Badge spotlight: Zilch

Fool's Gold (hard, 30 points) -- Earn 100 awards.

Many games on Kongregate have their own in-game achievements, which naturally serve as a convenient starting point for making Kongregate badges, either of the form "earn this particular in-game achievement" or "earn a total of X in-game achievements". However, the design goals for in-game achievements and Kongregate badges are often at cross purposes; the game designer wants people to play their game, so they have incentive to toss in lots of achievements, some of which may be ridiculously long, while Kongregate (as I've discussed earlier) is, I believe, better served by promoting a wide diversity of games, and of course includes the maximum for four badges for every game.

Consequently, Kongregate badges often don't match up to the in-game achievements. There are a few games (such as Arachnophilia and Vector Runner) where the in-game achievements conveniently translate directly to Kongregate badges, and it's not uncommon for there to be a hard (or, rarely, impossible) Kongregate badge for getting all of the in-game achievements, but sometimes some of the in-game achievements are simply unsuitable (usually because they're too long or grindy) for Kongregate badges, and this is a perfectly reasonable outcome too. (It even happens, sometimes, that the in-game achievements are too easy for Kongregate badges, as in the 3 Slices games.)

This brings us to Zilch. Zilch, which I reviewed here, is an entertaining little dice game, which serves as a nice little time-waster. (It is, however, the kind of game which is much better played a bit here and a bit there, rather than trying to sit down and play for two hours straight, which could get pretty tedious. The same is true of the Papa's Fooderia series, which is what I think a lot of the people who complain about those games are doing wrong, but I digress.) It's simple but cleanly designed, and has a good mixture of strategy and luck to keep you playing.

I actually started playing Zilch before it received badges (always a rarity), and enjoyed it, but I could see that the game had many in-game achievements (120 in total), and it was a pretty obvious choice to create a badge which required earning a certain number of the in-game achievements. At the time, it was not long after the badges for Amorphous+ had come out, which also had 120 in-game achivements and had received a Kongregate impossible badge for attaining all of them. So I was quite worried that Kongregate would go down the same path for Zilch; as I discussed in my review, this would have been a bad decision, since there are several extremely long and frustrating achievements (and overall, I felt that the in-game achievements weren't designed as well as they were in Amorphous+).

Much to my relief, however, the Kongregate hard badge ended up being for 100 achievements, which in my opinion hit pretty much the perfect spot. You had to play the game a fair amount and with some amount of skill, and get at least a few of the more difficult achievements, but you could earn the hard without having to do the worst achievements in the game. I think it represented an excellent compromise, and while it (naturally) took flak from both sides, the super Zilch fans who thought that all 120 would make for a great badge and the people who found Zilch too boring (probably because they were trying to do it all in one sitting) and thought 100 was way too many, it really was a very reasonable badge level.

In conclusion, balancing the design of in-game achievements with Kongregate badges is often a tricky act; there are certainly games with well-designed achievements which make a good starting point for badges, but there are also games with poorly-designed achievements which Kongregate is probably better off ignoring entirely. Still, I think that Zilch demonstrates that the balancing act can be pulled off successfully, even if you can never make everyone happy in the process.

Badge spotlight: Draw-Play 3

Preschool Artist (medium, 15 points) -- Complete level 18.

Today I'd like to post something a little different; rather than talk about badge design principles, this will be a lighter (and shorter!) post highlighting one of the oddities in the Kongregate badge system.

The Draw-Play 3 badge is unique: when it was originally created, it was actually a badge for Draw-Play 2. I reviewed Draw-Play 2 here, but if you don't want to read that review, suffice it to say I was not a fan. Many other Kongregators felt similarly, apparently, and over time the game accumulated a fairly large amount of negative comments and its rating dropped to a pretty low level (I think it was around 2.50, although I don't remember exactly; I'd be hard-pressed to say that rating was undeserved, though).

Rather than, say, try to fix the obvious shortcomings in the game, Eggy, the developer of the game, instead responded by replacing the game with some writing about how Kongregate was full of awful people and didn't deserve his game (again, I don't really remember the exact details, but as I recall that was the general gist). This left Kongregate in an awkward position -- it was the first time that there was a badge on the site which was no longer available (although not the last time; I'll probably revisit this problem in the future).

Fortunately, the time that all of this transpired, Eggy had released Draw-Play 3, a sequel which did in fact improve dramatically on Draw-Play 2, so Kongregate elected simply to transfer the badge over to Draw-Play 3, which neatly solved all of the problems -- Draw-Play 3 was probably deserving of a badge anyway, so this gave it one; people who had already finished Draw-Play 2 didn't have to play any more of the series if they didn't want to; and Eggy got attention for a much better game instead of its worse predecessor.

I am often astonished by how petulant developers can be when it comes to badges. Yes, it's certainly true that badges can often draw negative attention to a game, but badges are still something that mean tens of thousands, at least, of gameplays, and that will translate directly into money for developers. While Eggy's reaction was probably the most egg-regious (sorry), he's far from the only offender; I was certainly disappointed in both TaroNuke (DJManiax) and mastermax (Ultimate Assassin 3) for the way they responded to complaints about the badges for their games.

Despite there being several opportunities since then for Kongregate to employ this solution, this badge remains the only badge to ever be moved in Kongregate's history. Probably the best opportunity since then was Caesary, which received badges but then was pulled from Kongregate for legal reasons; although the possibility of shifting the badges to another similar MMO was suggested many times in the forums, Kongregate declined to do so, for reasons that weren't entirely clear to me. Perhaps in the Draw-Play case the move was fair because it was by a game of the same developer, but moving badges to a game by a different developer could end up being seen as being unfair to one (or both) of the developers. Still, I certainly think it's generally a reasonable solution, and I wouldn't object if Kongregate decided to do this in the future.

Badge spotlight: Realm of the Mad God

Naked and Famous (hard, 30 points) -- Earn 400 fame with a single character.
To Kill a God (hard, 30 points) -- Complete any 7 dungeons with a single character.


Having just finished Realm of the Mad God (by which I mean, gotten all the badges), I have some thoughts that I'd like to write down, so this post is going to be a little different than the previous ones -- it's more of an in-depth look at this particular game and its badges rather than generally applicable lessons (although I hope there will be at least some useful thoughts). Overall it's a very interesting, if flawed, game, and I think the badges match that.

So let's talk about the game itself. Realm of the Mad God describes itself as a "co-op fantasy MMO shooter", and I think that's about as good a description as you can get in four words, but let's go into a little bit more depth. At its heart, Realm of the Mad God is essentially like a classic 2-D "bullet hell" shooter, where everything on the screen, friend and foe alike, is pretty much constantly spraying bullets in some form, except that now it's massively multiplayer; up to 85 people can be in a "realm" at any given time. Realms are quite large, so it's quite easy to wander off by yourself if that's your thing (although the area with the toughest monsters will pretty much always be populated), but finding people to group with on an ad hoc basis is also quite easy (especially in the area with the toughest monsters). The game even makes this even easier by allowing you to teleport to anyone else in the realm instantaneously, with the only restriction being a short cooldown before you can teleport again. The graphics go for the retro-pixelated look, and, as mentioned earlier, the game has a fantasy theme -- the typical fantasy classes are represented (wizard, warrior, archer, priest, etc.) which meshes somewhat awkwardly with the shooter concept, in that even sword-wielding classes still attack their enemies by shooting at them (although with a small range); not quite sure how that works.

By far the most distinctive feature of Realm of the Mad God is that when you die, your character goes away. You don't just respawn in some safe location with everything intact, or maybe with a small experience penalty or having lost some of your equipment; no, you start over with a new character at level 1. (You do have a very small vault in which you can stash some equipment which a new character can use, but any equipment on your character at the time of death is permanently lost.) This is certainly not atypical for a shooter, but in a MMO-type game, it's highly unusual. The game claims that this isn't so bad, since leveling from 1 to 20 (the maximum level) is something you can do pretty quickly (maybe half an hour once you get used to it), but this is only half the truth at most -- reaching level 20 is nowhere near maximum power. After you reach level 20, the next step is to find potions which can permanently increase your statistics, one point at a time, until they reach their maximum values, and to find the best equipment possible, and this process can take quite a long time indeed. So if you lose a really powerful character, that can be many hours of work lost (and even half an hour is nothing to sneeze at).

Now, by itself, I think that "permadeath" (as the game generally calls it) is a good feature -- it's certainly a bold design decision, and I definitely like games taking risks like these. This is true even though it's really easy to die quickly -- a couple of seconds of carelessness in the wrong place is more than enough to seal your fate. Although one key is always sufficient to immediately teleport you to safety, certainly my reflexes on that key were not always fast enough to avoid my demise (and there are certainly things in the game that are capable of killing you instantly). Sometimes you can even be slain by things outside your control -- while the game generally does a very impressive job of maintaining good performance despite what must be pretty heavy demands on the server, occasionally you will get a spike of lag which can cause a lot of enemies to appear at once, and this is certainly capable of causing an entirely unearned demise. But that's not what I see as the flaw with the permadeath system.

The thing that frustrates me about the permadeath system is quite simple -- in a game like this, you'll naturally have to figure out what enemies and situations you can handle, and pretty much the only way to do this is via trial and error. The game gives you precisely one piece of advice on this subject at the beginning: "Stay near the beach at first. Harder monsters live inland." Everything else, you'll need to figure out by yourself. (It's also true that the game gives you quest monsters, which are generally appropriate to your level; however, in later levels, going after the quest monsters will often lead you through areas which are way too tough for your character. So this is a mixed bag at best!) Certainly, once you've learned how difficult a given situation is, it's relatively easy to navigate through the world, but obtaining that knowledge comes at a price -- and that price will take up a pretty substantial chunk of time, and become increasingly frustrating as the game goes on, since the cost of error only gets larger the better you do.


So this brings us to the badges. The first thing I find unfortunate about the badge design is that both of them require achieving a given feat in a single character. Given the issues discussed above, I think it would make a lot more sense to have one of them be a single-character badge and one of them be a lifetime achievement-type award, so that earning the badges isn't quite so dependent on avoiding death. Ths game certainly has an obvious option for this -- upon attaining a given amount of fame in a given class, you're awarded a star, with more stars coming at higher fame levels, and these stars stay forever. So you could easily set a badge which requires some amount of achievement in all classes (and if you're particularly bad at one class, you could easily balance that out by doing better in another class). I think somewhere in the 30-35 star range would have worked nicely; it would remove a lot of the luck and frustration involved in getting the two existing badges.

Moving on, each of the two individual badges is also problematic. The first requires you to accumulate 400 fame on a single character (after you reach level 20, the XP you would have gained is converted into fame instead; you can also gain fame by completing quests, dungeons, and so forth). In and of itself, this is certainly entirely reasonable; for instance, one can easily imagine a badge for getting 400,000 points in survival mode in an ordinary single-player shooter, and this is pretty much comparable. Unfortunately, the way that fame works in Realm of the Mad God is kind of strange. Up to approximately 240 fame, fame accumulates at a quite reasonable rate -- you can probably reach that threshold with a level 20 character with an hour or so of playing around in low-risk areas. Above 240, though, the rate at which you gain fame slows dramatically, so that even if you start hanging out in extremely dangerous areas (which, of course, increases the odds that you'll get killed and have to start all over again), it will take you many hours to reach 400 base fame; I never got particularly close to this threshold, because dying after putting in such a large time investment got very frustrating.

However, when you die (which is when the game actually awards you your fame), your character receives additional bonuses for accomplishing various achievements during your lifetime. Most of these achievements, however, you won't get just by playing the game ordinarily; there are a few, such as the accuracy bonus, but most of them are for doing unusual things (such as not killing any cubes). If you do know that they exist (which generally means looking them up in a FAQ) and are willing to do them (which generally just makes the game slightly more tedious), however, they're pretty easy to get, and you can accumulate enough so that the bonuses can easily double your fame earned. So, at this point Greg's principle #4 applies: given a choice between earning 400 fame naturally, which takes forever and is by no means an easy task, or looking up the multipliers, grinding a character to 200 fame quickly but tediously in such a way as to get these multipliers, and then deliberately dying, the choice is pretty easy. Unfortunately, it's just not a choice which results in a particularly enjoyable gameplay experience.

The second badge (which is, at the moment of writing this, the 8th-least earned badge on Kongregate, and for good reason) requires a player to complete a certain number of dungeons. At the outset, it originally required all 9 dungeons in the game at the time (a 10th has since been added), but after player outcry, this number was lowered to the current 7. Even at that threshold, though, it is a beastly hard badge. Dungeons are periodically dropped by monsters, and you (and anyone else nearby) can enter them and try to conquer the challenges within. There are a few relatively easy dungeons which can be handled by inexperienced players, but not enough to reach that number of 7 -- in order to get the hard badge, you are going to have to traverse some very difficult dungeons (the most difficult dungeon can easily kill even a very well-equipped and potioned level 20 character in an eyeblink). And the problem with the dungeons is that they make the trial and error process of learning even more difficult -- when these dungeons can kill even tough, experienced characters quickly, you'll naturally want to be quick on the escape-to-safety button. But the problem is, once you flee, it may be a long time before you get a chance again; while the lower-level dungeons are easy to drop, some of the high-level dungeons are extremely rare, and you could easily play for a substantial amount of time before getting the chance next. (Apparently, when dungeons were first introduced, they dropped as keys, and then the player with the key could use the key in a populated area, thus making it easier to find dungeons that you were looking for. However, this was changed at some point before I started playing -- I don't know which situation was in effect when the badges were introduced -- which means that finding dungeons, or players to help you with a dungeon, is now much more difficult.)

The other problem with dungeons are the multiplayer dynamics. Some of the dungeons (especially the mid-level dungeons) tend to drop in areas where there aren't generally a lot of people around, so unless you have a highly organized group ready to help out at the drop of a hat (I didn't), you'll have to do these dungeons solo (which is certainly doable, but especially for the mid-level dungeons can make for a pretty tedious experience). On the other hand, some of the dungeons drop in very heavily-populated areas, so if you can manage to find them (which is usually the hard part), there'll be plenty of people. So it's easy in that case to just hang back and let the more experienced people do the hard work, if all you want to do is get the badge. The worst is, of course, if you find a rare, difficult dungeon but there's no one else around to come in with you; in that case, you may have to watch your opportunity go by, as dungeons only remain open for a very limited amount of time. None of these really results in an ideally fun situation, though.

(As a sidenote, one pitfall in designing badges for MMO-type games presents itself here. While Greg and rawismojo, the current Kongregate badge makers, generally try to play through games before badging them, the extreme time demands of many MMOs make this rather impractical. As a result, they'll naturally solicit advice from the current players of the game. This has two drawbacks, however: first, you'll naturally be getting the most enthustiastic players of the game, so they may enjoy things that the majority of the Kongregate population won't; and second, since they're the most experienced players, they'll tend to underestimate the difficulty of tasks. As discussed above, many things in Realm of the Mad God become easy when you've accumulated enough experience, but to a new player starting out, they can be quite difficult. Even simply reaching level 20 on a character, which is pretty much a formality for an experienced player, is quite the challenge for a first-time player. So the fact that even the hardcore players thought that a badge requirement was too difficult was quite unusual, and should say something about how tricky this badge is!)

Anyway, behind it all, there is a lot of fun to be had in Realm of the Mad God, and I don't want this post to give the impression that I hated every minute I spent playing the game. But it did have enough frustrating moments that I can't say I had unalloyed enjoyment, either. And unfortunately, the badges definitely came down on the side of exacerbating the frustration. I think there's a lot of potential, but neither the game nor the badges quite reached that potential in the end.

Badge spotlight: GemCraft Labyrinth

Remind Me of the Babe (hard, 30 points) -- Complete the final stage of the labyrinth.

Today I'd like to talk about the length of badges. This is actually a subject I suspect I'll be revisiting a couple of times over the course of this series, but GemCraft seems like a good place to start the discussion.

I'm generally a completionist when it comes to games, and I like getting achievements (which is obviously part of what draws me to Kongregate and has kept me there). On the other hand, there are limits to my completionism; when, for instance, I looked at the achievements for Team Fortress 2 and saw the one for healing a total of one million HP as a medic, I decided I was perfectly content not getting that achievement, since I enjoyed the game, but not enough to play it several months continuously (all as a medic, even). And in general, for games on Steam or consoles, designers don't really have any incentive not to add ridiculously long achievements -- once you've sold the player the game, you might as well try go keep them playing it as long as possible. Kongregate, on the other hand, doesn't have these ridiculously long kinds of badges; it's #2 on Greg's principles of badge design, and I think it's an excellent idea. Part of this is because most Flash games don't support that kind of replayability, of course, but that's not the only reason. There's also the fact that, unlike in the Steam or console ecosystems, where achievements are created by the game developer, Kongregate creates the badges itself, and the strength of Kongregate is in its breadth, not in the depth of any single game. So it's better off encouraging people to play a wide variety of games. In addition, avoiding the super-long badges also makes it seem like all of the badges are attainable, which is a very appealing feature to a gamer like me. Overall, I think this strategy of Kongregate's is one of the best features of its badge system.

However, the flip side of the coin is easy to see. For any game with a well-defined ending (i.e., not counting games where the goal is just to get the highest score or build the biggest empire or whatever), awarding a badge for reaching the ending is pretty much a no-brainer -- the only thing really left to do is decide what difficulty it deserves. That's all well and good if we're talking about relatively short games, which the vast majority of Flash games still are, but what if a game takes a really, really long time to reach the ending? And what if a lot of that time is relatively repetitive content -- or does that matter? Does it still deserve a badge for finishing the game even in that case?

And that brings us to GemCraft. GemCraft is a wildly popular series; the first two installments both spent considerable time in the top 5 of the Kongregate rankings, and while Labyrinth comes in a little lower (currently #44 as of the time of this writing), it's still rated 4.37, which is an incredibly high rating by Kongregate standards. Plenty of people are huge fans of GemCraft, and while I've never quite been one myself (I've always preferred the free-build tower defense games to fixed-path ones), I certainly recognize that GemCraft is pretty much the pinnacle of fixed-path tower defense games. It's very solidly designed and has an extremely polished presentation; Labyrinth even borrows a few elements from juggling-based TDs, as well as eliminating the most annoying feature of earlier GemCraft installments, and it has tons and tons of depth, with a bevy of gameplay modes, additional challenges, and secret achievements all available to the GemCraft enthusiast. The game also does a good job of making a lot of different strategies available to the player, and encourages the player to develop a wide range of strategic options for dealing with different sitautions, which is another hallmark of good design.

But here's the thing: GemCraft Labyrinth is long. The aforementioned badge is for simply completing the game, and after completing the game there's plenty of additional content if you're crazy about GemCraft, but even completing the game takes a long time. There's a total of 165 normal levels, and they're not easy for an average player -- while you may get through many levels on your first try, some will take several, and this being a TD, an average level is going to take several minutes to complete, so you're looking at a pretty substantial time investment. Now, in fairness, you don't have to beat every level to reach the center -- if you follow the optimal path, in fact, you only need to beat 76 levels (but you'd have to know the optimal path by looking it up in a FAQ, since the game doesn't tell you). However, that's not necessarily going to save you time, since beating levels gains you XP, which makes your character more powerful, so if you take the optimal path, you'll be incredibly weak (relative to where you "should" be) by the time you reach the center of the labyrinth, so only a very skilled player (which of course takes a lot of time on its own) or one who has spent a lot of time grinding to gain more levels (which, of course, also takes a long time) could survive that way; I ended up playing through every level and still had a lot of difficulty in the later levels, so there's really no way to reach the end without some significant time investment. (Labyrinth also, to its credit, discourages mindless grinding; you can't just replay the same level over and over and keep gaining XP. Instead, you only gain experience by besting your previous performance, which requires either beating the level with harder difficulty modifiers, or simply playing better.) And of course 76 levels is still not exactly an afternoon's playtime.

So, is completing the game simply too long for a hard badge? This is a difficult question to answer, but my inclination is as follows. I think that the default assumption should be that any game worthy of badges should get a badge for completion, with exceptions only in the cases where the game is not very good (just above the quality threshold for badges) or completing the game is exceptionally tedious. While GemCraft Labyrinth is certainly very long, it is an excellent game, and while there is naturally some repetition involved in completing the game, the designers have done a good job of throwing a wide variety of challenges at you, so it's not horribly tedious. So in this case I think that having a badge for completion is justified. (And similarly, while it would certainly be possible, given the large number of additional achievements in the game past simply completing it, to assign a badge for further activities, I agree that not having such a badge is also for the best.)

That said, though, it's pretty much never that Kongregate doesn't add a badge for game completion to a game for which that's possible, and I do think that there are a few more cases where it would be a good idea -- it doesn't have to be many cases, but I think that more than nearly zero is quite reasonable. I don't want to go into a long list of badge-bashing, but just to provide an example, LethalRPGDestiny 2 is a game that I would have found tedious at 1/10th the length, and yet it still got a badge for game completion -- a much shorter badge I think would have not hurt anyone's experience, and of course people who still wanted to complete the game could. So perhaps a little more aggressiveness on the part of Kongregate in this field would be a welcome idea -- it would cut out some of the most unpleasant badges on Kong without really hurting anything.

Badge spotlight: Amberial: Nebulosa Realms

Spherical Ninja (hard, 30 points) -- Complete every level with an Ace and a Thunder finish.

I'm directing today's spotlight onto Amberial: Nebulosa Realms (reviewed previously here), but really I want to talk about an issue that's pretty pervasive in designing badges for Flash games (a problem that I'll bet people designing achievements for the PS3 or Xbox don't have to worry about), and that is that the quality of the computers that people use to play Flash games varies widely. Some people are playing games on decade-old machines or woefully underpowered netbooks, while others are playing on rigs capable of running Crysis 2 without any problems. As a result, a game that will play fine for some people may be unbearably slow for others.

For the majority of games, playing the game on a slower computer merely means that things happen more slowly, which (especially for fast-paced shooter-type games) can often give the player an advantage. Indeed, I will admit to deliberately playing some games on a slower computer to give me an edge on some of the more difficult badges on Kongregate. While you might think that this only would affect really graphics-intensive fast-paced games, it affects a pretty wide swath of Flash games, probably due to the fact that writing poorly performing Flash code is pretty easy. It even affects some games you would think wouldn't be dependent on processor speed at all (99 Bricks is my standard example -- although the game appears to proceed at the same pace on slower machines, your tower sways noticeably slower, which confers a significant advantage). And often even a small, nearly imperceptible difference in speed can make the difference between an impossible badge being attainable (at least for me) and truly unattainable.

If that's the only issue to worry about, the solution is pretty obvious -- play a game on a sufficiently fast computer that there's no slowdown (I would assume that Kongregate has such machines) and assign the badges based on that, and just accept the fact that people with slower computers have an advantage. This obviously isn't a perfect solution, but it's clearly better than the alternative of making badges targeted at slower computers which may be impossibly (or at least unreasonably) difficult on faster machines.

Of course, things are often not so simple. For instance, while most games have a well-defined top speed, some will just get faster and faster with computer speed; there are some games from 2008 on Kongregate which are nearly unplayable now due to the speed that they go on an average computer from today. Other games actually get more difficult on slower computers. In Vector Runner, for instance, while the pace of the action doesn't appear to get slower (at least it didn't when I tried on a slower computer), the controls get mushier, so having a faster computer is an advantage. There are even some extreme cases like Typing Ninja Hunter where the game is actually unplayable on a slower computer (the keys are so unresponsive in the boss battles that you simply can't get them to register in the allotted time).

The reason I've chosen Amberial: Nebulosa Realms as the spotlight for this discussion is that it has one of the most frustrating manifestations of this problem of all that I've seen. One of the requirements for its badge is to get a Thunder finish on each level, which requires beating a certain target time. On one level, I had a tremendously difficult time beating the target time, and it seemed to be due to one place where I had to wait a couple of seconds for a moving platform to reach me. It wasn't like there was any obvious way for me to catch it earlier, since merely saving a few tenths of a second wouldn't help; I would have to improve by a significant amount to catch it earlier, and that just didn't seem possible. So I looked on YouTube to see if there was some strategy I was missing. Nope -- they did the first part of the level pretty much exactly the same as I was doing it, and arrived at the moving platform at pretty much the same time, except instead of the moving platform having already left, it was just arriving! Apparently my computer was faster than the one in the YouTube video, causing the moving platform to be just faster enough to make the target time ungettable. So I finally resorted to somewhat questionable means -- I played a video in the background and suddenly, I could catch the platform and get the target time relatively easily. This is the only time I've had to resort to such shenanigans, and it's rather unfortunate that it was necessary.

As these examples illustrate, this is a pretty thorny field, and I don't think there's necessarily a clear-cut answer. I mean, it's clearly impractical to expect Kongregate to support 100% of its users' computers, given the wide diversity, so I think it's OK for Kongregate to sometimes say, "if you really want this badge, you might need a better computer". But where do you draw the line? Personally, I think it's OK to set the line at maybe a slightly below-average machine and accept that machines slower than that may have problems, but this may simply reflect my bias that the machines I've used for Kongregate (except for when I've deliberately played on a slow computer) are generally pretty middle-of-the-road. And this doesn't really solve problems for games like Amberial where the natural progress of computer quality may make the badge ungettable -- I don't think there necessarily is any solution to this problem other than to hope that game programmers take these issues into account when doing their timing routines!

One last note: This fact also tends to skew feedback on badges, and I think it's actually a pretty large factor. When people say that they found a (speed-based) badge very easy, my first thought is usually that maybe they just have a slow computer (or even a fast computer which they were doing a lot of other stuff on). I wish more people would take into account this factor when evaluating Kongregate's badge difficulty, since at least in my experience, it tends to be pretty solid.

Badge Spotlight: colourPod 2: dimensionPod

Fear Not the Darkness (impossible, 60 points) -- Complete all 24 missions.

I'm going to kick off this series with what I think is one of the most underrated badges on Kongregate, but first a little talk about impossible badges. As the name suggests, these are awarded for some of the most difficult achievements on Kongregate (although, fortunately, not literally impossible), and they tend to draw a disproportionate amount of attention. While there are (as of this writing) only 44 impossible badges, a new impossible badge, or the possibility of one, is always guaranteed to get a lot of discussion. As a result, there's a lot of pressure to get the impossible badges as right as possible, and this, in addition to the fact that most games simply don't have a task which is really suitable for an impossible badge, has resulted in a gradual decline of the number of impossible badges on Kongregate. This is certainly fine by me -- given that the impossibles, not surprisingly, often require an outsize amount of time to complete, I would certainly prefer having them awarded only to games which are really a great fit for the impossible badge idea rather than trying to make a greater quantity of not-so-great impossible badges.

Given how people like to complain on the Internet, for pretty much every impossible badge on Kongregate, you can probably find someone complaining about it on the forums: it's too easy, it's too hard, it's too luck-dependent, it requires too much pixel-perfect positioning, it takes too much grinding, etc., etc. Some of these complains have some validity, but I'd say that probably most don't. The impossible for colourPod 2, though, I don't remember anyone complaining about, which is in many ways the highest compliment a badge can get! (Of course, part of this is due to the fact that it's one of the older badges on Kongregate, I'm sure, but even still, the impossible for Pandemic 2, which came out at about the same time, is certainly not safe from criticism.)

So, why do I think this makes a good badge? Well, first, a brief description of the game: at first glance, it's a pretty ordinary shooter. You control an immobile turret in the center of the screen, and enemies ("fragments") approach from the edges, and you have to destroy them from before they hit your turret. The fragments can appear in either of two dimensions, so you have to switch between the two dimensions (by pressing the space bar) to be able to hit everything. Colored fragments will also appear, and if you catch them on your "lens" (mounted on your turret opposite the gun), you will gradually gain additional powers, with different colors conferring different powers. As you have some control over the colors that arrive, choosing your colors wisely is a very important skill.

Anyway, this badge has what I find by far the most satisfying quality in a badge: at first (in this case, because it seemed that the badge was so dependent on reflexes, which, as I've mentioned, are not my strength), it seemed truly impossible. Then, I gradually got better, and it seemed attainable, and by the time I reached the end, it almost seemed easy; although, of course, that was an illusion -- it was still hard! It was just that I had practiced so much that made it seem easy. And in fact, there are plenty of places where you can improve your skill -- for instance, since the game only very gradually introduces you to the different color abilities, there's a lot to learn in which ones are best in which situations, and which sets work well together. The other area where I really found myself improving over time was simple -- the game demands that you be doing a lot of things at once, and sometimes it will exceed your ability to do everything (probably true no matter how good your reflexes are, but certainly true for me). But as I went along, I discovered the key was triage -- not necessarily trying to do everything at once, but learning which things were the most critical and which wouldn't hurt me too badly, and this skill was definitely something I could see myself improving at as I played through the game.

As you can see at the top, the badge requires you to complete 24 "missions" (the game's name for various achievements), which is also a quality I generally like in a badge -- I tend to prefer badges which require a variety of tasks rather than one extremely difficult thing. Many of the missions simply boil down to playing the game well, but there are also many which require you to use or not use a particular color or colors, which adds an interesting layer as well -- they get you to experiment with abilities you may not have used normally, so you really get a chance to see the whole game.

In conclusion, then, this is why I think the badge is a solid one: The game itself was good (obviously a necessary prerequisite), the badge requirements were challenging but attainable (and you could work to get better at it), it really felt like it rewarded your ability, and it provided a good variety of different tasks rather than being completely repetitive. In some ways, in fact, this is the badge I'm proudest of; it's not the most difficult or rarest, but being in a category of game that I normally do poorly on, the fact that I was able to learn, gain experience, and improve my play to the level where I could get the badge really gave me a positive opinion of the game and the badge.

Announcing something new!

So I've been playing games on Kongregate for a while now, and in that time have accumulated a fair number of achievements, so naturally I've thought for a fair amount about the topic of achievement design. The achievements were what really got me into Kongregate in the first place, and I think the general quality of their badge design has been a large factor in keeping me there. In 2009, Greg McClanahan, the man who, at the time, was solely responsible for the badge design on Kongregate (now, he at least has someone to assist him with this task) and arguably the most visible person on Kongregate as a result (you will still find people who are under the impression that Greg founded and/or owns Kongregate), wrote an article for Gamasutra on the subject of badge design, and I think that the principles he lays out are really excellent ones -- I think it's contributed a lot to the success of the Kongregate badge system, and conversely, I think in the cases where he has produced bad badges, it's a result of (hopefully inadvertently) violating these principles. But other than that article, it doesn't seem to have been a system that's been thought about too much (as one can see from the wildly differing approaches to achievements on other platforms, for instance).

So I'd like to share a few of my thoughts with whomever is around to read them. I think the best way to do this is with a "badge spotlight": each post, I'll take a look at a badge which is particularly interesting or controversial, and talk about the issues around that badge's design, hopefully illuminating some more generally applicable principle. I've already written up a few, to ensure that this project gets somewhere, and will probably run to about 20-30 posts before I run out of ideas (or steam).

Naturally, the bad badges tend to get the most attention, and of course it will be instructive to look at cases where I think the badge process has erred, but I don't want to get completely into a negativity trap, especially since I think that would obscure the fact that the vast majority of badges on Kongregate are indeed well-chosen. So I'll try to also shine the spotlight on badges that I enjoyed and were particularly well-designed os that we can get some examples of what makes a badge good, as well.

Finally, a few words about my own preferences. I don't expect everyone to agree with these, of course. My own gaming strengths lie more in persistence and cleverness than speed, so I tend to prefer games which reward thinking and learning over pure dexterity. I really don't like achievements which require you to do something perfectly over a long period of time, since I find there to be nothing more frustrating than being great for five minutes and then screwing up at the end and losing it all. I'd much rather have a task with a lower cost of failure (even if it is overall harder), especially since that ties into my first point -- if dying only costs you a few seconds, but you have to try a large number of times, it gives you a lot more opportunity to learn and get better than if you have a smaller number of longer attempts.

Anyway, I hope this series will prove interesting to whoever reads it, and I also look forward to any feedback or other comments you may have!

Closing up shop

I always hate it when other places just stop updating without a proper notice, and here I've gone and done it myself.

Anyway, while I really enjoyed this project, I just haven't had the time to keep up with it lately, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to end it. I'd kind of like to get back to it at some point, but to be honest, I doubt I'll ever get the chance. Thanks for reading!

Dodge

Dodge contains all the ingredients to make a good Flash game: it's a simple, but interesting idea, and implemented well. The result is a game that's short, but satisfying; it's overall an enjoyable experience.

The basic concept in Dodge is clever (although I'm sure other games have come up with this idea before). It's basically a shooter, except you can't shoot -- the enemies can shoot at you, but all you can do is dodge (hence the title). However, the enemy's shots are homing, so if you dodge to the right place, you can kill the enemy with his own missiles. There's a total of 20 levels; the first enemies just stay put and shoot at you, but later levels introduce moving foes, exploding enemies, and teleporting enemies (which have a really irritating habit of blending into the background), so you'll have to stay on your toes to survive. You can refill all of your health between levels for the low, low cost of 25,000 points, which is quite a lot in the earlier levels but not too bad in the later levels, so as long as you remember to refuel when you're running low, you shouldn't have too much difficulty beating the game.

The presentation of the game is also excellent. The game is filled with pretty, pretty polygon effects, making it quite nice to look at, and generally operates smoothly (although there is some slowdown in the last couple of levels when the screen just gets completely full). The sound effects are pretty average; the music is a nice non-intrusive techno which complements the game well without being annoying. There's no save feature, so if you want to finish the game, you'll have to play all 20 levels in one sitting, but this is quite reasonable, as the game is not particularly long.

I'd be remiss, though, if I didn't mention one point which bothers me. The hard badge for Dodge is to kill 100 enemies without being hit. In general, I dislike badges which require you to avoid getting hit for a long period of time; since my game skills are more in persistence and learning than pure reflexes, this naturally does not play to my strengths. But, objectively, these are kind of annoying; the Frantic impossible, for instance, requires you to finish the entire game without being hit once; this is really annoying, because no one wants to spend 20 minutes playing the first nine levels only to get hit on the 10th. So, the existence of this badge seems like a poor choice. I would have much preferred a simple score-based badge; since your multiplier goes up when you kill enemies without being hit, this would accomplish a similar goal without being quite as annoying. (But, of course, this is not the game's fault -- the badge choice is entirely Kongregate's, as far as I know.) However, I (along with, apparently, quite a few other people) discovered that the best way to get this badge is simply to play extremely defensively -- merely circle around the perimeter and focus on avoiding shots rather than directly trying to kill enemies. The game designer responded by labeling this strategy "a BUG or EXPLOIT" and changed the game (by moving enemies closer to the edges) in an effort to make this strategy less viable. Obviously, changing the game after a badge has already been created in a way which makes getting that badge more difficult is kind of poor form to begin with, but this also speaks rather poorly of his testing efforts -- it's not like this is a terribly complicated strategy; if this is really not something he wants players to employ, he should have found it himself. Blaming it on people not "playing the game how it was meant to be played" seems like a poor response.

Anyway, sorry for the digression -- if you don't care about the hard badge, you probably won't notice this issue at all, and it shouldn't detract from the fact that Dodge is a pretty fun game to play, and quite pretty to look at. I'm not sure how much in the way of replay value it has, since there's only so much content in the game, but you should enjoy playing it through at least once.

N3wton

N3wton is, as you might not be able to guess from the name, a game inspired by Newton's Third Law. However, the classic E&M Pong aside, making a game based on a neat physics property won't always necessarily result in a particularly interesting game. While N3wton is by no means a terrible game, there's nothing about it that makes it really engaging, either.

So, the basic idea behind N3wton is that you control a mobile cannon, and there are various enemy cannons strewn around the stage. (Most of them are stationary, though there are a few moving targets in the last couple of levels.) You fire bullets at the enemies, and they fire back. When you're hit by a bullet, you get knocked backward, and the objective is to knock your enemies off the stage without getting knocked off yourself. You also suffer recoil when you fire a bullet, but your enemies, somewhat unfairly, don't. I constantly found myself forgetting this last fact and firing when too close to the edge, with predictably disastrous results. Gradually, various other elements are introduced -- stabilizing wells which keep you in a certain location, teleporters for yourself and your shots, and switches which have various effects.

Overall, the game falls into kind of an awkward gap. It's got some puzzle elements and some action elements, but neither is quite sufficient to carry the game on its own. There are some tricky shots that you have to figure out occasionally, but they're not terribly difficult; conversely, sometimes you'll find yourself in close combat with an enemy, but it's usually pretty easy to keep your balance. As a result, the game isn't quite satisfying on either level. There is one level which is much more puzzle-ish, but it feels kind of out of place with the rest of the game, and as a result is kind of confusing and awkward (though, if it were by itself, I would think it was pretty clever).

The graphics are pretty basic, as are the sounds. My opinion of the music swings from "interesting" to "really annoying", but, like so many other games, it does get repetitive pretty fast. There's a total of 25 levels, and each one is pretty quick, so it shouldn't take you very long to make it through the game. The game also has a couple of glitches; I found myself being shot through a wall more than once. All in all, N3wton is kind of a cute idea, but there's just not enough of a game surrounding it to make for a really interesting result. It's not an unpleasant game-playing experience, just one which is missing that extra element.

Bloons Tower Defense

Bloons Tower Defense is another game by ninjakiwi, the designer behind More Bloons (review here); there's also an original Bloons, but as it doesn't have badges, I didn't bother playing it. Anyway, apparently, having designed all this dart-throwing monkey artwork, ninjakiwi decided to make a tower defense game out of it, and the result is Bloons Tower Defense. However, while More Bloons is distinguished by its careful and clever level design, Bloons Tower Defense has none of that -- it's the most generic and bland tower defense game you could imagine, and as a result, it simply fails to be particularly interesting.

Anyway, if you've played any kind of path-based tower defense game, Bloons Tower Defense won't have any surprises for you. You have a few types of towers (but not many; only five) and each has a couple of upgrades. Balloons enter at one end of the path, and you have to destroy them before they reach the other end of the path; popping them gets you money, and you also get bonus money at the end of each level. Unlike your typical tower defense game, the balloons don't have HP; one dart or tack will pop them. However, the balloons do come in different colors. Red balloons simply pop, but when you pop a blue balloon, a red balloon comes out (so, effectively, they have 2 HP); this continues up the line to green and yellow balloons. (The bigger balloons also move faster.) Finally, there are white and black balloons, which are slower-moving and smaller, but also produce two yellow ballons when popped. There are 50 levels, each with an increasing number of balloons.

Bloons Tower Defense simply doesn't have anything that makes it stand out from the horde of other tower defense games that exist. Yes, the dart-throwing monkeys are kind of cute, but they don't make up for the fundamental lack of interesting features of the game. Once you figure out the basics of the strategy (namely, that tack towers are a bad investment), you should be able to breeze through the game without too much difficulty; there's simply too few choices to make it particularly challenging. The graphics are quite simple, although the dart-throwing monkeys are cute; there's no sound other than the sound of balloons popping, which could definitely use some variation, and there's no background music, either.

Overall, there are simply vastly better tower defense games than Bloons Tower Defense. In its defense, it does move the action along pretty quickly, so you won't really feel like it's a dreary slog if you're playing it to get the badge (like me!), but it's not really interesting action, either.

Thing-Thing 3

Oh joy, it's another Thing-Thing game. If you've read my review of Thing-Thing 2 (here), you can probably guess I'm not terribly enthused about playing Thing-Thing 3. But I'm currently in a period of working through some of Kongregate's older badges, which often means playing games that probably wouldn't meet today's badge standards, so unfortunately there'll probably be some mediocrity in the process.

Anyway, Thing-Thing 3 is not terribly different from its predecessor. You're in a basic platformy environment, enemies constantly assault you from all directions, and you shoot them. They appear able to randomly spawn from any direction, and, in contrast to Thing-Thing 2, they now carry guns, so now dodging them is more a matter of luck than anything else. Especially annoying is when they shoot you from offscreen and you can't hit them back. The levels are much, much larger than in Thing-Thing 2, which is definitely nice, but it's very easy to get lost in them, especially in level 2, where you have to find a keycard which is nearly impossible to find (I finally gave up out of annoyance and looked in the comments to find where it is). A minimap would be incredibly useful. Thankfully, the doors which require a certain number of kills to pass are gone, so that at least makes Thing-Thing 3 less annoying than its predecessor in one respect.

The story mode does finally have an actual story. It's not a particularly interesting story, and mostly it seems to prove that your character is about as intelligent as a box of rocks, but it does actually exist. There's also a survival mode, which operates pretty much as you would expect. The graphics are pretty much as basic as they were in Thing-Thing 2; both you and your enemies are built from a variety of mix and match parts. The sounds are your typical gun sounds, and the background music is so ambient that you'll barely notice it at all.

Overall, Thing-Thing 3 is perhaps slightly better than its predecessor, but it's still simply too flavorless to be really interesting. There's just not enough variation on the basic plan of shooting people to make for a particularly interesting game, and all of the challenge comes from the question of whether the enemies will drop health packs when you need them to. Overall, the game is not particularly long; there's six levels, of which two are boss levels; the last boss is incredibly annoying, since you spend 80% of the time just chasing him across the screen, but not terribly difficult, so it shouldn't take you too long to finish the game, but at least for me, it grew boring and repetitive long before I actually finished.

Feudalism

I know, I have a problem with badges. I played Feudalism II (review here), and I didn't really enjoy it, so why would I expect the original to be any better? Well, I didn't. But there were badges attached, so how could I not try it?

Anyway, Feudalism is not terribly different from its sequel (I always feel a little silly writing these reviews backwards like this). It's slightly smaller -- there's only four nations, so the world map actually fits on a single screen, and there's no skills for either yourself or your troops, so this takes out some of the already-paltry strategy involved in battles. You also can't enchant equipment like you can in Feudalism II, although random magic equipment does occasionally drop from enemies. Finally, there's no national champions, so once you've conquered a nation, that's pretty much all there is to do.

The basic mechanics are the same in the two games -- you hire an army, use that army to conquer cities, and then recruit troops from the new cities to continue your conquest. Better troops are found in more powerful cities, so you have to gradually work your way up the ladder, but once you've conquered one nation, then you have its most powerful troops available and should have an easy time with the remaining three. All the basic problems are the same in the two games, though. The battles themselves are so busy that there's really very little for you to do except stand and shoot your crossbow (or whatever ranged weapon you decide to end up using). You can use the occasional potion or scroll to help out yourself or your troops (tip: Scrolls of Rage are very useful). Much to my surprise, the gold is actually slightly better balanced than it was in Feudalism II; it was only after I had conquered four or five cities that I reached the point where I had so much gold that I could never possibly spend it all.

The graphics, sound, and lack of music are the same as in Feudalism II, and the interface is still riddled with typos and annoying features. (I was particularly nonplussed by the existence of a "forged bow". Maybe it was a cheap knockoff?) The autosave is still annoyingly squirrely -- once it completely failed to exist after I died, forcing me to go all the way back to my older manual save. This got me in the habit of regularly saving manually, which kind of defeats the purpose of an autosave. The game also has several glitches; dead soldiers occasionally remain upright and on screen after being killed, and dying on the second stage of a large city attack frequently froze my game entirely.

Overall, Feudalism was even less interesting than Feudalism II, but at least it went by relatively quickly. If you, despite having read this, are still interested in these games, at least try Feudalism II first; it is the better of the pair. This really has nothing to recommend it at this point.

(As an aside, it must be kind of an awkward situation for Kongregate when a sequel to a game that already has badges appears. Most games are sufficiently different that it's not a problem to give them both badges, but for games like this or, especially, Monster's Den (which I'll talk a little more about when I finally get the impossible badge), it seems a little silly to give out two sets of badges for doing essentially the same thing. There's no good solution, though; it's not like you can remove the badges from the old game, and simply transferring the badges to the new game also seems like it would be problematic.)

Whiteboard Tower Defense

I think I've been spoiled by the fact that my first encounter with Flash tower defense games was Desktop Tower Defense (review here), since it seems that every other TD game I play doesn't quite match up to DTD. Whiteboard Tower Defense is no exception -- while it does contain the one DTD feature that I think is the most innovative and interesting, the ability to build your own maze, there's still plenty of places where you can see that the design just doesn't quite match up to DTD.

Anyway, if you've played DTD, Whiteboard TD will seem quite familiar. Various critters enter the battlefield, and your job is to prevent them from reaching the exit. By placing turrets on the field, you can force the critters to traverse a maze, which makes their escape that much more difficult. Towers come in a variety of types, and can be upgraded to make them even more powerful, and boss critters come along once every so often; these have much higher hit points but a correspondingly higher reward. If a certain number of critters (depending on the difficulty level) successfully makes it to the exit, then you lose.

So, why does Whiteboard TD not quite live up to the (admittedly high) standards of DTD? Well, the first is juggling. In any tower defense game where you create your own path, juggling is a potentially hugely unbalancing strategy. (For those of you not familiar with the term -- "juggling" means, when the critters are about to reach your maze exit, you open up an exit earlier in your maze, and then close off the exit they're about to reach, forcing the critters to backtrack, and repeating as necessary.) DTD does a good job of recognizing this problem -- selling towers takes longer the more you sell, and since the waves come in continuously, you can't juggle indefinitely -- eventually your maze will fill up and you won't be able to open an exit anywhere without letting a bunch of critters out. In Whiteboard TD, however, there's no anti-juggling measures, so beating the game with juggling is embarassingly easy. I tried to keep my juggling to a minimum, just to keep the game interesting, but it's a serious flaw.

There are a bunch of other, more minor issues. There's only one entrance and exit, which makes maze construction a simpler affair than in DTD. Critters only come in three types (fast but weak, normal, and slow but strong), and you don't need to alter your strategy very much to deal with the different types. One clever feature of Whiteboard TD is that you can place electric floors, which go in the gaps between towers; this means that you're faced with a decision of whether to pack the towers in as tightly as possible, or leave room for some electric floors to slow down the enemies. This is a nice touch. There's also, however, not very much decision in which tower to pick; the increase in the price of the towers, as well as the increase in the rewards, is so rapid that at any given time, you really only have one viable choice for what kind of tower to buy. This eliminates a lot of strategic possibilities.

The presentation is kind of average -- the whiteboard motif is nicely executed, but it's been done before. The sounds fit the game well, although the whiteboard squeaking gets pretty annoying (I know, that's the point); the critters also do an adorable job of taunting you. There's no background music, just the soothing sound of your turrets firing at the enemy. The game also doesn't offer anywhere near the variety of challenges that DTD does -- there's just easy, medium, and hard difficulties, and they're all basically the same.

Overall, Whiteboard TD is not a terrible game; it was an enjoyable experience getting the badge. But it's simply overshadowed by Desktop Tower Defense in its genre; there's nothing that it really does better than DTD, and several things it does worse, so in the end I don't really see any reason to keep playing this when DTD is available.

Maze Stopper 2

I actually tried Maze Stopper 2 when it first hit Kongregate in September, but I was in full-on badge acquisition mode at the time and, since it didn't have badges, although it seemed kind of intriguing, I didn't really play too much of it. So, you can imagine that I was a little bit surprised when here, three months later, it finally gets badges. (And it's not like it's an API issue -- the API has been present since a few days after it was first uploaded. Have I mentioned that I don't understand the Kongregate badge process at all these days?) Anyway, Maze Stopper 2 isn't a game that will dazzle you with its glitz, but it's a very interesting and clever concept which makes for an excellent puzzle game -- one that will make you think, and one that can challenge you on several levels of difficulty.

Anyway, the basic concept of Maze Stopper 2 is quite simple. Your character, along with one or more foes, is present in a maze with some obstacles and a flag. The game starts with time frozen; when you start time, all of the characters will race towards the flag. You don't actually control your own character (or, of course, any of the other characters); all characters will merely take the shortest apparent route to the flag from their current position. However, you also have the power to add more blocks to the maze, which you can use to block the enemies from taking their shortest path, or, even more deviously, you can give the enemy a choice of paths, let them take one, and then block it off, forcing them to backtrack. (You cannot prevent any character from reaching the flag entirely, nor can you remove a block once it's been placed and time has started.) You can start and stop time at any time, so if you need to add a bunch of blocks at once, it's easy to do so.

In the early levels, you can place an essentially-unlimited number of blocks, but some levels also introduce a constraint on the total number of blocks you can place, as each block costs 1 mana and you may have a limited supply. In some levels, there are also powerups which speed up or slow down characters, and some levels also feature bonuses which grant you additional mana (although if enemy characters pick these up, you lose mana instead). Characters will not make any special effort to pick up or avoid powerups, so if you want them to grab something, you'll have to arrange blocks to steer the characters into them yourself. Each level is pretty short -- since the screen is not very big, there's just not that long it'll take for a character to make its way through the maze.

Simply beating a level is not too difficult; however, at the end of the level, you're rated on your winning margin. Merely winning only gives you one star; to reach more stars (up to the maximum of five), you have to win by increasingly large margins, which often involves constructing deviously complicated traps or mazes for your opponents. (In fact, in some ways, the maps where you have limited mana are easier to optimize than the maps where you have a large amount of mana, since there's a much smaller number of possibilities you have to consider.) The Kongregate hard badge is very well-chosen: you have to collect 100 stars over the 25 game levels, so you don't have to get a perfect on every level, but rather can try to optimize certain levels and leave aside other levels which may be too tricky. Getting the four- and five-star ratings can be frustrating at times, though, since often you'll need to stop time at just the right moment to place a barrier to thwart your foes, and if you miss you may have to start over again.

As far as presentation goes, the game is nothing special; the graphics and sound are pretty basic, and there's no background music, just some soothing forest noises. Overall, though, this is a solid enough idea that I don't mind the lack of flash at all; it's a very clever idea, and the individual puzzles are all well thought out. It'll require you to think, but does an excellent job of being challenging without being frustrating. I enjoyed this game very much, and would much rather see thoughtful, clever games like this get badges than overproduced but terribly-designed games like Epic War 2.

StormWinds 1.5

At first glance, StormWinds appears to be a pretty typical survival shooter game -- you buy turrets, then waves of enemies attack, and you shoot them with your turrets. In between rounds, you have the chance to upgrade your turrets. Overall, it seems like a pretty standard formula, and I don't really find a generic survival shooter to be that entertaining. However, StormWinds adds enough details to the basic formula to make a pretty interesting game; it's a nice lesson in how carefully crafting the details of your design can really add a lot to a game.

Anyway, in StormWinds, you first craft your defense by laying out your turrets. You typically have four or five slots in which you can place turrets, and careful consideration is important here. Some turrets are designated primary weapons, which means that they have a high enough rate of fire to use more or less continuously, while some are secondary weapons, which can only be fired once every so often (but usually pack a punch when they do); there are also support turrets which passively do useful things for the other turrets. Being able to quickly switch between turrets (since you can only be firing one at a time) is an important skill; it also means that there's not much point in having more than one primary weapon, except perhaps as a backup. Careful positioning of turrets is also important; high turrets are useful against high-altitude bombers and to lob projectiles on enemies from above, while lower turrets can be useful for attacking the less-protected underbellies of enemy ships. Forward turrets are more exposed to damage, so you'll want to stick something there which can soak up a lot of fire, and so forth. Turrets come in a wide variety of different types of destruction, and are often operated differently: some turrets are as simple to use as clicking where you want to shoot, whereas others lob projectiles or even fire guided missiles; these latter types are harder to use but can be quite useful in certain situations.

Once you've built your defense, the enemy comes in. There's a wide variety of enemy types, and not all of them can simply be shot. Many enemies have strong or weak points, so careful aiming is important; later, you'll encounter enemies which may be entirely shielded from fire from one direction, so having guns that can hit them from unexpected angles is not only useful, but necessary. Your turrets will take damage as they are hit by the enemy, and it's not at all uncommon to end a wave with one or more turrets out of commission entirely (though, of course, if all of your turrets are disabled, then you lose), so you'll need to plan for this contingency. Between battles, you can repair your turrets, buy new turrets, sell your existing turrets, or upgrade your turrets. This last requires your turrets to gain experience (every kill grants experience to all turrets currently on the battlefield); as your turrets gain levels, you gain upgrade points to spend on an upgrade. This often creates a dilemma about whether you should spend your money to buy a shiny new powerful turret even though it starts at level 1 again, or hang on to your older turret which has already gained several levels.

The game offers five campaigns, each of which contains 10 successive waves. Overall the game moves quite quickly; unlike many survival shooters, which tend to be pretty slow (possibly because of the popularity of zombies), each wave is pretty fast-moving and also doesn't last very long, so it won't take you too long to make it through the campaigns. One occasional nuisance is that you may reach the later waves of a campaign and realize that the mix of turrets you've gone with simply doesn't work; this may require you to begin the campaign again from scratch. (Should you be defeated, however, you just begin again from the start of the wave, so you can also try different tactics to see if you have any better luck.) However, once you've figured out which turrets make the best combinations, the game is actually pretty easy; I breezed through the last campaign, which is supposed to be the hardest, without too much difficulty at all. In addition to the campaigns, there's also a few standalone challenges, which just consist of one (usually long) wave with some special properties.

Graphically, the game is very well-designed; the game has an overall steampunk aesthetic, and the individual ships, turrets, and backgrounds are all very well-crafted. The sound effects are a little repetitive, but they're also probably above average; the music is nicely martial, though, like so many games, it gets repetitive eventually. The interface is solid, although it seems like the hotkeys for selecting turrets change in different campaigns, which is a little annoying (although you can change the defaults).

Overall, StormWinds is a fun little game. It's probably a little bit too easy once you figure out an optimal strategy, although it can be quite tricky to figure that out, but it does a good job of keeping the action flowing. It probably won't take you a terribly long time to finish everything the game has to offer, but it's definitely a fun little challenge.

Warbears

After playing and enjoying Warbears Adventures (review here), I figured I might as well try the original, since, after all, there was a badge attached. While Warbears is, at its heart, also a point-and-click adventure, it's actually a much different game from Warbears Adventures -- it's much more involved, complicated, and difficult.

The first thing that you notice about Warbears that sets it apart from a typical point-and-click adventure is that you have a four-man team (although only three are present at the beginning), and some of the puzzles require your team members to work together, as each has his own specialty. (This ability does seem somewhat underused, though; most of the time the team members are still working independently.) The game is also harsher than Warbears Adventures, or indeed most other typical point-and-click adventures on Kongregate; it is quite possible to die, and if you should die, you have to restart from the beginning, which is kind of annoying. (Fortunately, there seem to be fewer opportunities to perish in the later stages of the game, which definitely lessens the annoyance.)

The puzzles are quite tricky -- it'll take a lot of careful thought (and probably a few deaths) before you finally make your way through the puzzle. That said, it is quite solvable, though I did experience a few frustrating moments where I seemed to be out of possible actions and had to poke around for a bit before stumbling upon the correct solution. The interface is also a little awkward -- after clicking on a Warbear to select him, you move him by clicking arrows below him, which can get rather annoying when you're trying to move long distances. There are also a few times where dexterity is required, which is nice, but the interface for fighting is really awkward and confusing -- it could really use some documentation or explanation. Fortunately, it's not too difficult to win the fights just by fumbling around. The game also gives you point bonuses for accomplishing certain deeds, and also occasionally assigns penalties if it takes you several tries to accomplish a task you should have accomplished on your first try, so even if you beat the game, you can try replaying it to get a higher score.

The graphics are high quality -- the game does a good job of fitting a lot of action onto a single screen without it feeling crowded or cluttered, which is no mean feat, although like Warbears Adventures, the text is awfully small and hard to read. The writing is also pretty good, and does a good job of interspersing humorous moments into the game. There's no background music through most of the game, although there is some intro and ending music. The sound effects are also definitely better than your typical Flash game; there's a lot of distinct effects which are appropriate to the action. There is, however, no save feature, so you'll have to play the game in one sitting (or, alternatively, until you die, and then you can take a break).

Overall, Warbears is a very well-crafted puzzle, and quite a challenge to beat; if it weren't for having to restart upon death (instead of, say, just being able to undo) or other bad things happening, I would definitely give this game a 5/5. Unfortunately, it's just a little too frustrating to have to repeat the game when you screw up. Still, it's a good designed game which was quite the pleasure to finish.

Square2Ball

Sometimes, after having finished a time-consuming badge, I look around for another game to play, but don't really feel like going for another badge, so my eye wanders to the "Hot New Games" section of the Kongregate front page to see if there's anything that looks interesting. In this case, it was Square2Ball that my eye landed on. Of course, the Hot New Games section is somewhat of a crapshoot; while Square2Ball is not a bad game, it kind of lacks anything that makes it really distinctive.

Square2Ball is a puzzle game with a familiar format -- you have to get a ball to the exit by pressing the arrow keys. When you press an arrow key, the ball keeps moving in that direction until it runs into a barrier, at which point it stops and you can move it again. The barriers come in various rectangular sizes; some are quite large and some are very small. You also can click on a barrier to cause it to temporarily disappear, but you only have a limited number of clicks that you can use in a given level, and it can only be applied to one barrier at a time (that is, clicking on a second barrier will cause the first one to reappear). Later levels introduce unclickable blocks and keys which unlock purple blocks; nothing too out of the ordinary there.

The game offers a total of 35 puzzles (20 "easy" and 15 "hard"), but even the hardest levels are vastly less complicated than, say, Excit, so none of the levels should take you too long to solve. They are generally well-designed, though; the solutions require at least some cleverness and none of them has any terrible flaws (at least that I can see). The graphics are pretty basic (and the text is, to be honest, kind of ugly); there's no sound, but there is incredibly repetitive background music which will probably drive you crazy in short order.

Anyway, while Square2Ball is not a bad game, there's not quite enough present to make it a really interesting game, either. It'll definitely give you a bit of a challenge, but not too much, and is nice as a quick distraction, but don't expect it to provide entertainment for hours.

Epic War 2

more like epic bore 2 amirite? lol

Sorry about that. But after going through the dreary slog that is this game, I suddenly felt disinclined to spend any more time on it. Nevertheless, I suppose I should write something at least a little more literate, so here we go. Anyway, as you can probably deduce from the title, Epic War 2 is a sequel to Epic War (review here), and features very similar action. However, a few cripplingly bad design decisions mean that, instead of being a decent if overly slow and long game like Epic War, Epic War 2 ends up being a terrible and overly slow and long game.

I totally don't understand Kongregate's challenge policies. Epic War 2 got badges and a challenge almost immediately after its release, less than two weeks after Kingdom of the Wind, a very similar game by the same developer, had also gotten a challenge and badges, while seemingly much more deserving games (with functional API, as far as I can tell) continue to languish. I can only guess that this is due to some sponsorship issues -- Epic War 2 is sponsored by Kongregate -- but this seems awfully shortsighted; Kongregate should be promoting the best games, not just the games that they sponsor, if they want people to keep coming back to Kongregate.

The gameplay action in Epic War 2 is not terribly different from the original. You have a castle at one side, and your enemy has a castle at the other side. You accumulate mana over time, which you use to buy units which march toward the enemy castle; your enemy similarly sends out units at you. They meet, and fight, and the object is to destroy your enemy's castle. You're also equipped with a arrow turret which you can use to shoot arrows at the enemy (just use the up and down arrow keys to adjust the angle of the turret). Winning a battle gains you XP, which you can use to research various upgrades between battles. Epic War 2 is also somewhat grander in its scope -- there are three playable races, each with its own set of units and upgrades, and a total of 18 battles, which can be fought with any of the three races (although elves are highly, highly recommended for the final battle). In addition to the race units, there are also six generic units which can be unlocked through various achievements and can be used by any race.

So, why is Epic War 2 so much worse than its predecessor? Well, remember how I mentioned that you can buy upgrades between battles? In Epic War 2, buying these upgrades doesn't actually upgrade your units or castle. Rather, it just gives you the right to spend mana during the battle to upgrade your units or castle -- you always start each battle with nothing except a small pool of mana and your race's most basic unit (and any units you've unlocked through achievements). This means that the beginning of every battle is exactly the same: you use your arrows to hold off the enemy (which they are entirely capable of doing, with only a tiny bit of skill required) while you patiently wait for your mana to accumulate, then buy all of the upgrades that you have. Only then can you actually send out an attack force at the enemy. This means that you're essentially completely wasting 5-10 minutes at the beginning of every battle. This is an annoyance that adds up very, very fast. (It's not helped by the fact that killing enemy units no longer gives you mana, nor can you upgrade your mana total or regeneration rate between battles, so the rate of mana accumulation is even slower than the original, where it was already pretty slow.) Worse, since each of the three races accumulates XP separately, you'll have to replay many of the levels if you want to level them all up, so the game isn't just 18 levels, which is already way too long; it ends up being much, much longer than that if you're trying to get all the badges.

The game is also fundamentally kind of unbalanced. Because you have the arrows, which is a pretty big advantage, and the computer doesn't, the computer has to cheat to make up for it -- it usually has better units available than you do, it can send out units in packs, which you can't do, and when you get the enemy castle half-destroyed, the computer usually sends out a huge wave of units as a counterattack. This has the primary effect of lengthening the battle even more, since then your attack force gets destroyed, you have to destroy the enemy wave, and then you have to build up another attack force, adding more time to what was already a very long mission. (That said, reducing the arrow power would make the game even more terribly long, so that's clearly not a solution, either.)

Epic War 2 is undeniably a pretty game -- there's clearly a lot of effort put into the art; the units, backgrounds, and castles are all very good. However, the price of all this is that the game does bog down terribly when too many units are on screen; this effect can be somewhat alleviated by reducing quality, but it's still pretty slow. The sound effects are pretty average, but the music isn't bad. One nice touch is that the music shifts when the conditions of battle change -- when you're mounting a strong attack, or the enemy is posing a grave threat, the music changes appropriately. This is a very good feature (although occasionally it can get a little silly as the music shifts back and forth several times within the space of a minute or so). However, balancing this out is the writing -- unlike its predecessor, Epic War 2 features a plot (which is, at least, appropriately epic), but the writing is abysmal. It reads like LOTR fanfic written by a 14-year-old with a not very good grasp of English. Frankly, the plot adds nothing to the game.

Anyway, while you may enjoy the first few levels of Epic War 2, it very rapidly becomes a tedious grind, and the more you look at it, the more its design flaws become apparent. It's also true that this is the third game with the same basic format that I've played from this developer, and they all seem to be getting worse; it's really time for him to change the formula. There's clearly talent as far as the art and programming goes, but the design is simply not up to par in Epic War 2.

Terrascape

Terrascape is another game by NegativeONE, the developer behind Newgrounds Rumble (review here), and the two games share quite a bit of similarity; while Terrascape bills itself as a "Adventure-Platformer-Brawler hybrid", let's just say that as an adventure platformer, it's a very good brawler.

Anyway, so the basic brawling action is pretty much the same as in Newgrounds Rumble -- you move, jump, and have strong and weak attacks; these can be nicely chained into combos, but apparently only in the air. You can also pick up items which give you magic spells. The game offers a couple of modes; there's a couple of variations on straight fighting, and then the story mode, in which you have to battle your way through three different stages to claim an ancient artifact. Each of the stages is quite short and simple, though, so most of the content in story mode is still pretty much beating people up. Most of the rest of story mode consists of falling off platforms and having to start over again, which is kind of annoying. There's also hidden coins in story mode which you can collect to unlock the full power of the artifact; however, when I tried collecting them, it seemed kind of glitchy -- it would sometimes fail to record coins I was sure I had gotten. Some of the coins are also extremely difficult to find -- they require taking a leap of faith off the edge of the screen into areas that aren't automatically revealed by scrolling, which is really annoying.

Overall, the brawling action is solid -- your characters have a variety of moves and the animation is good, but you don't need to be particularly skilled to triumph; since there's not a lot of different things you can do, a pretty straightforward button-mashing strategy can carry you through the game without too much difficulty. The graphics are good; the characters are each well-realized and each of the four different story mode worlds does a good job creating a distinct feeling. The sounds are pretty run-of-the-mill; the music is nicely varied, but does get a little repetitive.

Terrascape isn't a long game -- you can probably complete story mode in 15 minutes or so, simply because there just isn't too much substance there. While the core fighting action is not bad, the adventure components of the game just aren't well-developed enough to be really interesting. Overall, it would probably benefit from a stronger focus on one aspect of the game rather than trying to be several things at once.