.
What fascinates me most though, was the Atari was out of the house, I didn’t really think about it anymore. It led to a small existential crisis for me.
I began struggling with understanding myself because I was terrified I was moving away from the little things, namely my love for video games and everything about them, that had defined me in my mind as a person. My appreciation was shaken as I bought into the idea that maybe I was getting too old to be playing games. I was in my mid-twenties, balancing writing about video games with working in the IT field. Perhaps I was just bored.
My backlog was overflowing with games still in their original wrapping and I felt like I was falling behind to the point that my retirement would consist of nothing but trying to justify completing all the games I’d invested so much in over a good chunk of my lifetime. I debated selling my entire collection and starting from scratch to refocus my efforts – hopefully inspiring my love of games all over again.
But then, as I was going through all of my games one day, I picked up my copy of Fallout 3 and it hit me like a mini nuke to the pants. I was over encumbered. Not so much physically, as I had slimmed down so much of my belongings over the years, but mentally.
I had built up what my game collection was in my head so much that the sheer lack of time I had to play all the games was eating me alive. So, it dawned on me to slowly focus on what I wanted to play, when I wanted to play it. Being a freelance writer, I was able to pick and choose a majority of my assignments and given that I’m no Jim Sterling, the odds of me being sent a review with a deadline were, shall we say, perilously low.
So I started to take my time and play, enjoying a game to its fullest like I was when I was a kid. If I didn’t want to rush through a game, I wouldn’t. However, if a game offered up droll content, then I’d pushed to the end, write about it and then part ways from it. I’ve long since felt the weight of that mental burden lift and perhaps saved myself from being filled with scorn over something I should have nothing but love for.
Certainly, mileage may vary, but I went from the kid who had to have everything to garnering significantly more happiness from the experiences I’m afforded. Books are great to read once, a movie might fill the void on a lazy, rainy day and no doubt, I’ll run through a game once, if not twice or more. But Stuff is just that. Stuff. You can’t take it with you when you die and you only have so much open space in whatever living space you have. Use it all wisely, lest the Stuff end up over encumber you, because you only get so much time to relish it all.
Call it a first world problem, but finding an MP3 player that actually fits in with a lifestyle has proven to be obtusely difficult. By that, of course, I mean a device that’s usable while also survivable in the generally rough days that tend to occur on a daily basis for me more often than not. Amidst my eye for thriftiness, I attempted to nab something that could fulfill those two simple requirements while slamming against the break wall of my wallet and leaving my bank account relatively unscathed.
Happening on a Groupon for a Riptunes MP3 player weighing in at a paltry $25 dollars, I thought my problem had been solved. Acquire a device that can travel with me in the car, in the gym and at work should I need to be confined to a server room for any stretch of time. Seemed easy enough that these three elementary desires could be met for a fraction of what an iPod or Samsung MP3 player typically cost. Hopefully, the Riptunes device would save me not just money, but the problem of being cut off from my music when my HTC Glacier lacked cell signal or battery power.
Unfortunately, what seemed like an impeccable buy quickly turned into a case of feeling like I wasted $25 that should’ve gone towards a more reliable MP3 player. Ripping open the packaging, I quickly evaluated my purchase. The weight made it feel flimsy and the screen had arrived pre-scratched for my convenience. I was already a bit disheartened, but given the cost of the device pressed on in hopes that its overall usability would sway me. Insult would quickly be added to injury with all the vigor of a bucket of salt on an open wound.
Let’s go through the advertised features and break down each one for ease:
Features
- 1.8-inch color display
- 4GB capacity
- FM radio with 20 pre-sets
- Quality voice recorder
- Customizable equalizer with seven pre-sets
- Built-in rechargeable battery
- Doubles as removable USB storage disk
The 1.8-inch color display, which is slightly larger than a 1.54-inch iPod Nano screen, quickly proves one solid fact – technology or not – it isn’t always size that matters. Yes, the screen is bigger than the smaller, major consumer electronic device offered by none other than Apple, but the Riptunes screen looks horrible. The colors are poor to the point that my eyes would have trouble focusing in certain lighting and it looks closer to an 8-bit display on a Windows 95 PC than what I would expect from an MP3 player in this modern age.
Did I mention the screen shipped to me scratched? I just thought I should casually toss that reminder in there.
Moving on to the 4GB capacity, which proves to be one of the few saving points of the device, does admittedly allow for a bit of storage. It should be more than enough for anyone savvy enough to understand the menu system to create a few cohesive playlists to use when you’re driving to or from the office, hitting the gym for a bit or just trying to wind down for the day with a private session of music. The problem though is the menu is hardly intuitive and will leave anyone, even IT professionals, struggling to get inside the mind of the developer behind this device to understand what the hell they were thinking.
It’s virtually unnavigable and the frustration will become quickly apparent when trying to simply turn on a song. By the time you finally do, you’ll either be overdue for whatever it was you were trying to accomplish or burned out from dealing with the device to the point of going back to the age old idea of whistling while you work. No device, especially an MP3 player should require such abilities to simply do what it is designed to do sans flowchart. But that’s just what happened.
More often than not, I would end up defaulting back to my phone in the car; office or wherever I was that had a dependable power supply for my lovely Android device. Not that my choice was utterly untenable, but because it became a matter of time versus desire to get the damn thing to do what I wanted it to do – play music.
Even when I did, the sound quality was subpar at any given time. Whether I hooked it up to the aux cable in my car, used my Altec ear buds while running or gave my Beats headphones a go, the sound quality is consistently terrible to the point of audiophilic rape. I’m almost certain that prisoners at Abu Ghraib didn’t endure such assaults on their ears. And ultimately, it ends up leaving other features feeling hollow and broken because I really don’t care whether or not I can set 7 different equalizer templates if all of them end up sounding like complete garbage.
So, while I don’t blame Groupon, I do blame myself for picking up this technological travesty that is so far on the opposite end of the Spectrum of Usefulness from the Death Star that it boggles my fucking mind. After all, for $25 more I could’ve nabbed an iPod Shuffle or put the same amount of money towards a Nano, which looking back I should have, then I’d have a device I’d genuinely be happy with as opposed to a damaged, flimsy piece of junk that will most likely end up in the trash before it ever heads out into the great big world with me again. At least the Death Star would’ve allowed me to destroy a planet or two before a single flaw caused it to crumble to pieces as opposed to shipping right out of the gate with more problems that a Windows release pre-service packs.
Final Verdict: Avoid at all costs
Modern Warfare 3 proves to be the definitive title in the hit series.
SOE’s online Star Wars title gets a massive update.
Few people have heard of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and even if they’re gamers, they can be hardly blamed for that since it can be relatively obscure to those both outside and, occasionally, inside the industry. Yet, the AIAS is responsible more so than any other organization for advancing the agenda of the interactive entertainment community by seeing that video games are recognized for their artistic values and few developers know the synergistic collide between art and games quite like Blizzard. Well, this week the AIAS Board of Directors welcomes Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce to their ranks.
The coolest mod you’ll see all day.
Nintendo proffers and lopsided amount of 3DS content this week.
GOG puts up a bunch of great Kalypso titles that shouldn’t strain wallets.
Tropico 4, a refreshingly fun game that was otherwise plagued by unacceptable buggy stability errors.
Blue Void Studios sets out on Kickstarter to fund what may very well be the next great First Person Puzzler: Blink
Method Pictures unveils the latest trailer for Helljumper, a series of shorts to be set in the Halo universe.
