On Playin Slayin: a Guide to...Slayin

(Formatting note: I wrote this guide in Google Drive and optimizing it for Blogger would be very unfortunately problematic. If you find it unreadable, please let me know in the comments, but otherwise I'm going to leave it as is.)

If you haven’t already played it, Slayin is a retro-styled arcade game ported over to the iOS. The controls are incredible simple. Your character always runs forward. You can change directions left and right and you have one action button. The action button does something different for each character, but it is essentially both an offensive and defensive move of some kind.

Slayin is really hard. It’s like retro-hard, where you die and die and die and swear to yourself that you are going to beat that damn level even if your fingers fall off as a result. And then they do and you still keep trying. It’s like, retro-hard.

So naturally I wanted help. I turned to Google for answers to certain questions I had while playing. When I searched, I was shocked to find that there was no information. In fact, what I found was a wealth of misinformation. I found advice like “always spend your gold” and “play cautiously, occupying one half of the screen.” This is awful advice if you have a clear picture of the game’s mechanics in mind. Let me shed some light on essential advice to getting to the depths of Slayin’s brutal levels.

1. Combos are gold - No,  really. I mean points are nice and all, but combos give you more gold. It is essential to build a 25+ kill combo and maintain it at all times. Buying certain items means buying up the prerequisite items and the costs add very quickly when combined with armor and potentially health that you might buy. You need a lot of gold early-mid game and that means you need combos. I find myself slayin only two to three enemies at a time so that new ones have time to spawn. If I slay everything on the screen at once it is likely I’ll lose my combo while waiting for new enemies to slay.
2. Gold, in addition to being gold, is also health - This is the other reason why combos are clutch. They keep you alive. The best way to keep your health up is to avoid getting hit...but collecting tons of gold is the next best thing. It can’t protect you from taking tons of hits all in a row, but it’ll keep you topped off.
3. Great as gold is, don’t lose your combo for it - You have to let some loot and gold disappear. There’s often a coin or a chalice that you’ll want to pick up but there are no enemies over there and you’ll lose your combo to get it. Leave it be. Even if you need the health from the coin, let it go. Your combo is worth more health over time than that one coin. I go out of my way to get the giant coins from treasure chests, though. I find they stick around long enough that it’s rare for me not to be able to get them.
4. You don’t always need completely full health - The price of health at the vendor goes up very quickly, and extra quickly for certain characters like the Archer (those with low defense, I suspect, but haven’t tested it). Try to be efficient with how much you buy. Use coins to fill your health and leave a little room for that at the end of your health bar when buying health.
5. Some weapons and abilities are worthless - Just a fact of life in any game. Some of the equipment, units, etc in any game are not worth using. The Knight has a lot of good equipment options in my opinion, but the Wizard and Ninja have some utterly pointless ones. Ice spells in particular, all of them, are terrible. They freeze enemies instead of killing them. The frozen enemies still hurt you if you touch them and they unfreeze soon after. Just avoid stuff that you figure out sucks. So far the things I don’t like to use are those ice spells and any of the Ninja skills except the Shuriken.
6. Horizontal attacks are the best attacks - This is common sense considering that enemies line up along the stage in rows. If you launch a lightning ball across the board it clears out all the ground enemies in that direction. Remember that horizontal doesn’t just mean along the ground. The reason the Shuriken is so good for the Ninja is that it clears out all the air enemies. The Archer’s bounce arrow essentially does both jobs, flying up into the air and then plowing through enemies in a line on the ground.
7. Vertical attacks are also the best attacks - Or rather, they are essential because you need to be able to kill enemies in the air and if your air attack has some horizontal momentum to it, all the better. Again, this is one of the Archer’s greatest strengths. His arrow flies in a parabola, killing a couple air enemies and landing on guys on the ground that are out of the reach of his slide.
8. Master the back and forth shuffle - Your character is always moving forward, so the only way to stay in one place is to run back and forth. You have to do this to time attacks well. It matters a lot with the Archer and Wizard who have some down time between attacks.
9. Strategize your upgrade purchases - You don’t have to spend all gold immediately to get upgrades like many guides suggest. In fact, if you don’t plan out what you are buying and when you might find you don’t have enough when it matters. I’m sorry to say I haven’t got the upgrades progression figured out, but they seem to be linear. They show you three--if you buy the second one you’ll see two more the next time you visit the vendor. But sometimes the list updates on its own. The Wizard can buy the 80gold spell and then wait until the ice spells disappear on their own, skipping to the lightning ball, for example. I wish I describe a more concrete pattern, but you should be aware that there is one.
10. Play the whole board - Many guides advise sticking to one side of the stage and keeping it clear. I tend to start at one end and gradually work my away across the board. Then I get to the other side and having collected all the gold and loot, I edge my way back to the other side where more gold and loot are undoubtedly waiting. Playing only half the board makes comboing difficult because you only have access to about half of the enemies and…
11. Killing fast means leveling fast - Why does it matter what level you are? Because your level determines what enemies spawn and when the stage ends. If a certain enemy tends to  give you a hard time, kill a lot of enemies as quickly as possible and it will stop spawning. I do this most often when I fight spiked walls (really try not to get in a jump/attack/evade cycle that has your jump/attack/evade ending just as the walls crash in since that can get you killed very quickly).
12. The Dragon Scale item doesn’t help at all with high scores - Every guide I’ve seen talks about how you need to get the Dragon Scale ASAP. I don’t know if it might have been patched since those posts were put up, but don’t bother if your goal is to get a high score. It resets all your points and in most cases won’t be worth it. To get a really great score, you have to just play awesomely. The only times I use the scale are to try and clear a quest that I’ve almost finished or to just play more continuously/further in the game.

Character specific notes:

The Knight:

The Knight is pretty good all around and is easy to get accustomed to. Get used to his jump so you don’t bump your head on enemies. Jump often because the other way the Knight frequently takes damage is enemies biting his ankles as they spawn underneath him. Oh, armor is good. Get armor. But some guides advise getting armor every time it is available. You don’t have to, especially if you don’t get hit a lot. But the price of armor does go up after the Death Worm boss, so at the very least get it half-way through that stage.

His weapons:

The Thief Knife:

It’s good because it boosts your luck which gives you more coin and loot drops. That means more health, more points and more gold to shop with. It is short and that means you take more damage, but to a degree the extra gold makes up for this. Still, you have to be proficient in not taking a lot of hits.

The series of weapons with long reach:

There are several of these and the more expensive they are the better they perform. The weapon prereqs come into play, but I have found you can skip the Bone Cleaver and Silver Sword if you buy the Thief Knife, wait a while and then buy the Broad Sword. That unlocks the Lance for the least amount of gold possible if I’m not mistaken.

The speed weapons:

These are great because the speed lets you play very aggressively which helps you keep up combos and clear the levels quickly. I think I might have noticed a bug where if you buy the upgraded armor enchantment while using these weapons then it makes you slower. I’ll have to try that again to test it out.

The Wizard:

She is really powerful and easy to use. Her action makes her invincible and kills what she touches. While not attacking she charges a spell if you have an active one equipped.

Various non-obvious notes:

Ice spells are worthless because they don’t kill enemies. Dancing Flame is amazing, but only in the first half of the game. The higher the level of your spell, the taller your tornado attack gets. There is a limit as to how tall you need your tornado to be. I think the best spell is Lightning Ball because it is cheap, gives you a tornado tall enough to kill almost all air enemies all the time and wipes everything in front of you on the ground when cast. This was the first configuration that I beat the game with. I buy Lightning Ball about half-way through Peloria’s stage because on that level there are a lot of air enemies which makes it difficult to combo with Dancing Flame.

The Archer:

He is a monster in a man’s skin. I love this character because once he gets a few armor upgrades (allowing his arrows to kill multiple targets), his gameplay becomes very technically satisfying. I play him dashing back and forth around the middle of the board and launching arrows toward the board edges. Firing your arrow with perfect timing at the end of your slide results in a golden arrow that doesn’t disappear due to striking enemies. Enemies hit by it always drop coins of a grade 1 higher than your combo allows. For example, with no combo, you will get gold +2 coins. With a 25 kill combo, you will get +3 coins from enemies struck by the golden arrow. It adds a layer of depth to the character, which is fun, but it also allows you to get more coins and thus survive longer.

Arrows:

I always buy the basic arrow because comboing with the Archer using only the slide in unbearable. Then I get the first armor upgrade and the Bounce Arrow after that. Then the rest of the armors and that’s it except for health. I have found the other arrows to be more difficult to use and/or obtain. I like the Light Arrow for example, but getting it means throwing a lot of gold away to unlock it. The bounce arrow, by contrast, is cheap and kills enemies in the air and then in a row on the ground. It’s essentially doing the same job as the Wizard’s Lightning Ball. I really only use the other arrows to complete quests specific to them.

Knave:

I have little experience with the Knave, but I have noticed his jump vector is different from the Knight. For example, getting over the Minotaur boss is harder. Killing enemies in the air requires different timing as well. As with the Thief Knife for the Knight, I find that the Knave’s high luck means you can get a lot of coins which helps keep you alive.

Ninja:

The Ninja has a lot of attacks that I found difficult to use. In my uninformed (I haven’t used her a whole lot) opinion, the Shuriken might be the best weapon, but some of the others are fun. I think the biggest challenge is learning to evade with her. She’s not invulnerable for the whole duration of her jump, but it seems like there might be some frames in there where she can’t be hurt. I’d have to test it more to say anything useful about it. I do know, however, that I often take damage coming down from it.

Tamer:

I played the Tamer. It doesn’t get lamer.

I don’t even understand how he kills airborne enemies. Maybe he’s neat if you figure him out, but I have yet to.

Slayin is a surprisingly deep game considering there are only three buttons and a few upgrades. When I first picked it up I had the impression I would mess with it until I got over the iOS app addiction phase, but I've found that there is a lot of satisfying challenge buried within. I hope this woefully incomplete guide will give you the edge you need to SLAY.

If you have any comments, specific questions or advice to add to this, please post them in the comments!

Warhammer Quest and Star Command Updates

I never did get around to a follow-up post on Warhammer Quest. It's late now and I'm flying out to Hawaii tomorrow, but let me hit the points worth hitting. I had a brilliant first playthrough with the four basic characters. Even having used all but one downloadable characters (6 in all), I think the basic ones might be the best balanced. I found the Trollslayer flavorless and the Warrior Priest too unreliable to be of use. The Archmage was useful though, and in my recent playthrough I've been having fun with the Shadow archer-whatever and the fire mage. I haven't played with the new area, but from the description it looks like new tiles and enemies for the end-game, something WQ desperately needs. If you're looking into the downloads, I say skip the Trollslayer and Priest, but the rest of it has been good in my experience.

While I'm at it, Star Command has some new content. I haven't gotten to the new missions, but they did update the UI in some very useful ways. I honestly forget if I've mentioned this game on 2d6D or not, but it rocks inside and out. It is fun, funny and old skool hard--a rare combo these days indeed. Err, well it was hard for me until I leveled my doods and built up my ship. I'm actually thinking of restarting on a harder difficulty now. Still, it is a very demanding game in terms of tactics and dexterity. I strongly recommend it.

That's all I've got right now. I'll be back to posting when I'm back from vacation. Peace out 'til then!

I Need Worlds of Magic Greenlit, Let's Help Make that Happen

You won't hear me say often how fortunate I was to grow up with three older brothers, but when it comes to my exposure to awesome stuff as I was growing up, there's no denying it. Games were a real big part of all of that. It was my brothers and their friends who brought home Final Fantasy 1. It was my brothers who introduced me to Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk and my older brother's friend who first showed me the glory of F-Zero on SNES. And it was the second oldest of my bros who bought and carelessly left out Master of Magic where I could steal it and lose myself in its deep wells of badassery. 

If you're not familiar with Master of Magic (MoM), it is one of the seminal works of the 4X gaming genre. 4X stands for the four X's of eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate, and it is essentially these four activities that make up the whole of the genre's gameplay. 

The 4X genre has withered away into a husk of it's former robust, mighty form. It is comprised of but a few recent titles, but luckily Wastelands Interactive is hard at work on a spiritual successor to MoM, Worlds of Magic. If you look at the features they're working hard to include, at the way they involve the dedicated fan base of the original in their development, at the way their game is almost flawlessly faithful to Master of Magic, it is clear that it is a game made for fans by fans. 

Unless it can't get greenlit because YOU wouldn't vote YES for it on Steam! Yeah, that's right I'm blaming YOU specifically for something that hasn't yet and might not even happen. All right not really, but this game will be seriously excellent if Wastelands Interactive can get the support they need to get the thing out. There is already a demo available and while it is clearly still in development, it is equally apparent that the developers are going in the right direction.

Basically the point is that I want to play this game really badly and I need you help to get this game onto my hard drive. C'mon, be bro. Err, a bro, not my bro. I"m not asking you to buy this so I can steal it off your desk. Just try the free demo and click yes that you'll buy it =)

Vassal Engine Update

Just in case you haven't seen it already, the Vassal Engine was updated not long ago. Far too many bugs have been corrected and there are too many updates for me to cover them all here, so I recommend reading the update news on their site. You can download the new version here.

Space Hulk Pre-orders on Steam

Seems I was actually ahead of the curve on something. Seems a lot of people are finding out about the Space Hulk game only now that it is up for pre-order on Steam. There's no question as to whether or not I will buy it. The only question is whether I buy it for iOS or for Steam. I intend (finally) to get an iPad when the next one releases and I'd rather have this for that and my iPhone. Especially if it supports iCloud saves the way Warhammer Quest does. Being able to pick up where I left off on either device would be a really attractive feature. I also would like to be able to play during my break at work.

I am still enthralled by Warhammer Quest on iOS. I have by now beaten the basic content and bought all the extras. I had to start a new campaign because the Skaven content begins at level 2 and I didn't want to just blow through it with a maxed-out party. I hope Space Hulk follows up with more excellent UI design and fun gameplay. I feel like this is a very good time to be a gamer/hobbyist.

Full Control will release Space Hulk on August 16th, 2013.

More Classics Ported to iOS: Chainsaw Warrior

Wow that's really convenient. Yesterday I got curious about upcoming GW games was thinking to post what I found of this on DakkaDakka yesterday. Turns out I don't have to say much because Natfka has already covered it very well over at Faeit 212.

Very briefly, it's a single player game where you race against the clock to save NYC from an extra-dimensional horde of zombies and mutants. I love that they're trying specifically to maintain the bodaciously radical 80s feel. And the fact that they're embracing the camp that comes with a title like Chainsaw Warrior. That's refreshing in an age of games where many seem to be taking themselves all too serioiusly.

Chainsaw Warrior is developed by Auroch Digital and is scheduled to release later this year.

Review: Warhammer Quest for iOS (and my 100th post! Woo!)

Warhammer Quest is f%&#ing awesome. I'll keep going, but really I could stop there. I bought it just to review it for 2d6D, but I am hopelessly addicted at this point. It's worth the five bucks I paid for sure and I think that's saying a lot because I consider anything over 1-2 pricey for iOS games. Unfortunately WHQ was one of those games I always saw people playing at the LGS, but could never afford myself. As a result I'll be looking at this purely from the stand point of video games. Feel free to chime in if there are things that should be said about the board game original and where the devs were coming from with this iteration.

You start out with four classes unlocked: the Grey Wizard, the Marauder, the Dwarf Ironbreaker and the Wood Elf Wayfarer. They're exactly what you might expect from fantasy game classes. The basic game play is tactical turn-based combat. You cannot move after attacking, so positioning gets satisfyingly complex. It's really easy to get yourself into a situation where warriors you need combating certain enemies simply can't get there and your team gets picked apart one-by-one.

Each of the different characters has a number of special abilities and character-specific equipment types. I actually feel that the classes are sufficiently differentiated. That is something that really matters to me in dungeon crawlers as it is something that is rarely done right. The Grey Wizard, for example, is very flexible and can attack, support and move in a number of useful ways, but doesn't do the raw damage that a Marauder does. The Marauder on the other hand can put out ridiculous volume of attacks but doesn't take hits like a Dwarf Ironbreaker. And the Wayfarer is nigh useless in melee, but once he has a good number of ranged attacks, he can kill distant enemies very well. The interplay between these classes makes for a fascinating, strategic game with lots of opportunities for tactical optimization.

The game does fall short in a few areas. First is the downloadable content. It is pretty expensive to unlock everything for the game. It already starts off at 5 bucks. Then the three unlockable characters are 2.50 each and the unlockable area with new monsters is another 5. So to have all of the content you're looking at a game that is really 17.50, much more than I'd pay up front if that were the base price to get all the content. Then there are also in-game pay-to-win options like buying gold, but luckily the game design isn't skewed toward driving you at their store the way Diablo 3 was. So far I have unlocked the Archmage and he's pretty fun to use. I was worried at first that he would end up being way too good (as a way of getting more buyers) and that he'd unbalance my party, but that hasn't been the case at all. If anything, I think the Ironbreaker may be more useful.

Second, the story is terribly dull and has no bearing on the player's experience. I never see my characters outside of the dungeons and my choices seem to have little in the way of meaningful consequences. Characters that you meet are likewise text-box entities and the text does little to give me an idea of these throw-away characters' personalities. As a result, I have no interest in what is happening or why. The background and story are there if you want to read them, but it doesn't build a believable world for me to get lost in the way good story-based games should. The fluff is a sauce for me to pour on a steak that doesn't exist. You might say "It's not really that kind of game, so why not let it go? The writer isn't trying to be the R.R. Martin of the iPhone." That is true and totally fair. I honestly can't tell if I'd rather they left all this out so I don't have to skip it. Knowing it is there is probably satisfying at some base level, maybe simply because I have been skipping bad story in games for many years (what? They can't all be as great as FF6 or Bioshock =P).

Thirdly, there are a LOT of random rolls made in the game. There are tons in combat, but that's where it matters least to me. Sometimes when traveling and ending turns in dungeons, random events occur that do nothing more than debuff you for no reason. It interrupts gameplay and has almost no noticeable bearing on the game. Generating a random number of magic points to use for casters can be irritating too. This gets especially bad when you are randomly ambushed in dungeons and have are given no magic at all. When that happens a few turns in a row you quickly run out of reserve power (that doesn't regenerate in dungeons) and find yourself dead due to no particular fault of your own. I'm not playing on Hardcore mode yet where your characters die permanently, but I can tell I will be very frustrated to lose a whole save due to some silly bad luck.

In closing, I want to remind you that I was sort of stretching to find some flaws in the game. The in-app purchases aren't necessary for the game to be a very good time. The story is so minimal and meaningless that skipping it doesn't get in the way of having fun in the slightest. The randomness probably comes from the board game, so if you played that you might be nostalgic for it in the first place. Losing a save would stink, but really without that most of the fights are so easy that there wouldn't be enough challenge without it. I've had a great time with the game so far and I expect to keep playing it for some time to come. I don't know whether or not I can recommend the additional content, but the base product is more than worth the few dollars it costs.

Edit: Something I forgot to mention before is that there is no multi-player. Where I was really disappointed in Talisman HD for that, I really don't think it takes anything away from the WHQ experience. Having more than one person playing might make the game cumbersome and slow. Playing a whole party is fun and works very well, just as it does in other RPG dungeon crawlers.

Given the game a try? What did you think? Got a favorite class?

Repost: Link to 6th Ed. Eldar Battlescribe Data File

A couple posters recently informed me that the link to the Eldar data file was broken. I edited the original post, but I'm reposting the link again now for anyone who had the same issue before.

Happy 5th Anniversary, App Store! Thanks for the free games!

Apparently there are a number of free games available on the App Store. Here is the Kotaku link I found out about this through. They may not have a full, comprehensive list of what's free, but I did manage to pick up some games I've been wanting for a while.

In other news, Limbo is apparently on iOS now. If you never played it on the console, it is an action/platformer/puzzle/horror game with a delightfully eery aesthetic. I strongly recommend it.

BattleScribe Data Files: Eldar

Here is the link to the Eldar data files I'm using for BattleScribe. Thought I'd post them here in case there's anyone who hasn't already found and installed them.

BattleScribe: A Good List-building App for iOS

So the other day my buddy Jeremy sends me a text about this app, BattleScribe (thanks for that, dude!). I figure since I have been wanting something like ArmyBuilder on iPhone anyway, and he said it was pretty cheap (just 350yen), I'd give it a try. Well, turns out there is a free version that has ads, but includes all the features! Good stuff, good stuff.

I made a list with it just now and found it incredibly easy to use. Importing data was incredibly easy too. I Googled it through Safari ("battlescribe data files") and was able to open the file I downloaded directly with the app. All in all I think the app does all the essential stuff it needs to do. I actually think there are only about five more features I'd want the app to have.

The first is an undo button for when you accidentally delete a unit with one of the one-touch X's on the right side just where I want to put my thumb when I hold the device. If not an undo feature, a lock feature or a slide method of deleting units. Anything really, as long as I don't have to rebuild units because of such an easy-to-make mistake. The second is file conversion support. I'd love to be able to export PDFs so I can view the files on devices without the app installed. Third, I wish there were options for printing. If not from the app directly, then this could tie into being able to convert to PDFs. Fourth, sharing support for social networking sites. It'd nice to be able to share easily through my blog and I see a button for "save roster HTML," but I've tried it and don't know where it is saving to or how to access it. That could be due to my own ineptitude, though, to be fair. Fifth, I think the list viewer could be better. Zoom would be nice and so would a cleaner layout with more clearly distinguished unit upgrades.

As long as your device is charged while you're gaming, and as long as you don't want to share lists and expose your nerdiness for the whole net to see, most of those issues don't matter that much. Any other problem I have with it is actually a problem with the data reservoir, I think. Some wargear for Eldar should be combined into one category for certain Exarchs. And items like the Shining Spear Exarch's Shuriken Cannon are missing.

All in all I'd say it's way more than worth the nothing I paid for it. It's even good enough that I'm going to pay for it just to support the guys who put it together. I'll probably also send them my suggestions in the hopes that they continue to support their work.



Did you/Will you give it a try? What are your impressions?