Rome Total War

Rome Total War is a RTS game from the Total War series.  The single player is about you conquering all of the Roman Empire and you are given a few areas.  The goal of the game is to control a lot of areas/cities and to be declared the Roman Emperor.  You get to manage multiple cities and build up your armies, but you also get to manage your armies first hand whenever you get into battles.  This game is very intimidating just based on its size, it starts in about 350 BC and you play through a couple hundred years of conquering, each year is divided into two turns.  Late in the game, when you control many areas, each turn can take a lot of time, especially if you don't auto-resolve battles (when one of your armies goes against an opponent's army, you hit a button so that the game randomly generates the results based on who had more and better men.)

When you play it, you get to learn a lot about the Roman Republic and how it functioned.  When playing through you are a major family from Rome and you can get elected to magistrative positions and the Senate assigns missions to you, if you complete them you gain popularity with them and if you don't, you lose popularity with them.  One of the big requirements to win the game is that you are the supreme ruler of Rome, so you must gain popularity through the way you rule and when you do certain things like defeat an enemy.

Overall I really like this game, mostly because it is a game that involves a lot of strategy and is really long and lasts for a while.  I also like how the game makes me think about everything and doesn't get boring even after many hours of gameplay.

See you next time!
Chauncey

Diablo 3 Will be Legendary

Diablo 3 so far looks like an incredible game, it will come out in America and Europe on May 15.  It is an action based RPG.  When you start you get to choose from so far 5 different classes including: Barbarian, Demon Hunter, Wizard, Monk and Witch Doctors.  You can customize your skills and spells and attach runes to them to make them more powerful.  There are also a few followers that you can hire (the Diablo 3 hirelings.)  You can also customize your hirelings abilities and what not.

One of the aspects of the game that I am most excited about is the game's promised auction house.  You can trade items that you find in-game in the auction house for either in-game gold or REAL MONEY.  Blizzard does take a small transaction fee whenever you trade items, they also take a fee whenever you withdraw money from Blizzard to get your actual money.  Don't worry, there is a whole bunch of security having to do with this aspect of the game, as it would be very unfortunate if you were to lose all of the cash that you played for hours to get.

I'm going to go a little more in-depth onto each of the Character Classes.

Monk - Monks are melee attackers, or physical, and they focus on having high speed, combos, aura, bonuses, and tactics.


Barbarian - Barbarians are melee attackers just like the Monks, but they are more brute force.  They use fury as their resource pool.


Demon Hunter - The Demon Hunter is a ranged attacker that specializes in bows and crossbows to attack.  They also have a lot of traps and some melee attacks that they can use (those are ranged melee.)


Wizard - The Wizard is a pure spellcaster, using arcane and elemental magic to do his bidding via a devastating array of offensive spells.


Witch Doctor - The Witch Doctor is a pure spell-caster that uses elemental magic, necromancy, nature magic, and alchemy.


I think I'm going to go download the beta for this game, I'll be choosing the Witch Doctor class!  Have fun if you play it yourself!


See you next time!
-Chauncey


Resources: http://www.diablowiki.net/Diablo_3_Basics

Call Of Duty

Call of Duty, or CoD is a very popular series of first person shooters.  The reason I'm generalizing it to just Call of Duty and not talking about the individual games as much is because all of the games are basically the same.  There are some minor differences, like how you unlock attachments for your weapons or how many prestiges you can go up to, but that doesn't really affect the game that much.  I used to play CoD and I used to be a huge fan of it, but then I started getting bored of doing the same things over and over again without much in the way of new feature in the games.

One other thing about CoD is the quality of the single player, or the lack thereof.  It is extremely incoherent as you randomly skip between countries that you are in and the character that you are playing as.  Most of the time, one has no idea what they are doing and just blindly follow the objectives that pop up on their screen.

Don't get me wrong, the Call of Duty series can be fun to play from time to time, but I just don't like that they have the same game published over and over again, and that you have to keep buying it, over and over again.  What I mean is, that it can have fun playing it for a couple weeks at a time, but I go months without even looking at any of the CoD disks that I own.

Minecraft = Awesome

Minecraft is one of my all-time favorite games as well.  It is a lot different from any game I had ever played before I played it.  It is a game based around placing blocks to build stuff.  There are three game modes: creative, survival, and hardcore.  Creative is when you get acces to unlimited blocks that you can place.  It is basically for people who don't want to spend forever to get resources just to build things.  Also some people use it to test there gadgets that they want to make in there actual games.  Survival is when you start out with nothing, you have to go around gathering resources and killing the baddies that try to kill you during the night and in caves.  This game mode is more of a game than creative.  Hardcore mode is basically survival, but the difficulty is set to hard and if you ever die you don't re-spawn (in survival if you die, you re-spawn and you cannot die in creative).  There really isn't much to say about creative mode.  I don't really like it just because of how there is no challenge, so I won't go into much detail about it.  This post will mainly be about survival, because hardcore is basically the same thing as survival but more extreme.

How to survive your first day of Minecraft

When you download Minecraft and run it for the first time, you will be in the middle of one of the biomes of Minecraft which include forests, deserts, swamplands, jungles, tundra, taiga, extreme hills, mushroom biomes, and oceans.  It is very rare that you spawn in an ocean biome, so you won't have to worry about that.

So, the first thing that you will want to do is chop down a few trees.  You can do this by walking up to them and holding down the left mouse button.  After you have chopped down a couple of trees, you are going to want to start crafting!  To do this you will first need to create wooden planks.  You can make wooden planks by placing one of the trees that you chopped down into the 2x2 box and click on the wooden planks that apear in the box to the side.  Now you can make a crafting table, arrange four planks in the four blocks like this.

Now that you have the crafting table, put it in the hot bar (bottom row of squares) and exit the menu by hitting escape.  Place the crafting table somewhere where you can acces it easily by right clicking where you want it.  Once you have created a crafting table, you will be able to craft many, many, many things.  I cannot tell you all of them, but I will go over the basics.  One of the first things you will need is a pickaxe.  Because you cannot obtain any other materials at this point, you will make it out of wood.  To do this you must first create two sticks, do this by placing one wooden plank on top of another like this.

You can then craft a pickaxe with the sticks and some more wood by arranging them like so

After that I would suggest making a shovel, you do not need to create a wooden shovel, but it will help you in the near future.

Once you have crafted those you will need to obtain rocks to make better tools and many other items.  You can either look for it on a mountain or in various other places, or dig down into the earth in a stair shaped manner, like I have done below until you find some, at the bottom of my staircase there are some rocks.

Once you have gotten some stone you can make stone tools to upgrade your wooden tools and you can make a sword and axe with the following recipes.

This is how you make an axe, it will be useful for cutting dow trees.

This is how you make a sword, you can use it to kill enemies that will attack you during the night or in other dark places

Here is how to make a stove, you need a stove to cook items.  Cooked Items are very useful for multiple things.  The reason why I'm making you make one right now is so that you can make charcoal to light up dark rooms and later to cook meat for eating.

Once you have your stove ready, arrange some wood and wooden planks like this to make charcoal.  Once you have your charcoal you will want to make some torches to light up the area, because night time is approaching.

Once you have your torches, you will want to place them all around your dug out staircase to a point where it is bright every where.  If you did not get a staircase structure when you obtained rock, you will want to make a hidy hole, to do this just dig into the side of a mountain or into the ground like so.

You will now want to close off the hole, so that no enemies can get to you.

This step is optional.  If you want to be extra safe, you can dig into one of the sides of your hidy hole so that enemies with projectiles (Skeletons) cannot get you.

Once you have done this, you are good to go for the night.  Congratulations, you survived your first night in Minecraft!

See you next time!
Chauncey

A n00b's Guide to Pokémon

One of the things that does interest me is Pokémon, especially the competitive battling aspect of it.  One of the things I like about Pokémon is that there is so much information about it that you can learn new things everyday, and it is still developing.  What I mean by this is that it is so complicated that you can learn new stuff about it constantly, but it is built so that you can still play it if you don't know everything.  So on the surface it looks like a simple child's game, but if you get really into it, it gets very complicated.  Some people like playing it for the actual games, which you can do with little to no knowledge about Pokémon.  Also, their is a big enough community of Pokémon players that if you need help or advice you can just log onto one of many forums about it and ask people questions.  You could even Google search it if you really wanted a fast answer.

As I have said earlier, there are two main parts of Pokémon, playing through the games, and competitive battle.  Playing through the games can be fun for a beginner, and even for the advanced player every once in a while, but the competitive battling aspect is what I am more interested in, as it is more complex and has more overall content.  For the sake of informing, I will go over the basics of both.

Playing through:


Pokémon games are divided into Regions where they are further divided into two games witch each have certain Pokémon that can be found in one game but not the other.  Some Regions are remade and some have a third game released after the first pair.  There are five regions this far, this translates to 10 games plus all of the extra games.  There is a third game out for the first 4 regions, which brings the total to 14 main games.  There are also 4 remakes of various games bringing the total to 18.  But there are multiple spin-off series games, such as Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, Pokémon Colosseum,  and Pokémon Trozei.  I'm not going to go to in depth into the spin-off games, because there are many of them and I have played on a couple of them.

I mentioned that there are five regions early.  These regions each have their own map and set of Pokémon.  Some of the Pokémon overlap/are available in more than one region.  Note, there is no overlap between 5th gen(another word for regions) Pokémon and any other region.  The regions are Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, and Unova.  The most recently released region is Unova, the released games from Unova are Pokémon Black and Pokémon White.  There is a total of 648 Pokémon since the release of Black and White.

By now you're probably wondering what is Pokémon?  Well, I'm finally going to explain what you actually do in the games.  So in the original games, Red and Blue, you started off in your room, and you could go downstairs and leave the house.  You could wonder around the city all you wanted, but it wouldn't be until you tried to walk into grass that the Pokémon Professor would try and stop you.  He would then proceed to bring you to his lab and let you pick from three Pokémon.  The options were Charmander (the fire type), Bulbasaur (the grass type), and Squirtle (the water type).  These were very rare Pokémon and could not find them in the wild anywhere else, so this decision laid out the base plan for the rest of your game.

If you chose Charmander that meant that you wanted a challenge or you liked dragons (Charmanders final evolution is freaking awesome and looks a lot like a dragon).  I say agressive because the first two gym battles, or boss fights (there are a total of eight in each region), the leader had a big advantage against you due to their typing.  At that point in the game, you wouldn't have much time to catch a Pokémon that would be strong against Rock or Water, the types of the first two gyms respectively.

If you sided with picking Bulbasaur, you were probably looking for an easy game, as Bulbasaur has a big advantage against the first three gyms and is neutral with the fourth.  Bulbasaur and its final evolution, Venasaur, are pretty defensive Pokémon and can't deal out as big of hits as Charizard, for example, can.  That doesn't mean that you can't OHKO(one hit knock out) all of your opponents, but it is something to keep in mind.

Finally there is Squirtle.  Squirtle is the middle man, he easily takes care of the first gym, but you cannot rely on him for the second and especially not the third, fourth, and some latter gyms.  He can deal out a lot  of damage, but he can also take some hits.  He is probably the second best for trying to have the easiest possible game, but you can also still have a challenge if you pick him.

After you decide on your starter, you then get challenged by a kid that you decided the name for at the beginning of the game.  This is your first battle!  It is pretty easy to win if you just keep using tackle, pound, scratch, or whatever attacking move your Pokémon knows.  You later get Pokéballs for catching addditional team members, and then you can go on the defeat all eight gyms and eventually the Pokémon League (aka the elite 4).

All of the games from the main series have similar plot lines, except for there are various antagonists that you have to deal with throughout the games, they are the only thing that prevents you from just sailing through the games in under an hour.  Also there are other various challenge that you have to conquer to complete the game.

I think that I have explained the games well enough at this point, so I'm going to now tell you about something called a Nuzlocke challenge.  These are very difficult and are not for n00bs.  What a nuzlocke challenge is is adding on to your game that you can only catch the first Pokémon on every area of the map that you encounter and that once a Pokémon feints (its HP goes to 0 in battle or out of battle) you can no longer use that Pokémon and must release it or place it in your PC.

I'm sorry that I did not explain many of the basic mechanics such as moves, levels and types in this blog, I will go in depth on them in the future.

Competitive Play:


For this I will assume that you have at least a basic grasp on how Pokémon works.  Competitive play is much more advanced than just playing through the regular games.  First off all, except for a few exceptions, of the Pokémon used in this are at Level 100, which would require a lot of work to get legitimately.  So people invent software to and hardware that allows you to edit your game and add Pokémon to your boxes and party, this saves a lot of time.  Don't worry, people still use Pokémon that they could obtain through normal game play, they just save a TON of time by editing their game.

Another way people save even more time is through creating applications dedicated to Pokémon battles.  The most popular application at the moment is called Pokémon-Online or P.O.  It allows players to create their own teams with a very easy to use interface and it allows them to do it without the standard hassle required with the actual cartridges.   For the purpose of this guide, I will only talk as if you were using P.O. and battling in the 5th generation.

There are a few mechanics of the game that I would like to point out:  IVs, EVs, Moves, damage, move order, type, weather, nature, ability, and type.  I wil give you a brief explanation of each.

Stats - Each Pokémon has 6 stats: speed, attack, special attack, hit points (or hp), defense and special defense.  The stats each are an integer value between 1 and 999, it is impossible to get to this stat without stat boosters, I will explain those later.  Stats are calculated based on the Pokémon's level, base stat, IV, EVs, and nature.

IVs - IV stands for individual values.  Each Pokémon has one for all of their stats (attack, defense, etc.) they are an integer value ranging from 0 to 31.  They effect the stat in a way that the higher the IV the higher the stat.  I will not go into too much detail about the odds of each IV on each stat and the formulas for calculating how much it effects the stat.

EVs - EV stands for effort values.  Each Pokémon can have a total of 510 EVs and a max of 252 in one stat.  You gain EVs from defeating Pokémon with higher stats in a specific area, like you would get 3 in Special Attack from defeating an Alakazam.  The stat goes up by 1 for every 4 EVs.  Most people have a split of 252 in one stat 252 in another and 4 in another, the extra two are useless.

Nature - Natures are a varyable that either gives the Pokémon plus 10% in stat and minus 10% in a different stat or they can have a neutral nature that doesn't affect them at all.  There is a nature that adds to every stat and subtracts from every stat and some various neutral natures.  Here is a chart that explains it very well Serebii Natures

Moves - This is one of the most complicated and simple areas of competitive battling.  Simple because it is simple to see that you select one of four moves and there isn't much math involved in doing that, but complex because there are hundreds of moves to pick from, and you only get to put 4 on your Pokémon, this creates huge numbers of combinations that you can pick from.  To know which moves to put on your Pokémon, you should first know which type of Pokémon you want.  By this I'm referring to five basic types of Pokémon.

Sweepers are the first one.  Sweepers are very offensive Pokémon that are meant to tear apart the enemies team.  They generally have very high speed and either physical or special attack.  This brings me to my next point, sweepers are divided into three categories: mixed, physical, and special.  Physical use physical attacks, special use special attacks, and mixed use both physical and special attacks.

Walls are up next.  Walls are Pokémon designed for taking hits against the opponent.  They have high hp and/or special/physical defense.  Walls also generally need a way of recovering their hp.  There are various moves for doing just that such as: wish, recover, etc.  Every team needs at least one physical and one special wall, to handle both physical and special sweepers.

Tanks are the third category.  Tanks are Pokémon that can both take hits and deal damage.  Tanks are not a necessary staple for a team, but they can be nice to have.  They generally have some high hp and moderate attack and defenses.  They can be used to take hits from sweepers that are both physical and defensive then destroy them do to their extrem fragile nature.

Spinners and setups are the fourth basic group of Pokémon.  setups are used to set up entry hazards such as spikes, toxic spikes and stealth rocks.  Spinners are used to spin away theses entry hazards.  Having a spinner is something that can be extremely important, to not take perpetual damage on switches and potentially getting all of your Pokémon poisoned.  Also having a setup can help you destroy your opponents team if they don't have a spinner.

Finally we have leads.  There are many different kinds of leads,  that all have their advantages.  I'm not going to go into too much detail about lead in this post.

So now that you know some of the types of Pokémon that you need on your team, you know that you need certain types of moves for them.  Like how you will generally have offensive moves on your sweepers and tanks.  And that you will have status inducing moves on your walls and sometimes tanks.  And that you will have setting up moves on your setups.

Weather - There are types of weather: hail, rain, sandstorm, and sunny day.  There are two ways to induce weather.  There are moves that do it for five turns (or 8 depending on weather or not you are holding a certain item) and abilities that make weather permanent.  Also certain moves are boosted in weather, like fire in sunny day.  There are many perks to the various weather things and I will go into more detail in a later post.

Damage - The damage a move does is based on a number of factors that most people don't need to know unless they want an accurate approximation of how much damage their move will do.  You also do not need to know the formula for it, because there are many programs online that will do it for you.

Move Order - Move order is based on two things.  First is move priority.  There are 13 tiers of move order most are 0 (the range from -7 to 5) and the higher the priority the earlier the Pokémon gets to take its turn.  If the two moves that are being used are the same then who gets to move first is based on who has the higher speed stat.  If they are tied, it is a 50/50 chance as to who gets to go first

Items - There are too many items to explain all of them, but they mostly give advantages except for a few that some people put on their Pokémon then use moves to switch them onto their opponents Pokémon.

Abilities - These used to be traits.  They are added perks that the Pokémon gets (sometimes they can be hindering).  Abilities are one of the big factors in setting certain Pokémon apart from others as Pokémon can only have a few different abilities.  There are some that are game changers and others that are virtually useless.

That about wraps it up for competitive battling for today, later on I will go into more detail about certain aspects of the game.  As you can see there are nearly infinite amounts of possible combinations of Pokémon and it is not nearly as simple as people often think.

See you next time!
Chauncey