9th January 2012, 10:32 PM
PSP
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Blokus: Steambot Championship -- won a match in the final room and thus saw the credits. This is a boardgame conversion of the board game Blokus, which I hadn't heard of before seeing this game but which is a fun puzzle/strategy style game. The two or four players have to place tiles on a board, made up of pieces of 1-5 blocks, in all the configurations you can lay out that many blocks. You only get one of each kind of piece though. The key is that you must play pieces on a DIAGONAL to one of the edge points of your current pieces, and cannot play in any space that also touches (left/right/up/down, not diagonals of course) one of your pieces. This makes gameplay quite unique and interesting. It's definitely a fun game. And as the name suggests, you're playing against characters from the Steambot Chronicles games as well, which is cool and adds something.
Complaints? Overall this is good, but the amount of time you have to spend waiting for the other players to play, at the higher difficulties, is quite annoying. It can be minutes sometimes between your turns, at the top rooms. Bring something else to do while playing this game. Also, once you've won in all seven room levels, which doesn't take THAT long, there's nothing else to do other than keep playing at the same difficulties; this game doesn't have a lasting campaign mode, and the only stat tracking is of how many times you've finished in each position. And given that you lose money if you finish in 3rd or 4th, I'd often just turn off the game when I finished poorly, so that record isn't really accurate anyway. (You can use money to buy different clothes and hair for your character, which you only see in the "choosing a room" lobby building but is a nice touch, and also for room entry fees.) Overall, I like it. It clearly was a cheap production, but is fun.
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Blokus: Steambot Championship -- won a match in the final room and thus saw the credits. This is a boardgame conversion of the board game Blokus, which I hadn't heard of before seeing this game but which is a fun puzzle/strategy style game. The two or four players have to place tiles on a board, made up of pieces of 1-5 blocks, in all the configurations you can lay out that many blocks. You only get one of each kind of piece though. The key is that you must play pieces on a DIAGONAL to one of the edge points of your current pieces, and cannot play in any space that also touches (left/right/up/down, not diagonals of course) one of your pieces. This makes gameplay quite unique and interesting. It's definitely a fun game. And as the name suggests, you're playing against characters from the Steambot Chronicles games as well, which is cool and adds something.
Complaints? Overall this is good, but the amount of time you have to spend waiting for the other players to play, at the higher difficulties, is quite annoying. It can be minutes sometimes between your turns, at the top rooms. Bring something else to do while playing this game. Also, once you've won in all seven room levels, which doesn't take THAT long, there's nothing else to do other than keep playing at the same difficulties; this game doesn't have a lasting campaign mode, and the only stat tracking is of how many times you've finished in each position. And given that you lose money if you finish in 3rd or 4th, I'd often just turn off the game when I finished poorly, so that record isn't really accurate anyway. (You can use money to buy different clothes and hair for your character, which you only see in the "choosing a room" lobby building but is a nice touch, and also for room entry fees.) Overall, I like it. It clearly was a cheap production, but is fun.