Art 4 Gamers

Type: Strategy-Based
Creator: BCartFall
Release Date: N/A
Official Website: http://www.starkingdoms.com/
Other Resources: http://www-und.ida.liu.se/~andli382/skguide/menu.html, http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/theluciaproject/SK/calc.html
Console: Computer/Online Game

Basic Info:
StarKingdoms is about universal domination and being the strongest of all the kingdoms in the universe. The players can choose different planet types that give different bonuses. Once a kingdom is created, they are either randomly put into a sector, or they can make a group/join a group with friends. A sector is up to 20 kingdoms. Each hour your kingdom will grow or lose networth. This is basically how many points your kingdom has and how strong it is. During the “hour change” you will get money, and units/buildings depending on whether you built some or not. Once into the game there are many options. Players can explore land, build buildings, train soldiers, and train higher level military units. The other options have to deal with other kingdoms in the universe. Exploring land will give you more land over a 24 hour period. Building buildings will allow you to build on any land that does not have a building on it yet. Training soldiers will give you soldiers in a 24 hour period. Soldiers are used to make higher level military units. Other functions include sector politics, and sector/alliance forums. The politics allow you to vote for a leader in your sector. They will get kingdom bonuses as well as being able to change sector message/banner/tax/login message/title and much more. The forums allow you to communicate with the other people in the game. This makes the game a lot of fun. More information on the game can be found in the game manual at the official website.

The Review:
This game is very enjoyable and the community is mostly nice to new players and help them out. There are a lot of strategies that you can play and communicating with fellow players is a great way to learn these. The basic concepts of the game are great. The things a player can do are very easy to understand and makes the game very fun. The game manual on the website is very effective and teaches almost everything. Other websites will have tools that help a player during the game and also teach them strategies and almost everything they need to know about StarKingdoms. The many options that a probe can do make this game more fun because there are many different ways you can hurt a kingdom without just attacking them. Overall, this game is lots of fun and easy to understand.

Rating: 9/10

Type: RTS (Real Time Strategy)
Creator: Blizzard
Release Date: July 1, 2003
Official Website: http://www.blizzard.com/war3x/
Console: Computer

Basic Information:
There are 4 different races to choose from, the Undead, Night Elves, Orcs and Humans. Each one has different units and different heroes to battle with. Each race will have different abilites on their units which allow for more complex gameplay and more in depth strategies. The game also has many different maps that allow you battle on different terrain. Another feature this game has is the ability to go online and play people from around the world. This is called battle.net. Although many people play the standard Warcraft game, also called melee, there are many player created maps all over battle.net (further on referred to as BNet). There are thousands of player created maps that are hosted on the BNet server. An example of one of the most popular maps is Defense of the Ancients. It is almost more popular than the original melee games of Warcraft.

Melee Games Review:
As mentioned before, the melee game has 4 races each with different abilities. Although this allows for extremely complex strategies, it is also very hard to learn all of the aspects of Warcraft. All the units, and all the buildings will first confuse a new player but once a player learns them, they will be able to begin playing the game to its fullest extent. Another part of Melee games are team melee games. These games allow for even more strategy by combining forces with your allies. The ladder system on BNet counts your wins, losses and ties for melee games when you us the quick play function. This way, you can check how you are ranked among all other players. There are also Tournaments almost everyday of the week. These allow you to test your skills with certain regulations and restrictions. An example of a tournament would be a 1vs1 orc tournament. This would force you to pick orc as your race and you would not be allowed to choose an ally. However, as I mentioned, not a lot of people play melee games compared to before. This is still a great type of game for Warcraft and these kind of games were the reason Warcraft III was created.

Melee Game Rating: 8/10

Defense of the Ancients (DotA) Review:
The Defense of the Ancients map is an AoS or Aeon Of Strife. These types of games allow you to control one hero and fight against enemy heroes. It allows you to have up to 5 players per team and an additional computer player to control defensive towers and allied spawning units. The two opposing sides in this game are the Scourge and the Sentinel. There are many, many heroes to choose from as well as items. Some heroes are also very good at making combos because of their skills and specialties. The items also are only sometimes worth it for certain heroes. The point of the game is to defeat the opposing side by destroying their main building inside their base. The main building for the sentinel is the world tree while the scourge’s is the frozen throne. To do this, a team must destroy at least 3 towers and a barracks. The concept of the game is very easy but playing it and knowing the heroes, skills and items is the hard part. Items are an important part of the game. To get items you must earn gold in order to buy them. To earn gold you must kill the units that spawn from the enemies base, kill neutral units, or kill an enemy hero. The amount of gold from heroes varies upon whether they have a killing streak, or you do, or if you get more than one kill at a time. As I said earlier this is one of the most popular maps. The reason is because of the numerous strategies and combinations that can be used in this game. Also, the fact that people continue to update this map regularly tof ix bugs and add new things encourages players to play more.

DotA Rating: 9.5/10

Type: Role Playing Game (Real Time Battle)
Creator: Square-Enix, Disney
Release Date: March 28, 2006
Official Site: http://na.square-enix.com/games/kingdomhearts/kh2/
Console: PS2

Background Information: The second installment of the Kingdom Hearts series. The story is about a boy named Sora who wields the mysterious “keyblade” and destroys enemies known as the Heartless. In the first game, Sora is taken off his home in Destiny Island and is thrown into a world mysterious to him. He lands in a town called Traverse Town where he learns much about the keyblade and the Heartless. He journeys with two disney characters, Donald and Goofy, with many other Disney characters in the game including, Mickey, Merlin, Winnie the Pooh, and Alladin. At the end of the game, Sora defeats a powerful Heartless named Ansem.

The Review: The beginning of Kingdom Hearts II will be boring. There isn’t much action but it teaches you how to play the game and how the battle system works. You can select from three different diffulties depending on if you want a challenge or just want to play the game through on easy once. Later on in the game, it will be more interesting so don’t stop at the beginning. ^.^ The game has many new options and abilities for the characters but the game lacks extra bosses. Unlike in the first game, this one only has one extra boss. This takes a lot out of the game because once you beat the game there is almost nothing left to do. There are a substantial amount of minigames but more would be better. The story and plotline is quite easy to understand. There is nothing extremely complicated. The battle system is ok, but consists of much button-mashing than any real strategy if you are playing on beginner. The new gummi-ship building system takes away from the game. The original allowed you to build anything as long as you had blocks, while the new system requires you to have a certain number of missions completed to get more points. In the end, the game is still a lot of fun though. For those of you who enjoyed Kingdom Hearts I you will enjoy this. The game may pass by a little too quickly but it is still a great game to play and worth the time.

My rating: 8.5/10.