The Prima Games Blog is the place to read about new video games, get expert strategy, tips, downloads,
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Jun
30
2009
Read more about Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood Game Guide
Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood is the story of Ray and Thomas McCall, a pair of gunslinging brothers fighting for their family’s honor and a fortune in Aztec gold on the wild western frontier. Start exploring Atlanta, GA with part 1 of the official walkthrough.
Includes a map with locations of all Secrets, Money Bags, and Weapons!
Jun
28
2009
Galactic Adventures has only been out for a few days and there’s already more than 1,000 community-created adventures available for download. So with so many adventures, how do you make yours stand out from the crowd? There are a few simple things you can do to increase the visibility of your adventure in the already crowded Sporepedia. Think of the Adventure Title Interface as the marketing panel; click on the blue “Name Your Adventure” button at the bottom of the screen in the Adventure Creator. Here you can write a description for your adventure, enter keyword search tags, define the genre, and assign detailed view pictures. While all of these fields are important to fill out, the detailed view pictures are critical. These four images appear on your adventure’s title card in the Sporepedia.
So how do you take a good picture? I like action shots so I start up the adventure and advance to an act I want to show an image of, such as a battle scene. While the action plays out, pause the game and enter freecam mode: Press Ctrl+Alt+C to enter freecam mode. This allows you to move the camera anywhere on the planet. And since the game is paused, you can take as much time as you want to frame the shot. When you get the shot you want, press the C key to take a snapshot. Repeat the process at least four times so you have four different shots. Once you have your shots, return to Build Mode and assign the detailed view pictures. Make sure you select your best shot for the first slot, as this is the image that appears on the front of the adventure’s card. The three other images only appear on the card’s expanded view when you click on the blue information bar at the bottom of the card in the Sporepedia. Now that you have four good images, a description, tags, and genre, your adventure should stick out a bit more.
By the way, I uploaded a new adventure a few days ago titled Colonel Grihm’s Last Stand. It’s a defense-based adventure…and it’s really tough. My goal was to make an adventure worth a lot of Spore Points. And it seems to have worked. Currently, completing the adventure earns your captain 75 Spore Points. So feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. I’ll give you a hint…use the grenades!
Jun
23
2009
1. Budget for Expansion
Before you go and build a bunch of production facilities, build up a strong, positive budget balance. Then, build production structures until that balance gets close to zero. This way, you’ll never outstrip your cash flow.
2. Short Roads
Roads are the simplest and most important things you can build in a game. You want short, cobblestone roads; this will increase the speed with which you harvest goods. If your roads are long, it will take extra time for your resources to be gathered and stored. Also, you’ll usually find that you have surpluses of stone as you play. Put that stone to use and pave your roads with cobblestone; it makes your resource collectors move faster!
3. The ideal Housing Situation
As you play Dawn of Discovery, you’ll probably tinker with a lot of different housing layouts. The key is to waste as little space as possible; you always want the spaces between your roads to be two houses wide, so that you never find yourself in a position where you either don’t have enough room for a house, or you have a little too much room. As your civilization advances, you’ll need to squeeze as many houses as possible into the space you have.
4. Some Needs Are Wants
The extent to which you fulfill your inhabitants’ needs dictates whether they move onto the next social level, regress back to the previous level, or do nothing at all. So you could say that the things that will keep your inhabitants at their current level of advancement are the actual “needs,” while the things that would take them to the next level are really “wants.” The point is that you can only meet a fraction of your population’s needs and generally be okay. Nomads, for instance, say they need everything from mosques to milk to carpets. But those are the things that will allow them to become envoys; the only thing nomads really need are dates. As long as you provide those, nomads will keep moving in, and never move away.
5. Tower Power
It may look silly, but you don’t need to place watchtowers anywhere near a wall. Rather, you should put them on the field of battle. Towers are a great and cheap way to boost your damage, especially in defensive battles.
6. You Don’t Need to Connect Everything
When you first begin playing Dawn of Discovery, you’ll be tempted to try to connect everything with roads. You don’t need to do this. If a market building connects and stores a resource, that same resource is instantly stored at every market building. Depositing resources in market buildings is like depositing money in a bank that way; it isn’t actually stored in the ATM, it’s stored in the metaphysical pool of funds that is available from any ATM, or in this case, market building.
7. An Island Is Truly an Island
Your goods are shared between market buildings on any given island, but your goods are not shared between islands. So if you decide to start developing on one, you’ll need to supply it with goods from another until it becomes autonomous.
8. Speed the Game Up at Your Own Risk
One impulse, especially in difficult levels, is to speed the game up to see how you’re doing. This can sometimes be a tempting mistake: if there’s a flaw in your system, accelerating time may exacerbate it to the point that it becomes a major, crushing issue. In other words, sometimes patience can be a virtue.
9. On-Foot Deliveries
Many farm buildings, such as hemp plantations, crop fields, and herb gardens, don’t deliver their goods by road. Instead, they have workers who deliver their products to other production buildings as long as those buildings are in range. You’ll want to be aware of whether or not a building requires a road connection, because if it doesn’t, you’ll have a lot more freedom with its placement.
10. Auxiliary Fleet
This is a somewhat advanced tip, but the auxiliary fleet can be your best friend in a continuous game or a scenario. For nothing but honor, you can instantly order small fleets from both the Orient and the Occident. If you’re under attack and have no other defenses, auxiliary fleets can save your life!
For tons more helpful tips, tricks, and strategies, check out Prima’s official Dawn of Discovery strategy guide!
Jun
23
2009
Joe Dodson, strategy guide author here again. So, you’ve just bought and installed Dawn of Discovery, and you aren’t sure what to do first. After all, this is a big game with three compelling options. In my opinion, you should definitely begin with the campaign. Dawn of Discovery is so big that it can be overwhelming if you just try to dive in; the campaign will introduce you to its details and elements in a logical progression. It does a good job of making sure you’ve had time to familiarize yourself with one idea before moving on to another.
With the help of the campaign, you’ll quickly go from this…
If you’d rather simply explore city building, you could either begin a continuous game or a scenario. On the continuous front, you could easily begin a preset easy game, or you could enter the game settings window and browse through all the different elements that compose different levels in Dawn of Discovery.
If you decide to play a scenario right out of the gate, choose the Elector scenario. It’s a nice and easy mission with no rivals to compete against. On the other hand, if you jump into a medium scenario, or heaven forbid a hard one, you might be destroyed in a matter of minutes by your aggressive and intelligent foes!
…to this!
One final thing to remember is that you can take it easy in the first several missions in the campaign. The game will try to tell you that time is of the essence and that the world is going to end, but unless you see a timer, you have all the time in the world. We mention this because overextending yourself is one of the easiest ways to get messed up. You always want to make sure you have a positive balance and adequate resources before you make any major leaps or take on any new challenges in Dawn of Discovery. Oh, and picking up Prima’s official strategy guide can’t hurt, either…
Jun
23
2009
Galactic Adventures is out now and as of this post there are more than 140 community-created adventures available for download. Among the new adventures is Spice Trouble, the adventure we created for our guide’s tutorial. Feel free to take it for a spin or open it in the Adventure Creator to find out how we put it together. In this adventure you must assist a meek group of colonists threatened by a mysterious alien race. It’s probably not the best adventure you’ll ever play, but it’s a good example of how to put together a simple adventure. For best results, open the Spice Trouble in the Adventure Creator and read the Adventure Creation chapter in the guide, starting on page 155. By reading and studying the adventure you can get a better idea of how we put it all together. Or better yet, start a new adventure and follow the tutorial’s step-by-step instructions to create your own version of Spice Trouble.
Jun
23
2009
I’ve now completed video strategy guides for the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network release of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Having viewed all of the videos, I’m pleased with how they turned out. The Street Fighter IV video strategy guides were the first I’ve done, and I think that experience, plus the fact that MvC2 has been out for a long time, enabled me to create a significantly better product for MvC2.
Moving away from MvC2, I received my first TMNT Smash Up build last Friday. I’ve been playing through the game to get a feel for it, and as you’ve probably heard from the E3 hands-on articles, it’s very similar to Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but it’s different enough to feel like a new game.
I will have my outline done today as I kick things into high gear and start hammering out this guide. More updates soon…
Jun
21
2009
Ready for the release of the Galactic Adventures expansion? It comes out this Tuesday, and it looks like we’re not the only ones eager for the release. With the help of Maxis, the writers behind Robot Chicken have put together some wacky adventures of their own, including My Big Fat Pig Wedding, Litterbox Gulch, and Whiney and His Poo. All of the Robot Chicken adventures will be available to download on the launch date through the in-game Sporepedia. For more information on the expansion, be sure to pick-up our guide on Tuesday. Also, check back here for some useful gameplay and adventure creation tips.
Jun
17
2009
By Joe Dodson
Dawn of Discovery has a big name, and it sounds like a big game, but trust us, there’s more to discover here than meets the eye. Sometimes with games like this, you get a large single player campaign and then some additional throwaway skirmish content.
But in Dawn of Discovery, the campaign is just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t get us wrong, the campaign is long and deep. You will build vast settlements, explore exotic lands, fight wicked enemies, and follow the course of an intriguing plot through it all. But when you finish there, you’ve still only seen a fraction of what Dawn of Discovery has to offer.
For starters, there are six scenarios that will put your mind to work for hours and hours at a time. And these scenarios aren’t just made of generic slider settings and enemy AI modifiers; these things are like humongous levels. They come with NPCs, quests, objectives, and challenges. They have character and characters, and you’ll quickly find yourself caught up in the dynamics of each as you attempt to meet some very large objectives in the face of equally large obstacles.
And just like the campaign sets the table for the scenarios, they in turn set up the continuous games. These are no mere sandboxes where you can build cities and then topple them with natural disasters. No, these are massively customizable maps that you can transform into any adventure you want. Maybe it will be hard and maybe it’ll be easy, but it will definitely be big.
For instance, we recently played through an “Easy” continuous game in order to work our way through some build trees, and we had our work cut out for us trying to balance the demands of our massive population while constructing an imperial cathedral. And that was without anyone shooting at us. This is a ton of game. And we aren’t even finished! (We’re just saving more for future blog posts – or get the guide to get the complete picture.)
Jun
17
2009
By Joe Dodson
City builders are intimidating. You know going in that you’re going to be responsible for thousands (if not millions) of lives, and every single one of them is going to have needs. You’re going to have to manage this demand, fix that broken road, do this, do that, and if you don’t do it just right, you’re met with thousands of complaints at once. People set fires, buildings burn down, and now you’ve taken four steps forward only to take five steps back.
Well not in Dawn of Discovery. This game is the gentle giant of city builders; it wants to be your friend. And to that end, it spares you from a lot of the grief you’ll find in other city building games. This is not to say Dawn of Discovery is easy. You will definitely feel like Atlas in the later goings as you try to balance the world on your back, juggling your peoples’ newfound need for coats with the increasingly aggressive overtures of your enemies.
But more often than not you’ll feel like you are kicking butt and taking over the world while surfing the wave of history. There are many ingredients to this successful and fun recipe, and we’ll cover some of them in future blogs. You can also pick up the Official Dawn of Discovery Strategy Guide, written by yours truly, to really delve into the game.
But for now, let it suffice to say that Dawn of Discovery is good about introducing one new element at a time, until the next thing you know, you’re juggling the needs of an entire civilization, rescuing lost children, and generally saving the day with your city management skills…even if you never knew you had any.
Jun
15
2009
The Red Minions
Last week I talked about some of the new features in Overlord II as well as introduced you to the Brown minions. This time, I want you to meet their cousins, the Reds minions. Reds are almost complete opposites of the Browns. While the Browns are your melee fighters, Reds are like your archers in that they have a ranged attack. When given a target to attack, they will move into range and begin throwing fireballs at the enemies.
While they can hit enemies from a distance, Reds have very poor defensive values and are often the first killed when faced with hand to claw combat. Therefore, keep them out of the fight and behind lines of other types of minions. Since Reds are friends with fire, they can move through fiery areas and even put out flames on barricades so that the rest of your horde may pass. On the other hand, Reds can start fires and their ability to set fire to enemies can cause them damage before they even get in range to hurt you.
One of the ways to give orders to your minions is with a guard marker. These are flags to which you can assign minions. Each minion type reacts differently when placed on a guard marker. Browns will move a short distance from the marker to attack any enemies who come near. Reads, on the other hand, will throw fireballs at any enemies within range—without you having to give them an order to attack. Therefore, it is a good idea to keep them on a marker when you are under attack. If the Reds on the guard marker are threatened, move them to a safe location. A good tactic is to place their guard marker on elevated positions where your Reds can fire down on the enemy while the enemy is unable to get to them.
Overlord II also has mounts for your minions to ride. Browns use wolves and Reds can ride salamanders. While mounted, Reds throw fireballs while they are moving. A good combat tactic is to sweep a group of mounted Reds around an enemy. They are faster than most enemies and these hit and run raids can soften up an opposing force before the main attack by other minions.
