I’ve been looking around for some good hockey simulator game and SHL was one of them because I used to play in 2004 when it was a is prime.
SHL is humorous ice hockey game where you choose tactics, formations, aggression levels, transfer in new players and win great prizes.

The game kind of lost is shine since they didn’t really improved it since there initial release and with all those FB game and html5 game it kind of seem outdated.

What the game is about ?

You’ve been hired has a coach for a Senior hockey team and you must train them, set-up there line, recruit new player and prepare the game plan for each game.

Your goal has to go to the top of the conference to be in the top team and win various tourney to show you team domination.

How your team rank ?

Your team is ranked based on a pyramid system

Each conference have 3 leagues these leagues are separated by section and division. When you’re in the top 4 you go up a division and if you in the bottom 4 you go down a division. They are some exception (like when switching league).

There a manager standing too, so you can see how you rank compare to other managers, your number of victory, goal and against who you won influence that standing.

How to play

First thing you should do when you start playing is to set up your line to have your best player for line 1 & 2 and to remove missing player from the line up. We will talk about the specific in another post.

combo box instead of dragging the player in the right line, very old school.

Once your line are ready update you need to update your tactic, there 3 tactic to update and keep in mind your opponent can see them, however you can change them in game with the advance tactic and the other players don’t have access to that.

Playing style
The playing style depend mostly on the ice quality, some say its depend on your team strength too.

The math is simple :
Fast Ice – european style
Normal ice – possession
surface water : Dump and chase
Slush:Dump and chase
Poor Ice: possession

Instruction
The other tactic is the the instruction, is kind of a rock paper scissor vs. the other team where attack beat defence, defence beat counter attack and counter attack beat attack.

Aggression
And the last not the least the aggression level depend on the referee, basically I use normal all game except when Stan Dupcomic is the referee, for him I use Psycho.

There other nice feature for the time that other hockey simulator have picked up, like training and making friendly game with your friend or challenging other player to a game.

SHL is a old school simulator it was nice when I played it but now it kind of old, the interface feel like 1999 and there not much to do except setting up your team and checking the other team game to prepare your tactic.

More on SHL :
-(Comming soon) beginner guide
-(Comming soon) training guide
-(Comming soon) cash guide

Webpage : seniorleaguehockey.com

Disclaimer: I’m not gonna do another review that describes everything about the game if you want one go here or there. It’s a simple impression about the game, what I liked, what different from other similar game (in this case Clash of Kingdom).

First impression

Before going in the detail, it want to give my first feelings while trying the game.
While the game might look like a Clash of Kingdoms clones they tried harder to make some dynamic different, Koram did a better job that they did with mythopolis and some features in the game are different from Clash of Kingdoms.

The basic

You get to chose between 4 tribes, this might change in the future, there seem to be some other city that might be used like London (the angles or Saxon perhaps) , Constantinople (former roman empire),  Barcelona (for the arab maybe even though it’s historically later that they took Spain) or maybe even Athene (Greeks)
You can read about the barbarian invasion on wikipedia, it’s actually very interesting to see how they come up with all those tribes.

Features

Instead of going through all the feature I’ve decided simply to point out what make the game fun and what new compare to a really similar game CoK.
While at a first glace, it may seem that Idomitus is a Clash of kingdom clone, when you play it you realised that while the fondamental of clash of kingdom, they changed a some feature that changes a bit the game and the outcome of it.

First there no premier elected
Instead of having to run for a premier, the premier (rank X) have to be in the tops player and have a lot of development point.
While there seem to be no apparent for of leadership, leadership is somewhat acquired to meritocracy since you can only increase rank when you achieve a certain level of development. Like in the time of barbarian the strongest will lead the tribes.

I wonder how this will play out, I’ve been a premiers and some player already tend to ignore PO and do crazy stuff, I think well organized guilds will tend to influence more the direction of the kingdom.

Guilds may seem like legion but they can actually have power over city changing rank and taking care of city boost.

The other thing that strokes me is in the beta (or alpha not sure) they were no way to form alliance, I wonder if they will lead it like this. Will I think alliance and peace treaties are a good way to prevent unfortunate attack in the game, removing it in a barbarian invasion setting actually make sense. I these time of darkness the tribes often plot and betray each other in other to get more land and riches.

In the new black market you can buy scrolls and exchange items.

There some change in city management too.
Now instead of city governor, a guild must invest in a city in other to gain control of it and get the privilege to issues city boost and post message.
There are many other notable change, like the way your heroes gain xp, the arena fight (for last man standing and Historical campaign now have an entrance) and the black market has some cool new feature like you can trade you older weapon.

In the Historical campaign and Last man standing you now have to choose which entrance your hero take determining who they will fight.

I actually liked the game and the fact they gave us free gold to play with for the beta testing. You can tried it here and here some link if you want to check some review:

http://www.thirteen1.com/2011/06/13/review-indomitus/
http://games.bbgsite.com/content/indomitus/index.shtml

I wrote awhile ago about Clash of Kingdom and promised you a nice review about the came.
Clash of Kingdom is another game about the historical  The Three Kingdoms  period (like Three Kingdom Online and Heroes of Three Kingdom) but the way the game is played is much more innovative that the previous one.
For most of you that come from a typical mmorts, clash of kingdom come with a fresh taste to it.

The main reason I love this game is the strong community sense to it, the perk to accelerate your manor development, the fact that if you lose a city to another kingdom you can rebuild it elsewhere.
When you start Clash of Kingdom your are given the choice of 6 kingdom, shao, ma, dong, meng, jiao and tao. If you’re joining a weaker kingdom of a server that recently started they might have some extra recruiting speed bonus and resources output bonus, but usually all kingdom start almost the same. You have to customize your main hero and after that your have a simple tutorial that shows you the basic of the game.

The tutorial show you the basic of the manor buiding and city development.
Manors are the equivalent of city/village in other mmorts with 3 majors difference :
It can only be built in city where you kingdom have conquered a city and you can only build if your rank is high enough, and the number of manor is dictated by your level of empire of one research.

Manor is your economic and military center, this is were you collect resources  and build unit.
You can create manor with every kind of building in it but it usually better to specialized you manor into one of the following : resources, silver or troops building.

The city is where you can improve your kingdom city, all the attribute of the city help all the player who have manor and troop in it, like improving the market help you get more silver from the residence in the city.
This is where you can recruit heroes, buy gear, and do various game to win some resources and xp.

For those who played Three Kingdom online know about the heroes but the heroes system in Clash of Kingdom is much more polished and historical heroes is available for everyone (gold and non-gold player)
Each heroes have a set of stats (power, leadership, intellect and power) that grow differently depending on the heroes and some heroes have a special abilities that increase the effect of some city command or increase the fighting power of some type of unit or that can be use on a battle field and cause more damage.

The kingdom is the center of the game, your main goal is to help your kingdom grabs the whole map. There are many ways to help your kingdom you can improve your kingdom cities, give to the landmark, give to your legion, participate to battle to grab new cities and to fight other kingdom, vote if (your in the top 70% of your kingdom) even run for premier if you’re in the top 50 of your kingdom.
The election system is pretty neat from what I saw in other mmorts game, the top 50 players can run for the premier and the top 70% player can vote for there premiers of there choice.

The premiers have the power to name other officer and the city governor. The officer can use special city and kingdom command to increase the effect of city development command and to increase attack when attacking cities.
The fight between kingdom can almost have an epic proportion, it’s can got up to million of soldiers fighting each other, heroes formation, skill, unit and settings can make a huge difference when fighting.  The battle takes place in a flash animated battle with all the troop deployed by individual players. Even if the battle is simulated, decision made by the player and kingdom prior the battles have a huge impact. Like if most of the other kingdom troop are set to attack the smallest and most of your kingdom target largest you will have a huge advantage on them even if they are in a larger army.

-

Other
There much more in the game, there a bunch of sub game like bulleye and the quiz and other battles like historical battle and battle royal that you can do to receive more items without losing any troops.

If you liked other mmorts like Three kingdom online, Travian or Tribal war you should definitely give Clash of Kingdom a chance.

This week  in bad game friday it’s actually more of a weird game friday.
I came across a funny game recently on http://www.indiegames.com called osada which I don’t know if we can really label it game since it more about making music with what you got on the screen.

It’s more about founding what to click and making music along the way some jamming are pretty neat and funny sometime you just have no clue of what happening and click everywhere.

The game is pretty click (about 30 minutes) and you’ll probably just play it once.
But for the heck of it it will be a weird and fun ½ of your life that you will never see back

Indie game review :
http://indiegames.com/2011/04/browser-game-pick-osada-amanit.html

Official site : http://amanita-design.net/osada/

There will be an upgrade to v2.6 on most server on the 22th of march, I think S1, S47 and S48 already got that upgrade.

There many nice feature to keep the game interesting even though I was king of losing interest since nothing was happening on my server.
If you want a detail review you can check this post on the Koram forum.

There a lot of nice thing there my favs are probably going to be the hermit house, the super field and the capital outpost.

The Hermit house:

 
Finally a way to get epic without paying,  you can recruit them in the hermit house and you have to do quest before recruiting them.
Note : You could get epic heroes by fighting epic guardian too but I think you already knew that…

Super field
There will be new field spawned around the map, 18f (like the item we talked about here) 17f and 16f. They are heavily guarded (min of 50k of troop there).
The number is really limited, and I think that suck because you will have a whole server fighting for them and I think that stink for the gold player who paid a boat load of money from the previous event to get a 18 farm fields city.

Capital outpost

(more in this post : TKO update Preview III:Capital Outpost )
This upgrade was almost necessary since the number of city is capped and not everyone was able to get those capital city.  There a forum post that explains well how it work.

There other bunch of nice stuff in this upgrade: new unit, better unit management, league features,  etc …
What did you like and what do you hate about this upgrade ?

Since my wedding and honey moon I haven’t write a lot (only one post …)
but I’ve been trying some new games recently and played less of the others.

Clash of Kingdoms

I’ve started playing this in November in server 2, I’m greatly surprised by this game on many level.
First the game really focus on helping your kingdom, giving to the landmark, improving the cities, fighting other kingdom on the battlefield to grab other cities, which creates a dynamic much more fun than other MMORTS.
The draw back is if you have a bad premiers or if people are not involve enough in the kingdom you might think the game is going nowhere.
Another thing I really like is that they removed a bunch of stuff that annoying in MMORTS. Plundering, building new city … stuff that I found boring in other mmorts.
That game definitely deserve a reviews and probably a few guide, more to come in 2011.

Lord of Ultima

While the game is fun, I basically stopped playing.
Managing 30-40 cities is boring and take too much time.
Yeah the barrack take like only half-hour to build level 10 but for the 5 first level which takes 5 minutes to build you have to build them and wait. Yeah you can go to other city and to the same thing there but after cycling through your 40 cities 2 hrs you get bored pretty easily.
And another thing I liked in this game, that I realized was somewhat lame after I saw what other players do with it.
I am talking about the fact that if there no castle in your city it cannot be taken. So what happen, when a small league dominates a continent a bigger league want to enter the continent, it simply put city everywhere there free land on the continent but without building a castle then with they cram some city with troop, turn them into castle when they have enough troop and conquer all there small league castle.
The game is still fun though but not has much when I started playing, I’ll try to post some strategies and tips I found around the web later this year.

Grepolis

(a Ikariam clone)
I barely play (about a day or two), so here what I discovered about this game.
You start on a Island and you build you village like other MMO RTS. You can build boat to attack other island and there a special “resources” that the gods flavors.
I honestly even played that much (about a day or two) you can always check other sites review for more info.  There some features that seem nice, favors of the god, building ships and having only your island to worry at the beginning, but since most other game have either these feature to or better graphic I tend to try other game first. Maybe you’ll see something about this game later …

Mythopolis

I stopped playing the alpha test, basically because the game was the same has TKO not that a bad game it’s just I don’t have time to play like 6 games at the same time…

Tribal war

I’m currently playing a turtle there, sometime I’m a week without playing.
This one is pretty old school they something have new features but not on my server.
I’ll check if I can post a list of tips I found on the wed later.

Three Kingdoms Online

Still playing this one, after getting squash when we merged.
I’ve posted a few articles on koram forum and I probably will post a few things about the merge.
You can check my article here.

That all for today folk I hope you doing well and happy gaming for 2011

Today I’ve decided to review a game that I recently started to play about a few months ago on server 11.

I founded the game via gamasutra article Interview: The Rise of Free-To-Play At EA

Lord of ultima is a mmorts like most of the game I’ve reviewed here, the basics of the game are like other game of the genre but some of the mechanics are somewhat different and that make the game much more enjoyable than most of the other.

Game Synopsis

Your Kingdom have been destroyed, open the vast ocean rise a new world to conquer and unite under your banner and be proclaimed the lord of Ultima. Your not alone to share this dream and other lord will try to take your land away from you.

Game Features

Managing your city

While the basis might be the same LoU innovate the way you can build your city.
Instead of having to build yours buildings in one predetermined place (like Tribal war) and instead of having a limit for the number of certain building or resources field (like travian) you can build anywhere in your city.  The only thing that limits how many buildings your city cans have is your town hall and higher your Town allH is more building you can build.

The Town hall is the center of your tech tree so to speak. Each time you level up your town hall you get access to new building.

Each city have resources node scattered around your city than can improve your resource production of surrounding building. And the way you place your building in your city influence other building too, like barrack will reduce recruitment speed of military building, or building cottage will increase resource output of resources building.

Being able to build more than one market makes the market management much easier and the trade interface is simply awesome compare to other games. You can ask other city to send you a type of resource to the city your currently in, so if your building in one city and you go “oh crap, I need more wood” you just go in the trade interface and sort which city have some wood to give away and some trade cart free and request the amount you need. I simply loved it.

Building your army

Lord of Ultima shine from other mmorts  with the management of the army has well.
At first It seems to be a mix of tribal war and travian, You have to build barrack to increase the number of unit you can recruit (like the farm in tribal war) and you have to have the food to keep those troop alive (like Travian and tko).
The of unit are different too, you have the traditional infantry, cavalry and siege weapon but they added new type of unit attack, divine and magic. You can even build ship and carry some troop to attack another city when they are on another continent.  
An interesting thing about military building and unit are that there a defense unit for almost each building. So you have a defensive siege weapon and a defensive ship.
In your city you can upgrade the wall to increase your unit defenses like in other game, but unlike other game you can build multiple tower and trap in some special tower slot. These tower boost the defense of a specific unit and city guard.
EA really tried to make the game enjoyable for both casual and hardcore players, in order to be taken a city must have a castle and to be able to capture plunder or raid other city you must have a castle. So If you just want to lay low and do your thing you should not build a castle and support big player instead.
There so much more to talk about the game, like you can plunder dungeon even if you don’t have a castle, or night protection or that its very easy to build a lot of cities. But all these features will go in another post.

Like and dislike

Like

Lord of ultima bring a lot of new feature and strategies that make it better than most mmorts.

Graphics
One thing that caught my attention is how well the graphic are that because there using the unity plugin, the graphic of the game surpass other game of the genre. I hope we will see more game using the plugin to bring browser game graphic to another level.

Town placement
Other feature I really liked in LoU is the way the town placement is done which is much more fun than other games. It a little hard to grasp at first.

Castle
I like the fact that you can decide when you ready to go to war, sure they can plunder you but you are sure that they won’t take your city.
Build queue of 6 building instead of 2 and more if you have a build minister
The build queue it’s much bigger than other game.

Night protection
Depending on the server time your attack power will be reduce.
The time of the protection will be from midnight to 8h00am server time.

Orb of peace
If you are willing to pays some diamond, they’re a really cool item that can prevents attack on you cities. How it work its that when you use it you have to wait a few days before it activate and when it’s activated you are protected from all attack.

Dislike:

Forum

At least they have an in game forum but the way it’s buillt it’s really clumsy and hard to get by compare to the Tribal War one.

Placement
Placement was hard to grasp at first: every building may affect other building, which make you swear when you realized it later

There are too many units : five type of unit  infantry, cavalry, magical, divine and siege. Add boat into this (they are like siege unit that evades trap) that somewhat hard to manage.

There only one race: Unlike travian or Three kingdoms online there no race everybody has the same unit which can be a good thing too since everybody is equal.

Many resources: there are five type of resource (wood, stone, iron, gold and six if you count mana) which is harder to manage than the typical four (3 fro Tribal War). But that not that much of an issue except you have to plan to have a building for each of them (or a city for each of them) and manage that you have enough of everything.

Too many cities
It’s too easy to have cities which make the game really time consuming when you get to more than fifteen cities. By the time you finish building stuff for all you cities the city you started with might be done and you have to circle through them all over again. Since some buildings are really fast to build and cheap (like the barrack) you have to circle through you city and build has many you can, the build manager can fix that if you use diamond but that can be annoying why not make building build instantly under one minutes like in clash of the kingdom, you can speed up you build if they’re less than five minutes to go.

Diamond
Like Three kingdom online or Travian,  those who are willing to put big buck in the game really have an edge over other player.
Extra resources, building and military manager, special item can be bough with diamond the equivalent of gold in Travian and Three kingdom online.

Overall Lord of ultima is a great game if you’re a MMORTS fan, it time consuming but worths trying.

1- Everybody have the same unit, kingdom, ability.

Everybody have the same unit has you there is no kingdom, town or tribes that can fit your playing style, it’s all the same. It can be a plus though, making all the player perfectly equal.

Like all MMORTS, but since it’s easy to get to 20+ villages, when you get there you can put/waste a lot of time on this game.

3- Boring the first week (nothing much to do)

No quest system and not much stuff to do the first week, some plundering once BP end but that’s it.

4- Not notified when BP end

Maybe it’s just me but I wasn’t notified when my BP ended

5- No quest

No quest/ tutorial bonus which gave a chance to have troupe at the beginning.
There a tutorial but it’s really basic and don’t give much.

6- Low Graphic quality

Graphic are pretty static compare to other game, the game is older though so that probably why.

7- More hardcore than other game of the genre

There seem to have more hardcore player than other game and they are pretty aggressive, since the only way to grab a city is to take someone else city, hardcore player seem to have no tolerance for noob.

8- No chat

It’s a pretty common feature that most game have but tribal war doesn’t have it.

Update : It’s does have a chat but you have to access it from the main page, there seem to be no in game chat.

That’s all,I hope you liked my like and dislike of tribal war. Don’t be afraid to comment what you liked or hated about the game.

1- Tribes Forum

The main strength of this game compare to other game is it forum.
It’s interface is really smooth, it’s integrated with the game and it’s easy to add in game links like a player, a village coordinate or a tribe.
The tribe forum can be shared with other tribe, which make it easy to communicate with your ally and sisters tribes. A feature that other game don’t have.

2- Rim

I like the idea of a second chance and the unique RIM feature is really neat for that.
When new players arrive or when a player lose all is villages they are placed around that main cluster far from the main cluster where all the action is happening.

3- Moral

Moral is a great way to help newbies or poor soul that have fallen to the RIM.
It’s give them the extra defense that might make bigger player leave them alone.

4- Cheap premium account compare to other game

the premium account is about 6$ (4 Euros) for a month compare to the gold system of TKO and travian that pretty cheap.

5- Can build the same building in queue

That always annoys me when I can`t upgrade the same building twice.

6- Each server have slightly different setting

That make you enjoy the game differently when you restart. Try new unit in one or make you think twice about your upgrade in another.

Cool tools

7- Battle calculator

There a in game battle calculator, really nice to see if you will win you fight or to check your potential casualties.

8- Noble planer

A recent add-on that tell your tribes mate which city your are going to take, the noble claim have a expiration date which remove the claim once the date arrive.

9- TW stats

TW stats is a awesome tool. To planing your attack or checking if a alliance make sense or just to check if a player stop growing this site give you all the tools for that.

10 – Everybody is equal (almost)

The premium account give a edge but not that much compare to what it give in other games. Everybody have the same unit.
You can still be unlucky and start surrounded by a really strong tribes or warmongers.

Koram announced that they have baked a new game based on the Greek mythology named Mythopolis.

I started playing the game today and my first impression is :
Is Mythopolis a new game or just Three Kingdom online with new clothes ?

The same game really ?

Just when starting the game you get to chose your zodiac sign (equal region in TKO), your city (which is the equivalent of the kingdom)

If we break down each city with there TKO kingdom we got

Athen = Wei Sparta = Shu Troy = Wu

The units are the same it just that the name has changed.

Mytho

TKO

Oasis are the same except the unit defending are mystical creature instead of yellow turban

Building are the same there name have changed and the tech tree is a little different.

Mytho

TKO

The concept of placing your building is the same too. This list can goes on and on, it’s kind of normal since the game seem to be built on the same game engine. Let check what’s different for fun

New and Improved – Top things that have changed compared to TKO

1- New interface

Mythopolis arrive with a brand new interface, easier to manage, faster access to yours heroes and less cluttered than the one from TKO.

2- New quest section

There a brand new quest section and its much easier to understand than the one from tko,
Quest are grouped in category and each category you can complete a group of quest from that category, they are even bonus when you complete a certain group of quest that let you can give a gift to your facebook friend. More information on that on the Mythopolis forum : Quest System

3-New heroes management

Instead of having to go the the unintuitive left menu for hero quest, you directly access all quest and feature related to the hero directly via your hero menu.
So the training labyrinth (tower of trial), the zodiac (faction map), stadium (arena) , meet your hero (previously in the governor house in tko) are all the same place so you won`t forget anything about heroes, how many times did I forget to meet my heroes for the extra xp.

4- They made a little cleanup

The messengers are gone, I’m not sure if we should be happy about it but it give the casual player more chance against hardcore player.
There no more daily quest, quiz, book of heroes and faction quest. Which is good for those who can’t log everyday, The one I really happy about is that they removed the book of heroes, it was really annoying having to go to your governor house get the name and paste it in the quest section every hours.

5- Facebook

They made a huge facebook integration, quests that ask you to invite your friend for bonus, gift for your friend when you complete a group of quest and ask your friend for help to accelerate your construction.
While the concept is great, something I actually felt that I was harassing my friend, even facebook blocked the games because I was posting too much stuff with it.
More information on the forum: Facebook Special Interactive Function

Other thing they left out

There seem to be no King of the hill, no emperor road and no escort guardian.
They are probably replaced by something else that we have yet to discover.

MYTHOPOLIS might be pretty much a Three Kingdoms online clone with a greek setting, but the new and improved interface, the cleanup might make the game worth it and give a new experience.

Did I miss anything in the new section ?
So what are you though about the change ?