Terra Battle Basics - Part 1

Here is my debut episode for my video series that will walk new players through strategies for playing the mobile game, Terra Battle. I've been playing Terra Battle for over 2 years, and the game has changed a lot over that period of time. Many of those changes have added complexity and breadth to the kinds of things you can do in the game. As such, I imagine new Terra Battle players might be a little overwhelmed with the onslaught of modes pulling their attention and precious stamina points in all directions. My first episode here just focuses on the basics of the battle system: how to move characters, arrange pincer attacks, and trigger chain combos that fire unique skills. Look for more episodes in the coming weeks.

Blips: Previously On...

Sources: Charting the edges of avant-garde videogames, Keeping the Cold War quiet in CounterSpy, Twitch gears up to conquer the final frontier: mobile
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

Just wanted to pop in and quickly plug three (!) articles of mine that popped up on Kill Screen the past couple days. First is a feature on DePaul professor Brian Schrank's new book Avant-garde Videogames, which frames experimental games in an art historical context. The chart above is an image from the book, detailing the categorical field that serves as the basis for many of the book's chapters. As you'll find out from my article, I think it's a tremendously useful book, especially for someone looking for that art context. I have so many avant-garde games to seek out now that I had never even heard of before.

Next up is a review of the Cold War-inspired side-scrolling stealth game CounterSpy. It's a game I quite enjoyed, but found the design to be pretty unforgiving if you don't play it very well going into the final run-up. It's stylish as all get out though, and now that I've got a handle on what to watch out for, I'm actually pretty eager to dive back in and play through again. I do wish that you could hide incapacitated guards and avoid firefights more frequently that the game allows. It is supposed to be a stealth game after all.

Lastly is an article about Twitch's mobile broadcasting aspirations. This article was written a while ago, but other bigger Twitch news kept popping up. Glad it finally got out the door because mere hours later, the Amazon buyout news hit. I think the challenges of bringing broadcasting tech to mobile platforms is pretty interesting, but I wholly expect the story to get buried amongst all the other news surrounding that company. Ah well, maybe someone will click it by accident.

Review: Pixelated (Mobile)

This past weekend after my Samsung Instinct touchscreen phone died, I picked up a sharp new BlackBerry Curve and set out to see what apps I could download for free. A quick stop at the Top 10 list gave me the game Pixelated by Ebscer, which turns out to be a simple and addictive little puzzle experience. The game sort of plays like a combination of 7up's Spot for the NES and Tetris if you play with the random garbage blocks turned on to fill up a level. Beginning in the upper left corner, you have 21 turns to switch the entire mess of colored blocks on screen to one color. You select one color at a time to decide which color of adjoining blocks to convert next. Soon the rectilinear blob will be overtaking the rest of the squares in waves as you make strategic decisions as to which color selection will yield the greatest advancement while also tunneling the most effective avenue across the board.

Pixelated's appearance is as basic as it gets, this side of color TV. The squares are as directly geometric as they sound and there are no graphical flourishes or sound effects to correspond with the moves you make. That said, the game doesn't really require any of that, and it's otherwise justified by the game's nonexistent price tag (unless you want to Plus version, which has extra difficulty settings and other options). I basically made a competitive analog version of this game 2 years ago using construction paper and a tile floor, so I understand why Pixelated's banal aesthetic has it's own brand of appeal. Also, this being a mobile game, the easier it is to distinguish between objects, the better.

I'm just speaking from playing the free version, but one of the keys to Pixelated's addictiveness is the 21-move completion point. For the size of the board, 21 moves is the perfect number to maintain a relative level of difficulty and force most rounds down to the wire. I actually enjoy how the free version doesn't display a move counter, adding a degree of suspense when you whittle the screen down to a couple of remaining squares and you wonder for a quarter second whether or not you've got enough selections left to complete the round. Maybe I'm being overly dramatic about what is essentially an on-the-go twitch puzzle experience, but I still see a simplistic elegance at work.